Nilak Butler presente!
The following are excerpts from a Dec. 30 statement
issued by the Indigenous Environmental Network in tribute to
Native activist Nilak Butler, who died Dec. 26 at the age of 49
from ovarian cancer. Ms. Butler was a member of the Big
Mountain speaking tour in the late 1980s, which linked the
struggles for national liberation for the Indigenous
peoples and the Black people of South Africa then living under
the racist white apartheid regime:
Nilak, one of the founders of the Indigenous Environmental
Network, dedicated the past 12 years to doing environmental
justice work with Indigenous communities. For near 30 years,
Nilak dedicated her life to defending the rights of Indigenous
peoples, from the Oglala Lakota community in South Dakota to
the communities of Big Mountain/Black Mesa in the territories
of the Navajo and Hopi Nations, to Inupiat communities in
Alaska.
When she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, she was
coordinating the IEN Labor Occupational Health Program, a
partnership between IEN and the University of California
Berkeley program. She helped create a worker health and safety
educational training program for tribal employees and tribal
grassroots environmental justice organizations.
During the 1990s, Nilak was a campaigner with the Greenpeace
Nuclear Free Native Lands Campaign. She worked with both Native
and Pacific Island communities impacted by radioactive exposure
and tribal communities threatened with becoming sites for the
dumping of nuclear waste.
Her work as a campaign organizer on nuclear issues took her
from nuclear weapons testing issues in the Pacific Islands to
the Native Village of Point Hope, Alaska, where the U.S.
military disposed radioactive waste in the homelands of the
Inupiat peoples. She worked with the Western Shoshone and
Goshute Shoshone of the Great Basin, where years of U.S.
nuclear weapons testing took place, exposing Shoshone and
Paiute peoples to radioactive contamination.
As a member of the Indigenous Women's Network, Nilak
provided leadership and provided us strength to stand strong in
protecting the sacredness of our Earth Mother.
Reprinted from the Jan. 30, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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