Fort Reno, U.S.A. - On June 1st, 2012, eight riders and a host of supporters are scheduled to set out from Fort Reno on a 1,391 mile journey in remembrance of the 1878 Cheyenne exodus.

The Ride Home was set in motion by Margaret Behan of the International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers and Cheyenne Elders Council who will be joining the riders for prayers and healing ceremonies at key locations along the journey which spans seven states.

From Oklahoma through Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming, the ride culminates in Lame Deer, Montana on July 28, 2012 at the 11th gathering of the Grandmothers Council. 

At sacrifice sites along the route, Earth skill educators will share the lost wisdom of caring for the earth through storytelling, land stewardship and wilderness survival training for families.  They will offer hands-on teachings of traditional skills such as fire making, shelter building, animal tracking, flint knapping, and more.

Inspired by Cherokee rider Noqah Elisi who first envisioned the ride after receiving a message in a vision quest instructing her to follow in the footsteps of her grandmothers, Margaret asked Juan Villarreal to organize the ride.  Juan, a member of the Texas Lipan Apache and The Apache Language Preservation Committee, board member of the Tribal Native American Church and founder of Sacred Wind Earth Teachings, had never ridden a horse.

Juan immediately contacted Suzi Landolphi from Red Horse Nation, a Native American Horse program of Lifesavers Wild Horse Rescue to begin his horse training.  Lifesaver is supplying all of the horses for the ride and is also the fiscal sponsor.

“My prayer is to bring spirit back to my people.  So much has been lost.  We need to bring our Cheyenne identity and pride back to the young people, teach them the traditional ceremonies and language,” says Grandmother Margaret Behan.

A film crew will be documenting the journey with acclaimed native filmmaker Chris Eyre acting as key advisor.  Colin and Livia Firth are also associated with the journey and film.

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After being found liable in Ecuador for creating one of the world’s worst oil disasters, Chevron filed a notice of appeal to Ecuador’s highest court where it seeks special treatment not afforded any other litigant under the nation’s laws — the waiver of a bond required to suspend enforcement of a judgment during the pendency of any appeal.

It would be illegal under Ecuadorian law for the appellate court to grant Chevron’s unusual and unprecedented request to waive the bond requirement, said Pablo Fajardo, the lead attorney for the indigenous and farmer communities who brought suit against the oil giant for the dumping of billions of gallons of toxic waste into the waterways used by several indigenous groups and farmer communities.

“Chevron has every right under the law to seek an extraordinary appeal to the highest court as long as it can cite a proper legal basis,” said Fajardo.  “But Chevron is yet again seeking a special exemption under Ecuadorian law when it claims the bond requirement should not apply to it, while it applies to every other litigant in the country.”

“Chevron behaves in Ecuador as if it is above the law while thousands of people continue to suffer the devastating effects of the company’s toxic contamination,” said Fajardo.  ”This abuse of the judicial process must end.”

For execution of a court judgment in Ecuador to be suspended pending appeal to the highest court — called the National Court of Justice — the losing party must post a bond that is usually calculated at roughly 8% of the amount of damages awarded (roughly $1.5 billion in this case). Chevron is seeking to have enforcement suspended even without posting a bond even though the indigenous and farmer communities continue to suffer grave health effects engendered by the company’s delaying tactics, said Fajardo.

Karen Hinton, the U.S. spokesperson for the Ecuadorians, said in a statement that “for almost two decades, Chevron has stood in the way of a comprehensive cleanup of billions of gallons of crude oil and toxic waste water it deliberately dumped into the pristine rainforest of Ecuador.”

“Thousands of people have died or suffered from illnesses as Chevron and its army of lawyers have waged a campaign to distract attention from the overwhelming scientific evidence against the company,” said Hinton. “Chevron has always believed that Ecuador’s many laws prohibiting environmental contamination should not apply to its misconduct.”

