All across the world, indigenous peoples are under siege. Miners, farmers, loggers, and petroleum companies from industrialized societies covet their land and resources and will stop at nothing to get them.
In the first week of September, 2017, aerial photos surfaced showing the burned out lodges of an uncontacted Amazonian Native community, sparking fears that at least ten of its members had been murdered by outsiders seeking to expand their gold mining claims onto indigenous land.
Burned Out Lodges of Uncontacted Amazonian Indians.
Officials from Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency (FUNAI) had conducted a flyover in the Amazon to verify claims by miners in the nearby non-Indian town that they had killed at least ten native villagers. The miners displayed “trophies” in proof of their story.
This is a story that is all too common in indigenous homelands around the world. Native peoples in the western hemisphere, especially, have borne the brunt of the pressure to increase resource extraction in that region to counter foreign oil dependency and to provide rare materials for newly globalized tech industries. Essential minerals like lithium for computer and cell phone batteries have created what economists have dubbed the “lithium triangle,” a region that that overlays Argentina, Bolivia and Chile (see map). It holds 54% of the world’s “lithium resources.” Canadian and Japanese mining companies have been extracting billions of dollars of lithium here, but local peoples like the Atacama of Chile have received little in return. The Washington Post reports that one contract is expected to generate “250 million a year in sales while each community will receive an annual payment — ranging from $9,000 to about $60,000 — for extensive surface and water rights” (Read More).
The Lithium Triangle
For less exotic resources—things like coal, oil, timber, and gold—the strategies of settler individuals and energy companies has been outright war.
Earlier this year, The Repatriation Files recounted how indigenous environmental activists who have been trying to protect their homelands’ resources are increasingly becoming the victims of this war. In Mexico this year, Isidro Baldenegro, a Tarahumara subsistence farmer and community leader, was gunned down in front of his home by a suspected supporter of a logging company.
Isidro Baldenegro
Mr. Baldengro’s murder marked a horrible anniversary for indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere. Just a year before, fellow Goldman Prize winner, Berta Caceres— a member of the Lenca community in Honduras—was shot to death in her own home. She had been protesting the Agua Zarca Dam, a joint project of Honduran company Desarrollos Energéticos SA (DESA) and Chinese state-owned Sinohydro, the world’s largest dam developer. http://www.goldmanprize.org/recipient/berta-caceres/)
Berta Caceres at the banks of the Gualcarque River in the Rio Blanco region of western Honduras.
Sadly, Beta Caceres and Isidro Baldenegro are the norm, rather than the exception. All told, 122 activists were murdered across Latin America in 2015. Being indigenous and caring for one’s homeland has clearly become a lethal occupation.
All told, 122 activists were murdered across Latin America in 2015
The NGO Global Witness has produced a chart based on statistics that record violence against environmental activists around the globe. It highlights, in vivid color, the awful concentration of violence the western hemisphere’s indigenous peoples bear in this global war for resources (Read More).
In North America, similar violence has been inflicted on Native peoples and their allies who have attempted to resist the endless expansion of drill rigs and pipelines across the west.
BIA Agent and DAPL Protester, Cheyenne River Reservation, February, 2017.
One of the most corrosive elements of this war has been a collatoral increase in sexual assaults where extractive industries have set up temporary housing for workers. A recent study at the University of North Dakota found that between 2008 to 2014, there was a “72 percent in dating violence, with domestic violence at 47 percent.” The region studied, 21 North Dakota counties and 12 counties from western Montana, is heavily populated by Native people, and includes MHA Nation, Fort Peck, and Trenton Indian Service Area.
Mary Kathryn Nagle, an attorney and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, joined Gloria Steinem in an essay analyzing this violence for the Boston Globe. For Nagle and Steinem, the connections between extractive industries and violence against Native women is clear:
That’s because, in this country as around the world, extractive industries create so-called “man camps,” places where male workers often work 12-hour days, are socially isolated for weeks or months at a time, and live in trailers in parks that extend for miles. Many men retain their humanity, but as advocacy organizations like First Nations Women’s Alliance have noted, these man camps become centers for drugs, violence, and the sex trafficking of women and girls. They also become launching pads for serial sexual predators who endanger females for miles around.
Researcher Nikke Alex, a Diné student of Natural Resource Law, Environmental Law, Water Law and International Law at the University of New Mexico, has written a report that demonstrates how oil drilling has affected the social lives of women on the Ft. Berthold Reservation in North Dakota.
Alex feels that “the Tribes need to hold the United States government and energy companies responsible “not only for the environmental impact, but for the social impacts” of oil exploration on tribal lands. Because “oil development has begun pumping sexual violence against American Indian women into the small rural community of Ft. Berthold, the Three Affiliated Tribes which share governance there will need to take “tribal, national and international action to protect their women.”
extractive industries create so-called “man camps” . . . centers for drugs, violence, and the sex trafficking of women and girls.
The global market for resources has touched indigenous peoples from the Amazon to the Canadian plains, leaving behind broken lives and land. The people photographed by Brazil’s FUNAI look up at the passing aircraft not with fear, but with anger. In their faces, we see 500 years of exploitation and warfare. Yet we also see their humanity. Women, men, and children who want to be left alone to live their lives in peace—the truest definition of freedom.
Aerial photo of noncontacted Amazonian people.
For them and thousands of other indigenous people in the western hemisphere, this is just one more battle in a war that began in October of 1492 and shows no signs of ending anytime soon. On Indigenous Peoples Day this year, think of the faces in this photograph. What will you do to protect your forest kinsmen from slaughter?
