Extractivism,

 

indigenous resistance

 

and revival worldwide

 

JOAN MARTINEZ-ALIER

 

THIS article presents several cases from around the world of indigenous defence against extractivism, motivated through local values of sacredness and livelihood, and through a revival of indigenous identity. In Latin and North America, Australia, India, Southeast Asia, Africa and the peripheries of Europe, we witness similar patterns, with certain variations, of Indigenous Peoples defending their rights and identity at the extraction frontiers.

A global indigenous cultural and political revival is in evidence, which manifests in environmental movements, which are growing on their own, and also alongside feminist, anti-colonial, anti-racist and many other movements of social and political awakening. This  can be seen in
over 1,400 cases of indigenous-environmental resistance documented in the Environmental Justice Atlas (ejatlas.org), which is an archive of ecological distri-bution conflicts, and a tool to support worldwide movements for environmental justice. The movements presented here are selected from these cases, each extensively documented on the website.

The Barbados declaration in 1971 saw 15 anthropologists calling for self-determination of Indigenous Peoples. One of these, Stefano Varese, wrote a pioneering book of 1960s anthropology, The Salt of the Mountains (La Sal de los Cerros) on Ashninka history and resistance in the Peruvian jungle. Also present in Barbados was Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, the author of another landmark book, Mxico profundo. Then came the ILO Convention 169 of 1989 – which many countries including India still refuse to ratify – and in 2007 the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In this article we take for granted that there is indeed an indigenous revival and that it overlaps to a large extent with the environmental movement.

We need to ask whether Indigenous Peoples are attacked because they are weaker (political hypothesis) or because they live at the commodity extraction frontiers (geographical hypothesis). Commodity frontiers is a concept from world systems theory rather than from anthropology, whose colonial background focused more on analysing Indigenous Peoples classificatory structures than on the ravages to which they have been subjected. In university departments of anthropology, Indigenous Peoples have often primarily been inert objects of study. Rather, to us, they are the heroes of numerous environmental movements.

This article therefore emphasizes links between environmental activism and the exercise of self-determination motivated through indigenous revival, as pressures against the worlds remaining indigenous communities increase. This revival brings back old names of tribes obliterated by colonization and racism, often together with the populations themselves. Many of the peoples deemed to be without history are recovering their history as victims of coloniality and racism.

The main enemy of indigenous communities has been capitalism, born from western civilization, but there is also a pattern of majority populations (and religions) attacking local minority indigenous and/or ethnically discriminated populations in post-colonial countries. Thus in India, one of Adivasis worst enemies is Hindutva politics, combined with internal capitalist growth searching for raw materials. The conflicts summarized below arise from the growth and changes in the social metabolism that accompany capitalist economic growth.

 

 

Starting our brief survey in the United States, a proposed mine in the Santa Rita Mountains in Arizona was halted in 2019 by a court decision taking cognizance of sacred, ancestral values of the tribal peoples whose lands would be devastated by this mine. The S. Rita copper deposits extend south into Sonora in Mexico, where similar conflicts are unfolding.

The Rosemont mine is promoted by Canadian company Hudbay Minerals. The US Forest Service approved Hudbays plans to dig a mile-wide open-pit copper mine in the mountains, burying dozens of sites sacred to the tribes under 1.8 billion tons of toxic waste. The natural grandeur of these mountains draws visitors from across the world with one of the richest patches of biodiversity in the USA, from wetlands, grasslands and desert, rising up through thick forests to high cliffs, sheltering threatened species from orchids to jaguars, and including Madera Canyon, one of the premier US bird-watching sites. However, copper has been central to Arizonas economy. The flag of Arizona has a central star that signifies copper production, and the state produces 68 per cent of US copper.

The $1.9-billion Rosemont mine would involve clearing dozens of known archeological sites dating back 10,000 years, starting with Gaylor Ranch, a historic Hokokam village, removing remains of the Ts ancestors within the first few months of construction. The Tohono Oodham Nation, Pascua Yaqui and Hopi Ts, among many others, have lived in the mountains for generations and resist these plans. They consider streams as sacred, lifeblood of their ancestors.

