Eco-Roundup: Why Truth And Reconciliation Matter, Even Under Trump
Every month, I assemble a round-up of stories I’m following and issues I’m covering, with palate cleansers at the end. Please consider a paid subscription so I can keep this up in 2025!
Hello friends. I’ve been busy working on a podcast series that I’m very excited to share with you all, and whenever I come up for air, I get knocked over by all the bad news. I left you without a newsletter in January, so you’ll get two in February.
I listened to two podcasts in January about efforts at reconciliation gone wrong. When I say reconciliation I mean attempts to repair harm after it’s been committed — particularly on a community or societal level. Done wrong, bad attempts at reconciliation can deepen the original harms. They can be more about PR than about accountability.
It was a strange moment to be thinking about this, given that it feels like we’re moving from a period of deeply flawed attempts at reconciliation and repair to unapologetic violence and abuse, under Trump.
Last newsletter, I mentioned that I’d started listening to Stolen Season 2: Surviving St. Michael’s. Well by the end of the series, journalist Connnie Walker had pretty stunningly exposed the shortcomings of Canada’s truth and reconciliation process around residential schools. For the better part of a century, Native kids were ripped from their families and forced to attend these horrible schools, in both the U.S. and Canada. It was bad enough that the kids were forbidden to speak their language or practice their culture, but these schools were also rife with abuse. Canada launched a Truth and Reconciliation process over 15 years ago. As part of it, former students were invited to share their experiences at the schools. In Stolen’s second season, Connnie uncovers how that process identified specific people who had destroyed generations of lives. Survivor after survivor accused the same priests of sexual abuse. But truth and reconciliation did not mean accountability. The abusers were allowed to die quietly in old age, never having to face their accusers.
Then another podcast, You Didn’t See Nothin, focuses on the aftermath of a severe beating by a white teenager of 13-year-old Lenard Clark, who is Black, in Chicago in 1997. Before the child had even come out of a coma, efforts at accountability were being railroaded by calls for healing and reconciliation. The white kid’s family had a lot of power — and links to organized crime. They aligned themselves with Lenard Clark’s mother and with a local Black church. The leader of the church went so far as to defend the kid who led the beating as innocent, apparently to access the benefits of a relationship with these powerful white men. This was reconciliation without truth and without genuine accountability, and, even though it happened over 25 years ago, a lot of community members never forgot it, including journalist and podcast host Yohance Lacour. The Invisible Institute, which does cool shit that you should check out, produced this one.
Both of these podcasts showed how the framework of reconciliation can be twisted to protect people who have done harm or to allow them to continue to do it. It feels like a type of thing Democrats especially shine at. DEI but no reparations. Biden’s apology for boarding schools, but no land back. Horror at the holocaust, but funding for mass murder in Gaza.
But now we’re entering a different kind of politics, and I don’t know how to think about the idea of truth and reconciliation or justice for past harms. Should the politics of false reconciliation feel quaint, in comparison to Trump’s onslaught?
As a journalist the question I’m really grappling is, should I set aside all the reporting I’ve been doing around things that happened in the past, and focus on reporting that responds to these new emergencies? The question of how to interrupt harms taking place this very moment feels so urgent. Is truth and reconciliation a luxury now?
For now, the answer I’ve landed on is no. I interviewed this filmmaker, who I don’t want to name right now, because it’s for this project that I’m keeping under wraps. He said something that felt clarifying to me:
Focus on what's important, and don't enter into their noisy zones. Stay out of their provocations, because it doesn't really help us to talk about what they want us to talk about. It's better that we talk about what's important: the pipeline, the nature, what happens in Gaza, the housing crisis, the climate crisis, and minorities under pressure and Native nations that are protecting our planet. You know, I think that's where we should be. And, and if we do that well, we can also fight back better, because entering into their noise — it makes us weaker. So stay focused.
As a journalist, I’m going to keep on doing the work I know only I can do, that no one else will pick up. And then I’m also picking an organizing lane, working with National Writers Union and the Freelance Solidarity Project to protect my community.
