February 7th updates from Unist’ot’enCamp and Gidimten:
The RCMP raid continues today as militarized, heavily-armed police backed up with K9 dogs, heavy equipment, and helicopters move further into Unist’ot’en territory. As we write this federal police are currently raiding the Gidimt’en checkpoint at 44km.
6:15pm: We are hearing that 30 RCMP are surrounding #Wetsuwetsuweten Hereditary Chiefs and supporters at 27KM who have blocked the road. Among them, Dini’ze Smogelgem, Dini’ze Dsta’hyl, and Tsake’ze Sleydo’.
Everything is quiet at @Gidimten checkpoint. Those in the cabin no longer see or hear police. It seems like the majority of the force has headed out and at least 15 RCMP have headed to 27km. The tower is still standing. The road is still blocked.
Denzel Sutherland-Wilson from the Gitxsan nation was arrested and removed from @Gidimten tower earlier today. Only those in Chief Woos’ cabin remain. The Gitxsan are the oldest allies of the #Wetsuweten.
3:45pm:#RCMP are now blocked in on the forest service road at the 27km mark after people parked several vehicles sideways — preventing vehicles from passing (this is the route out to Houston) #Wetsuweten. RCMP visibly frustrated at this additional barrier.
3:15pm:Anne Spice has been taken down from the tower. One person remains on top of the tower. Legal observers, @GitxsanJt, and a documentary filmmaker are still on site but far away.
2:30pm:RCMP are now using ladders to move up the wooden tower overlooking the territory.RCMP have said that the people on the tower are already under arrest and they are just trying to get them down.RCMP won’t specify what the charges are or why the people in the tower are under arrest.
2pm: The US-Canada border crossing in Mohawk territory was shut down by protests.
1:55pm: Eve Saint, the daughter of@Gidimten Chief Woos, has been arrested along with one other. They were removed from the bus blocking the road. They have been walked out by RCMP. They are not hurt.
12:55pm: The metal gate at @Gidimten is down. Legal observer is trying to get RCMP badge numbers and police names but RCMP won’t respond. Some RCMP are wearing masks to cover their faces.
12:45pm: RCMP are trying to limit the visibility of the tactical team to media by surrounding a bus containing media. RCMP “have one person stationed on the other side of the flipped van. They’re the one doing the lethal overwatch. They’ve got a gun pointed at us, underneath the warrior flag,” we’ve just heard.
12:30pm: Those at @Gidimten just said the teams dropped off by the helicopters included K9 units – so they are surrounded by snipers and police dogs.
6:30 am: RCMP militarized convoy engines are running and lining up in Houston now. Their extremist force is hardly a peaceful action against our unarmed, peaceful protestors. Shame!!! – Gidimt’en Checkpoint
February 6th updates:
6:45 pm: All six people who were arrested in Gidimt’en territories this morning are being released with no charges. Three are out already.
4:44pm: Chiefs & supporters blocked the road at 27km, forcing RCMP to let Wet’suwet’en chiefs in. Clearing work has stopped at 44km. Dsta’hyl (Likht’samisyu) said the #Wetsuweten will enforce the eviction of Coastal Gaslink, with any means at their disposal.
4pm: Solidarity actions are taking place across Canada. A blockade has shut down the Port of Vancouver. Various politicians offices have been occupied. Indigenous youth are locked down at the B.C. Legislature.
2:40pm Pacific Time: People at the Gidimt’en Access Point (44 km; the site of the armed police raid in January 2019) are now confirming that they see heavy machinery approaching.
Militarized, heavily armed police units known as “tactical enforcement teams,” supported by K9 dogs and infrared camera-equipped drones, have this morning raided the Wet’suwet’en First Nation territory in central British Columbia, Canada to remove indigenous occupation aimed at preventing construction of a fracked-gas pipeline.
Between four and six people have been arrested at the blockade setup at 39KM on the Morice River Road, 27 km from the main Unist’ot’en Camp. Journalists on-site were threatened with arrest, prevented from photographing the events (including police smashing the window on a truck), and forcefully removed from the area. This is the second militarized raid on the peaceful indigenous resistance camp. The previous raid, in January 2019, was later revealed to have included “lethal overwatch”—authorization to shoot to kill. In both raids, police carried sniper and assault rifles.
