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Beyond Stereotypes of World's Indigenous Peoples
From Colombia to Gaza and beyond, we must recognize the ideas, movements, and rights of all peoples formerly and still subject to the violence of fossil colonialism.
Aug 09, 2024
On August 9, 2001, in Colombia, riot police and private security forces from the Cerrejón coal mine — one of the largest open-pit coal mines in the world — surrounded the remote community of Tabaco. They then dragged residents out of their homes and bulldozed what remained of that town’s structures. There was, after all, coal under the town and the mine’s owner, Exxon Mobil Corporation, wanted to access it. Since that date, the displaced residents of Tabaco have been fighting for compensation and (as guaranteed by both Colombian and international law) the reconstruction of their community. So far, no such luck.
Note that August 9th was then and is now the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, as the United Nations first declared in 1994. That was, in fact, the day when the newly formed U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations had its initial meeting in 1982.
Indigenous peoples have, of course, been under siege by colonizers for hundreds of years, even if their struggles for land and sovereignty only gained true international recognition in the late twentieth century, a time when, ironically enough, they were experiencing new assaults on their lands globally. Since World War II, the unprecedented growth of both the world’s population and global consumption levels have pushed resource use far beyond any limits once imagined. And that scramble for resources only accelerated starting in the 1990s, which meant further encroachment on Indigenous territories — and, of course, an onrushing climate catastrophe.
The resistance of Indigenous peoples to extractivism has made them crucial protagonists in today’s environmental and climate movements. But that’s only part of the story.
Since then, however, the growing visibility and power of Indigenous movements have created enormous potential for fundamentally changing our world in a positive fashion. While the struggle of the inhabitants of Tabaco has in many ways been emblematic of Indigenous struggles against extractivism, the story is more complicated. First, Tabaco itself is not, in fact, an Indigenous community but one largely descended from Africans brought to the New World as slaves. A narrow emphasis on Indigeneity can make it hard to take in non-Indigenous land and environmental struggles. Moreover, not all Indigenous people are rural and the stereotype flattens the realities of such movements. Finally, popular but misguided ideas about indigeneity underlie the claim to a Jewish “Indigenous” presence in Palestine, one that divorces Indigeneity from its historical context.
A deeper dive into colonialism and Indigenous peoples can help clarify the nature of such movements today and, curiously enough, some of the debates around the Israeli-Palestinian question as well.
Defining Indigenous Peoples
Indigenous peoples today live under the jurisdiction of nation states and those countries define them in varying ways. In the United States, you are Indigenous if you belong to a federally recognized tribe. Colombia formalized legal recognition of Indigeneity in its 1991 constitution and laws that outlined the specific requirements a group must fulfill to become an official “Indigenous community.” Like other Latin American countries, it also legally recognizes Afro-descended communities like Tabaco. In the case of Israel and Palestine, there is no legal “Indigenous” status at all, though the concept has become a weapon in a political debate about who has rights to historic Palestine.
Indigenous peoples in the Americas were first identified as “Indians” by European colonizers. Those so defined had no prior sense of common identity, which only developed through the historical experience of colonization. In the United States, pan-Indian organizations initially emerged in response to the creation of residential boarding schools to forcibly “assimilate” Native American children in what were functionally educational versions of prisons. Starting in the late nineteenth century, children from widely varying homelands speaking different languages were forced into the same regimented schools.
The more radical American Indian Movement emerged in the late twentieth century among Indians from different nations thrown together, thanks in part to the 1950s Voluntary Relocation Program that brought more than 100,000 Native Americans to cities like Chicago, Denver, and Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, collective Indigenous identities in the United States drew not on long-standing language, cultural, or ethnic affinities but on the common experience of conquest and dispossession.
Only in the 1980s did international law begin to recognize a common historical experience among Indigenous peoples globally. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Affairs offered what has become a foundational definition of Indigenous peoples, even though the United Nations never formally adopted it: “Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories.” This formulation was later expanded to acknowledge the Indigenous peoples of Africa and Asia whose experience of “subjugation, marginalization, dispossession, exclusion, or discrimination” generally came from the independent nation-states that governed their territory rather than directly from European colonization.
Two important innovations in international law, the ILO Convention 169 of 1989 and the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) of 2007, reflected the growing strength of global Indigenous activism and acknowledged the growing threat of extractivist assaults on Indigenous lands. ILO 169 created a legal requirement for “prior consultation” — that is, a requirement that governments offer Indigenous communities a voice in any development projects that might affect their lands. The UNDRIP strengthened that provision by giving communities the right to veto projects they opposed by mandating that governments obtain “free, prior, and informed consent” before embarking on any project affecting Indigenous lands.
