Deceit and Destruction Behind FAO’s Forest Definition

Deceit and Destruction Behind FAO’s Forest Definition

by | Mar 22, 2018 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction

Featured image: Oil palm seedlings at Tamaco Commercial Oil Palm Nursery. Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas

     by  via Intercontinental Cry

For decades, the World Rainforest Movement (WRM) has demanded that the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) urgently reviews its forest definition, which mainly benefits the interests of industrial monoculture tree plantations companies. FAO’s definition reduces a forest to any area covered by trees. In doing so, the FAO definition discards other life-forms as well as the biological, cyclical and cultural diversity that define a forest in its continuous interconnection with forest-dependent communities. FAO’s reductionist definition also allows the companies behind tens of millions of industrial fast-growing plantations to claim their monocultures are “planted forests”. Countries’ forest statistics thus count these industrial monocultures as “forests”, in spite of the well-documented social and environmental impacts such plantations have caused around the world. The United Nations (UN) declared March 21st as the International Day of Forests in 2013.  At the WRM, we are taking this day as another opportunity to expose FAO’s misleading forest definition.

Already in 2009, the WRM denounced in its Bulletin 141 that: “the definition of forests is not an academic or linguistic discussion: it is a political issue having serious social and environmental consequences at the ground level. Defining plantations as forests empowers the corporate sector – particularly plantation companies – and disempowers local communities opposing them to protect their livelihoods. The FAO continues playing this role by refusing to change its definition.”

FAO’s definition remains the most widely used forest definition today. It serves as a guide for national forest definitions worldwide – as we denounced in an Open Letter in 2017. It’s also the reference in international forums, such as the UN climate negotiations. Albeit speaking of forests, the 2016 UN Paris Agreement promotes the expansion of monoculture tree plantations in various ways. Tree plantations are promoted as so-called carbon sinks, dubious reforestation or restoration programmes are launched and wood is advertised as an energy source to replace fossil fuels. Because the Paris Agreement adopts FAO’s forest definition, its promotion of industrial tree monocultures is taking place under the guise of the positive image of forests.

As the WRM, together with La Via Campesina, Friends of the Earth International and Focus on the Global South, stated in an Open Letter to FAO in 2014, “The definition fails the at least 300 million women and men worldwide who, according to FAO, directly depend on forests for their livelihoods.”The FAO should take full responsibility for the strong influence its forest definition has over global economic, ecological and social policies.

Here we present a compilation of WRM Bulletin articles from 2015 until 2018 and further information that addresses the different impacts and consequences of FAO’s forest definition. We hope this compilation serves to underscore once again the importance for a change of the FAO’s definition.

Plantations are not forests!

Download the compilation here

Women’s Humanity Should Not Depend on Men’s “Civilization”

by | Mar 18, 2018 | Male Supremacy

Women cannot possibly be viewed human so long our humanity is determined by men’s circumstantial “civilization.”

     by  / Feminist Current

Catharine MacKinnon’s book, Are Women Human? is riddled with examples of violence specifically targeting women. From beatings, to torture, to rape, to sexual subjugation, to murder, and to genocide, there are myriad examples that show how women are rendered insignificant in the cultural landscape of human rights. MacKinnon’s text asks how women can be considered people since, when placed next to legal renderings of other groups of people, women are excluded from similar protections. She writes:

“Women not being considered a people, there is as yet no international law against destroying the group women as such. ‘Sex’ is not on the list of legal grounds on the basis of which destruction of peoples as such is prohibited. For women as such, there is no legal equivalent to genocide… presumably because it is commonplace, built into the relative status of the sexes in everyday life.”

“Are women human?” remains a question of great significance today, as even those on the left consider us less-than. There is also the fact that, for many, women’s rights are considered “already won” and therefore part of an antiquated movement that should just simmer down.

But the facts speak for themselves: women are still underrepresented in employment in media, government, and education; women bear disproportionate responsibility for unpaid care work; while women are shown to make better use of loans, they are denied loans at a far higher rate than men; women will statistically be more prone to enlisting in credit repair services and accruing far more debt than men despite performing most of the world’s labour, earning on average 24 per cent less than men; and women are more likely to suffer from poor credit due to their relationships with men and through marriage. There are so many facts that show women are saddled with more work, lower salaries, and fewer economic benefits, no matter what level education they attain, no matter their financial investments, regardless of the few who manage to climb far up the ladder. While today, womanhood is still reduced to the superficial — “beauty,” attained or displayed through symbols of femininity, like hair, makeup, jewelry, and clothing — women’s realities are anything but decorative or camp. Women’s lives are still overwhelmingly difficult, as the burden placed on women to undertake unpaid domestic labour while being forced to pay more for beauty, hygiene, and health products stands in stark contrast to what men experience.

From articles that claim feminism is “going too far,” to the recent labelling of women who name sexual harassment and assault as taking part in a “witch hunt,”men are being positioned as victims of women’s efforts to fight misogyny. Sexism is so normalized, any challenges to it are viewed as an unreasonable attack on men.