The police raid Wet’suwet’en checkpoint shows they are acting as private contractors for the gas company, facilitating the plunder of stolen indigenous land and destruction of the planet for private profit.
Coastal GasLink/TC Energy is pushing through a 670-kilometer fracked gas pipeline that would carry fracked gas from Dawson Creek, B.C. to the coastal town of Kitimat, where LNG Canada’s processing plant would be located. LNG Canada is the single largest private investment in Canadian history.
Each clan within the Wet’suwet’en Nation has full jurisdiction under their law to control access to their territory. Under ‘Anuc niwh’it’en (Wet’suwet’en law) all five clans of the Wet’suwet’en have unanimously opposed all pipeline proposals and have not provided free, prior, and informed consent to Coastal Gaslink/ TransCanada to do work on Wet’suwet’en lands.
This is a developing story and we will share more information as it comes.
Call to Action — Blockade the Colonial Institutions
Indigenous youth in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en Nation are calling for organized, rolling occupations of MLA and MP offices, and of financial institutions tied to Coastal Gaslink pipeline corporation.
7:48 am: RCMP are transporting the 4 arrested supporters to Houston. BC. Everyone at 39KM was arrested except media. Media that were at 39km are being driven out in a police van.
7:22am: 36 vehicles, 1 ambulance and heavy machinery went up from 4 KM. At least 2 bulldozers and excavator.
6:59 am: We have reports RCMP have headed up from town in an approximately 20+ vehicle convoy. #Wetsuweten#WetsuwetenStrong
6:43am: We have reports that RCMP are now blocking the forest service road at 4KM.
6:22am: We have lost all communication with the Gidimt’en watch post at 39KM after RCMP smashed the window of the radio vehicle. It’s still pitch black out.
6am: We have just heard that RCMP denied access to a reporter headed out to the camps this morning. Media exclusion zone is in full effect.
5:56am – The person on radio at 39km reports RCMP have broken in the windows of their vehicle.
5:43am – We estimate more than a dozen cops on site, with six cops surrounding the person communicating updates over radio.
5:30am – We’re hearing reports from the front line that some RCMP had their guns out – not pointed at people – but guns in hand.
We’re told that even with more than a dozen vehicles out on the territory, the Houston community hall is still full of cops waiting to invade our lands.
5:05am – We’ve heard 13 RCMP vehicles headed up the road earlier this morning. Up to 4 arrests have been made now, and RCMP are taking down tents. Our understanding is these tents were NOT blocking the road and are not part of the injunction area.
4:55am – It’s not yet 5am – still totally dark out – and we’ve just heard RCMP made their first arrest at the #Wetsuweten monitoring post at 39KM. Cops are surrounding people there and beginning to clear the road to the Gidimt’en checkpoint.
Deep Green Resistance delegation to Unist’ot’en Camp – 2012
Editors note: The Columbia River has been turned into a slave of civilization, forced to provide hydroelectricity, barge transport, and irrigation water to cities and big agribusiness. It is shackled in concrete and dying from dams, from overfishing, from toxins, from nuclear waste, from acoustic barrages and armored shorelines and logging and endless atrocities.
We at Deep Green Resistance do not believe that the federal government will accede to demands such as these. Furthermore, there are thousands of dams currently under construction or proposed worldwide. There are millions of dams in the “United States.” The salmon, the Orca whales—they have no time to waste. Everything is heading in the wrong direction. Therefore, we call for a militant resistance movement around the world to complement aboveground resistance movements and to dismantle industrial infrastructure.
Featured image: The Columbia River is constrained by Bonneville Dam, and bracketed by clearcuts, highways, and utility corridors. Public domain.
Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation
On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, October 14, 2019, the Yakama Nation and Lummi Nation hosted a press conference urging the removal of the lower Columbia River dams as part of a broader call for federal repudiation of the offensive doctrine of Christian discovery, which the United States uses to justify federal actions that impair the rights of Native Nations. The press conference took place this morning at Celilo Park near Celilo Village, Oregon.
“The false religious doctrine of Christian discovery was used by the United States to perpetuate crimes of genocide and forced displacement against Native Peoples. The Columbia River dams were built on this false legal foundation, and decimated the Yakama Nation’s fisheries, traditional foods, and cultural sites,” said Yakama Nation Tribal Council Chairman JoDe Goudy. “On behalf of the Yakama Nation and those things that cannot speak for themselves, I call on the United States to reject the doctrine of Christian discovery and immediately remove the Bonneville Dam, Dalles Dam, and John Day Dam.”
