by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Sep 25, 2017 | Lobbying, Strategy & Analysis
Featured image: Dead Horse Point, Colorado River. (Clément Bardot/Wikimedia/CC-BY-SA-3.0)
Editor’s note: The first Rights of Nature lawsuit in the US was filed on September 25, 2017, in Denver, Colorado. The full text of the complaint can be found here.
by Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
On Tuesday, September 26, the Colorado River will sue the State of Colorado in a first-in-the-nation lawsuit requesting that the United States District Court in Denver recognize the river’s rights of nature. These rights include the rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and naturally evolve. To enforce these rights, the Colorado River will also request that the court grant the river “personhood” and standing to sue in American courts.
Four of my comrades in the international environmental organization Deep Green Resistance and I, are serving as “next friends” to the Colorado River. We are represented by the noted civil rights attorney Jason Flores-Williams who is based in Denver. Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is serving as advisors in the case.
The term “as next friends” is a legal concept that means we have signed on to the lawsuit as fiduciaries or guardians of the river. Under current law, the Colorado River is not “legally competent” and, so needs “next friends” to ensure her rights are protected. A “next friend” is someone who appears in court in place of another who is not competent to do so – like a minor or someone with a mental disability. My role, as next friend to the Colorado River, is to protect the river’s rights.
We recently released a press release that has been widely shared on social media. National media outlets are beginning to take notice. And, we’re getting interviews, receiving email inquiries, and responding to online comments. So far, the most common question is: Why does the Colorado River need rights?
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The most fearless environmental philosophers – thinkers like Susan Griffin, Neil Evernden, Derrick Jensen, and John Livingston – have insisted that we will never be safe so long as the natural world we depend on is objectified and valued only for the way humans use it. Livingston calls the objectification of nature “resourcism” and explains: “A ‘resource’ is anything that can be put to human use … It is the concept of ‘resource’ that allows us to perceive nature as our subsidiary.” Livingston notes that once the nonhuman “is perceived as having some utility – any utility – and is thus perceived as a ‘resource,’ its depletion is only a matter of time.”
Because our legal system currently defines nature as property, “resourcism” is institutionalized in American law. While climate change worsens, water continues to be polluted, and the collapse of every major ecosystem on the continent intensifies, we must conclude that our system of law fails to protect the natural world and fails to protect the human and nonhuman communities who depend on it.
Jensen, while diagnosing widespread ecocide, observes a fundamental psychological principle: “We act according to the way we experience the world. We experience the world according to how we perceive it. We perceive it the way we have been taught.” Jensen quotes a Canadian lumberman who once said, “When I look at trees I see dollar bills.”
The lumberman’s words represent the dominant culture’s view of the natural world. Jensen explains the psychology of this objectification, “If, when you look at trees you see dollar bills, you will act a certain way. If, when you look at trees, you see trees you will act a different way. If, when you look at this tree right here you see this tree right here, you will act differently still.”
Law shapes our experience of the world. Currently, law teaches that nature is property, an object, or a resource to use. This entrenches a worldview that encourages environmental destruction. In other words, when law teaches us to see the Colorado River as dollar bills, as simple gallons of water, as an abstract percentage to be allocated, it is no wonder that corporations like Nestle can gain the right to run plastic bottling operations that drain anywhere from 250 million to 510 million gallons of Colorado River water per year.
The American legal system can take a good step toward protecting us all – human and nonhuman alike – by granting ecosystems like the Colorado River rights and allowing communities to sue on these ecosystems’ behalf. When standing is recognized on behalf of ecosystems themselves, environmental law will reflect a conception of legal “causation” that is more friendly to the natural world than it is to the corporations destroying the natural world. At a time when the effects of technology are outpacing science’s capacity to research these effects, injured individuals and communities often have difficulty proving that corporate actions are the cause of their injuries. When ecosystems, like the Colorado River, are granted the rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and naturally evolve, the obsolete causation theory, en vogue, will be corrected.
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American history is haunted by notorious failures to afford rights to those who always deserved them. Americans will forever shudder, for example, at Chief Justice Roger Taney’s words, when the Supreme Court, in 1857, ruled persons of African descent cannot be, nor were never intended to be, citizens under the Constitution in Dred Scott v. Sanford. Justice Taney wrote of African Americans, “They had for more than a century before been regarded as being of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race … and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect…” And, of course, without rights that white, slave-owning men were bound to respect, the horrors of slavery continued.
