by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 14, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Male Violence, Prostitution, Rape Culture
By Cyril Mychalejko / Toward Freedom
One generally overlooked feature of the Guatemalan government and military’s 36-year (1960-96) genocidal counterinsurgency campaign against the country’s Mayan population is the strategy of targeting women with violence.
Rape, mutilation, sexual slavery, forced abortion, and sterilizations were just some of the sadistic tools used in a systematic practice of state-sponsored terror to crush the surviving population into submission through fear and shame via the suffering of their mothers, sisters, and daughters.
In 1999, UN-backed truth commission, the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), declared that during the war, “the rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice aimed at destroying one of the most intimate and vulnerable aspects of the individual’s dignity…[and] they were killed, tortured and raped, sometimes because of their ideals and political or social participation…”
Glen Kuecker, professor of Latin American History at DePauw University, said that the gender specific violence was and continues to be part of the government’s counterinsurgency program aimed to destroy the fundamental social fabric of Mayan communities.
“The goal of counterinsurgency is to undermine the cohesion of a community that is needed for resistance,” said Kuecker. “Gender violence not only terrorizes women in the community, but it also disrupts traditional patriarchal gender relations by sending the message to men that they are not capable of protecting women.”
According to Emily Willard, Research Associate for the Evidence Project of The National Security Archive writing in Peace and Conflict Monitor this April, “The military’s strategies of targeting women reached such a large portion of the male population, normalizing rape and violence against women. The residual effect of these genocidal policies and strategies can be seen in the rate and type of violence in Guatemala today.”
In 2010, 685 women were assassinated in Guatemala, compared to 213 in 2000. And while there were more than 40,000 complaints of violence against women filed with the Guatemalan Public Ministry, only 1 percent of those registered by the Judicial Department resulted in sentencing, according to a report published June 1 by the Nobel Women’s Initiative and the Just Associates (JASS), “Caught in the Crossfire: Women on the frontlines in Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala.”
The report, co-authored by Nobel Peace Laureates Rigoberta Menchú Tum and Jody Williams, was the result of a fact-finding mission led by them in January 2012 to investigate violence against women in these three countries.
In Guatemala, the report singles out the civil war’s legacy of violence and impunity, the increased militarization resulting from the War on Drugs, land and resource conflicts, and the influence of foreign governments and businesses – specifically from the United States and Canada – as major contributing factors to the ongoing violence directed at women, and the targeting of women as a tactical and deliberate tool of political repression. The report states that the phenomenon of femicide has “reached crisis dimensions.”
Guatemala’s Civil War: No Justice, No Peace
“The crises in Guatemala are not internal crises,” Grahame Russell, co-director of Rights Action, a community development and anti-mining solidarity organization, told Toward Freedom. “They are global struggles.”
Guatemala’s Civil War serves as a perfect example. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, in an uncharacteristic moment of historical honesty, apologized to the Guatemalan people back in 1998 for the U.S.’s role in overthrowing democracy in the country and contributing political, military, and financial support to genocidal counterinsurgency programs which successive dictators carried out on the Mayan population.
“It is important that I state clearly that support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression…was wrong,” said Clinton.
The war left over 200,000, mostly indigenous civilians, murdered, while tens of thousands were raped, tortured, disappeared and displaced. But in the wake of the war, as many as an estimated 98 percent of those responsible for war crimes and genocide (both Guatemalan and American) remain free.
“In Guatemala, the surge in femicides demonstrates that peace is not just the cessation of war,” the JASS report states. “The lack of justice for crimes of the 1980s has left victims without redress, and culprits in power.” Amnesty International noted that in the last 10 years as many as 5,700 women have been murdered.
