Jacob Johns was shot in the chest Thursday at a rally against a conquistador’s statue in New Mexico. Friends say he is recovering and is in good spirits, but the medical bill from two surgeries and his hospital stay will likely be very large. Those who want to donate to a fund to cover those bills can do so here.
Jeff Ferguson met the Spokane water protector and painter Jacob Johns more than a decade ago at the Gathering at the Falls Powwow, an annual Indigenous artisan market downtown. He recalled that Johns didn’t have a table to display his paintings, so he pulled a ball of twine from his belongings and “threw it up in the trees.”
“He wove this kind of web in the trees and hung his paintings from that twine,” Ferguson said. And he thought to himself: “Wow, that guy’s pretty dedicated.”
Ferguson shared this memory at a candlelight vigil downtown held Saturday to pray for a swift recovery for Johns after he was shot Thursday at a rally in Española, New Mexico. The vigil was held at a mural on Howard Street in Spokane that Johns painted this year.
Margo Hill, a member of the Spokane Tribe and an EWU professor, said Johns used art, some of which is overtly political, as a vessel for his activism.
“Jacob, he’s a doer” who would put his art anywhere it would make an impact, Hill told a crowd of about 20 gathered under the railroad tracks on Howard Street, which is home to a vibrant, colorful mural by Johns. “He would project it up on a building. He would paint it. He would march it. He would sing it.”
The Howard Street mural contains images of hands bound by chains, faces of Indigenous people, the state of Washington crest, a large text that says “FREEDOM TO VOTE” and the website for Free the Vote Washington, which educates formerly imprisoned people on their voting rights in the state.
In the years since meeting Johns at the powwow, Ferguson and Johns grew close through a series of global and national protest actions to protect water and the climate from the ravages of the fossil fuel industry. Ferguson came to call Johns his best friend.
“He was there when they toppled the Columbus statue in St. Paul, Minnesota,” Ferguson told RANGE before the vigil. “He was there in Portland for the riots. He was over in Seattle when they were protesting the mayor there.”
Last year, Ferguson witnessed Johns, who is Hopi and Akimel O’odham, be expelled from the U.N.’s COP27 climate change conference in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt for leading a protest with a Hopi war cry.
“There were three Native youth and him,” Ferguson said. “They stood up and held a banner that said ‘people versus fossil fuels.’ [President Joe] Biden was standing up there saying Indigenous people have the solutions to climate. And, you know, it was really a whole brainwashing effort because he wasn’t listening to the Indigenous people anyhow.” Despite that, Ferguson said, the action by Johns and the other protesters, Big Wind, Jamie Wefald and Angela Zhong, “echoed throughout that whole hall.”
“We’ve been locked out, our voices silenced,” Johns told the Guardian after the action. “The climate collapse is coming, we are literally fighting for our lives. If we’re not allowed to advocate for our future, who will? It’s shameful.”
Closer to home, Johns also has a legacy as an activist opposing symbols of colonization.
Hill said Johns was central to successful 2020 demonstrations to rename Fort George Wright Drive to Whistalks Way. He had organized a white Unitarian pastor to speak to the police on behalf of the protesters. “He’s strategically aligned with people that are not of color,” Hill said in an interview after the vigil. “And he’s put them forward.”
But such de-escalation doesn’t work everywhere.
Johns had been in Santa Fe for the U.S. Climate Action Network Conference and went to Española to support a demonstration by Indigenous groups against the proposed reinstallation of a statue of Juan de Oñate, which was taken down in 2020 amid the national George Floyd protests. Oñate is infamous for having brutalized and razed an Acoma pueblo in 1599, killing up to 1,000 and cutting off the feet of hundreds of men. The demonstrators were celebrating the county’s decision to postpone the reinstallation.
Media reports say just before being shot, Johns put himself between a group of vulnerable people at the protest as the accused gunman ran toward the crowd.
Photographs of the rally show Johns singing and holding a sign reading “Do not! Resurrect Oñate.”