The most hopeful moments in American history, on the other hand, have occurred when the oppressed have demanded and were granted their rights in American courts. Despite centuries of treating African Americans as less than human while defining them as property, our system of law now gives the same rights to African Americans that American citizens have always enjoyed. Once property, African Americans are now persons under the law. Similarly, despite a centuries-old tradition where women were, in the legal sense, owned by men, our system of law now gives the same rights to women that American citizens have always enjoyed. Once property, women are now a person under the law.
It’s tempting to describe this history as “inevitable progress” or as “the legal system correcting itself” or with some other congratulatory language. But, this glosses over the violent struggles it took for rights to be won. The truth is, and we see this clearly in Justice Taney’s words, the American legal system resisted justice until change was forced upon it. It took four centuries of genocide and the nation’s bloodiest civil war before our system of law recognized the rights of African Americans. While the courts resisted, African Americans were enslaved, exploited, and killed.
Right now, the natural world is struggling violently for its survival. We watch hurricanes, exacerbated by human-induced climate change, rock coastal communities. We choke through wildfires, also exacerbated by human-induced climate change, sweeping across the West. We feel the Colorado River’s thirst as overdraw and drought dries it up. It is the time that American law stop resisting. Our system of law must change to reflect ecological reality.
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Colorado River between Marble Canyon (Source: Alex Proimos/Flickr/CC-BY-NC-2.0)
This is ecological reality: all life depends on clean water, breathable air, healthy soil, a habitable climate, and complex relationships formed by living creatures in natural communities. Water is life and in the arid American Southwest, no natural community is more responsible for the facilitation of life than the Colorado River. Because so much life depends on her, the needs of the Colorado River are primary. Social morality must emerge from a humble understanding of this reality. Law is integral to any society’s morality, so law must emerge from this understanding, too.
Human language lacks the complexity to adequately describe the Colorado River and any attempt to account for the sheer amount of life she supports will necessarily be arbitrary. Nevertheless, many creatures of feather, fin, and fur rely on the Colorado River. Iconic, and endangered or threatened, birds like the bald eagle, greater sage grouse, Gunnison sage grouse, peregrine falcon, yellow-billed cuckoo, summer tanager, and southwestern willow flycatcher make their homes in the Colorado River watershed. Fourteen endemic fish species swim the river’s currents including four fish that are now endangered: the humpback chub, Colorado pikeminnow, razorback sucker, and bonytail.
Many of the West’s most recognizable mammals depend on the Colorado River for water and to sustain adequate food sources. Gray wolves, grizzly bear, black bear, mountain lions, coyotes, and lynx walk the river’s banks. Elk, mule deer, and bighorn sheep live in her forests. Beavers, river otters, and muskrats live directly in the river’s flow as well as in streams and creeks throughout the Colorado River basin.
The Colorado River provides water for close to 40 million people and irrigates nearly 4 million acres of American and Mexican cropland. Agriculture uses the vast majority of the river’s water. In 2012, 78% of the Colorado’s water was used for agriculture alone. 45% of the water is diverted from the Colorado River basin which spells disaster for basin ecosystems. Major cities that rely on these trans-basin diversions include Denver, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Salt Lake City.
Despite the Colorado River’s importance to life, she is being destroyed. Before the construction of dams and large-scale diversion, the Colorado flowed 1,450 miles into the Pacific Ocean near Sonora, Mexico. The river’s life story is an epic saga of strength, determination, and the will to deliver her waters to the communities who need them. Across those 1,450 miles, she softened mountainsides, carved through red rock, and braved the deserts who sought to exhaust her.
Now, however, the Colorado River suffers under a set of laws, court decrees, and multi-state compacts that are collectively known as the “Law of the River.” The Law of the River allows humans to take more water from the river than actually exists. Granting the river the rights we seek for her would help the courts revise problematic laws.
