A BBC investigation has revealed that tribal peoples living around a national park in India are facing arrest and beatings, torture and death under the Park’s notorious “shoot-on-sight” policy.
The park gets over 170,000 visitors each year. Fifty suspects were extrajudicially executed there in the last three years, and a severely disabled tribal man was shot dead in 2013. The BBC has estimated that 106 have been killed in the last 20 years. In the same period, only one official has been killed.
The BBC interviewed one local man who had been beaten and tortured with electric shocks during a detention by park officials before they realized he had no involvement in poaching.
The program also featured Akash Orang, a seven-year-old tribal boy who was shot in the legs by park guards last July. Akash said that: “The forest guards suddenly shot me” as he was on his way to a local shop. His father said: “He’s changed. He used to be cheerful. He isn’t any more. In the night, he wakes up in pain and he cries for his mother.”
Park guards have effective immunity from prosecution and are encouraged to shoot suspects on sight – without arrest or trial, or any evidence that they might have been involved in poaching. One guard admitted that they are: “Fully ordered to shoot them, whenever you see the poachers or any people during night-time we are ordered to shoot them.”
WWF has provided equipment – including what the BBC calls “night vision goggles” – which have been used in night-time operations and “combat and ambush” training. When asked by the BBC how donors might feel about their money being used to enforce this brutal treatment, WWF India’s spokesman said that: “What is needed is on-ground protection… We want to reduce poaching and the idea is to reduce it with involving other partners.”
Survival International is leading the global fight against these abuses and first brought the park’s high death toll and serious instances of corruption among Kaziranga officials – including involvement in the illegal wildlife trade they are employed to stop – to global attention in 2016.
Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said: “Conservation organizations, including WWF, are supporting a model of conservation which is resulting in gross human rights abuses. They have failed to condemn policies that are leading to widespread extrajudicial executions. For too long, conservation has relied on its positive public image to hide its horrific and sustained attacks on indigenous and tribal peoples’ rights. We’re working to stop this. It’s time for conservationists to work with tribal people, the best conservationists and guardians of the natural world. It’s time for conservation organisations to call for an end to shoot on sight policies.”
While misogyny, racism, and ethnic taunts were conspicuous signposts on Donald Trump’s path to the White House, much of that road was paved with “populist”, “anti-establishment” and “anti-globalization” rhetoric. Trump’s inaugural address featured numerous populist lines (e.g. “What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people”), attacks on the status quo (“The establishment protected itself, not the citizens of our country”), and barbs aimed at globalization (“One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions upon millions of American workers left behind.”)
Are these themes accurate predictors of how Mr. Trump and his administration will govern for the next four years?
Hardly. Long before the election, it was widely pointed out that the populist platitudes issuing from the silver-spooned mouth of a billionaire plutocrat represented little more than elite hucksterism. [1] Of course, post-election, the band of fellow billionaire corporate rascals and knaves Trump assembled for his cabinet and close advisors should have put an end to this fatuous ‘anti-establishment’, ‘populist’ charade once and for all. As one observer noted, “Trump’s cabinet has begun to resemble a kind of cross between the Fortune 500 rich list, a financier’s reunion party and a military junta.” [2]
What about Trump as an ‘anti-globalization’ crusader? Apart from the inconvenient fact that his own loot was built upon global outsourcing and the exploitation of cheap labor abroad for which ‘globalization’ is shorthand, the fact is that a “former Chamber [of Commerce] lobbyist who has publicly defended NAFTA and outsourcing more generally was appointed to Trump’s transition team dealing with trade policy.” [3] Did anyone really buy the notion that the swaddled child of corporate globalization had morphed into a working-class hero battling the ravages of that same globalization?
