The problem

I am not your data, nor am I your vote bank,

I am not your project, or any exotic museum object,

I am not the soul waiting to be harvested,

Nor am I the lab where your theories are tested,

I am not your cannon fodder, or the invisible worker,

or your entertainment at India habitat center,

I am not your field, your crowd, your history,

your help, your guilt, medallions of your victory,

I refuse, reject, resist your labels,

your judgments, documents, definitions,

your models, leaders and patrons,

because they deny me my existence, my vision, my space,

your words, maps, figures, indicators,

they all create illusions and put you on pedestal,

from where you look down upon me,

So I draw my own picture, and invent my own grammar,

I make my own tools to fight my own battle,

For me, my people, my world, and my Adivasi self!

Abhay Flavian Xaxa

– ‘I am not your data’1

AS dispossession of indigenous, Adivasi or tribal communities increases in many areas in India and other countries, and extraction of resources intensifies from what were these peoples’ lands, we witness many local movements opposing this in India, but little concerted opposition. This is in striking contrast to some other countries, especially several in Latin America, where indigenous movements have begun to reconceptualize and rethink models of self-determination from the grassroots.
These movements have exercised increasing political influence during recent years. In Ecuador for example, the last three decades have witnessed large-scale marches and protests calling for an end to all extractive projects, in the face of strong vested interests promoting these projects.

The concept of extractivism developed in Latin America following decades of mineral and fossil fuels exploitation. Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America (1971) helped open up a perception and questioning of the exploitation, dispossession, and devastation of these ventures. The influence of US copper mining (as well as telecom) interests in the overthrow of Allende in Chile, 11 September 1973, was all too apparent. The political and financial influence of extractive corporations has been extensively studied and makes clear that financial extraction accompanies and in effect controls the extraction of resources.

Extractivism has sometimes been understood in a relatively narrow sense of an economy that extracts raw materials or primary commodities, oriented towards exporting them from a country – a clearly visible pattern in Latin American and African countries during much of the 20th century. This narrow sense also tends to make an essential contrast between private companies and state owned or nationalized entities, for example PSUs (Public Sector Utilities) in India, such as CIL (Coal India Ltd), Nalco (National Aluminium Corporation), the OMC (Orissa Mining Corporation) or NMDC (National Mineral Development Corporation).

But trade patterns have shifted with globalization, so the nature of extractivism has changed since the colonial regimes that first established extractive economies; and anti-extractivist discourse has been through several corresponding phases too, becoming linked recently with the quest to decolonize.

During much of the 20th century there was tension between what was perceived as a right wing tendency to privatize, and a socialist tendency to nationalize. But those who have seen how PSUs (such as Coal India Ltd) behave in India, despite token gestures of worker security, can attest that in practice they are no different in exploiting local people, workers, and the natural environment than private corporations; and often their funding by foreign investment is no less now too.

An Indian-grown conglomerate such as Adani is extractivist in its essence. Its planned power station in Godda district of Jharkhand for example is to get coal from Australia and Indonesia, imported through Dhamra port in Odisha (which it controls), taken by rail to Godda, to produce electricity there to be transmitted and sold at considerable profit to Bangladesh.2

We shift therefore between a narrow sense of extractivist activities involving materials, and extractivism as ideology and discourse.3 The essence of extractivism is an asymmetrical power structure and economy, and this involves an asymmetrical flow of knowledge resources between people. Extractivism is often understood in a much broader sense therefore, as discourse and entrenched patterns of behaviour.

Abhay Xaxa’s poem ‘I am not your data’ illustrates this, as a fundamental statement of decolonizing, that everyone can learn from. In much of our own discipline of anthropology we find acquisitiveness towards ‘data’ from the world’s most diverse and distant societies that forms a distinct shadow over anthropology. Extractive research is a core theme in Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Cultures (1999/2012), and recent self-reflective critiques of anthropology extend this understanding.4 The problem is evident in a seminal text in anthropology, Tristes Tropiques (1955), where Claude Levi-Strauss boasts about getting secret names from Amazonian children, and the last drums and other artefacts for a museum from dwindling tribes.

The primary meaning of extractivism involves extraction of raw ‘natural’ resources, underground resources above all (minerals and fossil fuels); but also extraction of water sources, and extraction of communities from their land – and of land from communities. A prime example is big dams, which effectively privatize and control water, while inundating thousands of thriving communities under vast reservoirs.