The doctrine of Christian discovery is the fiction that when Christian European monarchs obtained what was for them new knowledge of the Western Hemisphere, those monarchs had a religious right of domination over all non-Christian lands. This doctrine was propagated by the Roman Catholic Church through a series of papal bulls in the 15th century, including a papal bull authorizing Portugal to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans” and to place them into perpetual slavery and take their property. The Roman Catholic Church then implemented a framework where the right to subjugate the Americas was split between Spain and Portugal, although they were later joined by other European states. The doctrine was therefore one of domination and dehumanization of Native Peoples, and was used to perpetuate the most widespread genocide in human history.
In 1823, the United States Supreme Court used the doctrine of Christian discovery as the legal basis for the United States’ exercise of authority over Native lands and Peoples. See Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. 543 (1823). The Court found that the United States holds clear title to all Native lands subject only to the Native Nation’s right of occupancy, which the United States can terminate through purchase or conquest. In relying on the doctrine of Christian discovery, the Court described it as “the principle that discovery gave title to the government . . . against all other European governments, which title might be consummated by possession.” Id. at 573. The Court used this religious doctrine of domination and dehumanization to unilaterally deprive Native Nations of their sovereign rights, racially juxtaposing the rights of “Christian peoples” against those “heathens” and “fierce savages.” Id. at 577, 590.
In the years that followed, this false religious doctrine became the bedrock for what are now considered to be foundational principles of federal Indian law. In United States v. Kagama, 188 U.S. 375 (1886), and Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 187 U.S. 553 (1903), the Court announced Congress’ extra-constitutional plenary power over all Indian affairs—the plenary power doctrine — which it justified by pointing to Native Nations’ loss of sovereign, diplomatic, economic, and property rights upon first ‘discovery’ by Europeans. In The Cherokee Tobacco, 78 U.S. 616 (1870), the Court applied the doctrine and held that Congress can unilaterally abrogate Treaty rights with subsequent legislation unless there is an express exemption provided in the Treaty—the last-in- time doctrine. In Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, 435 U.S. 191 (1978), the Court deprived Native Nations of criminal jurisdiction over non-members based on the statement in M’Intosh that Native Nations’ rights “to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished” by European ‘discovery’ — the diminished tribal sovereignty doctrine. These legal doctrines have been weaponized against Native Nations ever since, including by Congress in authorizing construction of the Bonneville Dam, Dalles Dam, and John Day Dam without the Yakama Nation’s free, prior, and informed consent.
The history of the lower Columbia River dams can be traced back to 1792, when United States Merchant Robert Gray sailed up our N’chi’Wana (Columbia River) and claimed the territory for the United States. Mr. Gray entered our lands and performed a religious doctrine of discovery ceremony by raising an American flag and burying coins beneath the soil, thereby proclaiming dominion over our lands and our families without our knowledge or consent. Following the War of 1812, the United States and England falsely claimed joint authority over what became known as the Oregon Territory until 1846, when England relinquished its claim south of the 49th parallel. Having eliminated British opposition, Congress passed the Oregon Territorial Act of 1848 and the Washington Territorial Act of 1853. Both Territorial Acts reserve the United States’ claim to the sole right to treat with Native Nations, thereby maintaining the federal government’s doctrine of Christian discovery-based claims.
At the Walla Walla Treaty Council in May and June of 1855, the Yakama Nation’s ancestors met with United States representatives to negotiate the Treaty with the Yakamas of June 9, 1855. Article III, paragraph 2 of the Treaty reserves the Yakama Nation’s “right of taking fish at all usual and accustomed places . . .” including many places throughout the Columbia River basin. At no point during these negotiations did the United States express a claimed right of dominion over the Yakama Nation’s traditional lands that would allow the United States to unilaterally ignore the Treaty. Territorial Governor Isaac I. Stevens did not explain that the United States would dam the rivers and violate the Yakama Nation’s Treaty-reserved fishing rights without the Yakama Nation’s free, prior, and informed consent.