Some of Trump’s voters were undoubtedly among those who have been economically marginalized by globalization and wealth inequality – the common folk on whose behalf populism historically emerged. No doubt some allowed Trump’s populist, anti-globalization legerdemain to blind them to his scapegoating of fellow displaced working-class victims of globalization – aka immigrants from non-European countries. That these constituted the majority of his voters, however, is questionable. As Jeet Heer argued convincingly back in August,
“Rather than a populist, Trump is the voice of aggrieved privilege—of those who already are doing well but feel threatened by social change from below, whether in the form of Hispanic immigrants or uppity women. … Far from being a defender of the little people against the elites, Trump plays to the anxiety of those who fear that their status is being challenged by people they regard as their social inferiors.” [4]
In other words, Donald Trump is no populist, but an “authoritarian bigot”[5], and his election represents the victory of the rich – and a victory for corporate globalization. He is “not an outlier, but instead the essence of unrestrained capitalism.” [6] (To be clear, this should in no way be read as an implicit endorsement of the neoliberal Democratic Party, whose economic and trade policies are largely pro-corporate as well.)
To see Trump as an anti-globalization crusader is to misunderstand one of the main structural features of globalization itself: the concentration of wealth by fewer and fewer corporations and the consequent widening of the gulf between rich and poor. According to a recent report, [7] here are some relevant trends from 1980 to 2013 – roughly the period of hyper globalization:
Corporate net profits increased about 70 percent;
Three-quarters of this increase went to the largest corporations (those with over $1 billion in annual sales);
Just 10 percent of publicly listed companies account for 80 percent of corporate profits; the top quintile earns 90 percent;
Two-thirds of 2013 global profits were captured by corporations from rich, industrialized countries;
During this period in these same “rich countries”, labor’s share of national income has plummeted. Needless to say, labor in poorer countries has not fared better – indeed, exploitation of labor’s “cheapness” in the poorer countries is the sine qua non of this spasm of corporate profits.
As Martin Hart-Landsberg explains in his summary of the report, “the rise in corporate profits has been largely underpinned by a globalization process that has shifted industrial production to lower wage third world countries, especially China; undermined wages and working conditions by pitting workers from different communities and countries against each other; and pressured core country governments to dramatically lower corporate taxes, reduce business regulations, privatize public assets and services, and slash public spending on social programs.” [8]
This strategy has not “helped lift hundreds of millions to escape poverty over the past few decades”, as is repeatedly, unquestioningly claimed in the mainstream media. [9] As scholar Jason Hickel has shown, such a claim rests on propagandistic World Bank-sponsored poverty statistics; if poverty were to be measured more accurately, “We would see that about 4.2 billion people live in poverty today. That’s more than four times what the World Bank would have us believe, and more than 60% of humanity. And the number has risen sharply since 1980, with nearly 1 billion people added to the ranks of the poor over the past 35 years.” [10]
Additionally, inequality has reached nauseating heights: the latest analysis by Oxfam shows that “Eight men own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity.” [11] Globalization – an abbreviated way of describing the worldwide evisceration of regulations hampering corporate profits and the institutionalization of those that enhance them – is an engine of extreme inequality and corporate power, within and between countries, full stop. It is not cosmopolitanism, humanism, global solidarity, multicultural understanding and tolerance, or any of the other noble liberal virtues claimed for it by its votaries. In fact, while a ‘borderless’ world was seen as the pinnacle of the globalization project, physical barriers at the world’s borders have actually increased by nearly 50 percent since 2000 [12] – with the US, India and Israel alone building an astounding 5,700 km of barriers. [13]
Widespread hostility towards globalization by the working class in ‘rich countries’ is understandable and justified. The problem is that this animosity is being misdirected against fellow working-class victims of corporate profiteering (“immigrants”, “the Chinese”), and not against the banks and corporations that are the source of working-class misery. This is the strange creature called ‘right-wing anti-globalization’, or, ‘right-wing populism’ – concepts that seem rather contradictory insofar as right-wing politics is about defending and strengthening status quo arrangements of power, privilege and hierarchy. Anti-globalization, on the other hand, is about challenging the gross inequality and injustice of the status quo; and populism – historically at least – is supposed to be about advancing the interests of common people and creating a more egalitarian society. [14]
Nonetheless, it is common in the mainstream media for ‘anti-globalization’ to appear on the ugly right-wing and reactionary side of a simplified binary ledger of political ideologies. It is listed, almost automatically, alongside such distasteful qualities as “inward-looking” and “anti-immigrant”, while the opposite side is ascribed noble qualities like “tolerance” and “solidarity”. This is merely a recycling of the popular (and very much corporate-sponsored) notion of globalization-as-humanizing-global-village. This Thomas Friedman-esque framing works to deflate the would-be critic of corporate globalization by threatening to tar her by association with reactionaries and xenophobes.