The regulations set forth in the 1922 Colorado River Compact are the most important and, perhaps, the most problematic. Seven states (Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming) are allotted water under the Compact. When the Compact was enacted, the parties assumed that the river’s flow would remain at a reliable 17 million acre-feet of water per year and divided the water using a 15-million acre feet per year standard. But, hydrologists now know 17 million acre-feet represented an unusually high flow and was a mistake. Records show that the Colorado River’s flow was only 9 million acre-feet in 1902, for example. From 2000-2016, the river’s flow only averaged 12.4 million acre-feet per year. So, for the last 16 years, the Compact states have been legally allowed to use water that isn’t there.
“Use it or lose it” laws are also common throughout the Colorado River basin. These laws threaten ranchers, farmers, and governments holding water rights who use less water than they are legally entitled to with seeing their allotments cut. So, those with water rights are encouraged to trap or use more water than they need.
Since the completion of the Glen Canyon Dam in 1963, the Colorado River has rarely connected with the sea. Stop and let that sink in. Many scientists believe the river is between 4 and 6.5 million years old. The Colorado River is so strong, so determined, she cut out the Grand Canyon. This magnificent being, millions of years old, who formed the Grand Canyon is being strangled to death by dams, climate change, overallocation, and a legal system that refuses to remedy its own insanity.
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When you contemplate all those who depend on the Colorado River when you know the sheer quantity of life the river sustains, is it possible to mistake her inherent value?
I hate to reduce a being so ancient and so powerful to an argument based in human self-interest. Know this: If you’re one of the 40 million Americans who depend on the Colorado River’s water and you’re hydrated right now, the river is literally part of you. If that water is poisoned, if that water dries up, if corporate rights to steal that water and sell it back to you continue to trump the river’s right to exist, you will be hurt. This is not law. This not rhetoric. This is reality.
This is also why the Colorado River needs rights. Life requires clean water, breathable air, healthy soil and a habitable climate to create healthy ecosystems. Without these ecosystems, life is impossible and the right to life is meaningless. American law fails to protect life’s requirements because it defines nature as property and does not recognize the rights of nature. In a rights-based system of law, to be without rights is to be defenseless. And, after witnessing centuries of the exploitation of the natural world, we know that to be defenseless is to ultimately be destroyed. It’s time we protect those, like the Colorado River, who give us life.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Sep 25, 2017 | Colonialism & Conquest
Featured image: World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has been working in the Congo Basin for decades – supporting squads who have committed violent abuse against tribal people. © WWF
by Survival International
A new Survival International report details widespread and systematic human rights abuses in the Congo Basin, by wildlife guards funded by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and other big conservation organizations.
The report documents serious instances of abuse between 1989 and the present day in Cameroon, the Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic (CAR) by guards funded and equipped by WWF and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the parent organization of New York’s Bronx zoo.
It lists more than 200 instances of abuse since 1989, including pouring hot wax onto exposed skin, beating, and maiming with red-hot machetes. These incidents are likely just a tiny fraction of the full picture of systematic and ongoing violence, beatings, torture and even death.
As well as these especially cruel incidents, the report also documents the forms of harassment that have become part of everyday life for many people, including threats, and the destruction of food, tools and personal belongings.
Read the full report here.
WWF funded guards in Gabon. © WWF
As well as Survival, over the past three decades, numerous independent experts and NGOs have raised concerns about these abuses. These have included NGOs like Greenpeace, Oxfam, UNICEF, Global Witness, Forest Peoples Programme, and research specialists from University College London, the University of Oxford, Durham University, and Kent University.
WWF and WCS have even partnered with several logging companies, despite evidence that their activities are unsustainable, and have not had the consent of tribal peoples as required by international law and their own stated policies.
One Bayaka man said: “A wildlife guard asked me to kneel down. I said: “Never, I could never do that.” He said: “If you don’t get down on your knees I’m going to beat you.”
A Baka woman said: “They took me to the middle of the road and tied my hands with rubber cord. They forced my hands behind my back and cut me with their machete.”
Survival has documented hundreds of instances of abuse, and collected testimonies from many “Pygmy” people. © Survival International
A Bayaka woman said: “They started kicking me all over my body… I had my baby with me. The child had just been born three days before.”
Tribal peoples have been dependent on and managed their environments for millennia. Their lands are not wilderness. Evidence proves that tribal peoples are better at looking after their environment than anyone else.