The bond requirement, typical in countries around the world including the U.S., is intended to protect the winning side from unnecessary delays during appellate review.  Ecuador’s first-level appellate court already affirmed the trial court judgment that the company is required to pay $18 billion for a clean-up, a relatively modest amount compared to BP’s estimated $60 billion liability for the smaller Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Fajardo also said that an arbitral order cited by Chevron as justification for its request for a bond waiver is not binding on the rainforest communities as they are not a party to that proceeding, which is held in secret pursuant to a U.S.-Ecuador investment treaty.

In any event, the arbitral panel never ordered — and under the law cannot order — that Ecuador’s courts take steps that would “clearly violate” Ecuador’s Constitution and international treaties binding the government to protect the fundamental human rights of its citizens, including the right to life and the right to seek legal redress in national courts, said Fajardo.  Further, the arbitral panel has never even held an evidentiary hearing on Chevron’s claims that a remediation contract with Ecuador’s government released it from liability.

“We believe Chevron clearly is misinterpreting the scope of authority of the arbitration,” he added. ”We want to reiterate that Chevron has every right to appeal to Ecuador’s National Court of Justice, but it has no right to special treatment during the pendency of the appeal,” Fajardo added.

The trial court decision, issued in February 2011, found that Chevron systematically dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon, poisoning waterways that local inhabitants use for drinking water and causing increased cancer rates. Damages were set at $18 billion.  In 2002, the case was shifted from U.S. federal court to Ecuador at Chevron’s request.

The trial court in Ecuador also repeatedly sanctioned Chevron’s legal team for filing frivolous motions intended to delay the proceedings, and for threatening a judge with jail if he did not rule in favor of the company.  These actions led to a punitive damages award that accounts for roughly half of the total judgment.

Chevron has roughly two more weeks under Ecuadorian law to determine if it will publicly apologize for its misconduct, which would allow it to eliminate the punitive damages component of the award.

As support for the contention that Chevron believes it does have to adhere to the law in Ecuador, Hinton cited a comment in a 60 Minutes interview where Chevron attorney Silvia Garrigo – pressed as to why the company said it would never pay any adverse judgment in Ecuador – said: “We don’t believe we should be in any court, much less the courts of Ecuador.”

The 188-page trial court judgment is undergirded by a wide body of scientific and testimonial evidence submitted during eight years of proceedings that prove Chevron designed a system of oil extraction that deliberately discharged toxic oil waste into the environment to keep production costs to a minimum. Chevron also has been heavily criticized for trying to defraud the Ecuador court and sabotage the proceedings.

In briefs submitted to U.S. and Ecuadorian courts, the rainforest communities submitted evidence that Chevron technicians staked out “clean” spots at contaminated well sites to test prior to court-supervised judicial inspections; sent dirty soil samples to a secret lab to prevent their disclosure to the court; and doctored a “judicial playbook” document so two academic experts in the U.S. would endorse the company’s misleading sampling protocol, among other charges.

A separate ruling by a New York federal appellate court marks Chevron’s third consecutive legal setback in its effort to block enforcement of the Ecuador judgment.

In September, a federal appellate panel blocked Chevron’s attempt to seek an unprecedented worldwide injunction blocking enforcement. In January, a federal district court judge denied Chevron’s illegal attempt to freeze the assets of the plaintiffs. And on January 3, Ecuador’s first-level appellate court confirmed the validity of the trial court judgment.

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While indigenous groups in Ecuador’s Amazon face possible death and grave illness from Chevron’s “Rainforest Chernobyl” disaster, several prominent U.S. law firms and their well-known partners are billing the oil giant hundreds of millions of dollars to forestall a clean-up that could save thousands of lives, according to court documents.

Chevron’s lead outside law firm in the U.S., Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, has 60 lawyers working extensively on the case, a recent court filing revealed. The filing also showed that Chevron has paid almost 500 attorneys and paralegals from 39 different law firms since the celebrated case was filed in U.S. federal court in 1993.

The litigation was shifted to Ecuador at Chevron’s request in 2002, with a subsequent eight-year trial resulting in an $18 billion judgment against the oil giant for causing what experts believe could be the world’s worst oil-related contamination.