Recently, acclaimed classicist and feminist, Mary Beard, painted herself into a corner over the Oxfam scandal. In response to reports that the former country director of Oxfam in Haiti, Roland Van Hauwermeiren, had bought sex from women and girls, she tweeted:

“Of course one can’t condone the (alleged) behaviour of Oxfam staff in Haiti and elsewhere. But I do wonder how hard it must be to sustain ‘civilised’ values in a disaster zone. And overall I still respect those who go in to help out, where most of us [would] not tread.”

This kind of comment exemplifies the way women (particularly women living in the Global South and women of colour) have historically been othered — their humanity rendered less legitimate than men’s. Beard’s comments have been described as “genteel racism,” as well as as patently sexist, and the reality is that they are both. This kind of response demonstrates the extent to which sexism has been normalized within the cultural subconscious of society, as well as the way the colonialist gaze positions dark-skinned bodies as provoking white man’s loss of “civility.”

Defending men’s violence and exploitation on account of disaster or difficult circumstances is not exactly new. From the well-documented cases of increased trafficking of females from ages 10 to 24 in India after natural disasters strike, to the recent U-turn in Russian law decriminalizing wife-beating because of the belief that the removal of this “right” posed a threat to men’s “traditional values” and masculinity, there is no paucity of examples at to how the humanity of men is positioned front and centre.

Considering her work in Women & Power: A Manifesto, which analyzes the cultural unconscious of misogyny, as well as her extensive work in the fields of ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, it is clear that Beard is skilled at analyzing misogyny in ancient cultures. Her failure to see it in today’s modern culture reveals a troubling (but common) blindspot. Indeed, her comments exist as part of a larger trajectory of British intellectual history and a long tradition of white, male colonization.

Terms like “civilized” beings, “disaster zones,” and “areas that most of us would not tread” are reappropriations of the same patriarchal language that have historically kept whites the colonizers of dark-skinned bodies and males the proverbial “owners” of females. Beard’s phrasing suggests that it is not the male Westerner who is uncivilized, but rather his proximity to the non-Western “zone” and conditions of “disaster” that leads him to behave in this suddenly “uncivilized” way.

Beard is not alone in thinking this way. Too many progressives cannot recognize misogyny when it happens within particular contexts and excuse it circumstantially. We see this in the way the left has excused prostitution and pornography, in terms of the vast numbers of women who are raped by relief workers in Syria, and when we look at the recently reported assaults on and harassment of female aid workers by male staff. But even if Beard’s words are not excusing the acts of rape by relief workers, they reveal a view that women’s bodies must bear the brunt of men’s “civilization” (or lack thereof).

I took a picture in my first months in Haiti while working on child protection projects in Port-au-Prince showing two tents — one factory made, the other a series of bed sheets put together on a clothesline hung upon trees. All around: the rubble from buildings that fell during the 2010 earthquake. The buildings in Haiti fell largely due to shoddy building materials and lack of steel reinforcements, as expensive cement from the US forced many contractors to pour in more sand and less concrete, creating a weaker structure, meaning that this particular disaster was very much man-made. In other words, these sites of “disaster” are created by the very “civilized” men who turn around and exploit the victims of their imposed “civilization.”

Cheapened materials sold at extortionate rates to a people whose lives are dictated by Western G7 powers results in destroyed infrastructure and situationstraffickers take advantage of. Where Beard sees chaos, I see a legacy of colonial encounters and the buttressing of colonial institutions. Let us not forget that it was the British elite who unwittingly engineered the murders of at least one million people and the rapes of thousands of women by hastily planning the Great Partition, continuing the British rule which segregated Indian society along the lines of religion, creating acrimony in a country that had previously been united. This would turn out to be one of the most politically catastrophic decisions made by the UK’s most “civilized” leaders.

Image: March 2010, Port-au-Prince (Photo credit: Julian Vigo)

Several generations of male colonialists have brought us this still present view of “foreign” female bodies as objects of curiosity and the mechanisms responsible for interrupting their “civilized” gaze. We have seen this metaphor of savagery throughout history. In Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz discusses the “Chingada,” a term which references the systemic rape of women during the Conquest of Mexico by Cortès. He writes:

“[I]t is possible to answer the question, ‘What is the Chingada?’ The Chingada is the Mother forcibly opened, violated, or deceived. The hijo de la Chingada is the offspring of violation, abduction or deceit. If we compare this expression with the Spanish hijo de puta (son of a whore), the deference is immediately obvious. To the Spaniard, dishonour consists in being the son of a woman who voluntarily surrenders herself: a prostitute. To the Mexican it consists in being the fruit of a violation.”

Paz’ insight into how colonial encounters in the Americas were directly tied to the violation of female bodies serves as looking glass into later centuries, wherein women were similarly violated through enslavement, rape, and the exchange of their bodies.

In the late 19th century, explorers returning from faraway lands attempted to authenticate their experiences by taking the “real native” from their habitats, bringing their captives back to the West, and putting them on display in the World’s Fairs popular during this time. From the Khoikhoi (in the West, known by the derogatory term, “Hottentots”) of Botswana who were displayed in fairs from Britain to France, to the Indigenous Americans on display at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, to the Apaches and Igorots of the Philippines on display at the Saint Louis World’s Fair in 1904, the black and brown body was something of a boon in the scene of freak shows that toured Europe and North America.