But big conservation organizations like WWF are partnering with industry and tourism and destroying the environment’s best allies. Now tribal people are accused of “poaching” because they hunt to feed their families. And they face arrest and beatings, torture and death, while big game trophy hunters are encouraged.
Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said: “This shocking report lays out, in detail, the abuse and persecution that “conservation” has brought the indigenous and tribal peoples of the Congo Basin. These are just the cases that have been documented, it’s impossible to imagine there aren’t a lot more which remain hidden.
“The big conservation organizations should admit that their activities in the region have been catastrophic, both for the environment and for the tribal peoples who guarded these forests for so long.
“WWF and WCS supporters might ask these organizations how they could have let this situation carry on for so long – and what they’re going to do now to make sure it stops.”
“Pygmy” is an umbrella term commonly used to refer to the hunter-gatherer peoples of the Congo Basin and elsewhere in Central Africa. The word is considered pejorative and avoided by some tribespeople, but used by others as a convenient and easily recognized way of describing themselves.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Sep 22, 2017 | Strategy & Analysis
Editor’s note: This is the third installment in a multi-part series. Browse the New Park City Witness index to read more.
by Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
Author’s Note: A member of Park City’s city government recently asked me why I write about Park City when Park City is doing so much for the environment, compared to other communities. I hope my respect for this person and the question is reflected in the days I spent contemplating an answer. In order to answer this question, I must answer several related questions. These answers give me a chance to be transparent about my motivations for writing this New Park City Witness series.
Underlying the question “Why do I write about Park City?” is the question “Why do I write at all?”
One reason I write is reflected in an experience I had, a few days ago, in Summit Land Conservancy’s offices. On a shelf, in a conference room, a book’s plain green and white cover grabbed my attention. It was the first edition of Park City Witness, published in 1998. Having recently finished the second edition of Park City Witness, and learning the first was long out of print, I was excited to see an original copy. I asked Summit Land Conservancy executive director Cheryl Fox if I could borrow the book.
Books, as anyone who has read a few knows, have the power to choose their readers. While reading the preface to the first Park City Witness, I knew I had been chosen. Maybe Cheryl knew I needed to read the book, too, because she wrote the preface to the first Park City Witness. In this preface, she quoted author Stephen Trimble who, in 1997 “speaking to a collection of writers and slow-growth activists amid the crowded shelves of Dolly’s Bookstore…explained how important it is for people who can write to write.”
Twenty years later, and Trimble’s words feel like they were spoken directly to me. I can write and because I can write, it is important for me to write.
If it’s important for people who can write to write, it’s even more important for people who can write to write what needs to be read. While nearly two hundred species go extinct daily, while every mother’s breastmilk contains known carcinogens, while every major biosphere on Earth collapses around us, does anything need to be read more than encouragement for stopping the destruction?
I think the answer is obviously no. Many artists share this feeling. My favorite political cartoonist, Stephanie McMillan, in an essay titled “Artists: Raise Your Weapons” writes “…in times like these, for an artist not to devote her/his talents and energies to creating cultural weapons of resistance is a betrayal of the worst magnitude, a gesture of contempt against life itself. It is unforgivable.”
Derrick Jensen, reflecting on a decades-long writing career with over twenty published books, writes, “…if we judge my work, or anyone’s work, by the most important standard of all, and in fact the only standard that really matters, which is the health of the planet, my work (and everyone else’s) is a complete failure. Because my work hasn’t stopped the murder of the planet.”
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I write about Park City because of the privilege and power that exist here.
It may or may not be true that Park City does more than other communities to protect the environment. We must remember that Park City’s human population depends on an ecologically unnecessary and problematic industry – tourism – for its continued existence. Ask yourself: Do corporate marketers spend millions of dollars on enticing hundreds of thousands of people to board greenhouse gas emitting planes from around the world to visit… Kamas? Are tons of coal burned to pump hundreds of millions of gallons of water up mountainsides to snow-making machines in…Heber?
