Facebook Live Teach-In: Environmental Justice

My name is Sagatiaej. I’m from the Tobique Band of Maliseets, 1st Nations. I want to thank you all for standing up for the Earth and for the future of our children. When I was 15 years old, my father died in a construction accident at work. I was in homeschooling due to bullying and graduated high school about a year later. I started college early. First semester I got all A’s, nine classes my first semester, but my mother was grieving and couldn’t handle raising children or taking me to school every day. Thougth I told her I wasn’t ready to be on my own, she moved me out anyway. The next semester I dropped out halfway through and ended up homeless with no home to go home to. So I made the best of it and hung out in Waterville at a place called The Art Academy, run by Rodrick Stewart, a local artist from Manhattan. He fed me often, taught me about art and philosophy. One day someone asked if I wanted to go to NYC. I asked when they were coming back. They said they weren’t. So I went, with $37 to my name. This was 1998-1999. I started out on the streets sleeping and playing guitar in subways. Due to high pollution exposure w/no way to get out of it, I developed an allergy to the sun called solar dermatitis. I got so thirsty I drank bad water and got very sick because I was so desperate for water that I drank from a polluted stream. I tried the old way of cleansing and filtering with grass, charcoal, rocks and birch bark, but the grass and the dirt were also contaminated. So I got very sick. The hospital called my mother and told her I would die, but she did not have the money to reach me. I surprised them and got better instead. Months later, I traveled across the country with my guitar. I hit every state but two. I hit a lot of providences in Canada and lived on many reservations. I returned to the tribal side of my family and they helped me heal from my father’s death, the murder I’d witnessed, the abduction I’d suffered and a long list of other things that happen to little girls who float around in the world. I made a spiritual commitment. On my fourth year, I had a heart attack. I had contracted Epstein Barr Virus, from bad water and communal sharing. I was in Elsipogtog Canada at the time. We couldn’t not drink From the well that year because non-natives had tried to poison the water with rat poisoning. They’d also left needles in the ground pointing up where people were meant to dance barefoot. So we couldn’t drink that water and had to bring water in. We shared water during tree ceremony and preparation sweats. I also collected rainwater in a spirit bowl and drank from that as is our tradition to take in what creator gifts us during our fasts. At some point I contracted EBV, which doesn’t harm most people but can become chronic and deadly for Asians and Native Americans as we have little or no anti-bodies against it. It caused a pericarditis which led to a heart attack at 26 years old. The reason for sharing this is because this story gives people an idea of what the homeless face, even what the animals face when they are not wrapped up safe in a home away from the damage that is being done to the earth and to the water. I still have problems. I have stomach paralysis and nerve pain. I have high white blood count and high platelets and they don’t know why. I have a lifetime of suffering for the years I was exposed to the natural world. Animals live in the damage we do constantly. We live detached from the damage so we can’t see what is actually being done or feel it. It is too easy to deny when wealth can let us live so detached from the damage we have done and continue to do. My great-grandmother who lived to 103, remembered a time when we could drink from the rivers or from natural springs and it was a safe and normal thing to do. In such a short time we have done all this damage. We cannot continue like this. My family has old stories. They talk about a time before the great flood, when this all happened before and the reason the Native people try to stay living in balance with nature is because they learned first hand what happens to people who don’t, hearing about large tribes from the south who’d destroyed themselves living out of balance. They say that’s what caused tribal people of this land to insist so strongly that living in balance with the Earth Is the only way we can live and we are taught to take from the earth it’s seven generations behind us in mind. I don’t know if those stories are true, but even if they are not, somewhere some how, our people learned not to live out of balance; not to extort the animals and plants and the we were taught that the only true unforgivable thing to do was to hurt innocence with malice or to harm the “water babies” or the spirits of the water which carries its own memories and holds the secrets of all life. In a perhaps more modern way, I believe in the values of those ideas and most importantly, I believe that we need to protect the water. Oil and water is like the blood and tears of Mother Earth. We are not meant to extract and profit off of her blood and tears. We won’t destroy the Earth. When she is tired of the misbehaving, she will simply sneeze and be done with us. Then she will take centuries to heal, if she can even recover from the few hundred years of damage we’ve done in the name of profit. It’s wrong. Everyone knows it’s wrong. Those standing up for doing it, are profiting or hoping to profit from the extortion of it, but in their hearts, they know this is wrong. They get angry because they feel their wealth or road to wealth might be threatened. There are other kinds of wealth… more valuable that we are all missing out on. We need to choose better. Thank you for your time. All my relations. 🙏🏽