The position of recently elected president Otto Perez Molina that there was no genocide in the country is a perfect illustration of how impunity persists. However, Perez Molina, a former general and CIA asset who was trained at the infamous School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, is taking a position that is self-serving, not just racist and revisionist. He led a military battalion in the early 1980s in the country’s northwestern highlands where some of the bloodiest massacres occurred. In addition, as Annie Bird, journalist and co-director of Rights Action pointed out in a profile of the president this year, Perez Molina ran a “secret torture center” for political prisoners while serving as head of the country’s military intelligence in 1994. One of Perez Molina’s past bosses, former dictator Efrain Rios Montt, unleashed a scorched earth campaign against the country’s Mayan population between 1982-83, wiping out entire villages in the process. Thirty years later Rios Montt, who was a very close ally of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, is just now standing trial, and is accused of being responsible for “1,771 deaths, 1,400 human rights violations and the displacement of 29,000 indigenous Guatemalans.”
Sandra Moran, a Guatemalan feminist, lesbian, artist and activist working on women’s rights and human rights in Guatemala City, is a member and co-founder of Colectivo Artesana and Alianza Politica Sector de Mujeres. She lived in exile in Canada for 14 years after participating in the country’s student movement in the early 1980s. After working tirelessly abroad to build transnational solidarity, Moran returned to Guatemala to participate in the Peace Process and to help rebuild a more peaceful, just and humane country.
“During the war it was State Policy to target the bodies of women as part of the government’s ‘Counterinsurgency Plan’. Although the war ended, this violence against women has continued,” Moran told Toward Freedom. Her office has been targeted and broken into in the past, with spilt blood left, and she has received numerous death threats as a result of her work. “The way some murdered and mutilated bodies have appeared [in recent years] are the same way they appeared during the war,” added Moran.
Amnesty International submitted a briefing on Guatemala to the UN’s Human Rights Committee in March, voicing concern how “female victims often suffer exceptional brutality before being killed, including rape, mutilation and dismemberment.”
Moran added that these misogynistic forms of violence and torture are social problems that have been taught at both institutional and individual levels. Many of the teachers of this violence are working with the government, military and police, and are often those same people who committed these types of crimes during the war. Moran also singled out the heads of private security industry, which according to the JASS report, has ballooned to an estimated 28,000 legal and 50,000 unregistered private security agents in the country.
In 2007 Amnesty International issued a report noting the presence of “clandestine groups” in the country, comprised of the “the business sector, private security companies, common criminals, gang members and possibly ex and current members of the armed forces,” who were then, and continue to target human rights activists in order to maintain impunity and an unjust and patriarchal social order.
“Guatemala’s peace-making process never moved into a necessary peace-building process that could assure strong institutions and practices,” the JASS report states. “The government typically fails to conduct investigations or prosecute the perpetrators of women’s murders.”
The Guatemalan government’s embrace of ex-war criminals and current criminals, combined with the support of international political and business actors, sustains what Rights Action’s Russell calls, “an unjust, racist, and violent social order” and “maintaining business as usual and politics as usual.”
Business as Usual
In 1954 the CIA, at the behest of United Fruit Company, coordinated the coup which overthrew democratically-elected president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. Reasons behind this act include the fact that he rewrote the country’s labor code and initiated land reforms, acts deemed unacceptable by United Fruit Company and Washington. The idea of Guatemala being solely a source of cheap labor and a place to extract resources with low costs and even lower oversight has been a continuum in the country’s history. The lack of justice and weak governance appears to be seen as a comparative advantage for the country. For example, Amnesty International, in its briefing to the UN this past March, also pointed out how “[t]he failings of the state continue to be relied on by companies, in particular mining companies, who prefer the lower national standard to international human rights standards.”
One example the JASS report points out is Perez Molina’s refusal to respect the 55 community consultations held throughout the country in indigenous communities, which overwhelmingly rejected so-called development projects involving mining, oil and hydroelectric dams. According to ILO Convention 169, the international law which Guatemala is a signatory of, indigenous communities must provide free, prior, and informed consent to any projects that would impact their land and communities. Other “failings of the state” include the refusal to investigate and prosecute those responsible for violence against activists who challenge the status quo by demanding that their human rights, such as those enshrined under ILO 169, are recognized and honored.
The JASS delegation led by Menchu and Williams listened to testimony from women who shared stories about the violence during the war and the violence associated with what might be described now as low intensity conflicts surrounding land and resources. Their report stated, “They described that today’s intent is subtler: to force communities out of areas where mineral and other types of resources are coveted. But the methods are very similar: rape, murder, imprisonment, division and harassment…Women presented testimonies and evidence of many cases where army and private security presence is associated with putting down local protests against mining operations and other development projects that displace and disrupt communities to exploit natural resources.”
