The Unflattering Cultural Poaching Of “Moana”

The Unflattering Cultural Poaching Of “Moana”

     by Anne Keala Kelly

It’s a twofer.

With a Thanksgiving holiday release of “Moana,” Disney’s Polynesian cartoon extravaganza can simultaneously expand its lucrative enterprise of exploiting marginalized, indigenous peoples (Pocahontas, Lilo and Stitch, Frozen) while perpetuating American amnesia.

A note about Thanksgiving: Early feasts of giving thanks celebrated some notable atrocities committed against Native peoples, including the 1637 massacre of 700 Pequot Indians by white Christians and the 1676 butchering and beheading of Wampanoag Sachem Metacom, whose severed head was then displayed on a pike for 25 years at Plymouth. Ultimately it was President Abraham Lincoln who declared it a national holiday in 1863, less than a year after he ordered the hanging of 38 Dakota men, which remains the largest mass execution in U.S. history.

Given the pre-Halloween rollout of the Maui skin suit so that children would unwittingly promote “Moana” like human billboards, I doubt the choice of a release date was any less thought out. Some of the most experienced and powerful business minds in the world own and operate Disney — they’re not the type to leave a hundred-something million-dollar investment to chance.

Opening dates, promotion, and merchandising are carefully planned well in advance to achieve maximum financial gain. The skin suit and Thanksgiving release shouldn’t be thought of as unintended cultural faux pas — these were calculated risks. To give the benefit of the doubt to a $50-billion corporate predator waiting to vacuum up a few billion more off of our culture(s) is to agree with the offense.

Most indigenous peoples under U.S. control, certainly Hawaiians, have yet to carve out a meaningful space to represent ourselves, what we value and our reality in mass media and film largely because America’s master narrative relies on our subjugation. The truth of what matters to us undermines the colonizer’s imagineered innocence. The narrative of Hawai’i as “the Aloha State” is a perfect example — every non-Maoli living and vacationing here is able to do so because of the theft of our nationhood and the complete appropriation and subversion of our land and culture.

While there are certainly other oppressed groups, our oppressions aren’t any more equal than our successes. Hawaiian world—indigenous world is all buss up, and our narratives are convoluted. But the settler world isn’t, and neither is its story.

Our hopes, dreams and struggles are inconvenient to what Disney has chosen to produce about us. Worse yet, we’re expected to shut up and enjoy the ride everyone’s taking on our back. Yes, some of our own people, grateful for any acknowledgment, don’t recognize an insult or culture theft when they see it. Others will happily join in with the massive, commodifying monstrosity of “Moana” and buy Moana gear and computer games. (I heard that the Ala Moana Disney Store is already well-stocked.)

One Maori writer, who likes the Maui skin suit, said it’s like dressing up as Santa Claus. He’s not far off, seeing as how we’re the ones doing all the giving. He reminded me of something funny that Haunani-Kay Trask, one of our beloved sovereignty leaders, once said to me: “Yah, the haole, they stole everything we gave them.”

Being culturally poached and misrepresented isn’t flattering — it’s a threat. The historical fact is that colonization in the Pacific, and everywhere for that matter, has had catastrophic consequences for indigenous peoples in every conceivable way. And native collaboration, while highly problematic, doesn’t legitimize hijacking or pimping our knowledge, heritage and identity.

Having said that, not knowing who the members are of the Oceanic Story Trust, a group that was hand picked by Disney to shepherd the cultural content and merchandising, we can’t ask these Pacific Mouseketeers what the capital F they were thinking when they helped Disney strip mine our culture(s) for the sole purpose of making a profit.

Although bad publicity in the form of complaints that the skin suit is racist motivated Disney to take it off the shelf, they did it with a condescending, “We regret that the Maui costume has offended some,” version of an apology. I suppose that’s the best we can expect from an entity whose bottom line is protecting its investment.

But Hawaiians and other indigenous Pacific Islanders are the ones who need to think hard about what something of this magnitude will mean. Given that it’s shaping up to become this region’s cultural heist of the century (so far), we may want to try to make native sense of the intent and the processes at work here, especially us Hawaiians.

I say especially Hawaiians because so much is being done to us politically, materially, culturally and spiritually these past few years. From the mass desecration project of the Thirty Meter Telescope to the Obama administration’s determination to force feed us federal recognition against our will, ours is a never-ending struggle to simply survive in our homeland as who we are.

The cultural imperialism of Disney mirrors the military imperialism of the United States and the other industries it uses to erase our indigenous belonging: tourism and real estate. Disney’s Aulani Resort, and now its “Moana,” secures its place in the economically enforced ethnocide and culturcide that is steadily replacing us with settlers.

If the promotional trailer is anything like the film, Disney’s about to get even richer by exploiting and mocking us in deeply genealogical and spiritual ways—turning Tutu Pele into an ugly lava monster and Maui into a ridiculous, clowning sidekick. The noted psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer Frantz Fanon was so on the mark when he said, “… Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.”

Disney has reduced us and our world to a cartoon at a time when our political future is hanging in the balance, when Hawaiians absolutely need to be heard and taken seriously, not distracted by or silenced for entertainment. Disney is trying to do to our culture and identity what America is doing to our land and nationhood: we are being carved up, sold off, and drained of our mana.

Since the Maui skin suit debacle, Disney’s 21st century iteration of the white supremacist ideology that informed people like British Major General Horatio Gordon Robley, a proud collector of Maori heads, and that guy who tried to sell a Hawaiian kupuna skull on E-Bay, I’ve been thinking in metaphors. I’m looking at what’s happening right now, but looking, too, at the horizon, at what’s coming toward us, imagining what might follow, hoping that whatever it is, Hawaiians and all Pacific Islanders can face it together instead of letting it further divide us.