You probably won’t be surprised to learn that neither the United States nor Israel ratified ILO 169 and neither supported the UNDRIP. Colombia, on the other hand, ratified ILO 169, incorporating it into its 1991 Constitution and extending such protections beyond Indigenous peoples to Afro-Colombian communities like Tabaco. Yet, in reality, as Tabaco’s experience shows, such legal rights continue to be violated.
Even as Colombia and other Latin American countries strengthened Indigenous rights, reformulating their nation-states as proudly multilingual, multicultural, and plurinational, Israel’s 2018 nation-state law further entrenched Jewish ethnonationalism there.
Fossil Colonialism
Fossil fuel use creates massive levels of toxic waste, including (but not limited to) the greenhouse gas emissions now overheating our planet. Increasing fossil fuel use — the industrial revolution in each of its phases — also accelerated the use of other resources. Industry can keep producing more and better stuff, but only by extracting more resources and producing ever more waste. As a result, geographical expansion — whether labeled Manifest Destiny, colonialism, or globalization — has been inseparable from the increasing use of energy, while both were also intimately tied to a 500-year assault on Indigenous lands and ways of life that continues today.
Remarkably enough, despite centuries of colonial expansion, Indigenous peoples still control about a quarter of the planet’s land — mostly (you won’t be surprised to learn) areas ignored by industrial colonizers because they were too cold, too hot, too wet, too dry, too high, too low, or too apparently resource-poor to be deemed useful. However, this century’s relentless push for coal, oil, and natural gas, as well as the growing demand for “clean” energy resources like biofuels, copper, lithium, and rare earth elements, dams for hydropower, and land for solar and wind farms, has pushed the geographic reach of extractivism into new Indigenous territories. And the toxic waste from extraction and production, including greenhouse gas emissions, is at the heart of the present environmental catastrophes that affect us all, but disproportionately Indigenous, poor, and marginalized communities.
Tabaco’s history reflects the experiences and fates of so many self-liberated Afro-descended peoples who established their own communities, some in still-autonomous Indigenous territories, throughout Latin America over the past centuries. Like Indigenous communities, they were rural-, land-, and subsistence-based. And like Indigenous communities, their communities predated the nation-states that later engulfed them. Today, like Tabaco, they find themselves under threat from a modern fossil-fuelized version of colonialism.
Are Indigenous People Natural Environmentalists?
The resistance of Indigenous peoples to extractivism has made them crucial protagonists in today’s environmental and climate movements. But that’s only part of the story.
Colonial ideologies long romanticized Indigenous peoples as living in harmony with the land and nature — the “noble savage” who inhabited an idealized past. This view had a dark side, too: Europeans also labeled them lazy, indolent, standing in the way of progress, and in desperate and eternal need of European tutelage.
Such colonial constructions offered useful rationalizations for destroying even imperial, technologically advanced Indigenous polities like the Aztec and Inca empires that controlled and transformed nature every bit as profoundly as did contemporaneous European societies. Conquest of what they called “the new world” turned European fantasies into reality, as Indigenous hierarchies were flattened and Indigenous peoples dispossessed, enslaved, marginalized, or ruralized. What began in 1492 would only continue with the Indian removal of the 1830s in the United States, Argentina’s “conquest of the desert” in the late nineteenth century, and what some Indigenous scholars have termed the fourth (or fifth) conquest occurring today with neo-extractivism.
Fossil colonialism created a world in which socioeconomic and ethnic categories came to overlap — but not completely. Ramachandra Guha identified “ecosystems peoples,” whose economies and cultures were based on long-term symbiotic relationships with their lands (and they were not all Indigenous). Then, of course, there were the industrializing “omnivores” whose technological and geographical reach knew (and knows) no bounds. Whether European or not, such voracious omnivores were also colonizers and industrializers. Rural, land-based ecosystem peoples, whether Indigenous, Afro-descended, or neither, tend to possess environmental values that look quite different from what passes for environmentalism among so many industrialized omnivores. Theirs is about changing the global economic system, not giving corporations in the global north yet more incentives to extract more from the global south.
Today, Indigenous people are indeed frequently “land-based,” but they remain Indigenous even if they have been displaced, whether voluntarily or not, from their rural communities (or in the United States, their reservations). Most Indigenous people in the Americas now do not live in peasant or rural communities but in urban areas. Some Native American tribal governments and members have even embraced extractive industries like oil and coal on their reservations and they are still Indigenous, even if they don’t match the colonial stereotype.