To accede to this binary framing would be a grave error, since it further empowers the existing system of corporate exploitation and wealth concentration. However, because there is undeniably an element of the anti-immigrant, xenophobic right that is also – at least rhetorically – anti-globalization, it is absolutely essential for the left to articulate in the clearest terms possible an anti-globalization stance rooted in international solidarity, intercultural openness and exchange, environmental justice, pluralism, fraternity, solidarity, and love, and to continually expose the fact that globalization is intolerant of differences in its relentless dissemination of a global consumer monoculture. In other words, the right should not be allowed to hijack the anti-globalization discourse, and contaminate and confuse it with racist, anti-immigrant sentiment, nor let localization – the best alternative to globalization – become equated with nativism, nationalism, xenophobia etc. It is unfortunate that we have to do this, since peoples’ movements against globalization and for decentralization/re-localization have already clearly drawn this distinction, indeed emerged in large measure in opposition to global injustice. But do it we must, since the corporate media is happily using the rise of the right-wing to discredit the spirited, leftist opposition to globalization that has stalled such corporate power grabs as TPP, CETA, and TTIP.
Should the left make common cause with those on the right when it comes to opposing globalization, irrespective of our profound opposition to the rest of the rightist agenda? Can we hold our noses and engage with this strange bedfellow to slay our ‘common’ foe, globalization? I do not think so. Not only is right-wing anti-globalization based on a deeply flawed and internally incoherent analysis, more importantly the political expediency of the implicit message – “as long as you join us in opposing corporate free trade treaties, your xenophobia, racism et al. can be temporarily ignored and tacitly tolerated” – is noxious and inexcusable.
Fortunately, a number of writers and activists have already been busy on the critical project of framing an inclusive anti-globalization stance. Chris Smaje, agrarian and writer of the Small Farm Future blog in the UK has spelled out a vision of “left agrarian populism” that is genuinely anti-establishment and pro-people (all people), is based on and strengthens local economies, and is fiercely internationalist. [15] Localist and internationalist? Yes. Localization of economic activity is, perhaps counter-intuitively, supportive of greater global collaboration, understanding, compassion and intellectual-cultural exchange, while corporate-controlled economic globalization has hardened, and even produced, cultural/national friction and competition.
Political theorist Chantal Mouffe has similarly acknowledged the right-wing hijacking of legitimate political discontentment against corporate elitism across Europe, the answer to which, she says, must involve “the construction of another people, promoting a progressive populist movement that is receptive to those democratic aspirations and orients them toward a defense of equality and social justice. Conceived in a progressive way, populism, far from being a perversion of democracy, constitutes the most adequate political force to recover it and expand it in today’s Europe.” [16]
Degrowth scholar-activists Francois Schneider and Filka Sekulova have, in line with Smaje’s left-green localism-populism, articulated the important concept of ‘open-localism’ or ‘cosmopolitan localism’. “Open-localism”, they write, “does not create borders, and cherishes diversity locally. It implies reducing the distance between consumer and producers … being sensitive to what we can see and feel, while being cosmopolitan”. [17] These visions, and many other related ones, provide an important foundation for social justice and environmental activists to build upon in boldly reclaiming the anti-globalization narrative and resistance in these difficult times.
Alex Jensen is Project Coordinator at Local Futures/International Society for Ecology and Culture. He has worked in the US and India, where he co-ordinated Local Futures’ Ladakh Project from 2004-2015. He has also been an associate of the Sambhaavnaa Institute of Public Policy and Politics in Himachal Pradesh, India. He has worked with cultural affirmation and agro-biodiversity projects in campesino communities in a number of countries, and is active in environmental health/anti-toxics work.
[12] Harper’s Index, ‘Percentage by which the number of international borders with barriers has increased since 2014: 48’, Harper’s Magazine, January 2017.
[13] Jones, R. (2012) Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India and Israel, London: Zed Books.
Featured image: Archer Daniels Midland soy silos in Mato Grosso. On the side of the BR-163 highway, where Amazon rainforest once dominated, one sees little except soybeans and the large silos owned by transnational commodities companies. Photo by Thaís Borges
Over the last 40 years the north of the state of Mato Grosso has profoundly changed. This far-reaching transformation — matched almost nowhere else in the world — is largely due to the rapid expansion of industrial agribusiness, particularly soybean production, which has destroyed huge swathes of savanna and tropical Amazon rainforest.
