Environmentalist a mentor to Lonefighters' leader

Page 9

Native environmentalist Dhyani Ywahoo has been a spiritual mentor to Milton Born With A Tooth of the Lonefighters Society for the last 12 years.

They met in 1978 on the Longest Walk, a march across the United States to protest the government's plans to dissolve all Indian treaties.

Her title is Chief Umwiyuhu of Etahwa Cherokee Nation. It means she is a thick-skinned leader and a walking-stick to help people over rough places.

She works with the Peace Keeper Mission of the Sunray Meditation Society in Vermont and is able to do environmental work through teaching about the Pale One and the Peacemaker and through co-operative community action.

Ywahoo credits her children with making her an environmentalist.

Her daughters, worried there would be no decent land left and no good water to drink wondered if they should have children.

Their concern caused her to expand her scope from working for poor people's rights and with abused people to working as a caretaker of Mother Earth.

And as a grandmother who looks to the future, she must skillfully find the best means of caring for the people on the land.

That includes helping to maintain existing people like the Peigans of the Blackfeet Confederacy whose lives are as entwined with the Oldman River as the Cherokees are with the hills and the woodlands.

The Lonefighters and their opposition to the proposed Oldman dam are important to Ywahoo because the survival of the Peigan will be directly affected by the dam.

Her own Cherokee people have already lost their land and clean water.

Ducktown, South Carolina, an example of how the land has been destroyed by mining, clearcut logging and smelting, resembles a lunar landscape. Sacred lands have been flooded and the rivers are polluted.

Ywahoo is looking to the Peigan Nation, sill living in its original territory, to hold onto the sacred song. She is also there to offer support from the Sunray Society and from 120 other concerned organizations across Europe.

"Whatever happens here in Canada will affect Canadians and Americans all the way down to Mexico," she says.

When the flow of water changes with the construction of dams, as it will with the Oldman a other proposed dams, the windshield balance of the planet will change resulting in flooding and drought, she says.

In Tennessee and Oklahoma vast flooding occurred when canals were built out of rivers. Towns were under water for weeks.

Changing the bodies of water is like plugging the veins on one side of the body, pulmonary embolism will result."

This astute Indian environmentalist brings a sense of urgency with her.

We have about two years to sort it out. It is an opportunity for Native and non-Native communities who work together for the future and to choose for the land. I'm thankful there exist many altruistic people with the right motivation such as Martha Kostuch from Friends of the Oldman.

Also Milto has made a good beginning with the Lonefighter diversion. He educated the farmers and those who may benefit from the dam to recognize that as land and sovereignty rights of Natives decrease, so will the rights of all Canadians. However, the Lonefighter action is not an isolated event.

Neither is Oka, the Lubicon standoff or Milton's political incarceration. They all reflect the loss of human rights across North America. As east bloc countries move towards increased human rights, representing the struggle against oppression, has fallen down.

It is thrashing about in its death throes. Only a few corporations and people will benefit from the coming oppression. We have to turn it around."