Less than two weeks after the report was released, Yolanda Oqueli Veliz, a community leader from the municipalities of San Jose del Golfo and San Pedro Ayampuc working against the widely unpopular Canadian gold mining project owned by Radius Gold, was shot by assassins and is now in the hospital in critical condition.
While criticism of the Guatemalan State is necessary and warranted, the Canadian government deserves the same treatment. Lawmakers in Ottawa have consistently aided and abetted such behavior by their industry due to what at best could be considered indifference, but is more likely a deliberate disregard for the human rights and environmental rights of communities affected by Canadian mining companies.
A perfect illustration of this was the failure to pass Bill C-300, a modest, if not flawed piece of legislation, which would have empowered the Canadian government to investigate human rights complaints and strip guilty companies from taxpayer subsidies through the Canadian Pension Plan and Export Development Canada. Apparently murder and gang-rapes linked to Canadian mining projects in Guatemala (not to mention similar acts throughout the hemisphere and around the globe) are not enough to encourage lawmakers in Canada to pass legislation that would hold their country’s companies accountable for these crimes and human rights abuses.
While women are being targeted for their social justice leadership roles in these conflicts, it is modest progress in the realm of rights and empowerment that has allowed women to assume such roles.
“Since the war ended women’s leadership in their communities and with community struggles have increased. More and more women have realized that they have rights and that they must defend their rights. And this is part of the reason why violence against women has increased,” said Moran. “An act of violence against a woman is not just an act against the individual, but against all women. It is a message that if you leave your house, if you continue to organize or raise your voice, that this can happen to you.”
Read more from Upside Down World: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3755-guatemalan-femicide-the-legacy-of-repression-and-injustice-
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 3, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Protests & Symbolic Acts
By Fabiola Gutierrez and Chris Kraul / Los Angeles Times
Plans to build a $3.2-billion complex of dams that would have flooded thousands of acres in the bio-diverse Patagonia region in southern Chile have been put on indefinite hold in the face of ongoing protests against the project.
The five dams of the so-called HidroAysen project would increase Chile’s electricity capacity by 15% upon completion in 2020. But it also would have flooded 12,500 acres of pristine territory that is increasingly popular as an eco-tourism destination.
Project partner Colbun, a utility company, announced Thursday that it was suspending work on an environmental impact study that is a prerequisite to starting the project, saying the government lacked a clear energy policy. The power utility that is majority partner, Enel-Endesa, also made it known that it wants to call a board of directors meeting to reconsider the project, roughly 1,000 miles south of the capital, Santiago.
The five dams would add 2,750 megawatts of power to the national power grid.
Protests have been frequent in the year since the dam was given preliminary approval. Thousands of marchers poured into the streets of Santiago in April to protest a Supreme Court decision greenlighting the project.
Critics claimed that the rationale for the project was mainly to provide cheap energy to mining companies, not to consumers. Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has called the plan a “political and financial folly,” were among the groups opposed to the project.
Also opposing it is the Roman Catholic bishop of the Aysen region, Luis Infanti de la Mora, who in a pastoral letter last year said it would provide little local benefit.
But President Sebastian Pinera remains solidly behind the project, making the case that dams are necessary to reduce Chile’s 96% dependence on imported oil. But his backing of HidroAysen has been a factor in his plummeting support in polls.
The government responded Friday by rejecting the notion of a suspension and insisting that it has a “clear energy policy.” Opposition group Aysen Future Foundation said in a statement that the suspension highlights the fact that the project is questionable and that support for it has diminished.
From The Los Angeles Times: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/06/dam-project-chile-patagonia-suspended.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 3, 2012 | Indigenous Autonomy, Mining & Drilling, Protests & Symbolic Acts
By Rocky Kistner / Natural Resources Defense Council
In the Dakotas, members of the proud Lakota Nation rose in protest this week to join a 48-hour hunger strike in opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline—and all tar sands pipelines—they say will destroy precious water resources and ancestral lands in the U.S and in Canada.