“There are certain regions, near Brasnorte [to the west of Sinop], for example, where you can look completely around, 360 degrees, and not see a single tree,” says anthropologist Rinaldo Arruda, a lecturer at the Catholic University (PUC) in São Paulo.
Map showing the extensive deforestation occurring in the northern part of Mato Grosso between 1986 and 2016. In just 40 years, the advance of agribusiness has radically reduced forest coverage. Map by Maurício Torres
There is much talk about the prosperity that agribusiness has brought to Mato Grosso state, but, according to Andreia Fanzeres, coordinator of the indigenous rights program at the NGO Opan (Operação Amazônia Nativa), the traditional communities, which had inhabited the region for centuries, were not consulted, nor have they benefited from the rise of soy: “The indigenous communities and the family farmers, rural communities in general, were always outside the decision-making process as to what type of development they would have”.
According to Antônio Ioris, lecturer in human geography at the University of Cardiff, who has carried out research into the advance of agribusiness in Mato Grosso, the start of this growth period was heavily supported by the federal government’s agricultural research body, Embrapa: “New technologies developed by Embrapa produced solutions for the acidic [nutrient-poor tropical] soils and other problems. The farming sector went through a crisis in the 1980s. Then soy arrived and ‘rescued’ it”.
The large-scale meteoric expansion of soy came at the end of the 1990s, when, Ioris says, “it benefitted from both the [global] commodities boom and the liberalization of the [Brazilian] economy”. Soy production is highly mechanized, and works most efficiently on very large plantations, so that led to the concentration of land ownership in Mato Grosso state among a small number of wealthy companies and individuals.
Where savanna and rainforest once stood, now only soybeans grow. The Brazilian ruralista agribusiness lobby’s goal is for large-scale soy plantations to penetrate even deeper into the Amazon rainforest. Photo by Thaís Borges
Then as commodities like soy boomed on the world market, the Brazilian economy became increasingly dependent on the millions of dollars brought in by soy exports. Ioris explains: “This gave the [large-scale Mato Grosso] soy farmers enough political clout to demand the paving of the roads and the creation of further logistic support, including waterways.” He concludes: “Today agribusiness blackmails the country”.
Driving along the BR-163 highway through the largely depopulated Mato Grosso countryside, one sees evidence of the new bosses in the region — the multinationals, who sell the farmers their seeds and chemicals, and who buy the farmers’ produce. Rising above a sea of soy are the occasional soybean silos, emblazoned with the logos of the multinational commodities companies that now control the region: Bunge, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Cargill.
There too are silos belonging to Amaggi, a powerful Brazilian commodities player. The Amaggi company was built by André Maggi and is now run by his family, including his son, Blairo Maggi. Once known as the “Soy King” and formerly the governor of Mato Grosso state, Blairo Maggi was chosen last year as Brazil’s agriculture minister by President Temer. Maggi’s rise in influence has paralleled the rise in power of the bancada ruralista, the industrial agribusiness lobby that today holds sway over much of the National Congress.
After accumulating a fortune through planting, processing and exporting soy, Amaggi has now joined the big players on the international market, cultivating a particularly close relation with Bunge, with which it jointly owns grain terminals in Miritituba, the new commodities port on the lower Tapajós River. The soy crop now flows by truck from north Mato Grosso down newly paved BR-163, to Miritituba, where the commodity is transferred to barges for the trip down the Tapajós to the Amazon River and on to foreign ports, especially in China.
On the side of the BR-163, one sees little except soybeans and the large silos owned by multinational companies, as well as those of the largest Brazilian soybean farming group, Amaggi. Much of the soy crop is bound for China. Photo by Thaís Borges
Agribusiness as usual
Some credit soy production with bringing “modernity” and “development” to Mato Grosso. Aprosoja, the soy farmers’ trade association, speaks of “the positive socioeconomic impact of soy farming”. It claims that for each person directly engaged in soy farming, another eleven jobs are created, “taking into account all the employment produced along the whole productive chain”. Agriculture Minister Blairo Maggi, when he was a senator for Mato Grosso state in 2012, told the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper: “If it weren’t for soy, Mato Grosso would still be backward.… Today the soy farmer gets a 30 percent return on the capital he has invested.”