There’s a sense in which it really doesn’t matter whether Park City is doing more than other communities. My almost-five-year-old niece is becoming notorious for her sassy one-liners and refusing to let adults get away with their bullshit. I shudder when I think about looking her in the eye when she’s my age. She’s not going to care if Park City did more than other communities to stop the destruction of the world. She’s going to care that she can raise children in a world with clean water, clean air, and a habitable climate. She’s going to care, if she does have a baby, that she can feed her baby without passing carcinogens through her breastmilk to her baby.
I write about Park City because it doesn’t matter which community is more environmentally-friendly. The only thing that matters, while life on earth collapses, is stopping the collapse. Stopping the collapse will require confrontation with those in power and this confrontation will require material resources. Close to 80% of Park City’s population is white and white people benefit the most from the exploitation of the natural world. People of color, around the world, have long formed the frontlines of the environmental movement. Justice demands that white people join them there. Similarly, the median property value in Park City is $868,100, and the median household income is $105,000, which is almost double the national average. Park City has more than most communities, so Park City should give more than most communities.
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The most important reason I write is because I’m in love. I’m in love with Gambel oak, maple, and aspen. I’m in love with the way they offer one last display of visual ecstasy in their changing colors before sleeping for the winter. I’m in love with rain and snow, the mystical moment rain becomes snow on a northerly autumn wind, and the water both of them bring. I’m in love with my partner, who was born here. I’m in love with her big, gorgeous brown eyes. I’m in love with the way her eyes become even bigger with warmth when she hears joy in her loved ones’ voices.
In short, I’m in love with life – a life made possible by Park City’s natural communities. We may experience life because the water we drink here, the air we breathe here, and the food we eat here combine to give us physical bodies. To love life is to love our bodies and loving our bodies, we must listen to them.
My body tells me to write. If I go more than a few days without pen, notebook, and solitude, the physical symptoms of anxiety affect me. I become fidgety, easily distracted, and slightly sick to my stomach. The longer I go without writing something coherent, the worse these symptoms get.
My body speaks through these symptoms. Through fidgetiness, my body tells me to act; writing, after all, is an action. The troubles with concentration are a warning to use my focus or lose it. Nausea accompanies and symbolizes the writing process, for me. There are times I’ve tried to quit writing, tried to shirk the hours of rumination, research, and drafting. But, the best words are not mine. They are given to me. Unreleased, they pool like bile and there is no relief until they’re written.
I used to be embarrassed to admit that I write to feel better. This seemed selfish to me. It felt impure. But, now I know that I do not create the anxiety anymore than I create the swelling that accompanies rolling an ankle. The swelling is a gift, a gift from my body, from the forces of life creating my body. My body, through swelling, tells me not to walk on the rolled ankle, and tells me to let the ankle heal.
Wherever we look there are bodies swelling, wounded, and scarred. Forests are clearcut, rivers no longer flow to the sea, and canyons are flooded by reservoirs. Life speaks through bodies – ours’, forests’, rivers’, canyons’ and so many more. Life tells us to let these bodies heal.
Before healing can take place, the injury must be stopped. Life, everywhere, is being injured. It does not matter how we stop the injury. But, we must stop it. There are a growing number of us in Park City who are willing to do more than is currently being done. We are willing to place our bodies in front of those destroying the planet – bodies we love as much as you love yours. Many of us are young, lack the wealth of older generations, look at a future growing darker and darker, and say, “This must stop.”
We could use your help.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Sep 21, 2017 | Lobbying
Featured image: The 2015 Gold King Mine waste water spill in the Animas River, in southwest Colorado. The Animas is a tributary to the Colorado River.
Editor’s note: The first Rights of Nature lawsuit in the US was filed on September 25, 2017, in Denver, Colorado. The full text of the complaint can be found here.
“Contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.” Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Sierra Club v. Morton (1972)
Denver, Colorado–In a first-in-the-nation lawsuit filed in federal court, the Colorado River is asking for judicial recognition of itself as a “person,” with rights of its own to exist and flourish. The lawsuit, filed against the Governor of Colorado, seeks a recognition that the State of Colorado can be held liable for violating those rights held by the River.
The Plaintiff in the lawsuit is the Colorado River itself, with the organization Deep Green Resistance – an international organization committed to protecting the planet through direct action – filing as a “next friend” on behalf of the River. The River and the organization are represented in the lawsuit by Jason Flores Williams, a noted civil rights lawyer and lead attorney in a recent class-action case filed on behalf of Denver’s homeless population.
