Laterite deposits are created by intense humidity and tropical weathering of rock and so they form in the tropics, often in hotspots for biodiversity and rich, intact rainforests. These deposits account for about 70% of the world's reserves of nickel, a mineral now in high demand for manufacturing batteries, especially for electric cars and clean energy infrastructure.
The central accuser said she was 14 in 2012 when Chasing Horse allegedly claimed that spirits required her to give up her virginity in order to save her mother, who had cancer. According to deputy district attorney Bianca Pucci, he then assaulted her and warned that if she told anyone, her mother would die. Pucci said the abuse continued for years afterward.
About fifteen kilometres northwest from Kitamaat is Kitimat, the industrial town that the global mining group Alcan (acquired by Rio Tinto in 2007) carved from the rainforest in the 1950s to house workers and support the needs of its aluminum smelter.
We don't eat batteries. They take away the water; they take away life. This pronouncement, in Spanish, appears in a photograph that the artist Tomás Saraceno sent via WhatsApp last month from Salinas Grandes, a high-altitude salt flat in northern Argentina. There, in one of the world's largest lithium reserves, the artist is working alongside 11 Indigenous communities to build El Santuario del Agua (The Water Sanctuary), a monumental work about the global energy transition.
Lyn Cheedy, a Yindjibarndi elder, takes her grandson to the pool most afternoons. At first, the cold water is refreshing. Then a gust of wind hits. The wind burns you, she says. I have to keep splashing my face, and your hair is drying that quick it's like you're sitting in front of an oven. In the Pilbara, heat and cyclones are nothing new, says Cheedy. Her people have survived extreme conditions for millennia.
White supremacy is a pandemic. In this moment in time, the shared global narrative centers around COVID-19. But white supremacy is a more pernicious virus, permeating every strata of human life for at least the last 500 years.