The ethos of these males who peddled in the trafficking of women is astonishingly contradictory, just as the aid workers raping and exploiting women in Haiti today: on the one hand, these men set out to instill upon the native, “dark-skinned other” their supposedly progressive values, and on the other, these men set up their objects of curiosity as caged spectacles, imprisoned as a means for the white Westerner to understand their own humanity. These World’s Fair installations were part of the rise of both eugenics and social sciences in the 19th century — specifically ethnology, where people were put on display in human zoos to show Westerners how people around the world lived in what was believed to be an “rapprochement” between West and East, even if entirely curated. The obvious problem with these zoos and expositions is that there was little consciousness at the time about how these “natives” felt about being kidnapped and enslaved.

 Where these fairs concerned women, the stories were always the same: kidnapping, sexual slavery, freak shows, then death. Sarah Baartman was taken from the Gamtoos Valley in the Eastern part of the Cape Colony (present-day South Africa) and brought to England in 1810. Bought and sold from handler to handler and shown at various fairs in England and Ireland, she was exhibited as part of a freak show under the name “Hottentot Venus.” Finally, in 1814, she was brought to the Palais Royal in Paris where she was enslaved and became the object of scientific study.

Parallel to male colonizers sexually objectifying women during this time were French scientists who were interested in knowing the size of black women’s labia. The head of the menagerie at the Muséum national d’Histoire, Georges Cuvier, used Baartman in his new discipline, comparative anatomy, developing his theory that Baartman was the “missing link” between humans and animals, with Cuvier referring to her as an “orangutan” and a “monkey.”

Baartman died in 1815 at the age of 25. After her death, Cuvier dissected her body, displaying her remains. Her brain, genitals, skeleton, and a plaster cast of her body were on display until 1974 at the Musée de l’Homme, not repatriated to Hankey, South Africa until 2002. For all the scientific knowledge Cuvier hoped to amass by violating and dissecting Baartman’s body, what he really brought to light was the kind of “civilized” behaviour Western culture interprets as “normal.” Indeed, generations of violations against dark-skinned bodies have had the effect of normalizing rape as a necessary part of civilization.

What would lead someone like Beard to view women as necessary victims of male violence and white male “civility” as something that comes and goes like a headache? The question surrounding our humanity didn’t begin with women’s absence from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, nor did it begin with Sarah Baartman’s labia on display for over 150 years. The answer to the question, “Are women human?” lies somewhere between these historical moments and our modern excusing of men’s abusive behaviour, supposedly brought on by “disaster” and the presence of othered bodies and cultures. Women cannot possibly be viewed human so long our humanity is determined by men’s circumstantial “civilization.” These men are in fact the “disaster zone,” ignoring the very civilized request they treat women and girls as human beings.

Julian Vigo is a scholar, filmmaker, and human rights consultant. Her latest book is Earthquake in Haiti: The Pornography of Poverty and the Politics of Development. Contact her via email: julian.vigo@gmail.com.

City Councillor and Leading Rights Activist Shot Dead in Downtown Rio de Janeiro

City Councillor and Leading Rights Activist Shot Dead in Downtown Rio de Janeiro

by | Mar 16, 2018 | Repression at Home

Featured image: Marielle Franco speaking at a campaign rally in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2016. Photo: Mídia Ninja/Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

     by Fernanda Canofre / Global Voices

Less than two hours before she was murdered on the evening of March 14, Rio de Janeiro city councillor Marielle Franco was speaking at a roundtable of black women activists about “young black women moving the structures.”

As Franco was leaving the site, a car pulled up to the side of her own vehicle and fired nine shots into it. Franco and her driver, Anderson Pedro Gomes, were killed on the spot. The councillor’s press officer, who was in the backseat, was hit by glass fragments and injured but survived.

Bearing all the hallmarks of an execution, the attack has sent shockwaves through Brazil including social media. Nationwide protests have been scheduled for the next couple of days. More than 70,000 people and organisations have confirmed their presence in the demonstration in Rio de Janeiro.

Marielle Franco was elected with the leftist Socialist and Freedom Party (PSOL) in 2016 as the fifth most voted councillor in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s second-largest city with a population of over six million.

As a young, black, favela-bred lesbian woman activist, she championed several underrepresented demographics in Brazil’s institutional politics and was beloved by activists across the country.

Remembering a fierce critic and activist

Marielle Franco was born and raised in the Maré favela, the largest complex in Rio and home to 130,000 people. In 2005, Franco’s best friend was killed there during a confrontation between police officers and drug dealers. That episode drove her into human rights advocacy and activism against police violence.

A fierce critic of Rio’s deadly police, she had been appointed in late February 2018 as the main rapporteur for the commission of Brazil’s municipal assembly to monitor the ongoing army intervention in Rio de Janeiro.

Brazil’s army took over the city’s public security in early February in response to gang violence despite criticism from local non-governmental organizations and the United Nations’ Human Rights Council.

She had openly criticized the intervention and compared it to a similar operation in her native Maré favela during the 2014 World Cup.

Franco consistently spoke out, both from the pulpit and on her social media pages, against extrajudicial killings of Rio’s poor and mostly black favela residents.