What followed was a 100-year conquest of the Columbia River by the United States. First, the United States Supreme Court paved the way by affirming federal regulatory authority over navigable waterways like the Columbia River in Gilman v. Philadelphia, 70 U.S. 713 (1866), and Congress’ extra-constitutional plenary authority over Indian affairs in United States v. Kagama, 188 U.S. 375 (1886). Congress then exercised this supposed authority by passing a series of legislative acts without the Yakama Nation’s consent, including Rivers and Harbors Acts, Right of Way Acts, the General Dams Act, the Federal Water Power Act, and the Bonneville Project Act, all of which facilitated construction of the lower Columbia River dams without regard for the Yakama Nation’s Treaty-reserved rights.
During the Depression, Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act authorizing President Franklin D. Roosevelt to approve public works projects like the Bonneville Dam. Construction started in 1933, but President Roosevelt’s approval of the project was quickly deemed unconstitutional in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935). The authorization was an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority from Congress to the President. It should have been deemed unconstitutional under the United States Constitution’s Supremacy Clause — which says the Treaty of 1855 is the “supreme law of the land” — because it was inconsistent with the rights reserved to the Yakama Nation by Treaty. Any argument to the contrary is an argument that Congress has plenary power over Indian affairs rooted in the false religious doctrine of Christian discovery.
Congress quickly re-approved the Bonneville Dam’s construction, which was completed in 1938. The Dalles Dam was built from 1952 to 1957, and the John Day Dam was built from 1968 to 1972. The Yakama Nation, as co-equal sovereign and signatory to the Treaty of 1855, never approved the construction of these dams. They inundated the villages, burial grounds, fishing places, and ceremonial sites that we used since time immemorial. Celilo Falls was the trading hub for Native Peoples throughout the northwest. The United States detonated it with explosives and drowned it with the Dalles Dam. After the Dalles Dam’s construction had already started, the United States negotiated an insignificant settlement with the Yakama Nation for the damage caused by the Dam. This was domination and coercion, not consent.
Today, the lower Columbia River dams stand as physical monuments to the domination and dehumanization that the United States continues to impose on Native Nations under the false religious doctrine of Christian discovery. “Columbus Day is a federal holiday celebrating the Christian-European invasion of our lands under the colonial doctrine of Christian discovery. Today, the Yakama Nation rejects that narrative by celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day and calling on the United States to remove the lower Columbia River dams that were built without our consent using the same false religious doctrine,” said Chairman Goudy.
By Max Wilbert / Featured Image: San People in southern Africa making friction fire. Photo by Isewell, used under the CC BY-SA 2.5 license.
Are humans inherently destructive?
Are we, as a species, some sort of cancer on the planet?
Are we “destined” to destroy the planet because we are “too smart” and “too successful”?
No. I reject this idea completely. Humans are not inherently destructive, and claims to the contrary represent intellectually lazy and culturally myopic thinking. Even more dangerously, these claims lead to the conclusion that nothing can be done to reserve the destructiveness of civilization. The claim that humans are a cancer is a cop-out.
It is clear that humans can be extremely destructive. But is is equally clear that, given the right social system, humans can live in balance for tens of thousands of years.
The Claim: “Humans Are a Cancer”
Back in July, we published an article entitled “Practical Sustainability: Lessons from African Indigenous Cultures.” The article contained an interview between Derrick Jensen and Dr. Helga Vierich.
Helga Vierich did her doctorate at University of Toronto, after three years of living with Bushmen in the Kalahari. Then she was hired as principal anthropological research scientist at a green revolution institute in West Africa. Subsequently she has been teaching at the University of Kentucky and the University of Alberta. Her website is anthroecology.wordpress.com.
Some readers responded to Dr. Vierich’s interview negatively, claiming that humans are inherently destructive and are a cancer on the planet. Here’s a representative comment from our YouTube channel:
“Dr. Vierich obviously observed and learned quite a bit from her experiences. But this idea that humans are some blessing on the Earth as engineers or anything else is ridiculous, and is nothing but anthropocentric fantasy. The FACT is that humans fit the medical definition of being a cancerous tumor on the Earth, growing out of control and consuming everything. Even the hunter-gatherers, who are the only humans who don’t destroy the natural world just by their way of life, are not necessary for any ecosystem. The comparison to wolves in Yellowstone is thus badly misplaced.”