 

 

Hudbay has also caused intense environmental conflict in Guatemala, trying to mine nickel in Lake Izabal, and elsewhere. It promoted Rosemont using the antiquated mining law of 1872 that allowed public lands with proven mineral deposits to be mined, and filed hundreds of unpatented claims on adjacent lands where they intended to dump the waste and tailings – a land grab the Forest Service approved without due examination. But in 2017, the Tohono Oodham Tribe partnered with Earthjustice to build a legal case emphasizing the unique importance of the Santa Rita mountains.

Hudbay was about to start excavation when the tribes attorney sought a preliminary injunction to stop any digging on the basis of immediate irreparable harm. Hearing the evidence, the court went further and definitively ruled on the merits of the tribes case itself, holding that the Forest Service made a crucial error by assuming that Hudbay had a right to use public lands without evidence of valuable mineral deposits, and that this error tainted the Forest Services evaluation of the Rosemont Mine from the start, abdicating its duty to protect our public lands.    

Conservation and tribal groups praised the ruling, which set a precedent highly significant for native Americans and conservationists alike. The US
and Canada witness many other environmental conflicts over oil and gas pipelines, water and land grabs, uranium mines and nuclear waste, and extraction of other resources, affecting the Navajo, Shoshone and many other tribes.

 

 

In Floridas Everglades, the rights of the Miccosukee Tribe are under threat from oil drilling. This small tribe has a deep connection with Everglades intricate land-water ecosystem since
the early 1800s, when they sought refuge there.

Miccosukee lands and water
now face pollution from agriculture,
urban and industrial development,
which they have fought through
protest and judicial activism. Everglades has become a network of compartmentalized reservoirs and canals as a result of large scale engineering projects. The South Florida Water Management District began back-pumping polluted water from affluent housing developments  into its eco-system from the early 2000s – dumping polluted water at the expense of a historically marginalized community. The polluted water is damaging native grasses and vegetation, jeopardizing hunting and fishing rights on which the Miccosukee cultural identity depends.

In 2004, after the tribe sued the water authorities, the Supreme Court ruled in their favour on the basis of the Clean Water Act, as well as tribes right to be treated as states. This ruling allowed the Miccosukee to set their own water quality standards, to be adhered to by both members and non-members of the tribe.

    In 2020 a new threat emerged, after President Trump switched control of wetlands from federal government to the state of Florida, whose Department of Environmental Protection is in charge of dredge and fill permits for the Everglades, a change made without any consultation with the Miccosukee. Compounding this, Burnett Oil, from Texas, applied in 2021 for a permit to
drill in Big Cypress National Preserve, where the Miccosukee Tribe has land rights. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection is reviewing Burnett Oils application for drilling that could start in 2022.

The Miccosukee have organized several major prayer walks to highlight the threats, releasing a statement that The tribe is deeply appalled about the loss of culturally sensitive sites and the potential destruction of the Miccosukee way of life. This way of life is integrally entwined within the Florida Everglades.

 

 

Indigenous Peoples in Latin America have a long history of collective opposition to extractive projects. A recent phenomenon since the early 2000s is of a locally organized referendum playing a major role in many mining conflicts. This often involves rediscovery and reassertion of indigenous language and identity.

For example, Caariaco is a copper deposit in the Lambayeque region on the northern coast of Peru. Between 1995 and 2000 it was explored by Placer Dome and Billiton Exploration & Mining. In 2001 Candente Copper Corp. acquired the project and began exploration in January 2004. In September 2012, nearly 2,000 community members of the San Juan de Kaaris Campesino Community attended a community consultation previously agreed upon with government and mining officials. The final result was 95 per cent of votes in opposition, rejecting the Caariaco mining project.

Candente Copper rejected this result however, on the basis of consent obtained in an assembly it had organized in July in the presence of 200 summoned villagers, without prior consultaation, judged legal by Perus Ministry of Energy and Mines. After suspending protests for a while, the president of
the community, Cristbal Barrios, announced that the decision of almost 4,000 community members was to resume them on 11 January 2013. On 25 January police attacked protesters, and this conflict has continued ever since.