Just this week, she made a series of posts on Facebook about the ongoing violence in the Acari favela:

This week, two young men were killed and dumped at a hole. Today, the police were walking through the streets threatening residents.

Franco called attention to a news story that reported five shoot-outs in the favela over the course of seven days:

Marielle last Facebook post was about the ongoing police violence in Acari favela. Photo: Screenshot/Facebook

Franco spoke out against Brazil’s lethal police

Police lethality in Brazil is staggering. In 2016, 920 killings by police were documented in Rio de Janeiro alone, up from 419 in 2012, according to Amnesty International. A report by Public Security Forum, a national research institution, counted 4,224 killings by police officers in the whole country in 2016, with 99 percent of them being men and 76 percent black. Many of those homicides may amount to extrajudicial killings, a crime under international law.

On social media, organisations, political parties and civil profiles used hashtags asking for a throughout the investigation of Franco’s murder.

The Feminist Network of Jurists stated on Facebook:

Her political importance goes beyond the direct actions to combat violence suffered by black people from Rio. Marielle, while a black woman, represented millions of women without a political voice within the State, breaking a pact of exclusion of black people crystalized by the history of segregation in Brazil, masked by the myth of racial democracy.

Amnesty International‘s Brazil chapter also demanded an investigation:

There should not be any doubts about the context, motivation, and authorship of Marielle Franco’s murder.

Her party PSOL issued an official statement saying that the hypothesis of a “political crime” could not be discarded, since “she had just denounced a brutal action” by the police.

Marielle Franco grew up at Maré Complex, the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro. Photo: Mídia Ninja CC BY-SA 2.0

“We cannot wait another 10 years or think that I will be there for another 10”

Sociologist and public security specialist Luiz Eduardo Soares, a close friend to Franco, remembered how the attack echoes that of Judge Patricia Acioli, also killed in a drive-by shooting in 2011. Accioli had been overseeing a number of cases involving paramilitary groups (called ‘militias’ in Rio).

When, my god, will the people awake and understand that public unsafety starts at the most corrupt and brutal segments inside police forces, and that we cannot live with this haunting legacy from the dictatorship period anymore. Will we continue to talk about ‘individual misconduct’? What can we do now, besides crying?

During the black activists’ roundtable that Franco had joined hours before being killed, she said:

We have a movement pushing for more women in politics, in power positions, more women occupying decision making spots, because that is the only way of getting more qualified public policies.

Franco remembered two black women politicians who had come before her, ten years apart from each other, urging:

We cannot wait another 10 years or think that I will be there for another 10.

India: Tribes threatened by Conservation, Plan Historic Protest

India: Tribes threatened by Conservation, Plan Historic Protest

by | Mar 15, 2018 | Colonialism & Conquest

Featured image: Baiga women threatened with illegal eviction, Achanakmar Tiger Reserve. The villagers are determined to stay and say they don’t want to leave their forest home. © Survival International

     by Survival International

Hundreds of Baiga people from the area that inspired Kipling’s The Jungle Book are rallying to oppose the authorities’ attempts to evict them from the forests that they have lived in and managed since time immemorial.

Baiga tribespeople are joining forces from over 70 different villages in an area of 1,500 square kilometres. The protests have been sparked by official efforts to evict two Baiga communities from a wildlife “corridor.” Dozens of neighboring Baiga communities are now terrified they will be next, as they face poverty, exploitation and misery if forced from their homes.

The fate that could await many Baiga threatened with illegal eviction: a Baiga woman works for a pittance in a bauxite mine.

The fate that could await many Baiga threatened with illegal eviction: a Baiga woman works for a pittance in a bauxite mine. © Sayantan Bera/Survival

The Baiga are particularly worried by the two upcoming evictions, as both state authorities and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) promised that evictions would not take place in the “corridor” areas, which run between the protected nature reserves.

By law, any resettlements of tribal people must be voluntary, even for those living in designated conservation areas. However Baiga people report threats, intimidation and violence until they have no choice but to leave their homes.

Baiga elder, Bhardan Singh told Survival International: “The forest guards beat me until I fell from the tree. I split my hip bone and couldn’t stand. I crawled to the edge of the park. The guards just left me and walked away.”

These Khadia tribespeople were evicted from a tiger reserve and forced to live for months under plastic sheets. Promises of “compensation” are rarely fulfilled.

These Khadia tribespeople were evicted from a tiger reserve and forced to live for months under plastic sheets. Promises of “compensation” are rarely fulfilled. © Survival

This weekend’s protest is a local flashpoint in an ongoing national issue. Tribal peoples living in tiger reserves across India are being forced to leave their ancestral homelands in the name of tiger conservation. However, tiger numbers have increased rapidly in the first reserve in India where a tribe won the right to stay on their land, showing people and tigers can flourish alongside one another.

Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights, launched a tourist boycott in November last year, urging visitors to India not to visit any of India’s tiger reserves until the Indian tiger authority respects tribal peoples’ rights to live in and protect their forests.

