The Struggles Of Being A Female Activist

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“They chained me to a wall and they wouldn't let me go to the bathroom. I was cold, alone, miserable, shivering within those grey walls. They isolated me. They strip-searched me many times. They stole my dignity. Tore down my confidence. And why? Just so they could make an example of me. It was a direct threat to every other female activist out there”

- Cherri Foytlin

Environmental activists lead a hard life. Last year, 207 land and environmental activists were killed across 22 countries—almost four every week, making it the worst year on record, according to a report by Global Witness. Their struggle is perpetual, they are oppressed and silenced by companies and higher authorities who are continuously chasing profit margins at the cost of sustainability. And, female activists take the biggest blow of them all. Death threats, cyber-attacks, sexual assault, legal suites and other extreme methods are used to silence them.

Even though nine out of every ten murdered activists last year were male, women activists face chilling gender-specific threats including sexual violence. The violence has become so unruly that not only are they being subjected to smear-campaigns, but their children are also being threatened now.

Foytlin, an indigenous woman of Diné and Cherokee descent, says she feels a moral obligation to protect this country’s land, not only for her sake but for her children and the future generations. Foytlin is currently fighting Energy Transfer Partners' Bayou Bridge Pipeline in Louisiana, the latest project from the Fortune 500 corporation behind the Dakota Access Pipeline. She has been arrested 10 times on account of environmental issues. Foytlin wrote a book, Spill It! The Truth About the Deep Water Horizon Oil Rig Explosion, which was published in 2011. It received several death threats. She came home to find her cat, still and lifeless on the floor. They poisoned her cat. Sounds petty and fictional, doesn’t it? She thinks that people misunderstand her protests and assume that she is trying to take jobs away from people who rely on the oil industry. But she is only pushing leaders to create and develop a new economy that depends on renewable energy. After all, use of coal in the U.S. fell 36 per cent from 2007 to 2017, while jobs in the solar industry grew 12 times as fast as overall job creation in 2015—surpassing those in oil and gas extraction  or coal mining. More than 250,000 people worked in the solar industry in 2017 nationally, with large wind and solar being as cost-competitive with fossil fuels. She is asking for a better future for us all, and we thank her by throwing bricks into her house.

Tara is a tribal rights attorney, based in Washington who has seen and experienced some of the worst punishments given out to ‘activists’ of her kind. “I was blindfolded, thrown around and stuffed into a small space. It was dark, cold and suffocating. I struggled to breathe. My tears and screams were gagged”, Tara says.  She was zip- tied and then left in a dog kennel, making this one of the worse ways to treat not just activists, but human beings in general. Tara was allegedly trespassing while protesting against the Dakota Access pipelines (Huskey Energy) in 2016 and this led to her arrest and everything else that followed.

After her release, she continued protesting and advocating.

“The oil refinery had this massive container of something called Hydrofluoric acid which they were cooling somewhere above ground," says Houska.  

They admitted that they were trying to make sure it didn’t explode because if it did, there would’ve been a toxic gas cloud that can eat through people’s skin. I mean, that’s terrifying to hear!”

Thankfully, the container did not explode, though the risk of it exploding still remains. A spokesperson for Huskey Energy said it is continuing to work towards stabilizing and winterizing the refinery site, with operations expected to resume in 2020.

LeeAnne Walters, another struggling environmental activist, comes home to find her tires slashed, her house broken into; vases broken, windows shattered, curtains torn, tables upturned and articles stolen. She was one of the first to test tap water and expose Flint homes as having lead levels exceeding the Environmental Protection Agency’s safety threshold.

Unlike other activists, her need to defend the environment doesn’t stem from a philosophical conviction to save the planet. Rather, it is a desperate need to save her family. Due to lead poisoning in their community's water supply, her three-year-old twins were breaking out in rashes and her eldest daughter's hair was dropping out in clumps. Walters’ efforts made international headlines. Her perseverance forced the local, state, and federal governments to act. Walters is a clear example of how, when women become too strong to silence, they are put in their place and subjected to violence from within their own community. She had to hire an attorney because her husband was threatened to be sent to a mental institute because he was “too damaged from Flint,” unless he would rapidly “handle his wife and get her under control,” according to Walters. And the people who reported this were his own comrades of 22 years from his military unit. “It's very hard to be a whistleblower and even harder when you are ostracized from the people that are supposed to be your brothers,” says Walters. Another problem women activists face is - the oppression by patriarchy, which will never accept the fact that women are equal to men. Fighting for not just the environment but her rights, she says, “Nobody should tell a husband to handle their wife and get her under control.” Juggling family responsibilities while being a full-time activist is an additional problem. In many communities, women still take on the brunt of domestic chores; their home and families depend on them. When they are attacked, the entire structure they hold up is threatened.  Walters complains of being away from her kids.

Gender discrimination and misogynistic insults (such as being labelled "bad mothers") historically form part of the repression of women opposing extractive projects. They try to damage them not just physically but emotionally.  For Foytlin, being a mother of six and an activist can sometimes feel like an impossible task. Last year, someone posted a video about her where Foytlin was called “public enemy number one.” This led to someone calling child welfare. “They tried to get my kids taken away from me. Do you know how frightening that is?” So, I have a question for all the oh-so-great-clever men who strongly believe in the patriarchal hierarchy, what logic do you use to justify this and fall asleep guilt-free at night?  She was fighting for the environment, the safety of all our families, so we threaten hers?

LeeAnne, Foytlin and Tara are three of hundreds of women around the globe currently facing oppression, persecution, violence—even murder and assassination—for defending the environment. But despite all the hurdles, women still lead this fight. Elizabeth Yeampierre, a Puerto Rican attorney believes that this is because of the nurturing nature of women, their intimate connection with their children and the Earth. “We think like people who come from struggle,” she says, adding that women of colour have been holding this space for years, and are now, finally, getting the visibility they deserve. “We tend to have this respect for Mother Earth as an extension of our culture and spirituality. So it's not surprising for me to see such an intergenerational group of badasses leading the way.”