The climate movement gave this Texas tribe millions and a global platform. No one checked its story.

In May of 2017, Juan Mancias became an overnight sensation in France. Standing over 6 feet tall with a mane of salt-and-pepper hair, a medicine wheel-emblazoned ribbon shirt, beaded belt, and feathered medallion bearing the seal of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, he was conspicuous on the streets of Paris, and he had a message: French banks were financing the desecration of sacred Native lands and burial si

conspicuous

on the streets of Paris, and he had a message: French banks

were financing

the desecration of sacred Native lands and burial sites. They were, he said, aiding in the ongoing

ethnic cleansing

of Indigenous people in Texas through their support of natural gas pipelines and export terminals.

“It’s the same thing for 500 years,” Mancias

told Observatoire des Multinationales

. “We were occupied by the Spanish, by the Mexicans, then by the Texans, then by the Americans. And now it’s the oil industry.”

Three months before Mancias arrived in France, the

last camps at Standing Rock

emptied. For nearly a year, thousands of Indigenous water protectors and environmental allies had gathered near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota to protest the

Dakota Access Pipeline

, or DAPL. Oil was now flowing through DAPL, but activists and environmental organizations kept the momentum of the protests going.

In South Texas, Mancias had been fighting the same battle on a different front. He and

Bekah Hinojosa

, a grassroots activist in the Rio Grande Valley, spent weeks organizing against the proposed

Rio Grande terminal

and

Rio Bravo Pipeline

. The $18-billion projects would carry tens of millions of tons of natural gas each year to the export terminal in Brownsville, where it would be liquefied and shipped overseas as LNG. The battle led them to collaborate with Rainforest Action Network

on a study

documenting what it identified as the projects’ threat to the area, which included Carrizo/Comecrudo lands. The proposed industrial corridor, Mancias said, threatened the tribe and

Garcia Pasture

, a village site near Brownsville with

human burials

, ruins, and a rare coastal ecosystem the World Monuments Fund, an organization dedicated to raising global awareness of endangered cultural heritage sites, declared “threatened by natural resource extraction.”

“It used to be one of the places that we would gather as different clans and set up our lean-tos and be there for awhile while we were fishing,” Mancias said. “That’s why we were real concerned.”

The report circulated. People were paying attention.