I have no doubt that Disney’s “Moana” will materially and psychologically aid and abet the colonial project of indigenous erasure and removal. It’s a cultural tsunami and it will impact the entire region. However, unlike natural disasters, this man-made disaster will play out over many months and years and will continue for as long as Disney can suck the marrow from our spiritual and cultural bones.

Anne Keala Kelly is the award winning filmmaker of “Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai‘i,” and a journalist whose work has appeared in The Nation and Indian Country Today, and on the Pacifica Network and Al Jazeera.

The Mapuche’s Cross-border Struggle for Freedom and Autonomy from Argentina and Chile

The Mapuche’s Cross-border Struggle for Freedom and Autonomy from Argentina and Chile

     by and  / Intercontinental Cry

Ever since the incursion of rampant neoliberalism in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s, the Mapuche territory or Wallmapu, located south of the Bio Bio River, has been subjected to immeasurable domination and constant exploitation at the hands of a diverse range of foreign and national economic interests. Megaprojects like hydroelectric dams, mining operations, oil extraction and forestry plantations embody some of the main threats to Mapuche self-determination and autonomy.

In Chile, thanks to the enactment of Law 701 in 1974, three forestry giants stand at the forefront of the exploitation of Mapuche territory Forestal Bosques Arauco, CMPC and Forestal Mininco. Overall, pine and eucalyptus plantations in Chile today amount to more than 2.8 million hectares. For their part, the forefathers of today’s latifundistas were European-born families, who were invited to settle in Mapuche territory during Pinochet’s dictatorship.

Underpinning the vast array of threats in Wallmapu there sits a  broader historical, socio-politico and economic reality that was recently defined by historians Fernando Pairican and Rolando Alvarez-Vallejo as the “New Arauco War”.

On the frontlines of this war, the Chilean State works vigorously to criminalize, demoralize, incarcerate and discredit Mapuche leaders using any manner or method at their convenience.

A prime and recent example of this harsh campaign can be found in the arbitrary detention of Mapuche Peñis, Ernesto Lincoyam Llaitul Pezoa and Ismael Queipul Martínez, by Chilean security forces last May, in Los Angeles (Bio Bio Region).

Peñi Llaitul was arrested due to the alleged illegal possession of firearms — although no concrete evidence for this accusation has since then been provided by Chile’s equivalent to the FBI, the Investigations Police of Chile (PDI). His arbitrary detention can be best explained as part of the regular series of intelligence operations against the Mapuche — constant monitoring and surveillance of Mapuche autonomist communities by undercover police, paramilitaries and co-opted local members has indeed become an entrenched strategy of the Chilean corporate state.

Most importantly, the violent arrest of Llaitul and Queipul came at a crucial juncture in Chilean-Mapuche politics. In the leading up to the first ever Mesa de Diálogo, a top-down embraced initiative to reconcile Mapuche and non-Mapuche interests in the region, the Arauco Malleco Coordinating Committee (CAM for its Spanish acronym)  publicly announced its refusal to participate. The announcement sparked anger and frustration among the politically liberal associations and NGOs that sought a peace process. The rationale behind CAM’s decision was that the Mesa de Dialogo was largely devoid of political power  since it was pushed by local and national actors which had themselves a vexed interest in the negotiations, such as conservative intellectuals, university chancellors, forestry and mining labor union leaders, among others. Unsurprisingly,  the corporate giants absented themselves from the table. In this sense, the Mesa de Dialogo was an attempt to paradoxically reconcile Mapuche and non-Mapuche interests by leaving capital untouched.

Ernesto Llaitul was arrested on preventive detention in 2016. Photo by Periódico Azkintuwe.

Mapuche activist Ernesto Llaitul was arrested by Chilean police on weapons charges in 2016. Photo by Periódico Azkintuwe.

This refusal to partake in the Mesa de Dialogo and any other similar de-politicized, de-economized processes came along with the release of a first of its kind mainstream special television report on CAM and its clandestine strategy of liberation. This report showed for the first time to the average Chilean citizen an unapologetic CAM, which openly defended violence (arson and other attacks against capital) as the sole means of emancipation–leaving the variegated cells of CAM  exposed to a wave of brutal quelling, which included arbitrary arrests, violent raids to communities and the expulsion of Mapuche from recovered lands. It was precisely in this critical environment where Llaitul and Queipul were arrested.

For his part, Ernesto Llaitul has been a long-time active member of CAM. His father, Weychafe Héctor Llaitul has been at the forefront of Mapuche resistance since the late 1990s. Therefore, his arrest comes as no surprise to the Mapuche communities of Arauco-Malleco.  He is another  de facto political prisoner jailed in Wallmapu. In the midst of his imprisonment, Ernesto Llaitul proclaimed “neither imprisonment nor bullets will halt our struggle”.

On Wednesday 21 of September, the Los Angeles tribunal ruled Ernesto Llaitul’s detention arbitrary and illegal. Preventive detention was revoked and he has since been granted partial parole. The tribunal states that insufficient evidence was provided by the prosecutors to proof Llaitul and Queipul’s illegal possession of weapons. This development, however, should not be construed as the triumph of justice in the highly-corrupted Chilean bureaucratic-legal system. On the contrary, it sheds light on the variegated and complex techniques of oppression and surveillance used by the Chilean state. It is through arbitrary arrests, like this one, that the Chilean state exudes the extent of its power. It is through granting parole that it aims to wash off international condemnation of its judicial processes. The release of Llaitul can only be seen as a statist tool to “pacify” and co-opt CAM.