In case you missed it:
In January, I published a story with Grist that underlines how all these past abuses refuse to stay in the past. The piece in part answers that question I asked in my intro. Uncovering the truth about the past can serve to interrupt harms taking place this very moment. I’ve been a huge fan of Tristan Ahtone’s Misplaced Trust and Land Grab Universities series, uncovering how stolen Indigenous land continues to fund public institutions. So I was super excited when he asked me to work with his data team — badasses Clayton Page Aldern and Maria Parazo Rose — on this piece about how stolen land funds prisons. Tristan really pushed me to think about this story in terms of economics. Those boarding schools, the criminalization of Native language and religions, all of it existed to enforce the stealing of land. This series points to a specific pot of money — public money that comes directly from stolen land — that could be repurposed to start to repair all that harm.
Other stories I'm following:
I could send you a bunch of links to what Trump is doing to destroy the things we care about (yes even you, Republican family members who may be reading). But in the spirit of talking about what we want to talk about, I’ll share a couple resources that I used as I was reporting out the prisons story. First is the Yellowhead Institute’s Cash Back report. This reports examines “how Canada got its economy through theft, how colonialism has been reframed as fiscal policy, and how Indigenous livelihoods can be protected and thrive even in the face of state deprivations and violence.” I would love to see a report like this focused on the U.S. It would probably say a lot of the same things.
The Land Grab Universities investigation opened up space for my alma mater, the University of Minnesota, to examine how it was founded and operates via genocide and land theft. The Truth Project produced a 200-page report on the institutional harms my school continues to commit. “The Founding Board of Regents committed genocide and ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples for financial gain, using the institution as a shell corporation through which to launder lands and resources,” the report states. Timber harvesting, mining, and other extraction on stolen land has generated nearly $600 million for the university since 1851. The report offers pathways to repair. “UMN must commit to perpetual reparations to Indigenous peoples,” the report states. Minnesotans, especially, you should spend time with this.
Journalist Alissa Azar was arrested and charged with trespassing while covering pro-Palestine student protests in Portland, Oregon last year. Alissa was painted as an activist and not a journalist, and her trial was set for January. Reporter Jen Byers wrote about Alissa’s case, and also explored the limitations to legal protections for movement journalists. As Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel to the National Press Photographers Association, told Jen, “Almost all of the statutes in the various states that talk about unlawful assembly talk about someone being a participant in the assembly, and our argument has always been, ‘Journalists are not participants.’ Journalists are there to observe and exercise the First Amendment, free press rights.” The role of movement journalists is more complex, Jen points out. In her piece Jen also stresses that the safety of movement journalists will depend in part on whether mainstream reporters and their organizations choose to stand up for them. Alissa is a member of Freelance Solidarity Project, and I’m proud to say that the National Writers Union did have her back. Under pressure from the union and others, the local DA dropped charges against her.
"A Decade of Wet’suwet’en Resistance"
I’ve done a lot of reporting on tactics the state and corporations use to push controversial oil and gas pipelines through Indigenous land, without consent. But I mostly work in print (and now audio), and so much of the story is lost without visuals. The documentary Yintah is about the Wet’suwet’en resistance to the Coastal Gaslink project in Canada. This is a visual story — the landscape that that pipeline passes through is unbelievably beautiful. As a bonus to the visually stunning footage, you get to see outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau make a fool of himself on repeat.
Palate Cleansers
I cover topics that are heavy and distressing to take in, so I'm ending these posts with things that make me feel grounded: food, nature, community.
Something Delicious: New Year's Pho
Brilliant journalist Lam Thuy Vo came over last weekend and taught my household how to make pho, in celebration of Lunar New Year. I love this essay she wrote a few years back for the Philadelphia Inquirer about learning to make pho in a time of distress. It comes with her recipe, and I hope you can find a little comfort in it.
Garden Update: The Worst Month of the Year
There is no garden in February. Just barren concrete and dead or sleeping sticks.
Bulletin Board: Supporting Incarcerated Journalists
Many of the firefighters confronting the L.A. fires were paid a pittance, because they are incarcerated. To support them, you can donate to the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, which provides them with equipment they need and puts the leftover funds toward the firefighters’ commissary accounts and toward scholarships for formerly incarcerated firefighters.
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