by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 14, 2016 | Lobbying
by Cultural Survival
“We call upon all member states, to condemn the destruction of our sacred places and to support our nation’s efforts to ensure that our sovereign rights are respected. We ask that you call upon all parties to stop the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline and to protect the environment, our nation’s future, our culture and our way of life.”
– Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman Dave Archambault II
The International Indigenous Peoples`Forum on Climate Change (IIPFCC) condemns the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline and stands in solidarity with our sisters and brothers of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and all Water Protectors in opposition to this project.
Human Rights and the Indigenous Rights Perspective
The Dakota Access pipeline is being built on the un-ceded treaty lands of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, without their free, prior and informed consent, as is described in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Articles 18, 19, and 32. The pipeline is also being constructed through sacred areas and ancestral burial grounds of the Standing Rock Sioux and other Indigenous Peoples of the area. This massive construction project does not respect the Standing Rock Sioux’s Treaty rights, sovereignty, or their right to self-determination. It is an outright violation of their rights over their lands and resources as Indigenous Peoples, and does not respect the human rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Climate Perspective
The Dakota Access pipeline will transport 470 000 – 570 000 barrels of oil every day, which will release emissions of 101,4 million tonnes CO2, as much as 30 American coal power plants, every year. This is not consistent with the State Parties’ obligations and commitments under the Paris Agreement or the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The continued production of fossil fuels only assures that global temperature will rise well above 2°C in the immediate future and threaten the lives and livelihoods of Indigenous Peoples around the world. The potential for a major oil spill from the Dakota Access pipeline is immediate. The pipeline is scheduled to cross underneath the Missouri River, which is the main source for drinking water for the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and for millions of people who live downstream. Sunoco Logistics, the operating company of the pipeline, alone has experienced over 200 oil spills in 6 years, and the US had in total over 3300 leaks since 2010, polluting rivers, ground waters, land and air, and both human lives, health and livelihoods has been lost.
The IIPFCC calls upon the US to halt the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline and to enter into serious consultations with the Standing Rock Sioux, and other tribes affected by this project, respecting the right of the Tribes to free, prior and informed consent.
The state owned Norwegian Oil Fund is heavily invested in the pipeline. The IIPFCC calls upon Norway to divest from the Dakota Access pipeline Project.
We also call on all States to ensure the protection of Indigenous Peoples´ territories across the world as a critical action in the implementation of the Paris Agreement and in achieving the SDGs.
Featured image by A. Golden/Flickr.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Oct 18, 2016 | Indigenous Autonomy
by Emmy Keppler / Intercontinental Cry
On October 13, the 500 delegates of the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) reached complete consensus on the proposal presented by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) at the opening of the fifth Congress three days earlier: the CNI will collectively enter the 2018 Mexican presidential race with an indigenous woman candidate at its forefront.
The Fifth Congress is now in permanent assembly while the delegates return to their communities and hold consultations to decide to either approve or reject the proposal.
This decision represents a major shift in strategy of the Zapatista movement which in 2003, after nine years of betrayed negotiations with the Mexican government, cut off all communication with the political system. In the subsequent thirteen years they have not looked back, focusing instead on constructing autonomy in their own communities. The proposed presidential campaign will not, however, be a return to engagement with the political system, but rather a takeover and, if successful, dismantling of that system.
“We confirm that our fight is not for power, we do not seek it; rather we call all of the original peoples and civil society to organize to detain this destruction, to strengthen our resistances and rebellions, that is to say in the defense of the life of each person, family, collective, community, or neighborhood. To construct peace and justice, reconnecting ourselves from below,” stated the CNI and EZLN in a communiqué released at the closure of the assembly.
The Indigenous Council of Government will be made up of representatives from CNI communities from all states and regions of Mexico, with the individual candidate serving to “make their [collective] word material.”
THE FIGHT FOR RECOGNITION
The CNI was formed in 1996, nearly two years after the indigenous Zapatistas of Chiapas famously rose up in arms and declared war on the Mexican government. Earlier that same year, the EZLN and federal government signed the San Andrés Accords, which agreed to recognize indigenous autonomy in the constitution, increase indigenous political representation, and guarantee access to justice.
In October of that year, thousands of indigenous people from communities all over the country gathered in Mexico City for the first National Indigenous Congress, agreeing that their primary objective would be to defend the San Andrés Accords. It was at this first Congress that the late EZLN commander Ramona declared what soon became the slogan of the CNI: “NEVER AGAIN A MEXICO WITHOUT US.”