A similar narrative of criminalization can found in nearby Argentina.

Most recently, on August 30 2016  a large contingent of police and military personnel took to the streets of city of Esquel in Patagonia, Argentina where Mapuche leaders and social movement gathered outside the courthouse to support Lonko (traditional leader) Facundo Huala Jones.

Credit: Red de Apoyo Comunidades en Conflicto MAP

Mapuche activists outside protested outside a courthouse on August 30 2016 in the city of Esquel in Patagonia, Argentina to support Facundo Huala Jones. Photo by Red de Apoyo Comunidades en Conflicto MAP

In preventative detention since May 27, 2016, Huala was accused of usurping land belonging to the multi-national Benetton in Chubut, Argentina and also faced extradition to Chile where he is wanted on counts of arson and possession of illegal weapons in a case dating back to 2013 in Pisue Pisue, Rio Bueno.

Huala Jones had no doubts about his situation: “I am a political prisoner, persecuted by the Government of two countries – Argentina and Chile,” he said. “This is political persecution that goes beyond this judicial process.’

This could not have been clearer when the Judge Martin Zacchino refused a request from Huala’s defence lawyer to allow him to go under house arrest on health grounds: “You incite people to fight, that verges on crime. 30 more days in prison,” he said.

The case of Peñis, Huala Jones and Llaitul both need to be contextualized within the broader warfare campaign targeting Mapuche leaders —from Machis (spiritual healers) to Werkens (messengers) and Weychafes (warriors) — all of them, struggling for the inherent right to autonomy of the Mapuche nation.

Unlike many other indigenous nations in South America, the Mapuche nation continued to be autonomous fiercely and successfully resisting any incursions on their territory up until the late nineteenth century. It wasn’t until the foundation of the colonial nations of Argentina and Chile, that the Wallmapu was divided in two and differing forms of oppression ensued.

In Chile, the Mapuche nation was forcibly annexed in the aftermath of the violent and brutal Operation “Pacificación de la Araucania”.

In Argentina, a campaign of genocide called the ‘’Conquest of the Desert’’ rampaged from 1778-1885, killing and enslaving the Mapuche, funded partly by the British who supplied Remington Rifles in return for 1 million hectares of land. Up until the mid 1920s, money was awarded to anyone who presented the ear of a slain Mapuche — a process which enabled many European settlers buy up land.

Despite this, the Mapuche never lost their vision of an autonomous Wallmapu and have maintained their historic fierce resistance to the colonial states.  Today, the Arauco Malleco Coordinating Committee and the emerging Movimiento Autónomo del Puelmapu (MAP) in Argentina are arguably the most important indigenous autonomist organization in the whole of Latin America engaging in a project not only for the recovery of scattered Mapuche lands but actively seeking to liberate the Mapuche nation from the grip of statist colonial power and its corporate allies.

The heavy police presence on the streets of Esquel during the trial of Facundo Huala. Photo by Red de Apoyo Comunidades en Conflicto MAP

The heavy police presence on the streets of Esquel during the trial of Facundo Huala. Photo by Red de Apoyo Comunidades en Conflicto MAP.

“We have a legitimate right to rise up and rebel in the face of tyrannical regimes, created through processes of military occupation by the Chilean and Argentinean government from the mid-1800s onwards which created poverty, violence, racism, denial of basic human rights and a policy of genocide which exists even today,” says Huala, “And even more so when there is no serious attempt at dialogue.  The response to our political proposals is always the same: prison and bullets.”

The imprisonment of Mapuche leaders raises serious concerns of due process in a country which has long been regarded as the epitome of Latin America’s liberal democracy.

Take, for instance, the highly controversial imprisonment of Machi Francisca Linconao and Machi Celestino Cordova, who were charged with terrorism due to their supposed involvement in the arson attacks against the estate of the Luchsinger family in 2013. Their trial was marred with inconsistencies, lack of transparency and heavily relied on protected “faceless” witnesses, all of this validated and substantiated by Chile’s 1984 Anti-Terror Law—a  controversial piece of legislation that dates back to Pinochet’s time. While the original law was first and foremost directed at targeting and quelling the more “direct” actions of leftist urban guerrillas in the 1980s , the amendments to this law passed by the Chilean Congress after the restoration of democracy post-1990s aimed to legalize the systematic surveillance of Mapuche communities, the militarization of Wallmapu and the inclusion of arson attacks as a terrorist act.

In Argentina the process of judicial harassment of Mapuche leaders has been less extreme than in neighboring Chile. One reason given by the MAP is the history of extreme violence against the Mapuche: “ Here we have dead bodies, not prisoners, ” they say.

And this violence could clearly be seen during the arrest of Huala Jones on 27 May 2016 in a police raid in Cushaman, a community which is in the process of land recuperation from the multi-national Benetton. 120 heavily armed police used bullets, tear gas and destroyed the homes of a group of 20 people living on 500 hectares of recovered land.  Six others were arrested but subsequently released, with the existing extradition request from Chile used to justify preventive detention for Huala.

The request dates back to 2013 when Haula had been visiting Machi Millaray Huichalaf  — an emblematic figure in the struggle against a hydroelectric dam on the Pilmaiken River — when her house was raided by police and she was arrested along with Facundo and four other colleagues all accused of involvement in an arson case on the agricultural estate Pisue Pisue. During a year long process of judicial persecution involving preventative detention, home arrest while the Chilean Government sought ways to apply the  anti-terrorist law to this case, Huala managed to escape back into Argentina. While the intellectual authors of the arson were never found, Machi Millaray was sentenced to two months in prison, the other four were absolved and Huala was declared a fugitive of justice.