It’s the historical continuity with people who inhabited a territory prior to those who founded today’s nation-states that makes people Indigenous. In Latin America, Afro-descended peoples share this “priority” not by their ancestors’ presence prior to 1492 but because of their marginalization by the nation-states founded in the 1800s.
Israel and Palestine: Who Is Indigenous?
When I first became involved with Palestinian rights activism during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the term “Indigenous” never arose. There were hints, however. Zionists argued that biblical history connected Jews to the land, and French historian Maxime Rodinson situated European Zionism in its historical context of European colonialism and colonial thought, presaging what later became settler colonial theory.
Today, the question of who is “Indigenous” comes up regularly as Palestinians emphasize their family and ancestral ties to the land from which they were displaced, while mainstream Jewish and Zionist organizations claim that Jews are “native and indigenous” to Palestine. They also insist that Israeli Jews cannot be considered colonizers because, unlike other European ones, they “came to a homeland” and there was and is “no ‘motherland’” to which they can return. Israeli historian Benny Morris typically relied on the narrowest definition of colonialism (as “the policy and practice of an imperial power acquiring political control over another country”) to insist that European Zionists couldn’t be colonizers since they were not agents of a state exercising imperial power.
Such arguments fundamentally distort the scholarship of Indigeneity and settler colonialism. Indigenous people are those whose presence predates the nation-state formed on their territory: in this case, the Palestinians. The Israelis, while cherry-picking from the scholarship on Indigeneity, ignore the basic fact that the state is theirs.
European colonialism has had many faces. Scholars have distinguished “franchise” colonialism (as with much of the British imperial project in India and Africa), in which a small number of colonial bureaucrats cycle in and out of a colony to enforce systems of governance and extraction, from settler colonialism. A classic example of the latter is British North America, where the goal was to eliminate, rather than rule over, native populations, and replace them with a flood of European immigrants.
Of course, such categories are “ideal” types (however less than ideal they proved to be in reality). Most European colonial projects had both settler and franchise characteristics. In fact, one thing the “Jewish-Indigenous” argument about Israel omits is the British Mandate’s (1920-1948) role in fostering the Zionist project in Palestine. It also ignores the fact that most settler colonies were populated not by direct representatives of the colonial power but by unwanted populations of prisoners, religious or ethnic minorities, enslaved people (mostly Africans), indentured or contract laborers, or, in the case of Palestine, European and later Arab and other Jews.
Settler colonialism in North America began in the 1600s but continued long after the United States became an independent country. After that, it wasn’t an outside ruler but a national government that promoted the mass immigration of often impoverished and excluded Europeans to its shores.
Latin America’s history also offers overlapping examples of different types of colonial enterprises. In addition to the Spanish religious and royal officials sent to establish foreign rule, adventurers and non-Castilians made their way to the Americas in both official and unofficial capacities. The colonial governments mistrusted American-born “Creoles” of European origin as promoters of their own interests rather than that of the ruling imperial powers, even if they were also natural allies in controlling recalcitrant indigenous, African, and Afro-descended populations.
Creole elites played a major role in Latin America’s eventual split with Spain and in establishing independent countries there in the nineteenth century. Latin America’s new countries, like the newly independent United States, did not, of course, offer much independence for Indigenous and Afro-descended peoples. And like the United States, they promoted European immigration to whiten their populations, while continuing the project of conquering, missionizing, and otherwise eliminating Indigenous peoples and identities.
Today, amid the brutality in Gaza, it’s worth remembering that the creation of Israel in Palestine, its ongoing genocide in Gaza, and its current settlement and immigration policies, share many parallels with those earlier settler colonial projects. Israel’s extractivist projects (especially of water on the West Bank and gas off the coast of Gaza) also place it firmly among today’s fossil colonizers.
There are many reasons for Washington’s fervent support for Israel, but what Secretary of State Henry Kissinger described as the U.S. need for Israel as a reliable “cop on the beat” or, as Secretary of State Alexander Haig once put it, an unsinkable American “aircraft carrier” in the oil-rich Middle East, certainly plays a major role. So does the colonial view that Israel represents technological and ideological modernity in a retrograde Arab world.
On August 9th, we honor the world’s Indigenous peoples. Let’s move beyond stereotypes and recognize the ideas, movements, and rights of all peoples formerly and still subject to the violence of fossil colonialism. That includes those displaced from the Colombian town of Tabaco and those in the besieged territory of Gaza.
