Seattle Rappers and ‘Kayaktivists’ Message Makes it Into Rolling Stone

Female musicians and Native activists recently led two days of protests against Shell’s Arctic drilling plans. Those actions(which we support) not only brought awareness to the almost certain consequences of drilling in the Arctic but also earned them a spot in Rolling Stone Magazine. Click HERE to read the article.

The following is an excerpt from the Rolling Stone piece:

Katrina Pestaño, 31, has been an activist since college, but she was politicized by hip-hop while still a child in the Philippines. She arrived in Seattle in 2006 and began organizing a monthly hip-hop show for women performers called Indayog, which means “movement” or “rhythm” in her native Tagalog.

Pestaño is running the mic. “Hollow, my bones will carry, rebellion like the rain,” her rap begins. Head raised, chest out, eyes squeezed tight, her momentum builds. “I am that ancient rhythm, the heat of the sun.”

Twenty-two-year-old Sarra Tekola, a rapper and member of the group Got Green?, describes how the drought that led her father to leave Ethiopia 40 years ago is now, because of worsening climate change, affecting an increasing number of the world’s most vulnerable communities, particularly people of color across Africa. “Climate denial is white class privilege,” Tekola says. Elaborating on that point, she notes that individuals with the most resources, who tend to be white, are better equipped to avoid climate change’s harshest effects, and thus they often ignore it.

Tekola is also an organizer with the climate group 350.org at the University of Washington, where she’s a student. The same day she and a coalition of students succeeded in convincing the school to divest its endowment from coal, Shell’s rig arrived in Seattle. “One campaign ended, and the next began,” Tekola says with a shrug.

Read the full article in Rolling Stone HERE

For more information on Got Green? click HERE

For more information on 350.org click HERE