While this is the first action brought in the United States which seeks such recognition for an ecosystem, such actions and laws are becoming more common in other countries. In 2008, the country of Ecuador adopted the world’s first national constitution which recognized rights for ecosystems and nature; over three dozen U.S. municipalities, including the City of Pittsburgh, have adopted similar laws; and courts in India and Colombia have recently recognized that rivers, glaciers, and other ecosystems may be treated as “persons” under those legal systems.
Serving as an advisor to the lawsuit is the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), a nonprofit public interest law firm which has previously assisted U.S. municipalities and the Ecuadorian government to codify legally enforceable rights for ecosystems and nature into law.
Attorney Flores-Williams explained that “current environmental law is simply incapable of stopping the widescale environmental destruction that we’re experiencing. We’re bringing this lawsuit to even the odds – corporations today claim rights and powers that routinely overwhelm the efforts of people to protect the environment. Our judicial system recognizes corporations as “persons,” so why shouldn’t it recognize the natural systems upon which we all depend as having rights as well? I believe that future generations will look back at this lawsuit as the first wave of a series of efforts to free nature and our communities from a system of law which currently guarantees their destruction.”
Deanna Meyer, a member of Deep Green Resistance and one of the “next friends” in the lawsuit, affirmed Flores-Williams’ sentiments, declaring that “without the recognition that the Colorado River possesses certain rights of its own, it will always be subject to widescale exploitation without any real consequences. I’m proud to stand with the other “next friends” in this lawsuit to enforce and defend the rights of the Colorado, and we’re calling on groups across the country to do the same to protect the last remaining wild places in this country and beyond.”
The lawsuit seeks recognition by the Court that the Colorado River Ecosystem possesses the rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and restoration, and to recognize that the State of Colorado may be held liable for violating those rights in a future action. The complaint will be filed in the US District Court of Colorado on Tuesday.
Media inquiries:
Law Office of Jason Flores-Williams
303-514-4524
Thomas Linzey, Executive Director, CELDF
717-977-6823
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Sep 18, 2017 | Indigenous Autonomy
by Rawiri Taonui / Cultural Survival
This month marks the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP 2007). Indigenous Peoples have come a long way. Our individual struggles coalesced during the 1970s in the Indigenous-initiated World Council of Indigenous Peoples. A decade of consultation and negotiation through the United Nations culminated in a first draft. Some of those who had worked on the draft lost their lives in struggles at home.
Consultation with states followed. On one side, the will of Indigenous representatives to craft a document worthy of the aspirations of first nation communities; on the other side the reservation of states.
The chair of the first Intergovernmental Working Group refused Indigenous representatives the right to speak. Silence incompatible with a voice seeking freedom, a walk out followed, the rules were changed and discussion proceeded. A New Zealand representative once described the Declaration as constituting discrimination – an easy allegory for an uneasy conscience.
The Declaration
On 13 September 2007, the UN General Assembly passed the Declaration – 143 countries in support, 4 against and 12 abstaining. The culmination of 500 years of struggle against colonisation, racism and neo-liberalism, every passage in the Declaration is a response to injustices suffered by Indigenous Peoples.
The preambulatory paragraphs and articles affirms the collective and individual human rights of First Nations as Peoples and human beings and in doing so proclaims our equality with all other members of society. The Declaration provides a framework for reconciliation with nation states by mapping a pathway to overcome the historical denial of our rights and established the minimum requisite standard for our advancement and the restoration of our dignity.
Our Place as Indigenous Peoples
The Declaration reminds us that the sovereignty of the States that came to wield power over us was not attained through “free and intelligent consent”, but through the trickery or absence of treaties, through warfare the coloniser called conquest, victory and the Christian mission, which today we understand to have been cultural genocide, the unjust alienation of our territories, the suppression of our languages, forced cultural assimilation, the inter-generational marginalisation of our societies at all levels, including the taking of our children through Residential Schools in North America, the Stolen Generations in Australia and in New Zealand through what were “State Care Homes.”