A feature of this movement in the northen department of Lambayeque has been Kaari use of Quechua on television, in a context where they were prevented from appealing to ILO Convention 169 by their own indigenous identity not being recognized by the state and disputed by the mining company – environmental injustice compounded by racism.

 

 

Consultations appealing to ILO 169 have taken place in many cases in Guatemala in particular, most famously in Sipakapa in the department of San Marcos in 2005, where communities voted against Canadian Goldcorps plans. At least 70 similar consultations have taken place in the country since. Without achieving immediate victories, these have at least increased the social legitimacy of project opponents and delayed implementation.

Another referendum model simply involves citizen mobilization, following
the precedents of Tambogrande in northern Peru, and Esquel in Argentine Patagonia, in 2002 and 2003. Both of these were effective in stopping gold mining projects, despite lack of formal recognition of the referendum process. These cases popularized slogans such as Agro Yes, Mine No, Yes to Life, No to Mining, Yes to Water, No to Gold.

The examples of Tambogrande and Esquel were propagated by videos and supported by numerous networks. These are not NIMBY (not in my back yard) cases, but manifestations of popular and sometimes indigenous environmentalism, local expressions of the global environmental justice movement where links between distant villages and countries are established, slogans, videos and pamphlets circulated. From NIMBY to NIABY (not in anyones backyard), one could say, together with the USA environmental justice movement.

All too many environmental conflicts in Latin America have involved the assassination of indigenous leaders. A notorious recent case was that of Ashninka leader Estela Casanto Mauricio, who was killed on 12 March 2021 in Peren, Junin, Peru, after years of being threatened for her indigenous land rights advocacy. The Ashninka of the Peruvian Amazon have long struggled against drugs trafficking as well as resource extraction in the form of mining, logging, and land-grabs on their territory in Shankivironi in the Peren river valley.

Although most of the countrys indigenous population struggles to get their land rights recognized, almost all communities in the central jungle have legally recognized titles. However, these titles are over 40 years old and have no defined borders with coordinates. There have been many intrusions upon these territories, and many of their defenders receive death threats, which the state rarely responds to.

 

 

Estela, aged 55, was found dead in a cave at the bottom of a ravine near her home after she was abducted at night. The main suspect, one of the neighbouring settlers who had been threatening and harassing her for over five
years for refusing to give up part of
her land, was released after less than
a day. Teddy Sinacay, president of CECONSEC (a coalition of 120 Ashninka communities), expressed the collective lack of confidence in the investigation, in a context where most murders are never solved.

Estela was the ninth environmental defender to be assassinated in Peru during 2020-2021. Older cases too, such as the 2014 quadruple murder of Ashninka in Alto Tamaya-Saweto by illegal loggers, have yet to be resolved.

 

 

One of the most emblematic socio-environmental conflicts in Venezuela in recent decades has involved Yukpa Indians of the Yaza and Tukuko rivers, resisting land grabs, as well as coal mining, compounded by military and rancher aggression. This is in the Sierra de Perij, a mountainous territory in the west of Zulia state, on the agitated border between Venezuela and Colombia. These mountains contain diverse resources such as uranium, titanium and large coal reserves, among others. In La Guajira over the border in Colombia, the Wayu have a similar struggle against the coal industry; and near the Yukpa in Venezuela more Wayu as well as the Bari and Japreria peoples face similar pressures.

After Colombia, Venezuela is the second largest exporter of coal in Latin America. In the late 1980s, extraction began in the northern zone (Mara municipality), which became Venezualas core area of extraction, and in the 1990s new concessions were approved in other territories too. This industrialization, together with new tourism developments and cattle ranching activities, increased  the negative socio-environmental  impacts and land dispossession for Indigenous Peoples throughout the region.

President Hugo Chvez spoke out against the expansion of coal mining and cattle ranches, and in favour of indigenous rights land reclamation. Yet despite the demarcation of indigenous lands since 1999 and promulgation of the Indigenous Peoples Law in 2005, the indigenous struggles here take place in an atmosphere of militarized hostility.