Survival Director Stephen Corry said: “These evictions, both inside and outside the tiger reserves, are totally unjustified, as well as illegal. Not only do they destroy the lives of the people forced from their homes, but they don’t help the tigers either. The authorities and WWF promised there would be no evictions – as so often in the past, such promises have proven worthless.”

Background briefing
– Baiga means “medicine man.” Baiga people are known for their distinctive tattoos, and for their very close relationship to their environment.
– Tribal people were evicted from Similipal tiger reserve in 2013, and were soon after found living in dire conditions under plastic sheets.
– Many Baiga were evicted from the nearby Kanha tiger reserve in 2014. They received no land, houses, or support but were supposed to find land to buy with their compensation money, an alien concept for those who’d lived all their lives in the forest. They told Survival: “We got some money, but we are lost – wandering in search of land. Here there is only sadness. We need the jungle.”

UN, Indigenous Leaders Condemn Philippines For Placing Special Rapporteur on “Terrorist Hit List”

UN, Indigenous Leaders Condemn Philippines For Placing Special Rapporteur on “Terrorist Hit List”

by | Mar 12, 2018 | Repression at Home

     by Terri Hansen / Cultural Survival

What do you do when a country places a United Nations Special Rapporteur on a terrorist hit list?

If you’re the UN, you hit back.

A petition filed February 21 in a Manila court by apparently unstable President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines labels Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples ‘a terrorist.’

Human Rights Watch saw the petition this week and called it “a virtual hit list.”

The legal petition accuses 600 people including Victoria Tauli-Corpuz  and Joan Carling, co-convener of the Indigenous Peoples Major Group on Sustainable Development, and several other Indigenous human rights defenders as being affiliated with “terrorist and outlawed organizations, associations and/or group of persons” connected to the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the New People’s Army (NPA).

“There’s a long history in the Philippines of the state security forces and pro-government militias assassinating people labelled as NPA members or supporters,” Human Rights Watch Philippines researcher Carlos Condehe said.

“These attacks cannot go unanswered. The U.N. Human Rights Council must take a position,” UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein told news reporters on Friday. “This sort of comment really is unacceptable, unacceptable.”

Although Zeid bluntly stated the president of the Philippines “is in need of a psychiatric evaluation,” there are serious concerns for their safety.

Tauli-Corpuz, a member of the Kankanaey Igorot people in the Philippines, believes she was targeted for statements she made on December 27, 2017 to the Human Rights Council. The Council has entrusted her to provide reports of alleged violations of Indigenous people’s rights worldwide.

Tauli-Corpuz called the allegations, “baseless, malicious and irresponsible,” and added she was consulting with lawyers on legal courses of action to clear her name and make accountable “those who put my life and security at risk.”

Human rights organizations have charged the Philippines army with harassing and killing the Indigenous Lumad people on Mindanao Island who have been caught in the middle of a communist insurgency. The terrorist list is the most recent move by the Philippines in a long conflict between defenders of Indigenous Peoples’ rights and the Duterte administration, the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA) says.

Under Duterte’s administration, Philippine Indigenous Peoples’ organizations have recorded at least 62 illegal arrests, 21 political prisoners, 20 incidents of forced evacuation affecting 21,966 Indigenous Peoples and more than a hundred others facing trumped-up charges and forcible closure of 34 Lumad schools from July 2016 to December 2017.

“The Government of the Philippines regularly and increasingly threatens and harasses Indigenous Peoples,” Julie Koch, executive director of IWGIA said in a statement. “We are extremely worried about finding some of our long-term partners on the list. We fear for their personal safety.”

One of IWGIA’s partners on the list is Cordillera Peoples Alliance, with co-founder Joan Carling and several other members named. Carling said she expects to take legal action, and as well expects the Philippine government to “ensure the physical safety of those of us who are listed in the petition, as called for by UN experts.”

Targeting Tauli-Corpuz provoked outrage among her fellow rapporteurs.

“We are shocked that the Special Rapporteur is being targeted because of her work defending the rights of Indigenous Peoples,” said Michel Forst, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, and Catalina Devandas Aguilar, chair of the Coordination Committee of the Special Procedures.

The international human rights and Indigenous community is expressing solidarity with Tauli-Corpuz and Carling, while condemning the Philippine government.

“Vicky is an ardent advocate for Indigenous rights around the world, not a terrorist,” Amazon Watch executive director Leila Salazar-López told Cultural Survival. She said the accusations against her were very worrisome. “We will stand with her as she has stood with Indigenous Peoples and land defenders for decades.”

Patricia Gualinga, Kichwa women’s leader from the community of Sarayaku, Ecuadorian Amazon told Cultural Survival, “I stand in solidarity with my sister Vicky.”

“When a woman is clear in her defense of women’s and Indigenous Peoples’ rights, authoritarian governments use their power to criminalize, threaten, and persecute us through the law, as has happened here in the Amazon,” she said.

The growing list of those expressing solidarity with Tauli-Corpuz and Carling include the Cordillera Peoples Alliance, the Cultural Conservancy, the Seventh Generation Fund for Indigenous Peoples, Tero Mustonen of Snowchange in Finland, Tebtebba, Indigenous Climate Action Network, Luisa Maffi of Terralingua, Tarcilla Rivera Zea and Jesús Fuentes as members of United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, and a growing list of others as they learn the news.

