Danny Kennedy, Project Underground

Danny Kennedy is the director of Project Underground, a Berkeley-based human rights and environmental organization which he helped to found in 1996. He is also a husband and a happy new father of a beautiful, bouncing baby girl.

Wow -- Wednesday. It is already Wednesday and all those well-made plans from Monday seem to have gone out the window. My to-do list has grown out of control and we are yet to complete the funding proposals I set out to do at the start of the week. No wonder we always seem broke! That means this morning I have to knock them off, write the report to past funders, and plough into my list of things to do. I have five phone calls to make, two letters to write, a mail package to send, and board meeting minutes to type up. Fascinating stuff, I assure you!\

This is my daily grind. As romantic as the human rights work that we do may seem, it is probably a lot like other desk jobs. Except the remuneration isn't as good -- at least not compared to people here in the Bay Area who earn $100K for "testing code." Not that I am bitter -- the rewards of this job are many, like the incredible people we get to work with, and far outweigh the downsides. But we're not all out "in the field" doing battle with evil human-rights and environmental abusers. Sometimes we get to do that, and it feels good, but a lot of the time we are tied to a desk.

So today I will sit here from 8:00 a.m. to 2 p.m. and try to crank through my tasks. And then at 2:00 I'll get to sit down and spend time crafting the next phase of one of Project Underground's best programs: a collaboration with the Indigenous Environmental Network. That organization is an amazing array of native environmentalists across Turtle Island working to redress some of the environmental racism against the indigenous peoples of Mexico, the United States, and Canada, both urban Indians and those on reservations. It's a privilege and pleasure to work with IEN, so I look forward to spending time on this.

Project Underground jointly manages the Indigenous Mining Campaign Project with IEN, which is an effort to develop a native capacity to deal with mining issues on indigenous lands. To date it has involved one staff person, the wonderful Ms. Sayo:kla Kindness of Oneida Nation in Wisconsin, who we have been training for nearly a year about the whys, hows, and wherefores of mining. Today we are going to start the conversation about what the next steps of the project will be, as Sayo:kla is now more than well enough versed in the scientific and social problems of mining on native lands. She wants to get out there and do something about it.

A lot of Americans don't realize it, but the U.S. is still a major producer of minerals, especially metals and coal. And most of this comes from native lands. That is not a function of the surface area of the country controlled by indigenous peoples (if you look at a map, reservations and native claims do not cover much of the lower 48 at all), but a result of mining companies targeting indigenous people. Why do they do this? Power. They think they have it over native communities and leaders so they can get a better deal or cut corners, while it would be harder to dig a pit in a white community's backyard.

This is why we call it environmental racism: There is a disproportionate environmental impact on native peoples in the U.S. from the problems engendered by mining -- water pollution, destruction of habitat and sacred sites, radiation, etc. And the Indigenous Environmental Network wanted to address this systemic abuse, so they came to us because we're an organization experienced in supporting communities resisting such exploitation and committed to indigenous and human rights. It has been a wonderful alliance, with our organization learning far more from Sayo:kla and her coworkers at IEN than we have imparted to her

We've gone through a period of training, taking exposure trips to places like Nevada where more than 24 mile-wide, mile-deep gold mines scar the lands of the Western Shoshone, and otherwise getting Sayo:kla involved in some campaign work. Our course of action now will likely be to conduct a needs assessment of all the issues (old uranium mines on Navajo land, the cyanide-based gold mines affecting the Western Shoshone, mercury poisoning from the 1849 Gold Rush for the Pomo of California) and craft a workplan to support the affected people to clean the messes up and stop the abuse.

Again, this is a work in progress and no startling change is going to take place today as a result of our meeting, but slowly we will make a difference. It is one of the things I like most about the Indigenous Mining Campaign Project -- we recognize that slow and steady wins the race when it comes to social change. We have invested a lot in training an organizer and are now going to send her into the field to begin the laborious process of building power amongst native peoples fighting wrongs done to them in pursuit of mines and money. It'll take time but it'll be worth it to roll back some corner of the blanket of oppression that has nearly smothered indigenous communities for the last 500 years or so.