On Sunday, dozens of hunger strikers and supporters marched at a rally against tar sands oil mining operations and pipelines in Eagle Butte, S.D., an impoverished community on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, close to TransCanada’s 1,700 mile proposed Keystone XL pipeline route to refineries in the Gulf.
Lakota tribal members and their children drove to a camp in the rugged hills near the Missouri River to fast in solidarity with a hunger strike at the Bella Bella Community School in British Columbia. Children at the school are protesting a plan to ship millions of barrels of oil through a potentially dangerous “Northern Gateway” pipeline that would pipe corrosive tar sands oil from Alberta to giant super tankers navigating Canada’s treacherous Pacific coast.
The massive environmental devastation caused by tar sands mining in Canada and oil company plans to ship it through the U.S. has united Native Americans against proposals to build tar sands pipelines here in the U.S. Here’s how veteran Lakota activist Debra White Plume described it at hunger strike near Eagle Butte:
“This pipeline is about rich people getting richer, this pipeline is about raping Mother Earth and feeding the machine. For us this pipeline is genocide for us and the First Nations people in Canada. I think our native nations will stay opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline and stay opposed to other pipelines that come through here because we understand that water is a gift from our Grandfather, it’s a gift of life. Our leaders understand that and they’re not going to make a deal. It’s a battle for our water, it’s a battle for our children. These are our grandchildren at the hunger strike, we’re really proud of them for going hungry for Mother Earth and for their elders who are doing this.”
Karen Ducheneaux, who lives on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, one of the poorest regions in the country, came up with the hunger strike idea after seeing a powerful video protesting tar sands oil by the children of the Bella Bella Community School in Canada. After talking to her family members and tribal leaders, Ducheneaux decided it was time to act in solidarity with the First Nation peoples of Canada.
“What they’re facing doesn’t just affect them, doesn’t just affect the west coast of Canada or Alberta where the tar sands are. It doesn’t just affect people along the where the pipelines are, it affects the whole world. What they’re doing, poisoning the water and polluting the earth affects all mankind, not just the Lakota or people of South Dakota, but everyone….I’m so proud of the group of school children in Bella Bella and so proud to be able to support them….we can’t drink oil, we’re going to destroy our own ground water and our own ecosystem and then we’re going to be stuck with nothing.”
So on an unusually hot April 1st in the Dakotas, a few dozen hunger-strikers and supporters gathered on family-owned land nestled in the rumpled hills near the Missouri River, land that has been a source of life and nourishment long before settlers invaded their Lakota Sioux territories more than a century ago. Lakota supporters built a sweat lodge and elders sang songs and prayers in support of hunger strikers in Canada over a thousand miles away. They were there to support and protect Mother Earth, a powerful Lakota tradition passed down through the generations, long before oil and mining companies came and polluted their land.
It is a tradition these hunger strikers say they will fight for until there are no Lakota left, a struggle we all should respect and support.
From EcoWatch
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 28, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Toxification
By Ecowatch
Each year, mining companies dump more than 180 million tonnes of hazardous mine waste into rivers, lakes, and oceans worldwide, threatening vital bodies of water with toxic heavy metals and other chemicals poisonous to humans and wildlife, according to report released on Feb. 28 by two leading mining reform groups.
An investigation by Earthworks and MiningWatch Canada identifies the world’s waters that are suffering the greatest harm or at greatest risk from the dumping of mine waste. The report, Troubled Waters: How Mine Waste Dumping is Poisoning our Oceans, Rivers, and Lakes, also names the leading companies that continue to use this irresponsible method of disposal.
Mine processing wastes, or tailings, can contain as many as three dozen dangerous chemicals including arsenic, lead, mercury, and cyanide. The report found that the mining industry has left mountains of such waste from Alaska and Canada to Norway and Southeast Asia.
“Polluting the world’s waters with mine tailings is unconscionable, and damage it causes is largely irreversible,” said Payal Sampat, international program director for Washington, D.C.-based Earthworks. “Mining companies must stop using our oceans, rivers, and lakes as dumping grounds for their toxic waste.”