The Reality: “Sustainability is an Adaptive Trait”
“Life is not a predatory jungle, ‘red in tooth and claw,’ as Westerners like to pretend, but is better understood as a symphony of mutual respect in which each player has a specific part to play. We must be in our proper place and we must play our role at the proper moment. So far as humans are concerned, because we came last, we are the ‘younger brothers’ of the other life-forms, and therefore have to learn everything from these other creatures. The real interest of old Indians would then be not to discover the abstract structure of physical reality, but rather to find the proper road down which, for the duration of a person’s life, that person is supposed to walk.” – Vine Deloria Jr.
Dr. Vierich saw Hoffman’s comment, and responded (also on our YouTube channel). We want to publish her brilliant response in full here. She wrote:
“I’m sorry you see all human economies as equally bad for the planet. I would agree with you that the current industrial economy is “growing out of control and consuming everything”. But this is hardly a fitting description of the sustainable economies typical of tribal peoples like the hunter-gatherers, the long-fallow swidden forest gardening systems, and certainly does not apply to traditional nomadic herding societies either. Why would Pleistocene hunter-gatherers have adopted practices that caused the dramatic reshaping of the global bio-sphere in ways that so often caused extinctions and harmed species diversity?
Surely this would have been a short-lived mal-adaptive strategy? After all, why would the evolving human creature, unlike all others who have constructed ecological niches for themselves, do so in a destructive way? Every other keystone species and ecosystem engineering species creates positive effects on ecosystem diversity; many other creatures gain, after all, by evolving their specialized behavioral and dietary niches, even if they are not playing key roles. Why should humans be any different? Is this the human niche? To be a “plague” species?
The short answer to that is clear: No. If anything, the human way was the opposite: which is why hunting and gathering was a long-lived and highly successful adaptive strategy, and why even the inception of plant and animal domestication did not stray far from these fundamentals. Indeed, everywhere we see “development” proceeding in rural areas today, even vast “wild” forests, jungles, steppes, and savannas bursting with wildlife, it is safe to assume that virtually all these landscapes are – or were until recently- managed for hundreds, even thousands of years by foragers, subsistence farmers, and nomadic pastoralists.
Is it any wonder then, that all over the world indigenous people are rising up to defend the last of their landscapes and watersheds from dams, oil infrastructure, logging, mining, commercial agriculture, especially oil palm and soybeans, expanding into tropical forests today? Given the overwhelming military power deployed by such states, resistance has often proven futile; ecosystems go down like dominos. Civilization is clearly a cultural system capable of distortion by social stratification. By seizing control of resources, institutionalizing use of force and debt “within the law”, even a tiny minority can offload the costs and risks of unsound economic ventures unto the majority – who may be unaware, poor informed, or even lied to. So far, the main effect, of vesting political and economic power in tiny elites, is “legal” shielding of their own sources of income.
By developing narratives that stress their own superiority of blood, minds, and manners, over the “common people”, these authorities meanwhile create cults of national destiny, and patriotic fervor, which facilitate war, ecocide, and ethnocide. The narrative of domination over nature arises in parallel with ecocide. What we are seeing today is the finale act in long endgame called “civilization”, whereby all that had been sustained for over thousands of years of careful tending, by the remaining hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, and nomadic herders in the world, is being destroyed by plows, mines, logging, and road-building.
Acceptance of what ALL the research reveals, about human evolution the impact of civilizations on ecosystems, need not descend to where the data does not follow: no, humans are not a “plague” species that always destroys ecosystems. This kind of hyperbole makes the unbearable merely incomprehensible.”
Humans Can Increase Biodiversity
Are humans really “not necessary for any ecosystem”? The question is more complicated than you might think. Any natural community is a dynamic, adaptive system, constantly in a state of change. But there have been countless examples of natural communities “regulated” or “managed” into a higher level of biodiversity and abundance through human interaction.