The Ecuador litigation represents the first time that indigenous groups have successfully sued a large oil company for harm caused to their health and ancestral lands, said Karen Hinton, the U.S. spokesperson for the Ecuadorians.  Evidence from independent health evaluations concluded that more than 9,000 rainforest dwellers face the risk of contracting cancer absent a rapid cleanup of the damage.

In all, Gibson Dunn was billing Chevron an estimated $250 million per year in 2010 and 2011 as the company launched lawsuits against the plaintiffs in 16 different federal courts, helped to litigate an international arbitration action against Ecuador’s government, filed a fraud case against the Ecuadorians and their lawyers in U.S. federal court, and supervised Chevron’s battery of local lawyers in Ecuador as they faced multiple setbacks that culminated in the adverse judgment against Chevron, said Hinton.

“Chevron’s environmental destruction in Ecuador is the best thing that ever happened to the bottom line of Gibson Dunn,” said Hinton, who noted the firm reported a 20% increase in per-partner profits in 2010 during a downturn in the economy as dozens of its lawyers worked full-bore on the Ecuador matter.

“Clearly, Gibson Dunn and several other firms are profiting from rainforest destruction,” Hinton added. “These lawyers have proven that fighting to deny the human rights of indigenous groups can be a very profitable business model.”

Gibson Dunn clearly has sold Chevron on its willingness to engage in questionable tactics and push the ethical envelope, said Hinton.  The firm boasts that it engages in “recuse operations” for clients in trouble and that if the law is in the way it is willing to maneuver around it to achieve client objectives. Several judges have sanctioned Gibson Dunn lawyers for trying to intimidate witnesses and for filing frivolous lawsuits on behalf of Chevron, and one well-known partner has been accused of trying to mislead the Congress about the case.

A federal judge in Oregon fined Chevron after a team of Gibson Dunn lawyers had harassed the executive director of a respected environmental organization that had filed a brief in support of the Ecuadorians.

Gibson Dunn also uses cookie cutter lawsuits, Hinton said, where defenders of human rights victims and their supporters are always accused of “fraud” for trying to hold wrongdoers like Chevron accountable for their misconduct.

“The basic Gibson Dunn template is to attack victims to distract from the evidence,” said Hinton.  “When that doesn’t work, the firm resorts to outright intimidation to silence any lawyer or advocate who stands up to the firm.”

Gibson Dunn’s approach also has created numerous problems for Chevron in Ecuador, the fifth-largest oil producing nation in South America.  Chevron’s legal team in Ecuador is said to be furious with the Gibson Dunn lawyers for losing the case because of their arrogant treatment of Ecuadorian judges, said Hinton.

Chevron lawyers in Ecuador working closely on the case with Gibson Dunn’s “rescue” team have been sanctioned repeatedly for filing frivolous motions (once filing a motion eighteen times in 30 minutes), threatening the presiding judge with jail time if he didn’t rule in Chevron’s favor, and paying a Chevron contractor to secretly videotape a judge to try to entrap him in a trumped-up bribe scandal.

The Ecuador court imposed a large punitive damages award on Chevron in large part for its abuse of the judicial process in Ecuador, according to the judgment.

In the meantime, the case has become a financial bonanza for several other large law firms who represent Chevron. The list of 39 law firms disclosed by the company in a U.S. court action also includes the prominent criminal defense firm of Arguedas, Cassman & Headley; Jones Day; King & Spalding; Akin, Gump, Strauss; Hauer & Feld; Holland & Knight; Jones Day; Steptoe & Johnson; and Williams & Connolly.