As aforementioned, Ernesto Llaitul’s father, Weychafe Hector Llaitul, has been a central actor in the Mapuche resistance movement since the late 1990s. Therefore, he has been subjected to the same controversial legislation and undue process. Weychafe Llaitul, current leader and spokesperson of CAM, was charged for the attacks against prosecutor Mario Elgueta back in 2008.

While Weychafe Llaitul is now on parole, his struggle for the revindication of Mapuche territory and the liberation of the Mapuche Nation  continues unscathed. Intimidation, infiltration and violent attacks by corporate-funded paramilitaries — such as the Comando Hernán Trizano — continues, limiting the processes of territorial recuperation set into motion by CAM.

Llaitul’s imprisonment then evinces the perpetuation of arbitrary and undemocratic Chilean legal processes that continue to criminalize Mapuche mobilization and persecute prominent Mapuche leaders and activists.

A surprise move unsettles the status quo on the other side of the colonial border. On August 31, 2016,  Argentinean authorities chose not to grant Chile its extradition request of Huala. The testimony of one of the witnesses brought forward by the prosecution was called into question after he claimed that he had been forced to sign a statement of accusation against Huala.

The revelation was key in the Judge’s final decision that was met with an explosion of excitement and the Mapuche battle cry Mariciweu!

“Historically, the Government has always ruled against Indigenous people,” said Qom leader Felix Diaz who attended the trial. “Today a precedent has been set which gives us hope of a new future for Indigenous people.”

For now, Huala while will enjoy time with his family and loved ones and the struggle will continue: “In prison or out, I will always fight.  When things are wrong we have to change them. When you see oppression and do nothing to change the situation, then you become complicit with the oppressor.”

Ernesto Llaitul and Ismael Queipul, meanwhile, continue to face persecution along with so many other Mapuche men and women who seek only to preserve the lands and rights of their ancestors.

Until both states choose to embody the democratic values they espouse and, most importantly, halt the unrestricted incursion of capital agents in the region that process will continue to play out as it always has, shedding more and more light on the extent of the political repression and economic subordination in both Chile and Argentina.

Lawsuit Filed to Protect Endangered Ocelots in Arizona, Texas From Government Killing

Lawsuit Filed to Protect Endangered Ocelots in Arizona, Texas From Government Killing

Featured image: Ocelot photo by Tom Smylie, USFWS. Fewer than 100 of these rare wildcats likely remain in the United States. 

     by Center for Biological Diversity

TUCSON, AZ The Center for Biological Diversity and the Animal Welfare Institute today filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to ensure that endangered ocelots aren’t inadvertently killed as part of the Department’s long-running program to kill coyotes, bears, bobcats and other wildlife in Arizona and Texas. The Department’s Wildlife Services program kills tens of thousands of animals in the two states every year using traps, snares and poisons.

“All the latest science shows Wildlife Services’ predator-control program is expensive, ineffective and inhumane,” said Collette Adkins, a Center attorney and biologist. “With fewer than 100 ocelots remaining in the United States, we’re trying to ensure that none will suffer and die in traps set for bobcats, coyotes and other predators targeted by Wildlife Services.”

Wildlife Services is required by the Endangered Species Act to consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on its activities that may affect endangered species, including its predator-control activities. Because Wildlife Services kills wildlife within the range of the endangered ocelot, and given the similarity in size between ocelots and many of the targeted predators, the Fish and Wildlife Service warned Wildlife Services in a 2010 “biological opinion” document that ocelots could be harmed by its use of traps, snares and poisons (including baited M-44 devices that propel lethal doses of sodium cyanide into animals’ mouths).

Since that 2010 opinion, ocelots have been spotted in several additional locations in Arizona, including the Huachuca and Santa Rita mountains. New evidence also indicates that Wildlife Services has failed to comply with the document’s mandatory terms and conditions, intended to minimize risk to ocelots. This new information requires the program to reinitiate consultation with the Fish and Wildlife Service to examine risks to ocelots and develop risk-mitigation measures. The complaint also alleges that Wildlife Services must use recent science to supplement its outdated environmental analyses of its wildlife-killing program in Arizona, which were prepared in the 1990s under the National Environmental Policy Act.

“The ocelot population is crumbling at the feet of Wildlife Services’ indiscriminate and haphazard wildlife-killing activities,” said Tara Zuardo, a wildlife attorney with Animal Welfare Institute. “With this lawsuit, we are sending a message to Wildlife Services that its tactics should not come at the expense of the future of this critically endangered species.”

To protect ocelots while the Fish and Wildlife Service completes the required analysis, the groups are seeking a halt to Wildlife Services’ animal-killing activities throughout the ocelot’s range in southern Arizona and Texas.

Background
The ocelot has a tawny coat marked by elongated brown spots with black borders. It can weigh as much as 35 pounds and stretch to 4 feet in length (including the tail). Ocelots seem to prefer dense cover but use a variety of habitats. Hunting mostly at night, they target rabbits, birds, fish, rodents, snakes, lizards and other small- to medium-sized prey.

The ocelot’s range includes Texas, Arizona, Mexico and Central and South America. Monitoring of collared individuals has shown that ocelots travel as far as 10 miles outside their home ranges. Since 2009 ocelots have been detected at least five times in Arizona, including a road-killed ocelot near Globe in 2010, a treed ocelot in the Huachuca Mountains in 2011, and a male ocelot photographed in the Santa Rita Mountains in 2014.