As her book explains, her research has found that human interaction with the land can be highly beneficial for biodiversity or productivity of ecological communities. Here’s the book jacket description:
“John Muir was an early proponent of a view we still hold today—that much of California was pristine, untouched wilderness before the arrival of Europeans. But as this groundbreaking book demonstrates, what Muir was really seeing when he admired the grand vistas of Yosemite and the gold and purple flowers carpeting the Central Valley were the fertile gardens of the Sierra Miwok and Valley Yokuts Indians, modified and made productive by centuries of harvesting, tilling, sowing, pruning, and burning. Marvelously detailed and beautifully written, Tending the Wild is an unparalleled examination of Native American knowledge and uses of California’s natural resources that reshapes our understanding of native cultures and shows how we might begin to use their knowledge in our own conservation efforts.
M. Kat Anderson presents a wealth of information on native land management practices gleaned in part from interviews and correspondence with Native Americans who recall what their grandparents told them about how and when areas were burned, which plants were eaten and which were used for basketry, and how plants were tended. The complex picture that emerges from this and other historical source material dispels the hunter-gatherer stereotype long perpetuated in anthropological and historical literature. We come to see California’s indigenous people as active agents of environmental change and stewardship. Tending the Wild persuasively argues that this traditional ecological knowledge is essential if we are to successfully meet the challenge of living sustainably.”
In the book, Anderson writes:
“About halfway into the [seven] years of fieldwork, I began to ask native elders, ‘Why are many plants and animals disappearing?’ Their answers… always pinned the blame on the absence of human interaction with a plant or an animal… [N]ot only do plants benefit from human use, but some may actually depend on humans using them. Human tending of certain California native plants had been so repetitive and long-term that the plants might very well have become adapted to moderate human disturbance. The idea had a very practical corollary: the conservation of endangered species and the restoration of historic ecosystems might require the reintroduction of careful human stewardship rather than simple hands-off preservation. In other words, reestablishing the ecological associations between people and nature might be appropriate in certain areas.”
This is not cherry picking. In fact, similar relationships between human societies and nature can be found among many indigenous and subsistence people around the world. We do not claim that indigenous societies are “perfect” or that native peoples have never harmed the land. The truth is more nuanced.
The Problem is Civilization—Not Humans
Civilization is based on violence. Every bit of steel in these towers was ripped from a rainforest or a mountainside. Every ton of concrete was strip mined. Trace the origins of the material of civilization itself: what you will find is blood and devastated nature.
The idea that humans are a cancer is a reductionist, simplistic, and biological essentialist position that is not supported by evidence. It is telling that this position is most commonly supported by people from inside settler-colonial culture; by civilized people.
What is certain is that civilization—the culture of empire—is not sustainable. Civilization has also worked to systematically destroy indigenous peoples and knowledge of how to live sustainably. This is a requirement for civilization, because when people have access to land and knowledge of how to live sustainably, they will refuse to be slaves, serfs, wage laborers, etc. They will prefer freedom.
Therefore, it is no surprise that it is the civilized who believe that destruction is inevitable. That this belief is so widespread is the result of civilized education systems and propaganda. It is only possible to believe that destruction is inevitable if you are raised from birth inside a destructive system. This mindset is what some indigenous people of Turtle Island have called “wétiko” sickness, which Lenape scholar and activist Jack D. Forbes describes (in his excellent book Columbus and Other Cannibals like this:
“Now, were Columbus and his fellow European exploiters simply “greedy” men whose “ethics”were such as to allow for mass slaughter and genocide? I shall argue that Columbus was a wétiko, that he was mentally ill or insane, the carrier of a terribly contagious psychological disease, the wétiko psychosis. The Native people he described were, on the other hand, sane people with a healthy state of mind. Sanity or healthy normality among humans and other living creatures involves a respect for other forms of life and other individuals, as I have described earlier. I believe that is the way people have lived (and should live). The wétiko psychosis, and the problems it creates, have inspired many resistance movements and efforts at reform or revolution… the wétiko [is] an insane person whose disease is extremely contagious.”
Further Reading
In the comment shared above, Dr. Vierich also shared four links for additional reading on this topic:
The Amazon Rainforest is on fire. But the fire is merely a symptom of deeper problems, not root cause. Therefore, simply putting out the fires does not solve the problem. To protect the Amazon rainforest, we need a deeper understanding of threats to it. For this, we turn to the indigenous people, the guardians of the Amazon, to learn from them.
The Kayapo Nation
The Kayapo (or Xingu) are an indigenous nation in the northwestern Amazon rainforest, who live on roughly 27 million acres of rainforest and savannah territory claimed by Brazil and currently subject to the rule of American ally and genocidal fascist Jair Bolsonaro.