Protesters gathered Wednesday night at the Rio Arriba County headquarters, where the county had planned to re-erect the statue that had been removed by authorities prior to protests in 2020. They built an altar with maize, candles, figurines and signs that read “WE DON’T WANT ONATE SAY NO!” and “We deserve to be human.”
A small group of counter protesters posted signs on the hip-high red wall that enclosed the courtyard in support of the statue. The Associated Press reported that some Hispanics may see the statue as a symbol of their heritage. Signs posted near the demonstration defended the conquistador. One said, “Oñate brought Culture to the New World Cattle, horses, sheep, goats, etc. Agriculture, Food, seeds, trees.”
Thursday morning, Ryan Martinez, a 23-year-old man with long hair wearing a blue jacket and a red “Make America Great Again” hat, began arguing with protesters and touching items on the altar. He was initially expelled from the area by police but returned just after noon.
Video of the shooting, which is graphic, shows Martinez hopping the wall and running toward the altar where the protesters were gathered. Johns and another man immediately pushed Martinez back out of the courtyard. Someone said, “Let him go,” several times. Martinez jumped back over the wall, took two steps back from it, pulled a black pistol from his waistband and fired a single shot, which entered Johns’ chest.
Martinez ran from the scene and drove away in a white Tesla, according to news reports.
According to the GoFundMe page to raise funds for his medical bills, “Jacob put his body between women and children when the shooter charged towards the altar.” As of publication time, the fundraiser has accrued more than $175,000 of a $250,000 goal.
Bill McKibben, the writer who founded the fossil fuel-fighting nonprofit 350.org and has pioneered a number of movements trying to address climate change, tweeted Johns’ GoFundMe, writing, “This indigenous activist was shot by some idiot in a MAGA hat; chip in to the Go Fund Me for his care. And be careful out there, because some of these goons have no boundaries.”
In a Sunday email to RANGE, McKibben noted the frequency of violence environmental activists face, especially in the Western Hemisphere.
“I’ve heard from friends who were on the scene, and the story is just gutting,” he wrote. “Around the world, people standing up for justice – often Indigenous people – are constantly targeted. I got to lead a memorial service two years ago for the 238 environmentalists killed the year before, most of them in the Americas. Every time it recapitulates our dumb violent history; I don’t think these people want to make America great again, I think they want to make it gross again.”
In the days since, Johns has undergone two surgeries. Speakers at the vigil said they had heard from his mother, who was with him Saturday, that he was in good spirits after waking from the second surgery. “I asked his mom to tell him we’re gonna get together and have a little vigil here for him tonight, and he said, ‘Get some action shots,’” Ferguson said with a smile in his remarks at the vigil.
Thursday was not the first time Johns put himself in danger to protect others. James Roundstone, a longtime friend of Johns who organized the vigil, protested with Johns at the 2016 Indigenous protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which were the largest Native protests in American history.
“There was a woman who had crossed the fence with her little kid, and security guards went rushing towards her, and Jacob jumped the line,” said Roundstone, who is Northern Cheyenne and Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux. “I didn’t even notice he was there until he jumped that fence to go save her. He tackled that guard and got in a little bit of a scuffle.”
Maureen Caputo, an activist and friend of Johns, echoed Roundstone. “He believes so much in what he’s doing that he’s not looking at the danger aspect of it,” she said.
Roundstone heard of Johns’ injury at night when he was at home in bed. “It was pretty devastating to me,” Roundstone said. “I didn’t sleep a lot that night. I haven’t had much sleep for the last couple of days. I’ve just been worried about my friend.”
But Roundstone is relieved that, though Ferguson said Johns “is not out of the woods,” he seems to be improving. “He can use all our prayers.”
Ferguson is traveling to see Johns on Sunday with his son Sam, but Johns’ injury may complicate plans the two have made to return to COP28 this year in Dubai.
This is the second shooting by someone who apparently supported the Onate statue in recent years. In 2020, as statues of slaveholders and colonizers were torn down across the country, Indigenous activists tried to pull down the Oñate statue. As they tried to push the statue over, a man rushed to protect it. Someone hit the man with a skateboard, and the man fired several shots, injuring another man. The piece has been in storage until now, and its reinstallation has been postponed.