Since 1982 the species has been designated as “endangered” under the Endangered Species Act. Although never abundant, ocelots were historically killed incidentally during the hunting, trapping and poisoning of coyotes, bobcats and other predators. Habitat loss also contributed to the animal’s decline; only a fraction of the less than 5 percent of original native vegetation remaining in the lower Rio Grande Valley is optimal habitat for the cats. Now continuing habitat loss, collisions with vehicles and inbreeding resulting from small and isolated groups are keeping the wildcat’s population numbers low.

See more about USDA Wildlife Services at this award-winning film:

Peru: National park plan to open up uncontacted tribe’s land to Big Oil

Peru: National park plan to open up uncontacted tribe’s land to Big Oil

Featured image: Many contacted Matsés have expressed opposition to any efforts to contact their uncontacted neighbors, or to explore for oil in their territory. © Survival International

     by Survival International

Survival International has learned that the Peruvian government is developing a “Master Plan” for a new national park that could pave the way for large-scale oil exploration. This will threaten the lives and lands of several uncontacted tribes.

The area, known in Spanish as the Sierra del Divisor [“Watershed Mountains”], is part of the Amazon Uncontacted Frontier, the region straddling the Peru-Brazil border that is home to the largest concentration of uncontacted tribal peoples on the planet.

A new plan for the area currently being drafted by Peru’s national parks agency SERNANP could enable oil companies to enter the park. It has further been reported that the new government wants to change the law to make it even easier to open up national parks to oil and gas operations.

The Sierra del Divisor National Park was created in 2015 to protect the region. The new plan could wipe out the uncontacted Indians, not all of whom have been recognized by the authorities.

A contacted Matsés woman said: “Oil will destroy the place where our rivers are born. What will happen to the fish? What will the animals drink?”

In 2016, Canadian oil company Pacific E&P cancelled a contract to explore for oil on nearby contacted Matsés territory, in the face of stiff opposition from the tribe.

The Watershed Mountains are a unique and highly diverse environment, home to many uncontacted tribal peoples. © Diego Perez

The Watershed Mountains are a unique and highly diverse environment, home to many uncontacted tribal peoples.
© Diego Perez

However, it still has a contract to explore in the Watershed Mountains.

In 2012, it conducted the first phase of exploration, which Survival International and contacted Matsés campaigned against.

The more vulnerable uncontacted members of the tribe are still at risk, and not in a position to consent or object to the project. The environment that they have depended on and managed for millennia could be destroyed.

The oil exploration process uses thousands of underground explosions along hundreds of tracks cut into the forest to determine the location of oil deposits.

Uncontacted tribes are the most vulnerable peoples on the planet. All uncontacted tribal peoples face catastrophe unless their land is protected.

With a new Peruvian government in place, Survival and the indigenous organizations AIDESEP, ORPIO and ORAU are urging the government to think again.

Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said: “It’s in all our interests to fight for the land rights of uncontacted tribes, because evidence proves that tribal territories are the best barrier to deforestation. Survival is doing everything we can to secure their land for them.”

Silencing of the River: Environmental Racism and Afro-Descendent Displacement along Colombia’s Patia River

Silencing of the River: Environmental Racism and Afro-Descendent Displacement along Colombia’s Patia River

Featured image: Afro-Colombian communities along the Patia River plundered by corporate privatization of water sources.

     by Mary Louisa Cappelli

Colombia’s infrastructure development projects have led to privatized water grabbing and the marginalization and displacement of many indigenous and Afro-descendent communities living along the Patia River Corridor. Ingeneria de Vias SA (VIAS SA), a private civil engineering company specializing in the execution of urban infrastructure works and water supply networks appears to be directly responsible for a visible pattern of environmental racism in which sand and gravel mining has led to the critical deterioration of wetlands, ecosystems, and, more importantly sustainable livelihoods, along the Patia River.

According to local Galindez spokesman from the Pan Corridor Community Council, “VIAS SA originally received a permit in 2005, but failed to renew it when it expired in 2009.”  Since 2009, trucks have been operating nonstop from 4 a.m. to 6 p.m. hauling away 14 square meters of material daily without governmental authorization. For 11 years, VIAS SA has been excavating sand and gravel to be used in the construction of roads and buildings. The excavation of the river has resulted in deterioration of water resources and bed degradation leading to the depletion of water tables, and the devastation of aquatic and riparian watersheds once inhabited by fish, waterfowl and other local species. Galindez spokesman explains, “I was born and I was raised here, and we have never seen this river look like a stream. And they want to continue drying it, just by extracting all these materials, they want to dry the river.”

The river has been a vital source of life for the socio-economic reproduction and traditional livelihoods of Afro-descendent communities. When neoliberal development projects emerged in the mid 1990s along with the sale of Empresa de Energía del Pacífico (ESPA) to an international consortium of Houston Industries, the needs of the local community were subordinated to privatized interests, which instigated unequal power relations and triggered an observable pattern of cultural disruption.

134 families from Galindez, 60 families from Palo Verde, 120 families from El Pilon and 15 families from Hamaca were dependent on the river for their sustainable livelihoods. In the name of development, habitats have been destroyed and families now suffer from food and water insecurity. According to Galindez Spokesman, “In the past, people didn’t have to buy plantains, corn, cassava, and fruits like papaya – but now because we can’t grow our food anymore, we have to work out how to get the money to buy the things we traditionally grew.”