In recent decades, search for hydrocarbon reserves has involved increasingly aggressive encroachment onto and pollution of indigenous lands. Ken Saro-Wiwa highlighted this on Ogoni lands in Nigeria up to his execution in 1995. One of the most infamous cases is the pollution of Cofán indigenous lands in the Lago Agrio oilfield in the Amazonian area of northeastern Ecuador, where oil extraction by Texaco harmed the livelihoods of an estimated 30,000 people. The case against Chevron (which took over from Texaco) has broken legal precedents, with jailing of Steven Donziger, the key lawyer who fought this case.5 Similar controversy over oil drilling on indigenous lands has beset Colombia and Peru, where the June 2009 police attack on an indigenous blockade initiated an oil invasion.6 Increasingly, plans to exploit oil deposits in India’s northeastern states of Manipur and Nagaland are promoted with oppressive militarization;7 and near Barmer in Rajasthan, Vedanta’s subsidiary Cairn India Ltd is preparing to start production.8

Extracting people’s land is not just done through mass displacement, as for a large dam or factory, but also through timber extraction and plantations of biofuels, soya, coffee, eucalyptus etc., and in proliferation of ever more intensively extractive farming methods. Industrial farming involves excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides, that extracts groundwater unsustainably, and has driven thousands of Indian farmers to suicide through debt (especially for GM cotton), promoting cash crops over subsistence farming. The recent farmers’ victory in India involved opposition to new farming laws that seemed to represent a new neoliberal interference with and exploitation of farmers – a new level of extractivism, linked to biotechnology that further industrializes farming. This victory may well prove ‘the Green Revolution’s obituary’, opening the way for more sustainable agroecological innovations.9

Sanctuaries increasingly divide India’s forests into areas sacrificed for intensive resource extraction that turns them into wastelands, and nature reserves in the form of National Parks and wildlife sanctuaries, which extract forest-dwelling communities from their land and land-based livelihoods in core areas and resettle them outside.10 This disregards the knowledge that these communities have about the rhythms and life cycle of the forest and all the beings that cohabit it.

Linked to and orchestrating this extraction of resources is a system of financial extraction. Analysing the mining and dam industries cannot be done without analysing the social structure of those involved, as well as their funding and finance, which uses a burden of unrepayable debt (especially from loans that paid for infrastructure projects) to control the economy as a whole of countries, and states within a country, as in India. From individual families to state governments, people are controlled through a financial ‘death-grip’ of debt (literal meaning of ‘mortgage’),11 that exerts pressure to open up areas to penetration and no-holds-barred-exploitation by big corporations, in many cases backed by a violent process of militarization – use of state forces to intimidate local people into surrendering their land, often involving assassination of leaders, for the sake of attracting foreign investment.12

Extractivism therefore refers to something more fundamental than exploitation – a complex financial-political system of extracting resources, especially land, water, and underground materials, but also extracting people both from their land – attacking their territorial sovereignty – and also from their cultures, languages, epistemologies.

Marxism inspires many anti-extractive movements in Latin America. Clearly Marx and Engels created a definitive analysis of the capitalist system. But why did they focus on cloth factories rather than metals factories and the mining and energy industries that fuelled industrialization? At the heart of the capitalist system that has spread since the 19th century is the burning of fossil fuels and the mining and metals production industry. Processes of industrialization, in communist as in capitalist countries, involved dispossession of communities and extraction of resources blind to environmental impacts. The financial links were often closer than is generally realized, for example the role of US engineers building dams and metals factories in the Soviet Union under Stalin during the 1930s, negotiated in secret deals with US Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon.13 Marxist analysis of ‘primitive accumulation’ is another analytical lens used to study extractivism, but too often lacks the detailed financial analysis of complicit institutions, as well as deconstruction of the ideologies that promote this accumulation by dispossession.

In terms of bauxite mining and aluminium factories, India began to export more aluminium than was used in the country around the year 2000, so the industry became an example of export-oriented economic growth from this date. Alumina refineries and aluminium smelters are immensely exploitative of water and coal, getting electricity cheap, as well as exploiting minerals, and their workers, who get a meagre wage with minimal job security doing dangerous work in highly exploitative conditions, through the sub-contracting system of informalized labour. The process of industrialization through mines, dams and factories is therefore extractive in its essence, towards people as well as the ecosystems they have lived in and managed with care over generations.

