Issue 4 — "You feel like you have no future, nothing"
On the exploitation of people and the environment
It was Maria Trujillo, a survivor of human trafficking who, late last year, told me the quote included in the headline of this newsletter. Trujillo, who is using a pseudonym because of safety concerns, was trafficked across the agricultural fields of the U.S. West Coast. For years, she worked long hours with little pay, harvesting strawberries and lettuce, and picking apples and cherries. The money she earned went directly to her trafficker — the man who helped her cross the U.S.-Mexico border from her hometown in western Mexico and the eventual father of her three children. Trujillo’s story exists at the nexus of labor exploitation, gender-based violence, and economic crime — factors which, for a period of her life, stole any semblance of a future from her and her children. That list, however, could have easily included one other system of oppression — environmental injustice.
As a form of modern-day slavery, human trafficking — which encompasses sexual exploitation and forced labor — is enabled by systemic inequalities including poverty, racism, migration, and discrimination with traffickers targeting those who have already been rendered vulnerable. While crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbate the circumstances in which trafficking thrives, those conditions, for the most part, already exist as a by-product of the world’s hunger for everything that is cheap. It’s hardly surprising then, that the exploitation of the environment so often relies on the exploitation of people.
In a 2018 paper, Columbia Law School academic Michael Gerrard traces the links between climate-induced migration, predicted to see 250 million people displaced by 2050, and human trafficking. In the wake of a natural disaster, for example, the mass movement of people creates the kind of social and economic vulnerabilities that traffickers exploit. One of the more recent examples was the uptick in reported cases of human trafficking in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan eight years ago. As formerly significant international climate agreements fall short of addressing the mass changes we’re now facing, the impact of these overlapping crises will be felt most, as always, by communities historically denied the resources needed to mitigate them.
In North America, this denial of resources — stemming from displacement, dispossession, and violence — manifests in the link between extractive industries and the trafficking of indigenous peoples — in particular, women and Two-Spirit people. Violence instituted against indigenous women has its roots as far back as Christopher Columbus’ pillaging of the Americas, whereby Taíno women and girls were essentially sold to be raped into what we would now call sex trafficking. As a teenager, Matoaka, more commonly known as Pocahontas, was kidnapped, trafficked, and raped by colonizers. Colonialism is, of course, inseparable from capitalism — and, arguably Columbus, himself — and the precedent of profit over native peoples casts a long shadow. According to data about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, one in three American Indian and Alaska Native women will be raped in their lifetime while murder rates for those same groups are 10 times the national average. In New Mexico, only 160 human trafficking cases have been opened since 2016, yet Native Americans — who make up 11 percent of the state’s population — account for a quarter of trafficking survivors.
“When we look at these histories and look at what’s going on now with Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, it’s not so much that history repeats itself, it’s just the same players, the same institutions, doing it over and over again,” said Christine Stark, an Anishinaabe and Cherokee writer and visual artist who spoke at a panel event I attended in late March.
Late last year, the Canadian oil giant, Enbridge, began construction on a controversial 337-mile pipeline slated to carry 760,000 barrels of crude oil from the Canadian tar sands to northern Minnesota every day. Line 3, as the project is called, would cross more than 200 bodies of water, have the equivalent climate impact of 50 new coal-fired power plants, and would cut through Anishinaabe treaty lands where tribal members are guaranteed the federal rights to hunt, fish, and gather wild rice. It is a project that is fiercely contested by Indigenous water protectors, many of whom are based out of the resistance camp — Camp Migizi — on the Fond du Lac Reservation in Minnesota. As Taysha Martineau, one of the camp’s founders said in a virtual tour, the camp members are not only undertaking land defense but are also protecting water and protecting women, particularly as elected officials have failed to do so.
Among the findings of Line 3’s environmental impact statement is an almost throwaway paragraph detailing the potential links between the project and human trafficking, particularly for Native communities. More than 4,000 workers — about half of whom are nonlocal, temporary workers — are estimated to be working on Line 3, often living in company-funded accommodation called “man camps.” This transience, as Winona LaDuke writes in her book To Be A Water Protector, means there is no accountability to a place or arguably, a people. As a result, the addition of a “temporary, cash-rich workforce” as described by the environmental impact statement, can increase the likelihood of sex trafficking and sexual abuse — something we’ve already begun to see.
Just two months after the construction of the pipeline began, two Line 3 workers were arrested on human trafficking charges. These recent incidents stem from a long line of exploitation that can be traced through the route of the pipeline itself, beginning in Canada where the tar sands originate. Alberta’s oil fields and the man camps associated with them have fueled high levels of violence and crime in a country where Aboriginal women are already overrepresented as victims of violence and homicide. Six years ago, this epidemic of sexual violence led to a coalition of Indigenous organizations requesting formal intervention from the United Nations, stating: “destructive, resource-intensive, and often forced practices of mineral extraction are primary ways that colonialist conquest and genocide continue today through simultaneous violence against the land and against indigenous peoples, disproportionately affecting women and girls.”
It’s not unexpected that a project like Line 3 was approved despite the potential human trafficking risk — in fact, it’s perhaps one of the lesser reasons it would have been denied in the first place. After all, many of the services and supply chains we rely upon involve some kind of exploitation often considered to be a necessity of cheap things and polluting industries. But the idea of “extraction” goes beyond what is simply being pulled from the dirt. It is about perpetuating the systems that ensure projects driven by some form of violence are not only realized but placed in communities where someone with more power and more money has deemed life to be expendable.
“Violence against the earth is violence against women,” said Jordan Marie Brings Three White Horses Daniel, the founder of Rising Hearts and a citizen of the Kul Wicasa Oyate — also known as the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe — in South Dakota. “It’s violence against us and our bodies.”
Recommended Resources
Journalist Connie Walker’s podcast Stolen: The Search for Jermain investigates the disappearance of a young Indigenous mother who has been missing since 2018. While not necessarily linked to environmental justice, the podcast touches upon a lot of the same issues of violence, racism, and trauma while looking at what it means to be an Indigenous woman in America
Sovereign Bodies Institute is one of the best resources for data and research on gender and sexual violence against Indigenous peoples
Follow and if you can support Camp Migizi’s resistance to the Line 3 pipeline
Read the full story of Maria Trujillo and how the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted survivors of human trafficking at DAME Magazine
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I’m Alessandra, the creator of Defender — a mostly monthly environmental justice newsletter. As you might have noticed, the newsletter has undergone some changes since its very short first year of existence. I’ve decided the best way to use my space in your inbox is to deliver short, reported essays on themes ranging from the newsletter you are reading now to an exploration of where “cotton candy-flavored grapes” (a real thing) fit into our very fraught food system.
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