While the Regional Autonomous Corporation of Cauca is supposed to give approval for development projects or projects with environmental impact, community members allege that Ingeneria de Vias SA has been operating outside Article 70, which states: “The State has the obligation to promote and foster access to the culture of all Colombians equally by means of permanent education and scientific, technical, artistic, and professional instruction at all stages of the process of creating the national identity;” Article 72, which states: “Ethnic groups settled in areas of archeological treasures have special rights over that cultural heritage, which rights must be regulated by law;” and Article 246, which provides that “the authorities of the indigenous peoples may exercise jurisdictional functions within their territories, in accordance with their own standards and procedures, provided they do not conflict with the Constitution and laws of the Republic.”

According to the community, they were not consulted about the excavation project and were denied a political voice about the development projects taking place on their ancestral rivers. While some community members are afraid to speak up for fear of physical reprisal, other community members strongly allege that the day-to-day excavation is being protected by paramilitaries who ensure a daily excavation quota. Justicia y Paz spokesperson observed the importance of considering the “role of the police and the role of the army” in the excavation processes.  “Because a lot of the money that funds these institutions come from the United States. And in many cases the army and the police have violated the rights of the communities.”

The racialized dispossession of Afro-descendent peoples by privatized water grabbing projects testifies to the privileging of political and international elites, which has led to a trajectory of displacement, deterritorialization, and physical vulnerability. This type of racialized dispossession must be addressed in Colombia’s Post Accords Peace Process and most certainly taken into consideration in the US Congress’s final decision on Obama’s $450 million Peace Colombia Plan— a hefty financial package to support socio-political and environmental justice in the region.

In the words of Afro-Colombian spokesman, he wants the United States to be aware of the water grabbing, as he would like “to get back to a life of dignity.”

 

Navajo Communities Still Struggle After Mining Disaster

Navajo Communities Still Struggle After Mining Disaster

Featured image: The San Juan River still turns a muddy orange after a heavy rain, as sediments from the Gold King Mine spill are stirred up from the bottom.  Suzette Brewer

     by Suzette Brewer / Indian Country Today Media Network

SHIPROCK, New Mexico—On Friday, as the Obama administration temporarily halted construction of the Dakota Access pipeline due to concerns of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, another water-related human tragedy continued to unfold within the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico.

A year after the Gold King Mine spill that turned the San Juan River bright orange with millions of gallons of toxic chemicals, Navajo families continue to struggle against the ongoing, catastrophic effects on their water supply that threaten both their health and the economic stability of an already fragile community. On a daily basis, tribal members along the San Juan River say, they are still confronting the environmental, agricultural, health and spiritual fallout from the disaster that has pushed some to the brink of despair and left many others teetering on poverty.

In August 2015, more than three million gallons of toxic acid sludge and heavy metals, including lead, mercury, cadmium, beryllium, arsenic and dozens of other dangerous contaminants, was released into the Animas River at its headwaters in Silverton, Colorado, the largest tributary to the San Juan River.

Home to Shiprock, the most populous community in the Navajo Nation, the San Juan supplies water to nearly 1,500 farms and 1,200 ranches that have been devastated in the wake of what the Navajo Nation contends was “a preventable tragedy.”

The disaster, which resulted from abandoned and poorly maintained mines, has left many tribal members depressed and fearful, saying they don’t trust that the waterways are safe for them, their crops or their livestock. This leaves hundreds of farmers and ranchers without the means to earn a living in one of the poorest regions in the United States.

Meanwhile, Navajo leaders say their communities situated along the river have been “torn apart” over whether to use the water from the San Juan for their irrigation canals, livestock and ceremonial purposes. They have been left stranded, the leaders say, with no clear answers or assurances that the river upon which they have lived and survived for thousands of years will ever be restored.

“It’s hard to even gauge the scale and significance of what the Gold King spill has done to our communities,” Shiprock Chapter president Duane Yazzie told Indian Country Today Media Network. “They began mining in the 1870s, so the net effect in the last 150 years is that these mining companies can inflict any damage they want without any liability whatsoever. Congress, who has the authority to fix this, has been asked to do so for nearly a century, but they won’t. And yet we’re left to clean up the mess.”

Experts agree that there are hundreds of abandoned mines in and around Silverton, Colorado, many of which interconnect and flow into the headwaters of the Animas River—which feeds into the San Juan and directly into the tribe’s irrigation canals. For decades, said Yazzie, it was public knowledge that the mines were being improperly managed with bulwarks that had been poorly conceived and constructed, causing a massive buildup of water pressure within the mines.

When subcontractors went in to do maintenance, the mine blew out a massive cocktail of toxic water that polluted rivers and waterways for dozens of communities downstream. The tribe, however, maintains that its communities are particularly vulnerable and the most at-risk because of their unique cultural, historical, agricultural, geographic and economic dependence on the San Juan River.

Although the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has conceded responsibility, the Navajo Nation says the agency’s response has been “slow and inadequate.” They say the mine owners continue to squabble and engage in finger-pointing and blame-shifting after one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.

The ensuing domino effect of the spill has led to a bitter legal imbroglio involving the Navajo Nation, New Mexico, Colorado, the mine owners and the EPA. Subsequently, New Mexico has sued Colorado, for example, and both states have sued the EPA.

The Navajo Nation, however, infuriated by the EPA for its “reckless negligence” and its unwillingness to reimburse the tribe for the more than $2 million incurred in costs related to the catastrophe, sued the agency along with the mine owners in August. In its petition, the tribe alleges that, collectively, “Defendants failed at virtually every step, in most instances advancing their own interests,” and were negligent in their maintenance of mines that were “known and substantial risks.” The EPA did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

RELATED: Navajo Nation Sues EPA Over Gold King Mine Disaster

The Navajo Nation also named Gold King Mines, Sunnyside Gold, Kinross Gold, Harrison Western, and Environmental Restoration in the lawsuit in seeking redress for the enormous amount of economic, agricultural and cultural damage done to the Navajo communities who rely on the San Juan River for their entire way of life. The 48-page petition alleges that the EPA, its subcontractor and the mine owners “consistently acted improperly, shirked responsibility, and failed to fulfill their moral and legal obligations… [and] must be held accountable for the harms caused to the San Juan River, the Nation, and to the Navajo people.”