Movements opposing the steel and aluminium industries in India have met an intensive militarization. One understands this more deeply when one looks at the use of metals in military hardware. For example, at Sunabeda in Koraput district (Odisha), sited close to Nalco’s bauxite mines and alumina factory at Damanjodi, stands Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL), one of India’s biggest factories of warplanes. As raw resources get scarcer, prices rise, instigating resource conflicts, and resource wars. Today’s wars in the Middle East and Ukraine are about resources as much as the ideological/political differences that appear to drive them.

Resource politics plays a keen yet often hidden role in geopolitics and also manifests as the resource curse that plagues remote indigenous lands that are ‘rich in resources’ in the form of vast increases in violence and exploitation. The militarization of tribal lands throughout India in service to the mining industry is painfully apparent, and involves hideous abuses perpetrated with impunity.14

Ecological Economics and political ecology offer models for understanding the overall social metabolism, that distributes resources unfairly, and remains addicted to growth.15 Among several key epistemologies from the South,16 Rights of Nature is a key concept, implemented in their Constitutions by Bolivia and Ecuador, that has come to represent a new level of indigenous-led activism, inspired from Latin America. ‘Multispecies ethnography’ and ‘anthropology beyond the human’17 challenge the anthropocentric ways of looking at the world which inform extractivism and industrial capitalism. Increasingly, indigenous ways of looking at the ‘personhood of nature’ are coming to the fore, breaking down the category of nature to recognize various beings from mushrooms to minerals. What economists and banks look on as ‘material resources’, indigenous communities regard as ‘sources of life’ as they fight to protect their sacred mountains and rivers.

This gives a very different take on the COP26 meetings in Glasgow in November 2021, which indigenous activists see as ‘a continuation of colonialism’.18 The electric cars, wind and solar farms and many other ‘green alternatives’, in the light of actual extractive projects actively promoted around the world, appear as fake solutions, with minimal focus on the mining of rare earth minerals used in wind and solar as well as mobiles and laptops, or on the lithium and unrecyclable aluminium fused with plastics in the batteries and bodies of newly minted electric cars. This is now termed ‘green extractivism’.19 What happened to India’s expertise in recycling old vehicles? Shouldn’t the rest of the world be learning from such examples?

What is sometimes termed ‘neoextractivism’ refers to a logic of extraction-dependent redistribution that aims to reduce poverty and inequality. Ecuadorean President Jaime Roldós tried to implement this (1979-81), provoking US ire; and so did Rafael Correa (2007-17); though the latter’s attempt to ‘keep the oil in the ground’ proved a much-lamented failure, and resulting indigenous protests were at the heart of Correa’s fall from power.20

Extractive industries are at the centre of the assault on nature and indigenous peoples alike – coal, the iron/steel and bauxite/aluminium industries as well as uranium, gold and diamonds. Many mega dams have been built to provide electricity and water to metals factories, displacing the largest number of tribal communities in India.

Extractive projects are routinely portrayed as bringing ‘development’ to ‘backward’ regions, and the entry of such a project into a rural area almost invariably divides communities into those for and against. Security forces are regularly deployed in large numbers to try and force local populations to acquiesce. Many commentators have called this process ‘internal colonialism’. It is observed that security forces are assiduous in upholding security for corporate entities that are bringing in financial investment, while drastically undermining security for tribal citizens.

In terms of raising or lowering people’s standard of living, what the World Bank terms ‘Development-Induced Displacement’, others call ‘Investment-Forced Dispossession’, since displaced communities’ standard of living often drops dramatically, and they gain no real development, while what is forcing them off the land is, basically in most cases, huge sums of money, with profits siphoned off by distant elites.

The corporate entities involved are loud in their claims to be bringing ‘development’, for example in the field of education (often funded through ‘CSR’). The term extraction education, coined by Canadian anthropologist Judith Walker, refers to large-scale education projects funded by extractive industries.21 In effect, industry funded schooling of this kind tends to extract children from their communities, undermining their shared values and knowledge systems. Cognitive justice demands indigenous communities’ self-determination over the whole process of education or schooling.

Indigeneity has become a powerful political force, in India as increasingly throughout Latin America, Canada and USA, Aoteaora/New Zealand, among Saami in northern Sweden, Norway and Finland, and elsewhere, pushing, sometimes very effectively, for a higher degree of self-determination for rural communities, including control over education and increasing use of tribal or indigenous languages.