The Declaration has lifted the confidence of Indigenous Peoples. Our rights are more visible. We are important. We are the descendants of the first arrivals or earliest surviving occupants of a land. We number between 350 to 500 million people living in up to 90 countries. We comprise 5,000 distinct cultural groups speaking 4,000 of the world’s 7,000 languages. We are home to 90% of the world’s cultural diversity.
We live upon 22 per cent of the Earth’s land mass harbouring 80 per cent of its remaining biodiversity. Our cultures, ancestral knowledges and philosophies are deeply embedded within the environment; the Skyfather, the Earthmother and their children are our relations. Once belittled, our epistemologies are integral to the survival of the planet.
Progress on the Declaration
Several of the original abstentions, such as Colombia and Samoa, now support the Declaration; 182 States at the Durban World Conference on Racism endorsed the Declaration. Having overcome the self-inflicted trauma of their previous hesitation, the governments of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand now support the Declaration.
God may also be on our side, Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical on meaningful climate action declaring that Indigenous Peoples “should be the principle dialogue partners” on matters concerning the environment and that when our land rights are protected we are the best guardians of the world’s forests and biodiversity.
Guided by the principle that “no one is left behind”; Indigenous Peoples are a priority under the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
From the Waitangi Tribunal and courts in New Zealand where the Declaration reinforces the 1834 Declaration of Independence and the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, to Belize, Bangladesh and the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights the international judiciary is increasingly citing the Declaration. Many more cases are going before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and Court of Human Rights, and the rulings and decisions are supporting the protection of Indigenous rights.
Indigenous rights are being recognised in new laws and/or being enshrined in constitutional instruments. South America has been an important leader, in particular Bolivia under the leadership of President Evo Morales.
In Asia, Myanmar and Japan are considering greater recognition. In Europe, Denmark has granted greater self-government to Greenland where 90% of the 56,000 population is Inuit.
In Africa, the Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Kenya, Namibia and Burundi have taken steps to recognise Indigenous Peoples. Others have processes in place.
Where once the killing of Indigenous People was conducted with impunity – the historical massacres in Australia, the Trail of Tears and Wounded Knee in the United States, and Handley’s Woolshed, Rangiaowhia, Ngā Tapa in New Zealand – there is increasing accountability. The leader of a militia that massacred Mbuti Peoples in the Ituri forest was sentenced to 18 years in prison. There have been arrests in Honduras for the killing of the distinguished Lenca leader Berta Caceres shot dead in 2016.
Challenges
Many challenges remain. Even where the countries have adopted the Declaration, most have not been able to implement it effectively.
Compromises in the Declaration from discussion with states will be difficult to overcome. States objected to Article 3 the Right to Self-determination. The compromise in Article 46, essentially that Indigenous Peoples cannot form new states, reinforces uncertainty and dislocation for Indigenous Peoples straddling the borders of nation states. The Karen spanning the river border between Thailand and Myanmar, the Guarani spread between countries across the Amazon, and 30 million Kurds, the largest nationality in the world without a country, are divided between Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.
We are losing one Indigenous language every two weeks. We remain the world’s most vulnerable peoples. At 6% of the world’s population we are 15% of the world’s poorest peoples. Wherever we live, we are the poorest of the poor.
It is unlikely that we will realise the goal of equality under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development because it does not prioritise the right to self-determination or the principle of free, prior and informed consent and therefore will not prevent the avarice of development that threatens many Indigenous Peoples. Every year were hear submissions at the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples echoing the words “we may not survive.”
Extractive Industries
The majority of new extractive industry projects, including mining, drilling, hydro-electric, forestry and agribusiness, are in Indigenous areas from the Artic to the Amazon, from West Papua to Africa. Drilling and fracking quench an insatiable thirst for oil. Agribusiness feeds a gluttonous demand for beef burgers. Environmentally friendly biofuels have unfriendly impacts on first communities. Coltan, tin and tungsten build our cell phones, laptops and flat screens.
The extractive industries cost many lives. It is sobering to apprehend that in the ten years since the signing of the Declaration the annual number of individual Indigenous human rights advocates being killed has doubled to 600 per year.