The Editorial Director at ČálliidLágádus – ForfatternesForlag said, “I am horrified that human rights defenders like UN Special Rrapporteur for Indigenous Peoples Human Rights are being targeted like this. Vicky is being accused for terrorism by Filipino authorities. This brave, warm-hearted, clear-spoken woman is a defender of humanity, no terrorist!”

Tauli-Corpuz is one of the Indigenous leaders who helped draft the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 1993 and then lobbied for it for more than 20 years until the UN General Assembly finally adopted the treaty in 2007.

She has founded and managed various nonprofits that raise awareness about social ills, climate change, and the advancement of Indigenous Peoples’ and women’s rights. In 1996, she founded Tebtebba, an international organization that promotes Indigenous Peoples’ perspectives on key issues such as human rights, sustainable development, climate change, and the environment.

Related: Cultural Survival Stands in Solidarity with Victoria Tauli-Corpuz and Joan Carling in the Wake of Unfounded Terrorist Accusations

— Terri Hansen is a member of the Winnebago Tribe. She has covered Indigenous Peoples’ issues since 1993. Hansen’s focus is science and the environment. She has reported on climate change in tribal communities since 2008, and on Indigenous participation in the annual UN climate summits since the COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009. Follow her on Twitter @TerriHansen.

Havasupai Prayer Gathering: Indigenous Nations Unite Against Nuclear Colonialism

Havasupai Prayer Gathering: Indigenous Nations Unite Against Nuclear Colonialism

by | Mar 11, 2018 | Mining & Drilling

Featured image by Garet Bleir

     by  / Intercontinental Cry

At the Havasupai Prayer Gathering, Fydel Rising Sun, member of the Havasupai Tribe, sang of resisting uranium mining to the sound of his beating drum. It was 3 a.m., and the sacred fire crackled under the dark outline of Red Butte, a site of great ceremonial importance to the surrounding native nations nations beside the Grand Canyon. The sun soon crested the horizon, and color returned to the land, as well as sweltering heat. Green shrubs poked through the red dirt, their roots a stalwart defense against erosion and increasingly common dust storms, in this parched land being robbed of millions of gallons of clean water.

As explored in our previous pieces within the series, millions of gallons of clean water have been contaminated with uranium and arsenic, directly above an aquifer feeding waters such as those pictured. Moreover, Canyon Mine is accused by conservation organizations and surrounding indigenous nations of desecrating land, medicine, and water surrounding Red Butte: just six miles from the Grand Canyon and from land held sacred by the Havasupai Tribe.

The aqua-marine waters of Havasu Falls on the Havasupai Reservation.

The president of the mine’s company, Mark Chalmers, has denied that that the tribe holds these areas sacred. In response, a four day Havasupai Prayer Gathering, the first in eight years, invited other native nations to come together beneath Red Butte for ancestral ceremonies, inter-tribal gatherings, entertainment, direct action training, and speakers.

Well over 100 people were in attendance over the course of the four-day gathering, many camping out each night for the entirety of the event. Speakers delved into a variety of topics covering past and current illegal land grabs, religious and cultural oppression, spiritual guidance, and stories of resistance. All these narratives came together to now fight the Canyon Mine’s desecration of the land surrounding Red Butte. These are their stories:

Richard Watahomigie, descendant of the first Havasupai leader, spoke to the audience about how he was able to overcome the challenges in his early life and return to his roots to help to lead the Havasupai Tribe. At the event he said he wished he was able to tell this story to more people, but hopes for his words to be shared broadly to help inspire others as well. He is pictured in front of Red Butte:

When I was five I was taken from my family by the white man. They put me in a Mormon school. I wanted to go home and started getting myself in trouble. Eventually they got tired of me and told me I was going home. I was happy. I was going home. Instead they took me to a boarding school in White River, Arizona called Theodore Roosevelt. There I got mistreated by government workers at nine years old.

Some of my relatives and people from Supai went to school there too. I tried to listen and understand them, but could only understand a little. They laughed at me and made fun of me because I couldn’t talk Supai. When I was alone I practiced and tried hard to talk my language.

From then on I went to other schools, tried to learn the white man’s way. One time I heard a native man, Chief Dan George, make a speech. He said, ‘if you finish high school, you’re going to become a half breed.’ So I ran away. I traveled, hitchhiked. I was 14 or 15 years old and eventually made it back home. Then I started over, trying to speak my own language. I finally got it. I listened to the songs with the elders at the sweat lodges and circle dances and practiced them. Now I claim myself a full blood because I got back my roots.

 After getting a job to help my parents I started traveling around again. But every time I did, Supai kept calling me back. I went home and thereafter just sort of wandered around looking for a stable life. Eventually I found my wife. I quit all the bad things I did when I was young. It was hard to give up smoking, drinking, hard drugs. You might call me a junkie. That’s what I was and now I’m clean.

When I grew older I was nominated for office. I didn’t want to accept that; I wasn’t about that. I’m not a political person, but I said to myself, ‘okay I’ll just let it flow and see how it goes and see what the people think of me.’ My people voted me into office. And now I’m a member of the Havasupai Tribal Council. Now I have great admiration, love, respect for my people, my land, water, wildlife, plants, Mother Earth.”