Sabino Romero was a key Yukpa cacique and leader who motivated the Yukpa assertion of their rights. When the land demarcation process stagnated, new communities were founded, representing recompense for expropriated lands. However, this triggered an escalation of violence in the area, causing clashes with the National Guard and hired armed groups. Romero was imprisoned in 2009-11, and then killed with impunity in 2013.

The Yukpa struggle in the Sierra de Perij mountains remains Venezuelas most emblematic struggle, against cruel odds, of Indigenous People trying to avoid obliteration from one of Venezuelas remaining natural and native spaces, that Yukpa and others have preserved.

 

 

Australia is a country that exterminated many of its aboriginal peoples and made the mining of exproriated lands central to its economy. Rio Tintos blasting of a sacred cave in May 2020 shocked the world. The site destroyed 46,000 years of continuous human occupation and provided a 4,000-year-old genetic link to present-day traditional owners, the Banjima people.

The cave lay in the Juukan gorge, in Pilbara region of Western Australia, full of iron ore, where Rio Tinto wants to expand its Brockman mine, while BHP Billiton wants to expand its South Flank mine nearby. RT received ministerial consent to develop the site in 2013, under Western Australias outdated Aboriginal heritage laws, drafted in 1972 to favour mining proponents. BHP was due to blast more Aboriginal sites in June, but with local indigenous protests reinforced by worldwide condemnation, the Australian government passed a moratorium on further blasting of sacred sites on 10 June 2020. Rio Tintos CEO Jean-Sebastien Jacques had to resign following the uproar and some investor pressure.

The Philippines has long ranked near the top of lists of attacks on environmental defenders (e.g. Global Witness). Many victims are indigenous. The Lumad people figure largely due to their resistance to large-scale land grabbing, which has led to violent persecution by the Army and what is called red-tagging. On 3 December 2017, eight Lumad activists were killed in a military operation intervening in a land struggle over a coffee plantation that supplies Nestle. Other cases involve mining for minerals or coal, and land grabbing for logging or plantations.

The eight Lumad men killed were from the community of Tboli and its indigenous rights organization, TAMASCO. Datu Victor Danyan was village chief and leader of TAMASCO. They were part of Lumad resistance to the violent expropriation of their lands that started in 1991. The Dawang Coffee Plantation covers 12,000 hectares spread across six villages, managed through a
25 year Integrated Forest Management Agreement (IFMA) permit, that was secretly extended another 25 years in
2016. TAMASCO was formed in 2006
to fight this injustice along with the
wholesale destruction of forest, and a
coal project inaugurated the same year.

 

 

The massacre at the end of 2017 was the day before the Catholic Church had organized a peace meeting between Lumad activists and government officials from the Dept of Environment & Natural Resources (DENR), who had granted the permit. The army claimed the eight TAMASCO men were killed in a military operation against communist guerillas of the New Peoples Army. A forensics expert was also killed for investigating the assassination in January 2018, after which officials claimed that there was no physical evidence the incident even happened.

As Marivic Danyan recounted, I had to put part of my husbands brains back inside his skull so he was fit for burial. I tried to change the clothes of my dead brothers, but their wounds were too bad Since this incident, women have been at the frontlines of the movement, and Marivic Danyan became one of its leaders and the first female village chief.

 

 

East Timor became independent of Indonesia in 1999, but its indigenous Mollo people have faced severe repression from mining interests in this newly independent nation. Mutis Mountain, where they live, is an area full of rich biodiversity; but also rich in hidden resources including marble, manganese, gold, oil and gas. The mountain is thickly coated in primary forest, and 13 rivers flow from its slopes. Mollo consider these forests to be sacred and rely on them for food and medicines; women in particular use forest materials to make art that defines their cultural heritage and identity. Mollo people consider themselves deeply connected to the land, and all are named after parts of the forest such as its soil, water, stones, and trees.

 In the 1980s, local forestry officials began giving illegal permits to mining companies allowing them to extract marble from Mutis Mountain without consent from the Mollo, who were thought of as getting in the way of economic development. Systematic mining began in 2004, without Mollo consent, and locals quickly noticed the consequences of the mining projects, including extensive pollution and deforestation, causing frequent landslides.

