According to the legendary scholar Noam Chomsky, the world is “facing potential environmental catastrophe and not in the distant future,” and the only communities standing between humankind and catastrophe is the world’s Indigenous people. Here we present a selection of articles & essays on indigenous people and their fight to defend nature from ‘civilised’ humans.
Indigenous people across the world are the ones keeping the human race from destroying itself and leading earth to a disaster as they gain voices in countries in Latin America, the United States and Australia, renowned political commentator and academic Noam Chomsky said in a recent interview.
“Indigenous communities have begun to find a voice for the first time in countries with large Indigenous populations like Bolivia (and) Ecuador,” Chomsky said in an interview, according to Alternet.
“That’s a tremendous step forward for the entire world. It’s a kind of incredible irony that all over the world the leading forces in trying to prevent a race to disaster are the Indigenous communities.”
Chomsky said that countries such as the U.S., Canada and Australia are suffering from “self-inflicted wounds” due to their history of oppression against Indigenous people and first nations.
He further stressed that the world is “facing potential environmental catastrophe and not in the distant future,” but the only communities standing between humankind and the realization of such a catastrophe is the world’s Indigenous people.
“All over the world, it’s the Indigenous communities trying to hold us back: First Nations in Canada, Indigenous people in Bolivia, Aborigines in Australia, tribal people in India. It’s phenomenal all over the world that those who we call ‘primitive’ are trying to save those of us who we call ‘enlightened’ from total disaster,” said Chomsky.
Chomsky’s comments come as many Indigenous groups across Latin America are becoming more involved in the continent’s politics while also pushing back against global corporations who for decades have exploited their lands and resources for profit due to Western and U.S. influence in the region.
Adivasi economics may be the only hope for India’s future
India’s Tribal communities are under extreme pressure, right from big dams and mines to violent insurgencies and militarisation engulfing their lands. In 25 years, will these communities cease to exist? Or, will they represent thriving, revitalised models of egalitarian sustainability that the rest of the world has come to recognise and is learning from?
Video: Aluna – A Warning from the Kogi of Sierra Madre
Charles Eisenstein, Tikkun.org
In this film, the colonial gaze is turned back on the colonizers—sternly, imploringly, and with very great love. The Kogi tell us, “You mutilate the world because you don’t remember the Great Mother. If you don’t stop, the world will die.” Please believe us, they say. You must stop doing this. “Do you think we say these words for the sake of talking? We are speaking the truth.”
At the heart of India’s raging tribal insurgency is a simple thing: respect
Time and again we have heard that the Naxal insurgency is due to “under development” in areas like Bastar. Education is also supposed to deter Naxalism, according to some, but one may ask whose education? Fundamentally it’s about respect, dignity and trust in our behaviour towards others, in this case the Adivasi.
Seeing Wetiko: On capitalism, mind viruses, and antidotes for a world in transition
What if we told you that humanity is being driven to the brink of extinction by an illness? That all the poverty, the climate devastation, the perpetual war, and consumption fetishism all around us have roots in a mass psychological infection? What if this infection is not just highly communicable but also self-replicating?
Indigenous people are fighting to save the earth for all of us
Pamela Leiva Jacquelín, Intercontinental Cry
Representing 5 percent of the world’s population, today many Indigenous Peoples are still excluded from society and deprived of their rights as equal citizens of a state. Living in 70 countries and speaking more than 4,000 native languages, they have gained increasing visibility for raising their voices on aggressive development policies that threaten the world’s remaining ecosystems and the biodiversity that depends on them. As the world moves fast to explore and exploit these ecosystems to meet increasing consumption, Indigenous Peoples are at the top list of those murdered for defending their land.
How to Colonize Your Own Country
Editor’s note: On Ecologise.in, we usually carry relatively abstract, ‘big picture’ articles or technical pieces on energy and the related topics of climate change, development and sustainability. In contrast, this hard hitting, extensively researched piece by Madhusree Mukherjee brings out the human cost involved in these issues – and especially for indigenous people, who are victimised the most. It’s essential reading if you want to understand the true extent of the price that is being paid by adivasis – and specifically adivasi women – for what the rest of us call ‘development’.
‘Indigenous peoples are the best guardians of world’s biodiversity’
Tauli-Corpuz, from the Philippines, was Chair of the UN Permanent Forum of Indigenous Issues when the Declaration was adopted, and is currently the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In this interview, conducted via email, she explains why the Declaration is so important, argues that governments are failing to implement it, and claims that the struggle for indigenous rights “surpasses” other great social movements of the past.
Food sovereignty in rebellion: The Zapatista Solution
The stunning manner in which the Zapatistas presented themselves to the Mexican government, as well as the world, saw them descend upon several towns, cities, prisons, and wealthy landowners. During the revolt, guerillas liberated political prisoners, stormed military barracks, occupied government offices, set fire to trumped-up files that unfairly criminalized Indigenous people.
Indigenous Communities Are Leading the Environmental Justice Movement
Today, we are facing a global crisis—climate change. Indigenous People are not only threatened by colonial policies to eradicate our rights, our cultures and identities that are intrinsically linked to our places of origin. We are now threatened by manmade climate change. Coastlines are rising, weather patterns are changing, and we’re experiencing floods, droughts, out-of-control forest fires, and species disappearing. It’s Indigenous Peoples and land-based peoples that feel it first and most adversely.
Our enlightened conception of knowledge has brought us to the brink of extinction (Article available from JSTOR)
Nirmalangshu Mukherji, Economic & Political Weekly
A real solution to the issue of survival requires that humans learn to progressively forget knowledge systems currently advanced in the most dominating centres of learning. If indigenous knowledge systems are our primary route for survival, every bit of knowledge beyond indigenous knowledge must be subjected to serious critique for their relevance.
‘For us, the land is sacred’: on the road with the defenders of the world’s forests
Of the many thousands of participants at the Bonn climate conference which begins on 6 November, there will arguably be none who come with as much hope, courage and anger as the busload of indigenous leaders who have been criss-crossing Europe over the past two weeks, on their way to the former German capital. The 20 activists on the tour represent forest communities that have been marginalised over centuries but are now increasingly recognised as important actors against climate change through their protection of carbon sinks. One of them, Rivas, a quiet young man from Nicaragua, said, “All the death and destruction that came to our country came from Europe,” he said. “I sense people still have a superficial understanding of our message. What we want is to be able to continue our spiritual connection with the forest.”
How modern schooling is aiding the destruction of the biosphere
Modern education serves a version of Gulag, by forcing our young to suffer unspeakable conditions in their most vulnerable years. It ultimately breaks them, in order to refashion them into a pliable workforce. This psychic predicament goes hand in hand with the destruction of life, with the catastrophic end of the biosphere.