When the EZLN and government met to finalize the Accords one month later, a familiar pattern of denial began to re-emerge: The government refused to sign the Accords. Simultaneously, then president Ernesto Zedillo launched a bloody militarization campaign throughout Chiapas climaxing in the Acteal Massacre in which paramilitary troops massacred 45 members of Las Abejas, an indigenous Catholic pacifist organization.
The primary focus of both the EZLN and the CNI, then, became an effort to push the Mexican government to pass the Accords. In 2001, the third National Indigenous Congress was held in the Purépucha community of Nurío in Michoacán. Representatives from 40 of Mexico’s 57 Indigenous Peoples created a list of demands including constitutional recognition of indigenous rights and autonomy, and the recognition of indigenous systems of justice and ancestral territory.
That same year, Comandanta Esther addressed the Congress of the Union: “When indigenous rights and culture are constitutionally recognized in accord with the [San Andrés Accords], the law will begin joining its hour with the hour of the Indian peoples.”
The following month, Congress unanimously approved a constitutional reform concerning indigenous rights and culture that ignored all demands for autonomy and recognition, completely undermining the San Andrés Accords and cementing the betrayal of Indigenous Peoples by the entire Mexican political system.
It was after this ultimate betrayal that the Zapatistas and CNI decided to turn their backs on the Mexican political system which refused to include them. Instead, they decided to take matters in their own hands and implement the San Andrés Accords themselves in their communities and territories. What the government refused to give them, they would build.
For the next thirteen years, the Zapatista communities of Chiapas and indigenous communities throughout Mexico worked to construct their own autonomy from the ground up.
ACHIEVEMENTS AND LIMITATIONS OF AUTONOMY
In this Fifth National Indigenous Congress, which also celebrated the 20th anniversary of the CNI, delegates shared the immense achievements of autonomy in their communities:
They have rebuilt their traditional farming structures using organic fertilizers and native seeds.
They have reconstituted their traditional governments, replacing the corrupt government authorities with elder councils and community assemblies.
They have built their own community police and self defense forces, ousting organized crime and replacing the similarly corrupt official police who often work with narcotraffickers.
They have created community radio stations to broadcast the truth, drowning out the lies and silence of corporate media which, in Mexico, is monopolized by the media empire Televisa.
They have recuperated territory that was violently expropriated by the government and large landowners.
They have created their own bilingual indigenous schools where students learn about colonialism, capitalism, and the history of their people.
They have revived their traditional medicine and built clinics where before people had no healthcare, fighting dependence on western medicine.
However, they have also faced extreme repression, plunder of their territories, and human rights violations. There was not a single community that did not speak of their fight against what they call ‘death projects’— mining, fracking, hydroelectric dams, gas pipelines, airport construction, highway construction — operated by foreign corporations which do not consult their communities before destroying their land.
They are fighting against agroindustrial chemicals and pesticides contaminating their land and waters, the destruction of their forests, the invasion of genetically modified seeds, and the privatization and expropriation of their sacred water and collectively-held territory.
They are fighting supposedly ‘green’ development in the form of wind farms and conservation reserves that expropriate their territory and farmland, often for the production of monocrops like African Palm.
They are fighting against cultural death— the tourism industry that pillages their sacred sites and perverts their traditions as attractions for foreigners, and the disappearance of their languages and clothing.
And they are fighting against literal death—the murder, disappearance, kidnapping, rape, imprisonment, and psychological warfare that all indigenous communities in resistance face at the hands of the military, police, and organized crime.
The nation is also on the brink of total privatization of the public sector with the 11 structural adjustments passed by President Enrique Peña Nieto in 2013. Though the the CNI can prevent these reforms from entering their communities on a certain level, they can not, through autonomy alone, halt the devastating impacts of the privatization of public healthcare, education, communication, energy, and housing, among others.
In this Fifth Congress, the delegates recognized that walking the path of autonomy, though remarkably successful on a local level, has not allowed the Indigenous Peoples of Mexico to truly unite. Building coalitions on statewide and even regional or municipal levels has proved exceedingly difficult with most communities remaining relatively isolated. Though they all face the same repression by corporations and the government, each community fights the same enemy from its different corner of Mexico, thus allowing what the Zapatistas call ‘the capitalist hydra’ to divide and conquer. As one delegate from Jalisco said, “they’re continuing to screw us.”
THE PROPOSAL
The proposal of the EZLN for the CNI to run a collective presidential campaign is an effort to halt the hydra. At first, nearly all of the delegates were doubtful. They expressed their concerns about sacrificing their autonomy to embark on the electoral route. All, however, also expressed their deep trust in the EZLN as their guide in the struggle and their willingness to be convinced. Throughout the three-day assembly this is exactly what happened.
