Reclamation-&-Expropriation

The following video looks at the many Indigenous-led struggles currently taking place across Turtle Island (North America). https://youtu.be/VA3wlnl_WyI Indigenous People Day of Rage On 11th October, 2020, Indigenous peoples called a Day of Rage Against Colonialism. Main actions organized were against the forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples and for an alternative to Columbus Day. Colonial statues were felled across the United States. For more information, visit the pages for Indigenous Peoples’ Day of Rage Against Colonialism and Indigenous Action. ...

Editors note: this article contains material excerpted from an August 2019 Communique from the Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee—General Command of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation, Mexico. Image by Nick Rahaim, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 August 17, 2019 We bring you our word. The same word as yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It is the word of resistance and rebellion. In October of 2016, almost three years ago, during the 20th anniversary of the National Indigenous Congress [CNI], the sister organizations of the National Indigenous Congress and the EZLN made a commitment to go on the offensive in our defense of our Territory and Mother Earth. Persecuted by the bad government, by caciques, by foreign corporations, by criminals, and by the law, and as we accumulated insults, derision, and dead, we the originary peoples (the guardians of the earth), decided to go on the offensive and circulate the words and actions of resistance and rebellion. ...

Editor’s note: DGR is not affiliated with the Secret Forest Society (Sociedade Secreta Silvestre) and does not endorse their statements or actions. This article is only for informational purposes. Some content in this article was sourced from the Rio Times Online. by Liam Campbell Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s openly fascist President, is loathed by groups who care about preventing climate collapse and protecting the Earth’s last healthy ecosystems. According to the Guardian, Bolsonaro’s policies are now resulting in 3 football fields per minute of rainforest destruction, and scientists fear that the Amazon is reaching a critical tipping point, beyond which it will be impossible to save. If that “point of no return” is breached it will result in massive forest fires, which will release an immense amount of sequested CO2 into the atmosphere, accelerating climate collapse and annihilating one of the Earth’s sources of oxygen. Violence is also increasing and loggers have begun killing indigenous leaders and resistors from the over 400 tribes who call the forest home. Bolsonaro has overseen major funding cuts and firings at the Brazilian indigenous affair agency, which has gutted the few remaining governmental protections for these people. ...

Featured image: Two children ride a bike through the plantation known as Las Palmeras in Guatemala. (WNV/Jeff Abbott) by Jeff Abbott / Waging Nonviolence Guatemala’s southern coast is in a constant conflict caused by the expansion of agro-industry. Across the region, small farmers struggle to feed their families as companies buy up more and more land for export crops. Since the arrival of the Spanish to Guatemala in 1524, the country’s fertile southern coast has been the site of some of the most intense social conflicts over land. These conflicts have continued into the 21st century with the massive expansion of sugar cane and palm oil production. ...

Featured image by Octaviano Díaz Chema by Tracy Barnett / Intercontinental Cry HUAJIMIC, Nayarit, Mexico — A century-old land conflict has flared up again in the Western Sierra Madre, deepening already raw tensions in the wake of the May 2017 assassination of two Huichol (Wixárika) leaders who fought to reclaim that land. On Friday, the anniversary of last year’s equally contentious reclamation action, 1,200 indigenous Huichols hiked for three hours down a mountain into the contested valley of Huajimic to meet the court officials scheduled to sign over to them a bitterly contested piece of farmland. ...

by Autonomous Territorial Government of the Wampís Nation / via Intercontinental Cry Translated by Daniel Dayley After more than half a year from the commitment of the national authorities to execute a third interdiction operation at the illegal mining site established in the Pastacillo stream basin, tributary of the Santiago and Marañón River, in the Amazon region [of Peru], The Autonomous Territorial Government of the Wampís Nation (GTANW), in view of the breach of this commitment, agreed and decided to peacefully evict the illegal miners from that area. ...

Documentary film spotlights Nasa struggle to regain what was wrongfully taken by Intercontinental Cry Tired of waiting for lands promised by the Colombian government, in 2015, the Indigenous Nasa Peoples from southern Colombia decide to take direct action to reclaim lands that have been industrialized by one of the richest people in the country. TIERRAS TOMADAS (Reclaiming Stolen Lands) documents the Nasa’s struggle to regain what was wrongfully taken, despite paramilitary threats, riot police and mercenaries.

Featured image: The Wixárika community of San Sebastian Teponahuaxtlán or Wuaut+a is preparing to send 1,000 members to the remote Nayarit community of Huajimic to take back from the ranchers lands that the courts have ruled belong to the Wixárika. Photo from Facebook/San Sebastian Teponahuaxtlán. by Tracy Barnett / Intercontinental Cry A contingent of at least 1,000 indigenous Wixárika (Huichol) people in the Western Sierra Madre are gearing up to take back their lands after a legal decision in a decade-long land dispute with neighboring ranchers who have held the land for more than a century. ...

By Agence France-Presse Work on Brazil’s controversial $13 billion Belo Monte mega-dam ground to a halt Monday after protesters torched buildings at three dam construction sites over the weekend, the developer said. Saturday, “a group of 30 people set fire to prefab structures at the Pimental site. They went into the cafeteria, destroyed everything and robbed the till” before setting it ablaze, said Fernando Santana, spokesman for builders Consorcio Constructor Belo Monte (CCBM). ...

By Survival More than 50 gunmen have launched a full-scale attack on an Indian community in southwest Brazil, shooting, threatening and then reportedly kidnapping one of their leaders. The violence began on Friday, shortly after the Guarani community reoccupied part of its ancestral land, which is now occupied by ranchers. A Guarani spokesman described how 50 gunmen surrounded around 400 Indians, firing shots at them, whilst laughing and shouting, ‘You Indians! Today, not one of you Indians will get out of here alive!’ ...