Rex Tilousi, elder and former Chairman of the Havasupai, spoke to the Havasupai people in both the Havasupai–Hualapai language and English, encouraging the Havasupai to remember their history, continue their traditions, and continue their duty of protecting their lands:

“My great-great-grandfather asked to be buried on top of Havasu Falls. They called him Captain Borough. He got that name when the first trainload of tourists visited the Grand Canyon and saw him hiking up Bright Angel Trail with the harvest. They said, ‘look at that animal coming up that trail, look at that jackass coming up the trail, look at that borough coming up the trail.’

Later President Theodore Roosevelt stood on the canyon rim too. He wanted to make a national park and take it from those before him. Rangers say John Wesley Powell discovered this area, but native peoples were already there and regard the canyon as a place of emergence.

When Roosevelt came to our village, he gathered elders to sign papers even though they couldn’t read them. Then he said, ‘I’m taking your lands. Don’t go up to the rim anymore. No hunting or gathering here, no prayers, no sweat lodges. I don’t want you in the park.’

In 1919, they removed the peoples living there. The last Havasupai chased out was my great-great-grandfather, Borough. He refused to leave the home he loved and gave him life. But rangers went down the trail, stuck him on a mule, and forced him out. That same year he passed away and was buried at the top of Havasu Falls.

Years ago rangers asked me to work for the park. I said I needed to do prayer work before responding so spoke to my great-great-grandfather’s grave. That night I had a dream and his voice said, ‘find out why we were chased away.” I accepted the position.

The park gave me a gray and green uniform and that hat Smokey the bear wears. I found out why. They said they wanted to protect the canyon for everyone who wanted to see its wonders. But they aren’t protecting it. They are allowing this destruction.

We were given a responsibility to protect and preserve this land and water for those yet to come. We have a job to do. The ancient rock writing in our canyon tells us to protect this place. The canyon doesn’t belong to us. We belong to the canyon, to the earth, to the water. It created us and gave us life. We are fighting for our lives and for those who are yet to come.”

Photo: Garet Bleir

Krysta Manakaja, Miss Havasupai, spoke to IC regarding the sanctity of the area of Red Butte and the mission of the Havasupai people at the prayer gathering:

“I am standing here in front of you as an ambassador of the Havasupai, to protect my home land and the waters of the Grand Canyon. Red Butte behind me was our first home, our first land, this was where we first lived. There are a lot of our ancestors buried out here and we are here to protect them.”

In the late 70s, when the Havasupai first heard that the Canyon Mine was being developed upon land they hold sacred, it wasn’t the company who told them. Someone working in the nearby city of Tusayan noticed the development and contacted the tribe. According to Rex Tilousi, “Without letting us know, they had already scraped the ground, the sage, and underneath the dust they destroyed ancient grinding stones, baskets, the pottery work our people traded with other tribes, and even bones. They had scraped everything away getting that place ready for mining.”

Photo: Garet Bleir

Havasupai Medicine Woman, Dianna Baby Sue White Dove Uqualla, is a third generation spiritual traditionalist, former member of the Havasupai Tribal Council and former Vice- Chairwoman for the tribe:

“Things are simple, but in this world we made it chaotic. Take away that complication and just live and breath love and have faith. The land behind me of Red Butte is sacred land to our people. You step on this ground and you are being blessed, even if you are not doing ceremony or prayer.

“This land is testing each and every one of us to see if we’re meaning what we are doing here. When you speak, speak truth. We have made lying a norm in this world which is not right. We have to go back to truth, because that’s what is the healer. We have once been the little sheep and they pulled the wool over our eyes. But now we have seen through this wool to recognize what is happening to us. We the people have the ability to take down our president but we have to walk in a force of many and share the word of respect and dignity so that all of us and all our children can survive. Right now we are in a dark place. And we’re sitting here thinking that we cannot do anything, but it’s not true. Yes, we will have to stand in the front lines and give life or give some kind of hurt, but if you’re really in the place of saying, ‘yes I do want to protect my land, my people,’ then that’s the sacrifice we make without question.

“Before you begin your journey, question yourself and ask, ‘am I ready?’ Because it does get scary. Your heart is going to flutter. Your feet are going to chatter. Your hands are going to begin to tremble. That’s human. But you can overcome these things, because we have our mind and our mind is so powerful. More powerful than we know and we have all that to give. To give and acknowledge.”

Photo: Garet Bleir

Rex Tilousi, former Havasupai Chairman, also spoke about why it is so important to resist the developments of the areas they hold sacred:

“Water is going to be just as valuable as gold in the future and that is what is happening today. Arizona calls itself the Grand Canyon State. But what are they doing about the Grand Canyon? They are allowing this destruction.

“To those of us who live in the Canyon, our religious stories and our creations stories from our elders say that this is where we all came from. Black, white, red, green, yellow, doesn’t matter what color one is, we all originated inside of the Canyon. When I hear those stories of how humans came to be, I feel this that is our mother, our grandmother, this is where we all came from, inside our mother earth.

