Remember the iconic photo of Darryl Hannah? Well, here’s the great-great grandmother who stood with her against the Keystone XL bulldozer ravaging her Texas land.

The elders are working for all of us, all seven generations to come. In Bloomington, since January 2011, elders James and Tomi Allison and their cohorts are taking the lead in promoting the Tenth Amendment to overturn Citizens United.

In the west, Great Old Broads for Wilderness have been active for over 20 years. From their website:

Our History

Great Old Broads for Wilderness was founded in 1989, on the 25th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, by a feisty group of lady hikers who wanted to refute Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch’s notion that wilderness is inaccessible to elders. Today our wrinkled ranks have grown to include men and younger women (Broads-in-Training), though the majority of our membership continues to be older women committed to protecting wilderness areas.

Our Vision

Wild places will have the respect and protection needed to preserve them for future generations.

Our Mission

Great Old Broads for Wilderness is a national organization that uses the voices and activism of elders to preserve and protect wilderness and wild public lands. Conceived by older women who love wilderness, Broads gives voice to the millions of older (and not so able) Americans who want to protect their public lands as Wilderness for this and future generations. We bring voice, knowledge, commitment, and humor to the movement to protect our last wild places on earth.

_____

Now it appears that not only are elders opposed by the Empire Addict and his Giant Machines that devour Earth’s resources like candy, but they are even opposed by actual living people who should know better. At “The Broads” latest encampment in Canyonlands, Utah, they were seriously harassed and threatened by people living in the same county! People, apparently, who though small and defenseless, are not Na’vi, not yet. Wake up, folks! Help the elders help your children and grandchildren.

Here’s a post from High Country News that speaks to the shame of what happened there.

Fear and Loathing in San Juan County

Finally, Elder Russell Means of the Lakota Sioux in Pine Ridge, S.D. he who, as a young warrior, led his people to a standoff with the U.S. Government at Wounded Knee in 1973, speaks in this long interview, of which I’ve only watched six minutes so far and already, he has made me realize that, hey, guess what, folks, We’re all on “the rez,” now, all Americans. The entire country has been turned into an Indian reservation — with all that implies. WAKE UP!

First, the notes below the youtube interview:

The United States is one big reservation, and we are all in it. So says Russell Means, legendary actor, political activist and leader for the American Indian Movement. Means led the 1972 seizure of the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington, D.C., and in 1973 led a standoff at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, a response to the massacre of at least 150 Lakotah men, women, and children by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry at a camp near Wounded Knee Creek.

American Indian Russell Means gives an eye-opening 90 minute interview in which he explains how Native Americans and Americans in general are all imprisoned within one huge reservation. Means is a leader for the Republic of Lakotah, a movement that has declared its independence from the United States and refused to recognize the authority of presidents or governments, withdrawing from treaties it made with the federal government and defining its borders which cover thousands of square miles in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana.

Means explains how American Indians have been enslaved within de facto prisoner of war camps as a result of the federal government’s restriction of their food supply and the application of colonial tactics, a process that has now also been inflicted on the United States as a whole which has turned into, “one huge Indian reservation,” according to Means.

Means warns that Americans have lost the ability of critical thought, and with each successive generation become more irresponsible and as a consequence less free, disregarding a near-perfect document, the Constitution, which was derived from Indian law. Means chronicles the loss of freedom from the 1840’s onwards, which marked the birth of the corporation, to Lincoln’s declaration of martial law, to the latter part of the 19th century and into the 20th when Congress “started giving banks the right to rule,” and private banking interests began printing the money.

We may all be on the rez, but we sure don’t always treat our elders the way the Indians do.

Let us learn from and absorb the earth-based, generative, and intergenerational values of the Na’vi Native Americans.

Let us all together dismantle the still invisible, but highly lethal, frequency fence of predatory, corporatist capitalism that has shoved aside our democracy and keeps us all enchained.