Aleta Baun, also known as Mama Aleta, started walking from village to village organizing resistance. She gathered over 150 local women for an occupation protest at the mining sites lasting for about three years. Although she insisted on peaceful protest, she and her supporters were often harassed and beaten, and police refused to intervene. In 2006 she barely survived an assassination attempt that ambushed her in the forest. Her legs were slashed with machetes while she was walking home holding her baby. Despite threats, the movement continued growing as more women joined, leaving the men to stay at home to take over domestic work and childcare. Even though the police and the military were backing up the mine, the community outnumbered them. Finally, in 2010, the mines were shut down and the Mollo community established a strong network protecting their land from all commercial exploitation while promoting an economy of sustainable living.

 

 

Rakyat Pununggu people in North Sumatra (Indonesia) are on the frontline against oil palm plantations. They reclaimed their land rights during the 1950s, but these lands have been increasingly encroached on by a state-owned palm oil and sugar company called PT Perkenunan Nusantara II (PTPN II). In June 2011, armed forces were sent in to burn down protesting villages. Destruction of forest has been on a vast scale. This ecological devastation especially affects indigenous women, almost all of whom previously subsisted on farming vegetables and rice, but now have to work in the plantations, applying fertilizer, collecting produce and clearing the fields.

Further violence from armed forces against Rakyat Pununggu villages continued in May 2013 and December 2017, with further land grabs. Locals performed a blockade, with many women climbing onto the heavy equipment, for which they faced severe beatings. More forced occupations and violence continued in September 2020, with many women, especially mothers, at the frontline. On 29 September, a particularly gruesome incident occurred when hundreds of indigenous locals across Kampung Durian Selemak protested against PTPN IIs continued violent displacement methods. The Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN) was there in support, and witnessed armed forces violence against peaceful protestors. Some residents went missing after the incident, presumably abducted or
killed.

In contrast to AMAN evidence, PTPN II claims they have been compassionate to residents and offered compensation that they rejected, denying not only the violence, but the existing pattern of peoples communal land ownership. AMAN continues efforts to ratify an Indigenous Peoples Bill for enforcing legal customary property rights for Indonesias Indigenous Peoples, but this has yet to be approved. With about 17 million members from more than 2,300 indigenous communities throughout Indonesia, AMAN supports Indigenous Peoples sovereignty over land and natural wealth, and customary law that guides socio-cultural sustainability as Indigenous communities. In 2015, AMAN was awarded the prestigious Elinor Ostrom Award.

 

 

To come now to India, we see similar patterns of intense intimidation of environmental protesters, many of them from Adivasi or tribal communities. These are resisting through many strategies, including – as we have seen in so many other situations worldwide – a conscious revival of indigenous identity.

In northern Chhattisgarh, the vast forest of Hasdeo Arand is one of the largest contiguous stretches of dense forest on the subcontinent. But its subsoil is also rich in coal – a resource India cant seem to get enough of these days. State mining companies have sub-contracted rights to Indias powerful Adani conglomerate.

Organizing resistance, the Hasdeo Arand Bachao Sangharsh Samiti is a village-level organization set up to protect these forests, lands and livelihoods. On 2 October 2021 – marking Gandhis birth anniversary – hundreds of tribal villagers began a long protest march against government plans for Adanis major coal mining expansion on their lands.

 

 

The challenge of climate change poses fundamental questions about
the survival of the planet. In such a scenario, dense forests like Hasdeo need to be saved from destruction. The representatives of all 30 villages of Hasdeo Arand have taken part in the recent padayatra (foot march) to demand justice from the state and central government and cancellation of all coal mining projects in the region.

Coal mining in Hasdeo is one out of hundreds of industrial offensives against Adivasis who live at the frontiers of extraction. These movements are against bauxite and iron ore mining, aluminium
and steel factories, big dams, coal mines and power stations, as well as dozens of new megadams.