The Kayapo, who are split into many different groups, live a largely traditional lifestyle, hunting and gathering and practicing small-scale agriculture. They use at least 900 species of plants as food an medicine. They live in small villages which are periodically abandoned to return to forest. Beauty is highly valued in the Kayapo culture, as is oratory. Each tribe has different colors, and leaders often wear a headdress made from the birds of native feathers.
The Kayapo are threatened by mining, logging, and hydroelectric dams which are rapidly destroying their way of life. This conflict has simmered for decades as a clandestine war, with farmers, loggers, miners, and ranchers murdering Kayapo people and the Kayapo protesting, lobbying, and violently fighting back in self-defense of their forests, rivers, and people.
The Altamira Conference
In 1987, the Brazilian government announced plans to dam the Xingu River, the largest tributary of the Amazon. As Survival International explains, this project was “a central part of Brazil’s Accelerated Growth Programme, which aims to stimulate the country’s economic growth by building a huge infrastructure of roads and dams, mainly in the Amazon region.”
In response, 26 indigenous nations led by the Kayapo organized the Altamira Conference in 1989, in what was then the small frontier town of Altamira.
“Some of the tribes present at the meeting had not encountered each other previously while others were traditional enemies,” wrote observer Jeff Gibbs. “Each tribe could be identified by their unique body paint and beads, distinct feathered headdresses, particular chants and songs, and even their weapons of choice (ironwood clubs, machetes, bows and arrows). Some arrived in small chartered bush planes from far-flung dirt airstrips while others had traveled by river in canoes for days or weeks.”
Representatives from government, industry, and indigenous nations spoke in front of the crowd. Engineer José Antônio Muniz Lópes (later president of Eletronorte, the state power company in charge of the dam) addressed the room, arguing in favor of the dam and the “benefits” it would bring—jobs, electricity, civilization.
As he finished speaking, a woman named Tuira Kayapó rose to her feet, brandishing a machete. Kayapo women are powerful and direct, and do not defer to men. As Gibbs writes, “The tension in the room was immense as Brazilian military officers with automatic weapons watched on, along with arrow-clad indigenous body guards charged with protecting their people.”
Kayapó walked towards Lópes, and running the blade of her machete three times over his cheeks, then slapped him with the flat of the blade. She proclaimed his act on her people and on the entire Amazon as an act of war. She then stated in Kayapo:
“You are a liar – We do not need electricity. Electricity is not going to give us our food. We need our rivers to flow freely: our future depends on it. We need our jungles for hunting and gathering. We do not need your dam.”
Another chief brought his daughter with him. Embracing her, he said “What I am saying is not for me – it is for her, and for my grandchildren. We want the waters of the Xingu to be clean, and full of fish.”
After the Altamira Conference, the World Bank cancelled a $500 million loan and the Xingu Dam proposal was shelved.
The Undead Wetiko Returns
However, capitalist and colonial forces of civilization wouldn’t be thwarted that easily. In 2011, permits were again granted and construction began shortly thereafter on the Belo Monte Dam on the Xingu River, over the protests of the Kayapo and countless others.
The Belo Monte project, which is the fourth largest dam in the world, is largely completed now. The dam has been built, flooding some 6500 km² of rainforest and destroying more forest with roads, building construction, worker housing, transmission lines, supply dumps, and more.
The result is devastation. Hundreds are species are now committed to extinction as a result of this dam. Greenhouse gas emissions from the dam and the reservoir are estimated to be at least 110 million metric tons. Twenty thousand indigenous people are now refugees from the land their ancestors have lived on for a thousand generations.
It is expected this project is bringing 100,000 migrants to this area, triggering a wave of “development” that will utterly destroy the intact rainforest that remains.
Civilization’s War Against the Planet
The electricity from the Belo Monte Dam will be largely used to power aluminum smelting, an extremely energy intensive industry in which one smelter can use as much energy as a small city. Aluminum production is dependent on bauxite mining, which is it’s own atrocity.
Across the Amazon, we see the same story. Iron ore and gold mining. Logging. Grain and soy agriculture. Factory farming. Industrial production. Pollution, destruction, despoiling. The greatest rainforest in the world is being murdered before our eyes.