The damage to the Navajo communities that depend on the San Juan River, Yazzie concurs, has become incalculable.

“Indians have been expendable for a long time, it doesn’t matter what damage we’re subjected to,” said Yazzie, a hint of anger flashing in his eyes. “Our people are torn [about using the water], but what choice do we have? Just like the people from Flint, Michigan, it’s a disaster, but what choice do they have?

“The Gold King spill is so massive that we don’t even know if it’s possible to clean up.”

Something Happened to the Water”

Allen and Bertha Etsitty were caught off guard. On August 7, 2015, two full days after the spill, the Etsittys were one their way to Shiprock when they heard over the Navajo radio station, KTNN, that “something had happened to the water.”

The Etsittys, who have been married for nearly 50 years, are retired and live on Social Security. At approximately 19 acres, theirs is one of the largest family farms on the Navajo Reservation—the income from which they use to survive throughout the year.

“We’ve been farming ever since we got married,” said Allen.

“Our parents and grandparents were farmers, too,” Bertha said, as Allen nodded. “We learned to farm from them. The river is sacred for us, it was here ever since we were kids. The river is so important to us, and it provides the food we need.”

Allen and Bertha Etsitty attend a workshop for farmers and ranchers in Shiprock, New Mexico, to get assistance in filing their EPA claims from the Gold King Mine Spill. (Photo: Suzette Brewer)

Allen and Bertha Etsitty attend a workshop for farmers and ranchers in Shiprock, New Mexico, to get assistance in filing their EPA claims from the Gold King Mine Spill. (Photo: Suzette Brewer)

Later that day, they received a call from Martin Duncan, president of the San Juan Dineh Water Users, informing them that there had been a toxic mine spill in Colorado and that the tribe would be shutting off the main gate to the irrigation canals. That night, the Etsittys, who are in their 70s, set up camp in their fields with their son, Huron, as the three of them worked around the clock to irrigate their crops with what clean water was left before the main gate was closed.

“We flooded the fields,” said Allen. “We did everything we could do.”

Over the next several weeks, the Etsittys loaded their vehicles with 325 gallon water tanks and drove back and forth nearly 100 miles a day to get water from the tanks that had been set up by the tribe in Shiprock. All told, the elderly couple hauled more than 60,000 gallons of water in a desperate attempt to save their crops.

“We only had our regular vehicles, which aren’t built for that kind of thing,” said Allen. “We went through brakes, drums, pads, transmissions, everything, trying to keep our fields watered and save what we could.”

But it was not to be. As time dragged on and the growing season stalled, the Etsittys could only watch as their crops withered away—along with their income at fall harvest.

“Our corn didn’t even make it past the tassels. We only produced about one-quarter of what we normally grow,” Allen said, adjusting the cap on his head. “It hit us hard.”

“Our corn pollen is sacred to us for prayers and offerings,” Bertha said. “It was a loss to our traditional medicine men. Everybody was looking for corn pollen this year, and we didn’t have any.”

Allen says that prior to the disaster, they planted every square inch of their acreage with crops that included several varieties of traditional Navajo corns, squash, watermelons, cantaloupe, Navajo winter melons, and a wide variety of vegetables and fruit trees. This year, they said they did not plant the same volume because of the stigma that is now associated with crops grown with potentially contaminated water. As a result, people are buying their produce elsewhere.

“People used to come from all over the rez to buy our corn,” she said. “But now we can’t grow everything we normally would because people might not buy it, so we just planted what we could.”

Additionally, the Etsittys had to give away their pigs and sell all of their sheep, livestock and horses because they simply did not have the food and water to maintain them.

“This has been stressful for everyone here,” said Bertha, with a tired smile. “This has been very stressful for us, but we do the best we can. This River is so important to us because we need that water. But with this contamination people don’t really trust the water anymore. My grandchildren ask, ‘Grandma, where are the peaches? Where are the squash?’ We don’t have any.”

The Dark Legacy of Mining”

Since the early 1990s, the residents of Silverton, Colorado, which had based its tourism on its historical ties to the mining industry, had vigorously rejected EPA efforts to list the area as a “Superfund site,” according to the Associated Press. Fearful that such a designation would impact the town’s tourism, Silverton and San Juan County fought federal funding and assistance, even though it would have allowed mitigation for the clean-up of toxic acid leakage and hundreds of other contaminants in what has been described as one of the “worst clusters of toxic mines” in the country.

In the subsequent decades, however, water pressure behind the cheap, poorly constructed bulkheads put in place by the now-defunct mining companies continued to build—until they inevitably burst open last year, creating an unprecedented environmental disaster. In February of this year, after national outcry over the spill, the city of Silverton and San Juan County reversed their position and asked the state of Colorado to declare the area a “disaster zone” to seek federal money for clean up.

On September 7, the EPA officially announced that Silverton will become a Superfund site under the official name of “Bonita Peak Mining District.”

RELATED: Activists, Tribes Hail EPA’s Superfund Designation for Gold King Mine

Even so, the tribe continues to suffer. Last month, the Navajo Nation Attorney General’s office hosted a workshop at the Shiprock Chapter House for local farmers and ranchers to assist them with filing their claims with the EPA. One by one, tribal members filed in and quietly took their seats in the small auditorium, hoping to get answers, legal advice—anything that might help them navigate the complicated, bureaucratic maze of a government that they feel has let them down too many times to count. The exhaustion and weariness from a year-long struggle to survive was palpable.