In 2009, the Chhattisgarh state environment ministry categorized Hasdeo Arand as a no-go area for mining, due to its rich, unfragmented
forest cover. Soon after, in 2011, this no-go moratorium was overruled, and coal blocks everywhere were opened up. In 2019 the Ministry for Environment gave clearance for open cast coal mining in Parsa coal block, completely inside the dense Hasdeo Arand forests. The operator is Rajasthan Collieries Ltd, nominally separate from Adani Enterprises Ltd, but 74 per cent owned by it. This environmental clearance has far-reaching consequences for forest conservation in India. A potential ecological disaster is  under way, that has involved allegedly forging the consent of local Adivasis, who continue widespread protests.

In Singhbhum district, south Jharkhand, the scale and abuses of uranium mining around the village of Jaduguda, which started in 1967, have done irreparable damage to tens of thousands of Adivasis health and wellbeing. Many analysts have highlighted Jaduguda as a national disgrace, for example in the harrowing documentary Buddha Weeps in Jadogoda.

A proposal to mine uranium in Meghalaya (classed the third richest state in uranium after Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh) is located in the West Khasi Hills district. Khasi are among the most numerous and vocal out of hundreds of Scheduled Tribes in Northeast India, and Khasi Students Union has emerged as one of the main opponents of this uranium project. They express the fear that uranium mining would devastate the environment and open floodgates of outside influence in the state.

As in India, it is common for African states not to recognize the category of indigenous, on similar grounds that the bulk of the population is African by origin, even if there are ethnic minorities. There is no equivalent of Adivasi or even Scheduled Tribe in Africa, yet tribal identities are being reasserted as ways to motivate resistance in many resource conflicts. There is no question that
many African populations self-identify
as indigenous. The Ogoni and Ijaw resistance to oil extraction and gas burning in the Niger Delta is one of the best known examples.

 

 

In Nigeria and Cameroon right now, those involved in intense conflict over plantations try to insist that the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007 should be taken into account by unwilling government authorities and foreign companies, such as Wilmar International, which runs a huge oil palm plantation in Cross River State. When the Declaration was approved by 144 countries, Nigeria abstained. Communities in the region, with assistance from civil society groups, continue legal activism, highlighting the failure of Wilmar to conduct a mandatory Environmental Impact Assessment.

A similar case of neocolonial landgrabbing is the rubber tree plantation of Hevea created by the government of Cameroon in 1975. Various communities, including Bagyeli and Bulu people, have complained against land expropriation and deforestation. After early attempts to stop this, it has become a low intensity conflict, with residents apparently resigned to letting go of what seems an impossible fight against such a big company. Hevecam is one of the three major employers in the country after the state itself. In 2014, the Bagyeli people raised their voice against the plantation. Traditionally they are hunters who rely on the forest, yet much of their forest no longer exists. The forest belongs to us, they say; forest that is still left is being destroyed by HEVECAM.

This Rubber plantation borders the National Park of Campo-Maan, a 246.000 hectare reserve created in 1999 (originally a hunting reserve created
by French colonizers in 1932). Nowadays, this park is classified by Birdlife International as an important place for bird conservation, with about 80 different species of mammals, 307 different species of birds, 122 species of reptiles.

 

 

According to WWF, the area is in danger because of an array of big infrastructure projects, extractives and agro-industries, including the Kribi deep sea and industrial port complex, the Memveele Hydropower Dam, the Mount Mamelles iron ore exploration project, the Hevecam and Socapalm rubber and oil palm plantations respectively and the construction of a railway terminal to transport iron ore from Mbalam to the Kribi seaport. But are local hunters excluded by industrial projects and National Park alike?

In Ethiopia, aboriginal communities in the Omo valley are facing the threat of starvation in the name of sustainable development and clean energy. The Omo River in the countrys south is the largest Ethiopian river outside the Nile Basin. Its course is entirely contained within the boundaries of Ethiopia, and it empties into Lake Turkana on the border with Kenya. In December 2016, Ethiopia inaugurated Gibe III dam, under the aegis of the countrys prime minister and chief executive of Ethiopian Electric Power, the CEO of Italian construction company Salini Impregilo and the Chinese ambassador, among other investors. According to project promoters, the dam will boost the Ethiopian economy and bring prosperity. 