Directly and indirectly, these industries have cost 100,000 West Papuan lives since 1963. From 1998 to 2003, 10,000 to 70,000 Indigenous peoples lost their lives in the conflict mineral regions of central Africa. Alongside gorillas and elephants some were eaten as bush meat supplying militias.
The Struggle for Identity
Many Indigenous Peoples struggle for recognition. China supported the Declaration, an official once stating because there are no Indigenous people in China. There are 10 million Uighur, 2 million Tibetans and 13 million Yao-Mein and Miao-Hmong.
India recognises 400 groups numbering 84 million people as Scheduled Tribes; over 600 groups numbering at least the same are not recognised. Russia recognises ‘northern groups’ as Indigenous but only if their population is smaller than 50,000.
The San, Khoi, Mbuti, Mbenga, Twa and Batwa are the earliest African Indigenous Peoples and oldest cultures on Earth. Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia do not recognise their indigeneity.
Racism, Violence and Suicide
Indigenous Peoples continue to face grave racism. In developed countries this has a “new colourism.” Dominant institutions prefer indigenes if we are compliant, middle class, fair skinned and have European features.
Indigenous women and children continue to endure significant violence. There is an emerging world-wide crisis in Indigenous suicide.
New Zealand acknowledges the UNICEF Building the Future report saying that at 15.6 per 100,000 we have the worst adolescent suicide rate in the developed world. What is not recognised is that the national figure is elevated by a high Māori youth suicide rate, often double or more than for non-Māori, in conjunction with their higher proportion of the national population proportion (35% under 15 years old; 27% between 15 and 40) when compared with other Indigenous situations. The crisis is Māori suicide.
Comparative figures demonstrate that the Indigenous suicide rates in Canada, Australia, the United States, and among the Nenets of Russia, the Guarani of Brazil and the Sami of Scandinavia are equal to, or higher than Māori. However, they do not lift their national average in the same way because the Indigenous demographic is a significantly smaller proportion of the national population than that of Māori.
If we do not understand the problem then we miss the best solutions. Mainstream approaches to suicide focus on mental health, bad parenting, drug addiction, crime and poverty. These approaches have their place, however, they are also driven by underlying deficit assumptions about the inferiority of first cultures.
In the case of Māori, historical research shows that pre-European Māori were good parents; before 1900 when the language was intact Māori were just 3% of prisoners – today they are 50%; before the mass urbanisation of the 1950s every Māori knew their marae and subtribe and suicide was half that of Europeans. A Canadian study has shown that where 50% or more of an Indigenous community speaks their language suicide is between half that of other communities and zero.
Cultural alienation as anomie is a causal factor so too its relation racism and discrimination. They compress Indigenous youth between two worlds and a past they do not understand, a present that does not understand them and a future without hope.
The Future
The Declaration is not perfect. A lack of action by governments is the greatest impediment to progress. Nevertheless, the journey has begun. We live in a new world.
Standing Rock has taught us of the power of social media in the fight to raise consciousness.
New allies may benefit the cause of Indigenous Peoples. North America and Europe require 100 million new immigrants each by 2050 to support ageing European populations. Many immigrants suffered oppression in old countries and confront racism in new lands. In a country like New Zealand the combined Māori, Pasifika and immigrant community will equal and then surpass the European population somewhere around 2050. We are natural allies and will be the majority of the work force, the parliamentarians and the decision makers.
There is a changing of the guard between the West and the developing world. Alt-right and the American presidency are a reaction to that. In 2050, 27 of the fastest growing economies in the world will be formerly oppressed brown colonies. Those who can work with other cultures as equals will be a force for change.
There are risks. We need to stay grounded with the lowest common denominator in our communities and the realities of other Indigenous Peoples, use our proven resilience and capacity to fight for our rights and survive in the face of great difficulties to take all our people forward in emancipatory praxis.
We need to be cognisant of the risks of building a self-serving middle class, confining power to small elites or suffering rigid cultural nationalism lest the formerly oppressed becoming the new oppressor. For those who survive the next generation there is a future.
–Rawiri Taonui is a professor at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences & Global Centre for Indigenous Leadership at Massey University in New Zealand.
This paper was presented at the Conference on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples on 5-6 September 2017 at Te Papa Tongareva – Wellington Museum, New Zealand.