But for others, the 40-year soy expansion serves as just one more example in a long historical process in which the Brazilian rainforest has been cut down and rural indigenous and traditional populations disenfranchised — replaced by agribusiness monocultures owned by a very few who make the lion’s share of profit.
The sociologist José de Souza Martins, whose writings have become essential reading for Amazon scholars, showed that, while the military government in the 1970s spoke a great deal about attracting landless farmers to the Amazon (under the slogan “the land without people for the people without land”), powerful economic groups were the main beneficiaries of the money it poured into the region.
While the generals spoke of “occupying the empty land”, many large-scale landowners set up large cattle ranches that drove out many more people — including the “invisible” indigenous communities, rubber-tappers, and fisher folk — than they ever brought into the region.
Cândido Neto da Cunha, an agronomist employed by INCRA (the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform), believes that what is happening with soybeans now is, to a large extent, just a continuation of the military programs. “Though ‘development’ has replaced ‘national security’ as the ideological driving force, the state is creating the same negative social consequences — rural exodus, deforestation and precarious labor conditions — through its support for agribusiness.”
Land ownership concentration in just a few hands, caused by the arrival of industrial agribusiness in the region, even impacts lands that were once set aside for agrarian reform, creating tension between small-scale and large-scale farmers. Photo by Thaís Borges
Soy’s unlevel playing fields
In its march north, soy appears in some surprising places. One of these is at the Wesley Manoel dos Santos agrarian reform settlement, created by INCRA in 1977. Located 70 kilometers (43 miles) northwest of Sinop, this settlement exemplifies the serious challenges faced by Brazil’s small family farms.
The land was originally bought up by the Brazilian subsidiary of the German company, Mercedes Benz, at the end of the 1960s. According to research by Odimar João Peripolli, a lecturer at Mato Grosso State University, the company set up ten separate subsidiary companies to get around the legal limits on land ownership. Each subsidiary bought “40,000, 50,000 or even 60,000 hectares, so that in the end it [Mercedes Benz] had acquired about 500,000 hectares (1.2 million acres). The whole large estate became known as Gleba Mercedes (the Mercedes Holding)”.
The company was able to use its clout as a large-scale landowner to gain hefty federal benefits, mostly tax rebates from SUDAM, the Amazonia development agency. This money was supposed to be invested into the land, but wasn’t, according to testimonies gathered by Peripolli. The company’s vast holdings were “never, effectively, occupied by the company.” Mercedes eventually sold Gleba Mercedes to a São Paulo company, which in turn sold it to INCRA, which created an agrarian reform settlement with plots for 507 families.
But it’s not easy for a small-scale farm settlement to compete economically in a remote region where the government is actively promoting large-scale agribusiness. Lacking sufficient federal technical assistance, the settlement’s 500+ families tried several survival strategies. In the beginning, they reared dairy cattle and sold milk and cheese in the town of Sinop. Though this was the nearest market, it still took three hours to transport dairy products there — and that was when it wasn’t raining.
The venture went well at first, but then ran into government obstacles. Settler Jair Marcelo da Silva, known as Capixava, relates how the small-scale dairy farmers were very careful with hygiene, because it was their principle to only sell products that they themselves consumed. However, their common-sense approach didn’t satisfy the authorities. “The food safety bodies don’t think like ordinary people, they think very differently”, says Capixava.
To prepare the land for mechanized agribusiness, the forest must first be cut, then the roots of the felled trees must be removed — a labor and time intensive process that small-scale farmers are often unable to afford. As a result, large-scale landowners often pay for the work, while also largely gaining control of the land for soy production. Photo by Thaís Borges
The authorities made unrealistic regulatory demands on the small-scale farmers, and when they couldn’t satisfy those demands, the settlers were banned from selling their produce in Sinop. It was the end of their dreams. “I had six cows, from which I took on an average 90 liters of milk a day”, explains Capixava. “What was I supposed to do with this milk [if the federal authorities wouldn’t let me sell it]? What do you think? We gave it to the pigs! Just imagine that!”