But the project has been promoted with extensively reported violence. At least fifty members of the Suri tribe were massacred by government soldiers who were forcing them to move from their land. Gibe III is Africas 3rd largest dam, giving 1870 mw of electricity at the cost of displacing an estimated 700,000 inhabitants around the valley and Lake Turkana, as well as devastating a uniquely biodiverse environment.

 

 

Omo Valley tribal communities belong to at least 16 distinct ethnic groups whose survival depends on traditional farming, forestry, breeding, herding and fishing. Salini proudly declares that their project offers benefits for local communities, enabling the development of fisheries, preventing the occurrence of floods, and preserving traditional recess agriculture. But the NGO Survival International, among others, has documented terrible and systematic human rights violations, and the voices of the affected Indigenous Peoples are little highlighted in world media.

Myanmar is a country with many indigenous peoples. Military rule lasted from 1962 to 2011 and resumed in 2021. In 2011, President Thein Sein sent a letter to Parliament announcing that the Myitsone dam project would be suspended because it is against the will of the people. The dam site is in north Burma, close to the birthplace of the Irrawaddy River, at a sacred confluence of two rivers, located in Kachin territory – an ethnic group which has often been in armed rebellion against the state. China lobbied to revive the dam in a joint venture between the China Power Investment Corporation, the Burmese governments Ministry of Electric Power, and the Asia World Company. The dam was planned to produce electricity primarily for export to Yunnan in China.

 

 

Despite the seeming success in 2011, by 2014 Kachin villagers were being displaced, exiled from their ancestral homes. The Myitsone dam project lay unfinished but not dead. 12,000 Kachin villagers remain in exile as a political and military drama plays out over the dam.

Similar injustice marks the completion of the Ilisu dam in the Kurdistan region of Southeastern Turkey. In the late 1970s, the Turkish government launched the Southeastern Anatolian Project (GAP), with the declared aim of producing cheap energy and encouraging land redistribution by increasing the amount of irrigable land. The Ilisu reservoir has recently (2019-2020) submerged an estimated 300 square kilometres, displacing thousands of Kurdish villagers and townspeople, including inundating Hasankeyf, one of the regions most ancient urban centres. Kurds are one of the people indigenous to the Middle East. Their struggle for self-determination is simultaneously political, environmental and a matter of asserting an ancient cultural identity.

In November 2013, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination called on the Swedish government to stop activities at a proposed nickel and cobalt mine located in the Sami area in in the Bjorkvattsdalen valley in the north of Sweden, where Smi have herded reindeer for generations.

Many local Sami organizations and villages have protested the decision to give Nickel Mountain AB permission to open this mine, as the area is vital for pasture rotation for their 8,000 reindeers, and the mine would block a narrow migration passage. It is also close to the Umealven river, whose pollution would have disastrous consequences for both humans and ecosystems.

The guidelines for the Swedish government to make a choice of evaluation between two national interests are stated in their Environmental Law of 1998, which states that the choice should in the most appropriate way promote[s] a long-term management of the ground, the water and the physical environment in general. Sweden has not yet ratified ILO 169, that requires prior consultation with Indigenous Peoples.

 

 

Indigenous resistance at the extraction frontiers around the world is a remarkable phenomenon. Indigenous communities are calculated as only 5 per cent of the world population, but they appear as key protagonists of resistance in about 40 per cent of cases in the EJAtlas. Around the world there are about 4,000 named Indigenous Peoples (depending how this is assessed), of whom Indias STs/Adivasis are the most numerous.

Anthropology, and other related disciplines such as ethno-ecology and ethno-biology, have shown a long-standing interest in understanding Indigenous Peoples lifeways and cultures, and more recent interest in resurgent indigenous-led governance (e.g. Philippe Descolas celebrated study on the Achuar of Ecuador). It was anthropologists who founded Survival International.

 

 

Indigenous resistance mostly takes place at commodity extraction frontiers, whether for copper, uranium, nickel or coal mining, wood, palm oil, coffee or rubber plantations, hydroelectricity; and also at the waste disposal frontiers (as in the water pollution in the Everglades and in Swedens Umelven river).