The Belo Monte Dam is one battle in civilization’s war on the planet. The dominant culture is murdering all life for economic profit. It is a death cult perpetuating a murder-suicide of the entire world.
In his book Columbus and Other Cannibals, the Powhatan-Renapé and Delaware-Lenápe writer, scholar, and activist Jack D. Forbes expanded on the ancient idea of the wétiko.
Now, were Columbus and his fellow European exploiters simply “greedy” men whose “ethics”were such as to allow for mass slaughter and genocide? I shall argue that Columbus was a wétiko, that he was mentally ill or insane, the carrier of a terribly contagious psychological disease, the wétiko psychosis. The Native people he described were, on the other hand, sane people with a healthy state of mind. Sanity or healthy normality among humans and other living creatures involves a respect for other forms of life and other individuals, as I have described earlier. I believe that is the way people have lived (and should live). The wétiko psychosis, and the problems it creates, have inspired many resistance movements and efforts at reform or revolution. Unfortunately, most of these efforts have failed because they have never diagnosed the wétiko as an insane person whose disease is extremely contagious.
The wétiko disease is a defining characteristic of modern civilized culture.
It is long past time that we gave up our illusions and understood reality. We are living in a time of war. To stand on the sidelines is to remain complicit. Once we know the truth of this war, it’s our responsibility to fight back on behalf of the living world and sanity.
The destruction of the Amazon rainforest is thousands of miles away. But the system that makes that destruction possible is global, and it is vulnerable. We must work to expose these vulnerabilities and call all warriors to arms in defense of the planet. It is time to fight and dismantle the economy of destruction by any means necessary.
Despite centuries of persecution, indigenous groups still manage or have tenure rights over at least a quarter of the world’s land surface. Often inhabiting these lands as far back as memory extends, they share a deep and unique connection to their environment.
Recently released figures show that indigenous groups are continuing to pay a heavy price for standing up for their ancestral lands. In 2018 alone, at least 164 indigenous people were killed defending the environment, adding to hundreds more deaths in preceding years.
They’re not the only ones – numerous lawyers, park rangers, and journalists have also been killed attempting to protect both resource and biodiversity-rich land from extractive industries. But indigenous groups account for the largest proportion of these killings, in a global battle that according to new research published in Nature is now more lethal than some war zones.
We must make sure that these deaths aren’t in vain. The same key UN report that declared a million animal and plant species as at risk of extinction also highlighted that nature under indigenous control is declining less rapidly than in other lands. It’s time for us to sit up and take note of how they safeguard biodiversity, and why they’re willing to put their lives on the line for nature.
Indigenous knowledge
Sharing a worldview that is centred on the land and their place within it, indigenous knowledge contains two central ideas that place nature front and centre. The first is connectedness. Constantly observing the surrounding environment, indigenous peoples have an intimate understanding of the interconnected nature of all living beings and natural systems. Tied to the changing world, this understanding is thorough but pragmatic and local in scale, always open to be altered in the face of evidence.
The second idea is collectiveness. Knowledge is not considered to be owned by individuals, but held collectively by people as shared experiences that represent the sum of their wisdom. People are responsible for one another, nurturing values of cooperation, sharing and reciprocity.
Research on indigenous livelihood practices shows how these values preserve the integrity of nature. In Amazonia for example, centuries of attention to crop health, climate, and forest regeneration has led to the development of rotational farming practices, whereby diverse crops are grown within a small farming area and continually rotated across a larger natural landscape over successive harvest seasons.
Compared to modern intensive monoculture farming, this traditional method improves soil water and nutrient retention, reduces erosion and degradation, stores carbon more efficiently, increases crop biodiversity, and preserves forest habitats. The system provides a continuous flow of food through different seasons, where surpluses can still be sold, and its diversity makes it more resilient to environmental threats. The involvement of many in the success of the crops reinforces community cohesion, and a closer connection with the natural world.
At a larger scale, indigenous territories have been recognised as crucial for maintaining vital natural stores of carbon. For example, studies using satellite imagery from northern South America suggests that indigenous lands have lower incidence of deforestation rates as a result of less invasive methods of farming, fishing, hunting, and land management. These methods not only require much less open space, but also support healthy soil and animal populations, creating much more resilient ecosystems.