Indigenous, tribal or Adivasi communities are by no means the only ones being invaded and dispossessed by extractive projects in India or Latin America, but they are prominent at the forefront of protest and disproportionally threatened by displacement and disruption of rural livelihoods. Mining companies in India use loopholes that repeatedly override the country’s strong legislation on tribal rights.

With over 100 million citizens belonging to the Scheduled Tribes (STs), India has the largest population of ‘indigenous people’ of any country; and on paper at least, their land rights are guaranteed in Schedules V and VI of India’s Constitution, and in the PESA (1996), Forest Rights (2006) and other acts.

But who is indigenous? Controversies about politically correct language frequently distract us from core issues. Yet language matters. We all know that who is classified as ‘Scheduled Tribe’ is often arbitrary and highly controversial, and we have to keep questioning the term ‘tribal’, while quests for ST status by ‘de-notified tribes’ (DNTs) such as Pardhis, who were once hunter-gatherers until displaced from the forest, are hugely significant.

‘Adivasi’, like ‘Dalit’, forms a coherent identity in much of India, but in the Northeast it collapses, since the tribal people from eastern-central India taken by the British to work in the tea plantations and most of their descendants identify as ‘Adivasi’, yet lack ST status in Assam and other states, and are not ‘first dwellers’ in this land. So, most people from the northeastern STs do not identify as ‘Adivasi’, rejecting this term as Hindi.

As for ‘indigeneity’, contests over indigenous status seep into identity politics. The success of movements in Odisha, West Bengal and other states has depended on Adivasi-Dalit solidarity. Elsewhere (e.g. in Kandhamal, Odisha, in 2008) Hindutva forces have played the communities off against each other. On the other side, ‘Mulnivasis’ is a concept that connects them.22

Like Dalits, Adivasis face huge prejudice and discrimination. But living over generations in remote areas, the STs kept their own languages, rituals and shamanic approach to the spirit world, and forest skills, as well as collective ownership quite distinct from the emphasis on private property introduced from Europe.

Indigenous identity is obviously a sensitive issue, and often changes markedly. Among many others, ST citizens often grow up facing huge prejudice and abuse that can be termed ‘cultural racism’. The caste system itself obviously perpetuates racism. In the case of communities who inherit distinctive cultures and languages, this prejudice or racism often takes the form of an attack on their culture or language when seen through the lens of social evolutionary paradigm; and has been institutionalized in many schools in undermining use of tribal languages – a situation arguably approaching one of linguistic genocide. Schools often impose non-tribal names, short hair and prohibition on traditional ornaments and dress, alongside Sanskrit prayers. Recently, Adivasis have been outspoken about the Hinduisation processes and linguistic chauvinism they have faced.23

In April 2017 we visited a Hindu boarding school for Gond children in Dantewada whose curriculum includes Sanskrit classes at 5 am, but where Gondi, most children’s mother tongue, is banned. Gondi has a claim to be as ancient as Sanskrit, like a grandfather language to Tamil, and as indigenous as any Indian language, so why should it be banned by educators who don’t know it and look down on it?

Extractivism therefore tends to exacerbate not only the dispossession and direct oppression faced by tribal or indigenous citizens, but also the prejudice they face, extracting them from their cultural identity and values. How can we conceptualize and articulate these issues?

International legislation upholding the right to self-determination of tribal or indigenous peoples has been sidelined repeatedly in India, especially ILO 169 (passed in 1989, and recognized in Nepal but not in India) and UNDRIP (passed in 2007 and signed by India yet not recognized as applicable). This international legislation expresses elemental rights that connect the situation of peoples who live closely on the land in India with similar situations in other countries. In Aoteaora/New Zealand, Maori have established landmarks in self-determination over education. Saami in Scandinavian countries have similar achievements; and indigenous peoples from Ecuador to Canada have won ‘pluri-national’ rights.

Indigenous rights to self-determination should not therefore be seen as ‘essentialization’ or ‘eco-incarceration’, but in terms of finding intersectional solidarity to strengthen struggles against multi-level dispossession and to create and implement innovative models of grassroots democracy.