The settlers tried rearing pigs and chickens, but once again they fell afoul of food safety regulators. Lacking any other income, some settlers trained to operate the sophisticated machines used by the large-scale farmers who had the money to comply with government health and safety rules. Others worked as day laborers. Women found jobs as maids in Sinop, leaving their husbands to look after the children.
In time, all attempts to use their land to earn a living were largely abandoned.
A sign welcomes drivers to the city of Sorriso, Brazil’s agribusiness capital. While soy production has brought prosperity and development to some in Mato Grosso, it has brought misery and poverty to others, including the indigenous and traditional people who lived here when the land was covered in rainforest and savanna. Photo by Thaís Borges
(Leia essa matéria em português no The Intercept Brasil. You can also read Mongabay’s series on the Tapajós Basin in Portuguese at The Intercept Brasil)
The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is a unique pyramid-shaped mountain on the northern tip of the Andes in northern Colombia. On its slopes live four separate but related peoples: the Arhuaco (or Ika), Wiwa, Kogi, and Kankuamo. Together they number more than 30,000.
The mountain’s peak is over 5,000m high. Rising from the shores of the Caribbean, the lower plains are clad in tropical forest, turning to open savannah and cloud forest higher up.
To the Indians, the Sierra Nevada is the heart of the world. It is surrounded by an invisible ‘black-line’ that encompasses the sacred sites of their ancestors and demarcates their territory.
Yoryanis Isabel Bernal Varela, 43, was a leader of the Wiwa tribe and a campaigner for both indigenous and women’s rights.
The Wiwa are one of four tribes that live on the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a unique pyramid-shaped mountain in northern Colombia. The Sierra Nevada Indians believe it is their responsibility to maintain the balance of the universe.
Bernal Varela is the latest victim in a long line of attacks against Sierra Nevada leaders, who have been at the forefront of the indigenous movement in South America. Many Indians have been killed by drug gangs, left-wing guerrillas and the army.
José Gregorio Rodríguez, secretary of the Wiwa Golkuche organization, stated: “Indigenous people are being threatened and intimidated. Today they murdered our comrade and violated our rights. Our other leaders must be protected.”
The problem is not limited to Colombia. Indigenous activists throughout Latin America are being murdered for campaigning against the theft of their lands and resources. The murderers are seldom brought to justice.
by Henry Geddes and Martin Valdiviezo / translated by Angélica Almazán / Intercontinental Cry
Long before it was used by early European settlers to establish the Massachusetts Bay Company–and later, the Massachusetts Bay Colony–the term “Massachusetts” referred to an Algonquian-speaking nation known as the Massachuset. One of dozens of smaller nations that made up the Wampanoag Nation, the Massachuset lived in what is now the eastern side of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a region that includes the City of Boston. The name “Massachuset” means “At or about the great hill” in the Algonquian language.
The Massachuset’s territory was home to numerous hills and stone structures that lent themselves to burial mounds, ceremonial sites and other religious practices. While many of these sites were undoubtedly lost to the ravages of colonialism, the legacy of the Massachuset invariably remains in the land itself. And so too that of other indigenous nations inhabiting the surrounding area.
Massachusetts–the U.S. state–is home to another legacy. It is the site of the first wave of European colonization that resulted in the decimation of First Nations in North America. While the Massachuset disappeared by 1800, the Mohegan, the Mohican and the greater Wampanoag Nation endured. Efforts such as the modern tradition of “Thanksgiving” have nevertheless obscured the violent nature of the encounter. Even now, Indigenous Peoples continue to struggle for their territorial and cultural rights across the breadth of the U.S. landscape, as the Sioux at Standing Rock can attest in their struggle against the oil pipeline project in North Dakota.
There is another chapter of this struggle currently playing out in the Western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. Lake Street Development Partners LLC wants to build a 6-megawatt power plant, euphemistically labelled as the Wheelock Tract ‘Solar Farm’ Project to veil an otherwise ecologically disastrous initiative to clear 28.6 acres of healthy forest where the Mohican Peoples claim to have cemeteries and other ceremonial sites.
The Shutesbury Planning Board approved this project in June 2016 even though members of the Narragansett and Wampanoag tribes had previously expressed their concern for an enterprise that would potentially undermine their cultural property rights.