The report says some multinational mining companies are guilty of a double standard.
“Some companies dump their mining wastes into the oceans of other countries, even though their home countries have bans or restrictions against it,” said Catherine Coumans, research coordinator for Ottawa-based MiningWatch Canada. “We found that of the world’s largest mining companies, only one has policies against dumping in rivers and oceans, and none against dumping in lakes.”
There are safer methods of disposing of mine tailings, including returning the waste to the emptied mine. In other places, dumping of any kind is too risky. No feasible technology exists to remove and treat mine tailings from oceans; even partial cleanup of tailings dumped into rivers or lakes is prohibitively expensive.
“We are really suffering because of the millions of tons of mine waste that Barrick Gold dumps in and around our river system every year,” said Mark Ekepa, chairman of the Porgera Landowners’ Association. “Our rivers run red, our houses have become unstable, we have lost fresh drinking water and places to put our food gardens, and sometimes children get carried away by the waste.”
A number of nations, including the U.S., Canada, and Australia, have had restrictions on dumping mine tailings in natural bodies of water. Even these national regulations, however, are being eroded by amendments, exemptions, and loopholes that allow destructive dumping in lakes and streams. Even though U.S. law long banned lake dumping, in 2009 the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Coeur D’Alene Mines of Idaho to dump 7 million tonnes of tailings from the Kensington Gold Mine in Alaska into Lower Slate Lake, filling the lake and destroying all life in it.
In Canada, Taseko Mines Ltd. is proposing to reclassify Little Fish Lake and Fish Creek in British Columbia as a tailings impoundment for its proposed Prosperity Gold-Copper Mine. The watershed is home to grizzly bear and highly productive rainbow trout, and is an important cultural area for the Tsilhqot’in People. After being refused environmental approvals for the past 17 years, the company has re-applied with plans to build a tailings impoundment to dispose of 480 million tons of tailings and 240 million tons of waste rock in the basin of the creek and lake, burying the ecosystems under a hundred meters of waste.
From Ecowatch
Photo by Dominik Vanyi on Unsplash
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 20, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Mining & Drilling, Toxification
By Sarah Rotz
In 2008, Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI) Chief Donny Morris, along with five other community members, were criminalized and jailed for saying “No” to mining exploration on their land. Although the Ontario government ultimately settled the case with Platinex Inc. (by providing the company with a $5 million handout), the government was unwilling to assure KI that unwanted mining exploration would stop categorically. Moreover, the Ontario Mining Act continues to enable free entry for mining companies like God’s Lake Resources; the newest gold mining company to stake a claim on KI land.
KI First Nation—a remote fly-in Oji-Cree community located roughly 1,400km northwest of Toronto—has governed and cared for their land since time before memory. This immense and rich area of lakes, rivers, boreal forests, and wetlands provides KI (with a population of 1,300) with the essential elements of life, including a clean and consistent supply of fresh water. Indeed, one of the many reasons that KI has chosen to say no to mining exploration on its Homeland is that it would contaminate much of the local water system. As a result KI has created an official Watershed Declaration and Consultation Protocol, which declares that “all waters that flow into and out of Big Trout Lake, and all lands whose waters flow into those lakes, rivers, and wetlands, to be completely protected through our continued care under KI’s authority, laws and protocols. We look at protection as restoring our land and waters to their original condition and preserving them in that condition for future generations. No industrial uses, or other uses which disrupt, poison, or otherwise harm our relationship to these lands and waters will be permitted. This includes no mining exploration…”
Clearly, KI has a vision for their land and environment that benefits the KI people, and all life. If nothing else, this vision must be respected. However, the incompatibility of KI’s philosophy with that of unfettered capitalism and economic growth held dearly by our colonial government, makes any form of authentic, unconditional adherence to KI’s declaration unlikely.
Development as Environmental Injustice in Canada
In Canada, environmental and health advocates are often dismissed on grounds that they are unable to present clear causal links between the activities of industrial companies, and the effects experienced by the community. This strategic dismissal of causality—and indeed, dismissal of the people most affected by the injustice—is typical in cases of water, soil and air contamination. It is a common legal position deployed with unconscionable regularity by the Canadian government, as well as various federal and provincial Ministries including Environment Canada, Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development, Energy Mines and Resources and Natural Resources.