Obviously, the line between indigenous and ‘non-tribal’ communities is often contentious in India. Yet there’s no doubting the similarity of assaults on ST communities with invasions of indigenous lands across the American continent and Southeast Asia. Yet indigenous peoples face crisis and violence in so many countries: Indonesia, Philippines, Myanmar, Thailand, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico are among those that have witnessed numerous recent killings and immensely violent suppression of indigenous movements and their leaders.24

The irony is that just as it is becoming widely recognized that indigenous peoples have generally proved the best guardians of outstanding biodiversity, many regions of exceptional beauty and diversity are facing ecocide simultaneously with cultural genocide of the peoples living there. Yet Indigenous people have shown resilience and have fought hard against these attempts and have engaged with diverse agents of modernity in their own distinct ways, sometimes using them as tools to resist oppression. This is why Chomsky, among other pre-eminent commentators on global geopolitics, sees indigenous peoples’ knowledges as crucial for human survival.25 Can we actually start to learn from tribal or indigenous communities, instead of erasing them?

And how to counteract and decolonize the research extractivism that often undermines indigenous knowledge and value systems while pretending to support them, by conserving records and artefacts, in tribal museums for example? – a museumization of cultures that extracts items from communities where they were made and used, confining these cultures to spaces where alien ‘experts’ define who they are through publications and participation in development programmes.

One aspect of this came home forcefully to us at a session on Anthropology of Mining at the European Association of Social Anthropologists conference in Stockholm in August 2018. After listening to three sessions of papers that often treated corporate propaganda and the anti-extractivist ideology driving indigenous movements on a par, an eminent anthro-pologist questioned what these papers were for? Analysis of social movements is much sought after by the corporations and international agencies that fund or promote extractive projects. What is needed, from anthropologists and others, is a reversal of the gaze and hard analysis of the extractive economy that can help such movements in their struggles against corporations, to understand the structure of corporate houses with multiple subsidiaries, the role of hedge funds, banks, accountancy firms, stock markets and metals trading organizations (such as the London Metals Exchange), and government development agencies such as the DFID (Department for International Development of the UK government).

Yet communities are resisting the extraction of their land and resources, in India as elsewhere. In the USA, Standing Rock became a symbol of indigenous resurgence and resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline bringing tar sands mined from indigenous lands in Canada. The protest was viciously suppressed soon after Trump came to office in 2017 yet has continued to win legal battles.26

Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, like Kurds in Rojava, northern Syria, are finding indigenous models of self-determination and autonomy that question received, and highly flawed models of democracy promoted by capitalist governments.27

Ecuador’s Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities (CONAIE) represents a new level of self-determination and ‘plurinationalism’, with strong local indigenous organizations represented in a central federation that exerts real political force on the state. Among recent indigenous victories are those of the numerically small Cofán people from Sinangoe against gold mining (as well as oil drilling) in 2018,28 and of the Waorani against oil concessions in 2019.29 These victories are on the basis of communities not having given their consent – the principle of Free Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) that has also been repeatedly overridden in India. Such confederations are a feature of indigenous movements throughout Latin America.

The Niyamgiri victory of Dongria Konds, with Dalits, in preserving their mountains from bauxite mining (in Odisha, 2013) became a symbol of tribal resistance in India, as did the Pathalgadi movement in Jharkhand (from 2016), erecting large stones with writing from India’s Constitution or pro-tribal legislation, affirming rights to self-determination.

Yet India’s tribal rights legislation continues to be circumvented, the Pathalgadi movement faced huge repression during 2018, with key activists still in jail, and thousands of other Adivasis incarcerated over false cases. Stan Swami, who investigated many of these cases, died in jail himself in July 2021, aged 84, on charges most consider absurd – ‘state murder’ as many have called this. Despite the Dongria victory, repression in and around Niyamgiri continues. Vedanta brings bauxite mined from ‘mountain-top removal’ on Kodinga Mali to its Lanjigarh refinery just north of Niyamgiri; and Hindalco seeks bauxite from Mali Parbat, having defeated Odisha’s original Kashipur movement, already mining bauxite from Bapla Mali, and refining it near Kucheipadar.

Tribal rights enshrined in Schedule V of India’s Constitution fall short of real self-determination and are often undermined. Schedule VI gives considerably more power to autonomous tribal councils in Northeast India, such as the Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council in Assam.30 The PESA Act (1996) was meant to extend the principle of self-determination, but the state’s failure to implement PESA is notorious, and boils down to unwillingness to allow real self-determination. This is what gives local movements against extractive projects such significance. But how deeply are these movements connected? What role does the Adivasi Mahasabha play for example, set up by Jai Singh Munda in the 1930s? Could the federation model set up by indigenous peoples throughout Latin America, and by Kurds, bring more effective resistance to extractivism in India? Lingering wars of words between conservationists (as well as the Forest Department) and tribal rights activists tend to undermine tribal communities’ truthful assertions that they are the real protectors of forests, if not upholders of the Rights of Nature.31 India gave the world the concept of Swaraj – self-rule that is based on the principles of autonomy and local self-determination. Can this be rediscovered?