Currently, the project has been stopped by a court order initiated by an individual of Mohawk ancestry to start an investigation that allows Narragansett and Wampanoag representatives with relevant expertise in identifying indigenous cultural property to confirm the existence of archaeological sites on the land in question.
The developers, Lake Street Corporation and the owners of the W.D. Cowls land, have so far refused to give indigenous representatives access to the location to confirm (or not) the presence of indigenous cultural property. The developers intend to enforce an archaeological report conducted by SWCA, an environmental consulting firm from Arizona. According to SWCA’s report, there are no ceremonial sites in the region.
The research that led to the report sparked controversy because of its lack of cultural and geographic context that might have been provided by qualified indigenous experts on local native cultures, a critique made by external reviewers that included several high profile archaeologists. The debate on the existence of indigenous archaeological remains is crucial to determine the legal foundations and the political instruments that can sustain the cultural property rights of First Nations in Massachusetts and beyond.
Besides the threat to the cultural property rights of the Mohican People, as well as the affront to biodiversity and carbon sequestration involved in clearing almost 30 acres of forest, preliminary research results in Great Britain and the U.S.regarding the actual ecological impact of industrial-scale solar arrays errs on the side of caution until the research is more conclusive.
Numerous oil and hydroelectric projects are ongoing causes for conflicts between energy corporations, Indigenous Peoples and environmental groups, since they involve the destruction or expropriation of ancestral remains and territories. Allegedly, the development of alternative energy projects (such as solar power) could reconcile the interests of these three parties. However, this case shows that solar power projects can have negative social and environmental consequences when designed to privilege capitalist and colonial private interests.
It is important to observe that this debate on the Shutesbury indigenous archaeological heritage is taking place in a context of huge structural inequalities marked by the long-term disregard for indigenous treaties and rights, one that has denigrated indigenous cultures and even denied that they still exist in states like Massachusetts. Such cultural subjugation is still being massively practiced through the statements of public officials and the Media, as well as in books, movies and educational programs that make Indigenous Peoples and their cultural heritage invisible. This is a manifestation of the political marginalization of Indigenous Peoples in Massachusetts that facilitates the appropriation of their legacy. Nevertheless, the recognition of the indigenous cultures in the U.S. and in the world is a fundamental topic of human rights, and it is crucial for the establishment of fair and inclusive democratic societies.
A common thread in the situation of our indigenous brothers in Anglo America and Latin America, from Canada to Chile, is the need to fight against the Eurocentric order to ensure their universal rights to territory, as well as respect for their cultural properties and rights to a dignified and peaceful life. To a greater or lesser extent, despite their democratic and sometimes multicultural or intercultural constitutions, these States continue to reproduce the colonial legacy. The decolonization of the Americas is as crucial for the recognition of our Indigenous Peoples as it is for the fulfillment of the democratic ideals of freedom, equality and solidarity within each one of its States. The stones on the great hills of Massachusetts do matter as sacred spaces and ceremonial sites for all Americans.
Henry Geddes: Associated Professor, Communication Department, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Martín Valdiviezo: Postdoctoral Researcher. Communication Department, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Assistant Professor. Education Department. Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
“Na Sam” is a documentary film that sheds light on the modern Chorote way of life.
After being subjugated into a group of insecure land occupiers on their own land, the Chorote have arrived at a desperate pass.
Located in the central-western Chaco region of Argentina, the Chorote are witnessing the desertification of their homeland, widespread soil impoverishment and a loss of biodiversity stemming from indiscriminate felling of native forest and extensive cattle rearing enterprises
Industrial harm to the Pilcomayo River–a crucial source of fresh water and fish–has caused even more damage. The river now presents high levels of mercury contamination and other heavy metals due to spillages in the mining areas of neighboring countries.
Various other development plans, implemented on Chorote lands without consultation, have caused further alteration and degradation to areas of traditional use, leading to increased malnutrition and poverty and reduced access to fresh water.
Beneath this surface of harm, the Chorote are struggling now more than ever to maintain their language and traditions, and their cultural heritage, while adapting to this changing world.
Theirs is culture that is dueling to exist after generations of invisibility and oppression.