“That’s the reason why we are fighting. Fighting for a home that gave us life, is still giving us life, and is still protecting those that lived down below. Not only us, but the many visitors who come below the rims. The visitors who have been there, if they knew what was going on today, I am sure they would sign the petition that is going around to help stop uranium mining around the Canyon.

“Projects like the Canyon Mine and the casino and tramway they want to make to the bottom at the Grand Canyon with the Escalade Project serve to make more money for those that are developing these things. It is not the idea of the native people. This idea comes from the lawyers, the developers, and the people that are going to disturb this area. Drilling holes, pumping our waters, and pumping the springs that was created by these waters. We have been told many times, when you come to a spring, talk to it before you drink, thank it after you leave, do not bother the spring. Even though I may not be here to see the end of it, I will look down from behind the clouds and say I am very proud of my people.”

Members from the Havasupai Tribe, Navajo Nation, and Haul No take their message to the gates of the Canyon Mine, located just 6 miles south of the Grand Canyon on the site of the sacred Red Butte.

Klee Benally, volunteer with the indigenous-led activist group, Haul No and member of the Navajo Nation taught direct action trainings for the camp in preparation to resist the Canyon Mine:

“Two of my uncles worked at Canyon Mine back in the ‘80s. They helped lay concrete and build the headframe for the uranium mining shaft. Today I feel a great sense of responsibility to rectify their transgressions.”

Photo: Garet Bleir

Photo: Garet Bleir

Guardians of the Grand Canyon, a group of Havasupai dancers, tour Arizona and the world while bringing back a lost tradition to the Havasupai people. The group performed the Ram Dance at the prayer gathering and IC spoke with Richard Watahomigie, who reignited these once-lost traditions:

“My brother in law and I were out hunting one day and we came upon a trail of blood. We tracked it and found two bighorn sheep. They were slaughtered. Hidden underneath bushes. I took them back to the village, did the proper blessings and buried them. The bighorn sheep are sacred to the Havasupai. When we pass away we reincarnate into the bighorn and travel along the rim of the Grand Canyon, back and forth, guarding it. That’s why the ram dancers call themselves the Guardians of the Grand Canyon.

“I took the death of those two bighorns as a sign that we needed to recreate the Ram Dance, a forgotten tradition of the Havasupai practiced over 100 years ago. With the help of a friend, a former council member as well, we got together, made replicas out of the real bighorn, and figured out a way to recreate the dance in order to honor them once again.”

Photo: Garet Bleir

Ruth Havatone, member of the Havasupai Tribe, spoke to an audience regarding new ways of resistance to colonization through the legal system and how colonization has forced the tribe from an agrarian society to a tourist economy:

“Nowadays we can’t fight with arrows or guns, we have to educate our children and send them to college and law school so we can understand how to fight back with the white man and their language, their laws, and their regulations. It is very sad what is going on here. We want to stop the uranium mining and we want the public to recognize that we the Havasupai are here and the dangers of the uranium contamination. It’s not right.

“After the federal government took away most of our land and pushed us into the canyon, we don’t even know how to make money down there. We barely survive with the tourists. In winter we don’t have much money. No tourists buying our groceries or eating in our cafes, only us natives are there surviving on little money. But we survive.

“We are not used to the public view. The tourists don’t see some of us because we are shy of the white people that arrive to our village. Some of us, the older ones, we are watching but they don’t see us because we are hiding in the bushes or the canyon rocks, watching them walk by.”

Photo: Garet Bleir

Uqualla, a Havasupai Medicine Man and Spiritual Traditionalist, spoke throughout the four-day gathering about returning to listening to the earth and finding balance within one’s self. Uqualla also facilitates workshops and ceremonial life coaching sessions throughout the Southwest.

“Everyone that is birthed on this Mother Earth has dark and light, good and bad, masculine and feminine. Learn how to bring that into a magnificent balance. The Mother Earth stated at the beginning, ‘I will give you what it is that you ask for. Not what you ask for from the language or the voice, but what you put forth in your actions.’

“Everything about Mother Earth speaks in symbolism. Learn how to pull from the information given by the surroundings. The medicines of wind, the medicines of the water, the medicines of fire, the medicines of rock. The Mother Earth knows how to take care of itself. And it will take care of itself. It’s going to be the greatest teacher for all of us so go out to her daily and allow for yourself that connection in whatever way you wish that is comfortable for you do so. Even if it is just a step out there. That one moment of total blankness will allow for that infusion of Mother Earth to come through. Allow for yourself to make a connection with the Mother Earth and have her be a constant watcher, healer, teacher, and leader for you.

“We are the children of the Mother Earth and every single one of them walk and trash and abuse the earth beneath them. It’s a surface that gives us the ability to walk, talk, breath, sing, dance. And that is important for us to understand. Without that where would we be? We would not be.”

Garet Bleir is an investigative journalist working for Intercontinental Cry documenting human rights and environmental abuses surrounding uranium mining in the Grand Canyon region. To follow along with interviews and photos highlighting indigenous voices and to receive updates on his 12 part series for IC, follow him on Instagram or facebook.

This article is a part of #GrandCanyonFutures, an ongoing deep journalism series published by IC in partnership with Toward Freedom.