Commodity frontiers is a concept that, socially speaking, allows us to see reality from below, expressing degrowth in practice, as a signpost towards a better future. Other well known political ecologists do not insist on resistance, and tend to leave indigenous people aside.

For instance, in my view, Harveys accumulation by dispossession looks at the world abstractly, from above, contemplating the logic of capitalism. As a Marxist, and a pessimistic one, Harvey does not place Indigenous Peoples – together with peasants, fisherfolk, pastoralists, women activists, local EJOs, religious groups, scientists and sometimes trade unionists – at the vanguard of successful resistance
to industrial capitalism. He tends to
look at environmental resistance in terms of isolated events and not as instances of a world movement
for environmental justice in which indigenous communities are among the main participants.

Indigenous and environment are underused words in the old Marxist dictionaries, which emphasized concepts such as Raymond Williams militant particularisms, to analyse working class movements before they coalesce into trade unions or socialist political parties. Applying this concept to environmental movements of the poor and the indigenous is a sort of nimbyism (Not In My Backyard-ism) that denies the reality of vital interconnections. In many movements of environmental resistance, one motivating factor is the presence of indigenous groups with a strong
revived identity. Self-identification as indigenous is in itself a denial of particularism, through identification with a growing indigenous movement around the world.

 

 

Resistance by indigenous peoples has its own characteristics, including confronting commodity extraction at remote frontier areas. The extraction takes place as part of the growing and changing social metabolism of the industrial economy. The price of these commodities is desecration of indigenous territories along with massive human rights abuse in areas of unique biodiversity and provisioning for human livelihoods. Social factors include legal concessions, social licence to operate, bribery and cooptation of local stakeholders, as well as brute force, and the dynamics of resistance. These factors play out over huge areas, as we have seen with palm oil, coffee and rubber plantations, and vast coal mines in Central India.

Here I propose provisional answers to two hypotheses. The first is geographical. Are Indigenous Peoples attacked and sacrificed to commodity extraction (or to waste disposal) because they live at distant frontiers (sometimes as refugees) while nearby territories have already been sacrificed as the search for new commodities reaches new extraction frontiers? Is the march towards new sites for extraction and waste disposal occupied by the worlds remaining indigenous peoples explained by the geography (and geology) of growth and changes in the overall social metabolism?

For instance, where do we find lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper for the electrical transition? Where to locate the windmills and solar panels that will be needed? Locations tend to be chosen far from the metropolis in remote areas where surviving Indigenous Peoples live. 

I also ask a political question: Are indigenous populations attacked disproportionately because they are politically and socially weaker than other populations?

 

 

I tend to answer yes to the geographical question and no to the political question. Indigenous populations appear often in instances of resistance because they live in as yet untouched resource frontiers, and also because they are not weak but strong, although subject to violence and lacking in financial power. They have learnt to defend themselves by legitimately displaying their indigenous identity, and thus (sometimes, and in some countries) are able to argue in terms of ILO Convention 169. In other countries, such as India, they are able to make use of other legislation (such as the Forest Rights Act).

Legislation alone cannot guarantee succesful resistance. These peoples own cultures, religions, habits of independence, their arts of not being governed learnt over many centuries, constitute a political force that is often effective against the geography of robbery by outsiders.

Despite this resistance, in most cases we see that environmental justice is not achieved. Only in some instances is the indigenous revival able to stop destructive extractive projects or correct the consequences of pollution. On the other hand, each case of success, as it becomes visible around the world, reaffirms the indigenous revival so closely linked to an environmentalism of the dispossessed and the subaltern.

 

Footnotes:

* This article is an edited, shortened version of Chapter 25 of the forthcoming book Land, Water, Air and Freedom: World Movements for Environmental Justice by Joan Martinez-Alier.

** Source: Environment Justice Atlas (EJA-tlas), where all the cases summarized here are fully referenced. I am grateful in particular to Brototi Roy, Dalena Tran, Ksenija Hanaek, J.F. Gerber as members of the EJAtlas team.