While it may be true that the diffused and ambulant nature of ecological elements may make causal patterns of contamination difficult to identify, the Canadian government has done little to facilitate research or exploration into the impacts of corporate activities on people and environments. Indeed, there are many instances in which the government has actively concealed the demonstrable truth of these claims. They have suggested that claims of environmental injustices are simply untraceable and unprovable, all without any due diligence. This position of willful ignorance and plausible deniability is an effective green light for any and all environmentally destructive corporate activity, as well as a legal bulwark against those who would seek to hold them accountable for their actions.
Communities affected by corporate activities on their land, or attempting to prevent such activities, face a tireless search for scientific evidence to corroborate their lived experience. Such endeavors require a great deal of resources. Of course, most communities simply do not have access to the required time, money, knowledge or power. More importantly, they are often unable to prevent the perpetrator—likely a potent mix of public and private entities—from using aggression, violence, intimidation, coercion, or even extortion to destroy the community’s capacity for resistance. The kicker here is that most cases like this are occurring on unsurrendered First Nation lands, which are to be governed by the First Nation community, and off limits to unwanted development, period. No trial should be necessary, because as long as the land is being used against this Nation’s wishes, the community should have full right to say “NO!” This continuous disregard for such rights means that all communities—in Canada and elsewhere—must step up and support them in their resistance.
Indeed, cases like this are typical within geographically, politically and/or socio-economically isolated or oppressed communities. First Nation reserves such as Aamjinaang know these battles well, and bare the scars to prove it. Aamjinaang is a Chippewa (Ojibwe) community just south of Sarnia. As a result of various oppressive forces, Sarnia’s chemical valley and various other industrial areas have been built directly around the community, enclosing it in the chemical debris of some of the largest industrial corporations.
Consequently, Aamjinaang has been dangerously exposed to toxic levels of industrial chemicals. And the effects are devastating. Residents suffer physical ailments ranging from persistent and debilitating migraines to a multitude of cancers: lung, liver, colon etc. Still, the trifecta of legal, political, and corporate hand-washing insists, there is no causal evidence that proves these effects are directly related to the ongoing industrial activity. This fails to explain why the male-female birth ratio has been dramatically altered. Presently, twice as many girls are being born than boys—an effect often caused by chemicals that imitate endocrine hormones. The release of industrial chemicals has also affected the community’s cultural practices and livelihood activities including hunting, fishing, ceremonial activities and medicine gathering. Nevertheless, those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo in Aamjinaang, have clung desperately to the claim of insufficient causal evidence. Most disturbingly, this claim is being laid to protect industrial producers, and allow them to continue operating on land that is not theirs in the first place, while drawing an immense profit.
Although this community has been fighting a battle with the government and industry for years, little has been done to protect the community from ongoing chemical contamination. The longstanding issue for Aamjinaang, as with many health and environment cases, is that the government continues to disregard cumulative effects of pollution, contamination and toxicity by preventing legislative regulations limiting these effects. In fact, Environment Canada issued an approval for increases in pollution by local industry. In November 2010, residents of Aamjinaang launched a full lawsuit challenging this development. That being said, Aamjinaang has been working on proving their case for years and they are now just shifting their efforts towards government. This change in tactics is a response to the industry’s statement that they abide by regulations that the government sets. What this statement ignores is the pressure the industry puts on governments to regulate in their favor. The tremendous power held by companies is used to coerce government action and/or inaction. According to Aamjinaang, the government follows a long-standing modus operandi when responding to community health and environment claims: “deny, divide, delay, discredit”.
In contrast to environmental contamination cases such as Aamjinaang, mining represents some of the most explicit and traceable forms of ecological and social destruction and injustice. The sources of the toxic burdens of mining are highly physically concentrated. Thus, the “deny, divide, delay, discredit” approach taken by powerful polluters, would seem to be much more difficult to seriously adopt. That said, the situation in KI demonstrates the importance that power itself plays within our colonial society. Of course, Platinex, De Beers and God’s Lake have certainly done their fair share of lobbying, and their unabashed government support should be proof enough.