One of the fundamental principles of both the CNI and the EZLN is that they do not aspire to take state power, which they view as inherently corrupt and oppressive. The delegates spoke of their commitment to this principle and their concern of sacrificing it. Through their discussions, however, they clarified that they would not aim to take power, but rather dismantle this power from below and to the left, from the poor and marginalized indigenous communities fighting for their dignity, freedom, and autonomy.
Another fundamental principle is their opposition to all political parties, which they view as the same elite oppressor class dressed in different colors. They clarified that they would not create a new political party, but rather an Indigenous Council of Government which, Subcommander Galeano (formerly Marcos), urged us not to confuse with an Indigenous Government Council, meaning that they are not trying to indigenize the current government, but rather build a new indigenous government that governs according to the principles of the EZLN and CNI:
- Serve, don’t self-serve
- Represent, don’t supplant
- Construct, don’t destroy
- Propose, don’t impose
- Convince, don’t defeat
- Go below, not above
- Govern by obeying
The EZLN is demanding that we disrupt our basic notions of what a government is and what a government can do. In indigenous communities throughout the country as well as in Zapatista territory, the CNI has expelled government officials and revived their traditional systems of self-governance. The EZLN is asking us to envision this happening on a national level: a Mexico that is governed by a council of hundreds of indigenous people from all nations and tribes guided by the wisdom of their ancestors.
Central to the proposal is that the candidate who will represent the Indigenous Council of Government be an indigenous woman. Galeano, in his explanation, continually emphasized this point. He said that both mestizos (non-indigenous) and men have proved incapable of governance, and that this point was not up for debate. He also reminded us that this will not be a government run by any and all indigenous people, because there are of course indigenous landowners, paramilitary, and police, as well as indigenous communities that have been bought out by the government. It will be a CNI government, running not with a political platform, but rather a program of struggle that is explicitly anti-capitalist.
Galeano also emphasized that it must be the CNI that approves and constructs the campaign, not the EZLN. In 2006 the EZLN ran ‘the Other Campaign’ parallel to the presidential race to spread the word of autonomy and urge the people of Mexico to organize their communities outside of the electoral sphere. In his speech at the Fifth Congress, Galeano explained that in the Other Campaign, the EZLN led and the Indigenous Peoples of Mexico followed, and that it needed to be the other way around, with the Indigenous Peoples in resistance leading the nation.
The aim of the presidential campaign will be not only to win, but to fortify and unite the CNI and, as one delegate from Michoacán said, to “force the people of Mexico to turn and look at us”. In his opening speech, Subcommander Moisés repeated the urgency of uniting the people of the country and the city:
“Now is the time to remind the Ruler and his managers and overseers who it was who gave birth to this nation, who works the machines, who creates food from the earth, who constructs buildings, who paves the roads, who defends and reclaims the sciences and the arts, who imagines and struggles for a world so big that there is always a place to find food, shelter and hope.”
ANOTHER GOVERNMENT IS POSSIBLE
Some may question the possibility or efficiency of a collectively run indigenous government. The assembly itself refuted these doubts. Over 500 people from all different cultures and contexts discussed the proposal for three twelve-hour days without a single moment of disrespect. Instead of arguing based on ideology or political views, they truly listened to and, in the face of doubt, convinced one another. Most importantly, no delegate spoke from personal interest, but rather the collective interest of their community.
The consensus, then, that the proposal be brought back to their communities for consultation, was based on a true and complete agreement that the presidential campaign would benefit them all. Compared to the disrespect, corruption, corporate control, and political deadlock that we are used to in our current federal governments, the CNI was an example of the power of traditional governance.
This campaign will be unlike any other in the history of the world. In this moment of global political despair, particularly in the midst of the US presidential elections, the EZLN is once again challenging us to imagine outside of the defined realm of possibilities. After being denied a space in Mexico for over 500 years, they are deciding to construct a new Mexico and eventually, Galeano said, a new world.
In the words of the General Command of the EZLN:
Now is the hour of the National Indigenous Congress.
With its step, let the earth tremble at its core.
With its dreams, let cynicism and apathy be vanquished.
In its words, let those without voice be lifted up.
With its gaze, let darkness be illuminated.
In its ear, let the pain of those who think they are alone find a home.
In its heart, let desperation find comfort and hope.
In its challenge, let the world be seen anew.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Oct 11, 2016 | Colonialism & Conquest
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.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Oct 6, 2016 | Mining & Drilling
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
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.”