The best answer to capitalist extractivism, as Chomsky and others have suggested, lies in indigenous initiatives of resistance and resilience. Sacred conceptions of our human place in the natural order of things need to be heard from indigenous voices, along with outrage at the daily injustice they meet, in a diversity of viewpoints that cuts across indigenous and non-tribal, elders and youth, ‘educated’ and non-literate expression, which speaks from the forgotten authority of oral cultures. Allowing this diversity of voices forms an essential aspect of the decolonizing that needs to be done, both in terms of confronting and stopping extractivism, and in terms of decolonizing knowledge production.

MALVIKA GUPTA and FELIX PADEL

* This issue of Seminar is dedicated to the memory of Abhay Xaxa (d. March 2020).

Footnotes:

1. 13 January 2016 at http://adivasiresurgence.com/2016/01/13/i-am-not-your-data/

2. Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, ‘Adani Again…From Australia to Jharkhand via Bangladesh’, The Citizen, 11 April 2018; Chitrangada Choudhury, ‘Taking Over Fertile Land for Adani Group from Protesting Farmers, Jharkhand Government Manipulates New Law Meant to Protect Them’, Indiaspend, 1 December 2018.

3. For example, ‘Data Extractivism’, http://imaginacionmaquinica.cl/data-extractivism, See also Thea Riofrancos, ‘Extractivism and Extractivismo’, https://globalsouthstudies.as.virginia.edu/key-concepts/extractivism-and-extractivismo

4. Andrea Burman, ‘Are Anthropologists Monsters? An Andean Dystopian Critique of Extractivist Ethnography and Anglophone-centric Anthropology’, Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8, 2018; Richard Kamei, ‘Uncivilising the Mind: How Anthropology Shaped the Discourse on Tribes in India’, Caravan, 1 March 2021.

5. Sharon Lerner, ‘How the Environmental Lawyer Who Won a Massive Judgement Against Chevron Lost Everything’, The Intercept, 29 January 2020.

6. ‘Indigenous Protestors Acquitted Over the Bagua Massacre in Peru’, Survival International, 4 November 2016.

7. Yambem Laba, ‘No to Oil’, The Stateseman, 21 August 2017.

8. ‘Protest at Cairn Energy’s Headquarters – “No Oil for Vedanta!”’, Foilvedanta, 18 August 2011; Rosamma Thomas, ‘Barmer Farmers Call for Postponing Aug 31 Public Hearing on Cairn India’, Newsclick, 30 August 2020.

9. Aniket Aga, ‘Farm Protests in India Are Writing the Green Revolution’s Obituary’, Scientific American, 24 January 2021; Aniket Aga and Maywa Monenegro de Wit, ‘How Biotech Companies Can Crash – and Still Never Fail’, Scientific American, 27 December 2021.

10. Madhu Ramnath, ‘Conservationists Should Be Helping Adivasis Save Forests. Instead They Are Working To Evict Them’, Scroll India, 2 March 2019; Kashif Kakvi, ‘We Have Been Betrayed and Looted, Say Tribals Evicted from Panna Tiger Reserve’, Newsclick, 10 August 2019; Krystyna Swiderska, ‘Protecting Indigenous Cultures is Crucial for Saving the World’s Biodiversity’, The Conversation, 14 February 2020; Mayank Aggarwal, ‘To Spend Less to Protect Biodiversity, Involve – Not Evict – Forest-Dwellers,’ The Wire, 6 December 2020; David Treuer, ‘Return the National Parks to the Tribes’, The Atlantic, May 2021.

11. Michael Rowbotham, Grip of Death: A Study of Modern Money, Debt Slavery and Destructive Economics. Jon Carpenter, UK, 1998. For an anthropological analysis see David Graeber, Debt: The first 5000 Years. Melville House, New York, 2011.

12. In India this was analysed for the aluminium industry in Samarendra Das and Felix Padel, Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel. Orient BlackSwan, 2010/2020.