Ethel Branch, the attorney general for the Navajo Nation, had driven up from Window Rock to facilitate the workshop. Dressed in jeans and boots, Branch introduced herself to the small audience in Navajo. In English, she then explained that the tribe was offering this assistance out of recognition that many tribal members have no legal experience or representation and needed help with filing their claims.

Branch, who was born in Tuba City and grew up in Leupp, is a Harvard-trained lawyer and is barred in the Navajo Nation, Arizona, Oregon and Washington State. The suit against the EPA and the other defendants, she said, goes far beyond financial compensation.

“At bottom, the purpose of the litigation is to make the Navajo Nation and the Navajo people whole, to clean up our river, to restore our river to its role as a life giver and protector, and to shield us from the ongoing threat of future upstream sediment suspension and hard rock mine drainage and bursts,” Branch told ICTMN. “Our farmers and ranchers deserve to be able to continue pursuing their livelihoods undisturbed―livelihoods that trace us to our ancestors, going back to time immemorial. Our people also deserve to have the food, water and financial security they enjoyed prior to the spill.”

To that end, she says the tribe has suffered tolls on their mental, physical and spiritual health from which it will be difficult to recover. Gold King, she said, was yet another in a long list of environmental incursions on the Navajo people.

“We also want to send a strong message that the Navajo Nation is not a National Sacrifice Area,” Branch said. “Assaults on our land won’t go ignored, regardless of who commits them. This is our homeland—our sacred space—and our people will not leave it. Whatever happens to the land happens to us as a people. In the past the federal government has paid no heed to our timeless connection to our land. It has left it peppered with over 500 abandoned uranium mines and mills that continue to poison our land, our water, and our people. This is unacceptable and must stop. The filing of this lawsuit is our line in the sand saying that we will hold people accountable for their violations on Navajo land and of Navajo people.”

The Navajo Nation continues to struggle with the effects of uranium mining, among other issues related to resource extraction. (Photo: Suzette Brewer)

The Navajo Nation continues to struggle with the effects of uranium mining, among other issues related to resource extraction. (Photo: Suzette Brewer)

Branch echoes the sentiments of many tribal communities across the country who continue to suffer the deleterious effects of mining and other forms of resource extraction on their water sources and lands. Tribal scientists and environmental experts say that the primary difference between tribes and their non-Indian neighbors is that they are culturally, spiritually, historically, legally and physically connected to their lands and can be “sitting ducks” for ecological disasters.

Karletta Chief is an assistant professor and assistant specialist in the Department of Soil, Water and Environmental Sciences at the University of Arizona at Tucson. Chief, a member of the Navajo Nation from Black Mesa, became a co-principal investigator of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to examine the exposures and risk perceptions following the Gold King Mine spill.

“It’s devastating to see the San Juan contaminated knowing all the ways our people use it,” says Chief, a graduate of Stanford University. “It just breaks my heart to hear how deeply wounded they are from the spill, not just financially but also spiritually and emotionally. It has definitely fueled me and driven me to do this work on behalf of our people.”

As a part of her NIH research, Chief has taken thousands of samples from the Navajo communities along the San Juan, including water from the river and soil from the banks and fields, as well as tap water and food, measuring varying river flows and testing for contaminants—chiefly, arsenic and lead. Additionally, she and her team of researchers have been conducting focus groups, as well as house-to-house interviews to assess the complexity of the impact of the spill on their lives.

In collaboration with the tribe, other investigators have also conducted blood and urine sampling of the Navajo residents to test for arsenic, mercury and heavy metal poisoning, the results of which are not yet completed. Other projects include a dietitian, a bio-statistician, a chemist and a social scientist, all working to establish the full measure of the disaster on the tribe.

“The object was to look at all the ways people might have been exposed and affected,” Chief said. “What we found is that there are 40 different ways that tribal members used the river. So it’s much more nuanced and complex than, say, a hiker, or someone who is using it for recreational purposes. That river is everything to these communities.”

Back in Shiprock, as the EPA claim workshop began to wind down, the simple human impact of the contamination of the San Juan was apparent. Frank John, a rancher who lives in Beclabito, had questions for the lawyers in attendance. He had filed a claim with the EPA last fall, he said, but gotten no response.

Frank John, a Navajo rancher, seeks information from attorneys in filing his EPA claim. (Photo: Suzette Brewer)

Frank John, a Navajo rancher, seeks information from attorneys in filing his EPA claim. (Photo: Suzette Brewer)

“Their lack of response is their response,” came the reply. “If they did not respond, then they have denied your claim.”

The attorney hired by the tribe to assist the attendees encouraged John to refile his claim online. But like many residents in his community, John said he has no internet, does not own a computer, and does not know how to use one, which puts him at a grave disadvantage in the modern era of instant technology.

After the workshop, John told ICTMN that after the spill, he hauled more than 250 gallons of water a day to water his cattle and sheep, to which he is now barely hanging on. He is tired and cannot understand why the EPA has ignored his claim. And he is more than a little suspicious of the federal government and its response to this and other environmental crises on the Navajo Reservation.

“Our fathers worked at the uranium mine—and they’re suffering,” he said. “And we didn’t cause this problem, but we have to live with it. And it’s ruined the river that I used to swim at when I was little, and I don’t go down there anymore.”

He stopped and looked away, wiping tears from his eyes.

“This is my home, and I’m not moving. The river is the most important thing. It’s sacred. It is our life.”