The all-star cast of attorneys who have worked on some aspect of the case for Chevron include Theodore Olson of Gibson Dunn, a former Solicitor General of the United States; Brendan Sullivan of Williams & Connolly, who reportedly represented a Chevron executive who faced potential criminal liability in Ecuador; Greg Craig of Skadden Arps, President Clinton’s impeachment lawyer who Chevron reportedly hired to explore settlement;

Mickey Kantor of Mayer Brown, the former U.S. Trade Representative under Clinton who spearheaded a Chevron effort to cut trade preferences for Ecuador; David Boies , whose firm helps the oil giant fight discovery actions in the U.S. designed to expose its corruption in Ecuador; and Alan Vinegrad , a former U.S. Attorney who represented a Chevron lawyer indicted on criminal charges of fraud for lying to Ecuador’s government about the results of a sham remediation.

Chevron also has used six public relations firms to push talking points denying the company caused any environmental damage in Ecuador, even though the judgment is undergirded by extensive scientific evidence and the allegations have been confirmed by numerous independent news accounts.

After an eight-year trial, the Ecuador trial court in 2011 found the oil giant systematically discharged billions of gallons of toxic waste into the rainforest, decimating indigenous groups and causing an array of oil-related health problems. An Ecuador appellate court affirmed the judgment in early January, potentially opening up Chevron to standard collection actions against its assets in jurisdictions around the world unless its posts a bond in Ecuador.

Chevron stripped its assets from Ecuador and has vowed never to pay for a cleanup, even though reports indicate it contacted the plaintiffs recently in an attempt to explore settlement possibilities. Ultimately, one must wonder how much Chevron shareholders are getting in return for these expensive legal services, she said.

In the last three years, since Gibson Dunn’s “rescue” operation was launched, Chevron was hit with the $18 billion judgment, the largest ever for an environmental case; the judgment was confirmed by a three-judge panel; multiple courts sanctioned the company for its unethical litigation tactics; and a U.S. appellate court in New York prevented Chevron from seeking a worldwide injunction to block enforcement of the judgment.

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Otavalo is one of the most important markets in South America. It is located in the city of Otavalo in the Imbabura Province of Ecuador. The town shows colonial architectures, with narrowed streets. The people known as the “Otavaleños” have conserved their traditions with perseverance, exposing their culture and beliefs proudly.

The town encloses approximately 50,000 inhabitants and it is located on a precious site, by being a city enclosed and surrounded by mountains and volcanoes, such as the Imbabura 4,630m, Cotacachi 4,995m, and the Mojanda volcanoes.

The inhabitants are mainly indigenous, followed by mestizos and a small percentage of afro-ecuadorian. The indigenous people are mainly dedicated to the production and commerce of textile crafts, meanwhile the others focus on different activities such as stores, transport, tourist services etc.

In the market you will find colors, textures and handcrafts. Hammocks, shigras, ponchos, sweaters, hats, necklaces, tablecloths, earrings, bags and many other crafts are the center of attention for tourists as well for native people that come to the market in order to buy these amazing products at great prices. The indigenous crafts give great recognition to otavalos at an international and national level. The products of ancestral origins are a strong factor for the local economic sector since the products are made for markets abroad.

One of the great things to notice is the clothes for women. The vestment consists on white embroidered blouses, with flared lace sleeves, followed by a black skirt with a cream or white underskirts. The women’s long black hair is tied back with a colorful ribbon that matches the band of their waists. Their necks are also decorated with beautiful necklaces made of strings of gold. Men wear much simpler clothing, just using white trousers and dark blue ponchos.

The native language of the Otavaleños is Quechua, commonly known as the primary mother-tongue of the Inca empire. It does not have any similarity with the Spanish language, although some words from Quechua have been introduced and incorporated into the Spanish language, such as Ñaña (sister), Taita (father), achachay (expression to denote a feeling of cold), and chacra (farm).

Music has been a primordial sector in Otavalo. Since the town is also recognized as being the wedge for artists and compositors of Ecuadorian music, it has served as musical contribution with indigenous folkloric groups, with national and international trajectory.

There are many forms of transportation for getting to this town, the easiest way being by bus. From Quito, there is the possiblility to take the interprovincial buses, known as the Transportes Otavalo and  Los Lagos, which arrives directly to the city of Otavalo.

rebvt / Shutterstock.com

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