13. Ibid., p. 45 (2010 edition), p. 51 (2020 edition); D. Cannadine, Mellon: An American Life. Allen Lane, London.

14. Two books that illustrate this violence and impunity (though not the link with extractivism) are Patrick Hoening and Navsharan Singh (eds.), Landscapes of Fear: Understanding Impunity in India, 2014; and Kishalay Bhattacharjee, Blood On My Hands: Confessions of Staged Encounters, 2015.

15. Joan Martinez-Alier, ‘Social Metabolism and Environmental Conflicts’, Socialist Register, 2007, pp. 273-293, and Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation, 2002.

16. Boaventure de Sousa Santos, Epistomologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Routledge, New York, 2015.

17. Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Anthropology Beyond the Human. University of California Press, 2013; Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, Durham, 2016.

18. Nina Lakhani, ‘A Continuation of Colonialism: Indigenous Activists Say Their Voices are Missing at Cop26’, The Guardian, 3 November 2021.

19. London Mining Network, 14 December 2021, https://londonminingnetwork.org/2020/12/resisting-green-extractivism/

20. Tom Bawden, ‘The World Has Failed Us: Ecuador Ditches Plan to Save Amazon from Oil Drilling’, The Independent, 16 August 2013. See also John Perkins, The New Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Ebury Press, USA, 2016, pp. 150-154.

21. Judith Walker, ‘Creating an LNG Ready Worker: British Columbia’s Blueprint for Extraction Education’, Globalisation, Societies and Education 16(1), 2018, pp. 78-92; Malvika Gupta and Felix Padel, ‘The Travesties of India’s Tribal Boarding Schools’, Sapiens online journal, Chicago University Press, 16 November 2020.

22. Promoted by BAMCEF – Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation.

23. Madakam Koya, ‘How Adivasi Languages Are at Threat by Dominant Cultures and States’ Apathy’, Adivasi Resurgence, 8 August 2020; Santoshi Markam, ‘The Alienation of Adivasis from Our Identity, or How I Unlearned my Hinduisation’, The Wire, 12 August 2020.

24. Global Witness, ‘Against All Odds: the Criminalisation of Land Rights Activists in Guatemala’, 13 January 2020; Tom Younger, ‘UN Expert to Peru: Guarantee Indigenous Peoples’ Rights, Title Their Lands and End Criminalisation To Protect Human Rights Defenders’, Forest Peoples Programme, 7 February 2020; Aljazeera, ‘Philippines “Deadliest” Country for Environmental, Land Activists’, 30 July 2020; Demetrio Romeo, ‘Environmental Human Rights Defenders in Mexico: The Issue of Structural Violence’, Open Democracy, 19 September 2020.

25. Noam Chomsky, ‘World Indigenous People the Only Hope for Human Survival,’ Telesur, 6 July 2016.

26. Louisa Boyle, ‘Standing Rock Tribe Celebrates Significant Win Over Trump in Pipeline Court Ruling, The Independent, 26 March 2020.

27. Pierre Bance, ‘Autonomy Institutions in Chiapas and Rojava – What Lessons? Peace in Kurdistan, 19 January 2022.

28. Nicholas Mainville, ‘Historical Indigenous Victory Against Gold Mining in the Amazon’, Amazon Frontlines, 13 August 2018; ‘An Unprecedented Legal Victory for Indigenous Rights in Ecuador Frees Up Vast Swath of Amazonian Rainforest from Gold Mining’, October 2018; Tito Correa, ‘Ecuador Indigenous Community Welcomes Judges To Jungle, Demands Role in Mining Concession’, Reuters, 16 November 2021.

29. Richard Loki, ‘How Indigenous Peoples Won a Landmark Victory Protecting the Amazon Against Oil Drilling’, Open Democracy, 5 June 2019; Rachel Riederer, ‘An Uncommon Victory For An Indigenous Tribe in the Amazon’, New Yorker, 15 May 2019; ‘Waorani People Win Historic Appeal Against Ecuadorian Government: Verdict Protects Half a Million Acres of Amazon Rainforest From Oil Drilling’, Amazon Frontlines, 11 July 2019.

30. Dharamsing Teron, Reclaiming the Ancestors’ Voices. Karbi Studies vol-2. Assam Book Hive, Gauwahati, 2011.

31. Felix Padel and Malvika Gupta, ‘Faultlines in Paradise – Indigenous People and Conservation Areas’, Gandhi Marg 43(1), 2021, pp. 71-87, 2021.