Before proceeding, I want to preemptively consider a potentially dangerous, and indeed popular, counter argument to analyses like this one. The argument goes as follows: perhaps the practice of displacing a small indigenous population in order to secure massive amounts of raw resources that would service an entire nation, is not, at bottom, unethical. That is, perhaps, at least in theory, there is some way to justify, or balance the initial moral deficit of the endeavor. The Canadian government views itself as a representative of an entire nation—a nation they say, which is predominantly concerned with jobs and economic growth. The government is therefore obligated to demonstrate their competence in providing relevant resources and services to the nation we call Canada. Of course, if they could do this inexpensively without polluting indigenous territory, they would. If they could do this without forcing themselves into indigenous lands, they would. But, they say, they cannot. That being said, surely there must still be a win-win situation to be had? Somehow we can strike a deal that will make “both sides” happy. What would this look like? In it’s abridged version there seems to be two steps. 1. Carefully, and with foresight, the government would relocate the affected indigenous population. 2. As compensation, offer them a sizable funding package. The population will be better off because they do not have to bear the health and livelihood effects of mining, and Canada can continue its upward economic and consumptive trajectory. No harm, no foul.
The problem with this perspective is that it fails to recognize that indigenous people never overtly surrendered their lands to the colonial government at any point in the treaties. The government of Canada’s ongoing act of dispossessing First Nations is based on a flawed assumption that, through treaties, the colonial government acquired full ownership over what is now off-reserve indigenous land. The fact that these unsurrendered lands were unilaterally placed under federal and provincial management, and are now are being used for the purposes of lumber, mineral, water and oil extraction (among countless other forms of extraction and dispossession), patently illustrates the ingrained nature of this flawed assumption. To deeply reconsider this assumption means that a vastly different process of engagement would have to take place between the government—and the corporations it alleges to regulate—and First Nations. Under the traditional application of First Nation minority rights in Canada, when dispossession occurs, indigenous communities cannot simply decide, voluntarily, to leave or to accept whatever compensation the government is offering. Indeed, if the “deal” presented by the government is not accepted, the government can simply revoke it, along with many ‘rights’ that the government has granted the indigenous population. The indigenous community will ostensibly be labeled an enemy of the colonial state and forcefully relocated, and any contractual obligation for compensation is largely null and void. Although the government actively conceals this process, it has been physically, socially, environmentally and culturally destructive for indigenous peoples in Canada—indeed, one need to look no further then the Attawapiskat case to see the devastating consequences of dispossession, encroachment and dislocation. The issue here is that this traditional and ongoing mode of engagement between the government and First Nations is based on a profoundly flawed assumption of ownership (both of land and people) by the colonizer, and is being continuously reproduced in the interests of the state. From an indigenous perspective, the argument is one of sovereignty. Thus, to speak of land and natural resources in Canada as if they are all part of a unified, uncontested whole under the Canadian government is to erase a 400-year history of violent colonization, dispossession and indigenous resistance. In essence, this line of argument is missing an important consideration. At the same time, this kind of discourse necessarily frames a particular group of people and their land claims as simply something that can be bought and paid for, rather than a sovereign right. This objectifies and commodifies and entire group of people based on nothing more than a combination of their race and geography. Surely our collective memories are not so shortsighted that we need to be reminded of where this kind of ontology can lead? Ahem…. slavery?
Lastly, it should be noted that the resource in which Gods Lake Resources is pursuing in KI is not farm land to feed Canadian’s, it’s not even oil to keep us living the comfortable life we have grown accustom to. It is not lumber for houses, it’s not coal for power—that’s not to say that if it was oil, coal or lumber it would be acceptable. Indeed, the resource is gold: the penultimate expression of opulence, indulgence and extravagance. This is not about maintaining our industrialized living standards; it’s about making money for some of the wealthiest companies on the planet.
Read more from Intercontinental Cry: http://intercontinentalcry.org/environmental-injustice-resistance-why-we-need-to-support-ki/