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Air Pollution From Canadian Tar Sands Up to 6,300% Worse Than Industry Reports
"In quantifying the astonishing and largely unreported levels," said a Greenpeace campaigner, "these scientists have validated what downwind Indigenous communities have been saying for decades."
Jan 26, 2024
Aircraft measurements of pollutants over the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta, Canada show levels exceeding industry reports by 1,900% to more than 6,300%, scientists revealed Thursday, underscoring the need for humanity to rapidly phase out fossil fuels.
While the Canadian government requires air quality monitoring around oil sands operations, industry figures focus on certain compounds. For this research, published Thursday in the journal Science, experts from Yale University and Environment and Climate Change Canada, a department of the Canadian government, accounted for a wider range of emissions.
After collecting data from 30 flights around 17 tar sands operations in 2018, "what we saw were very large emissions of total gas-phase organic carbon from these facilities," said co-author and Yale professor Drew Gentner in a statement. "On average, the majority of the total gas-phase organic carbon was from often overlooked compounds, which are typically outside of the scope of routine monitoring."
"This report backs up what the communities living in these areas experience—it is so bad they cannot open their windows because it hurts their lungs to breathe—especially at night."
Co-author John Liggio of Environment and Climate Change Canada noted that "the magnitude of the observed emissions from oil sands operations was larger than expected, considering that it was roughly equivalent to the sum of all other anthropogenic sources across Canada when including all the motor vehicles, all the solvents, all the other oil and gas sources, and everything else reported to the inventory."
Nadine Borduas-Dedekind, a University of British Columbia atmospheric chemist who has worked with Liggio but was not involved with this study, told Nature that "I'm concerned by how big this number is."
"You want to be measuring all this carbon. For air quality, for health, but also for climate," she said, explaining that some of the molecules are oxidized to planet-heating carbon dioxide.
Thanks to the tar sands deposits across northern Alberta, which are estimated to contain 1.7-2.5 trillion barrels of oil, Canada trails only Saudi Arabia and Venezuela in terms of total known reserves.
As Inside Climate News detailed Thursday:
The deposits do not technically hold crude oil, but instead a heavier hydrocarbon called bitumen, which must be heated and treated in order to form a liquid that can be piped and refined like oil. That process requires sprawling industrial operations of open pit mines, ever-growing waste ponds, and refinery-like "upgraders." The waste ponds have leached toxic chemicals into groundwater, and a heavy, sulfurous stench often settles over the region. The mines have stripped away an area larger than New York City, lands that had long been occupied by people from several Indigenous First Nations. One of those First Nations, Fort McKay, is now surrounded by mines.
Jean L'Hommecourt, an enrolled member of the Fort McKay First Nation, told Inside Climate News she wasn't shocked by the new findings.
"I was just like, eh, I knew all along," said L'Hommecourt, who has worked to clean up nearby operations. "We feel the physical effects here."
Jesse Cardinal of the Indigenous-led group Keepers of the Water similarly said to The Guardian, "We are told this is all within the limits and OK but this report backs up what the communities living in these areas experience—it is so bad they cannot open their windows because it hurts their lungs to breathe—especially at night."
Asked to comment on the research, Keith Stewart, a senior energy strategist for Greenpeace Canada, wrote in an email to The Independent, "I suppose 'Holy s***' isn't printable."
"In quantifying the astonishing and largely unreported levels of health-damaging air pollution coming out of oil sands operations, these scientists have validated what downwind Indigenous communities have been saying for decades," Stewart added. "This is making people sick, so our governments can and should require these companies to use some of their record-breaking profits to clean up the mess they've made."
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Vatican Rejects 'Doctrine of Discovery', Used to Justify Colonial Conquest and Land Theft
One Native American group hopes the historic move "is more than mere words, but rather is the beginning of a full acknowledgment of the history of oppression and a full accounting of the legacies of colonialism."
Mar 31, 2023
In a historic shift long sought by Indigenous-led activists, the Holy See on Thursday formally repudiated the doctrine of discovery, a dubious legal theory born from a series of 15th-century papal decrees used by colonizers including the United States to legally justify the genocidal conquest of non-Christian peoples and their land.
In a joint statement, the Vatican's departments of culture and education declared that "the church acknowledges that these papal bulls did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of Indigenous peoples" and "therefore repudiates those concepts that fail to recognize the inherent human rights of Indigenous peoples, including what has become known as the legal and political 'doctrine of discovery.'"
"The church is also aware that the contents of these documents were manipulated for political purposes by competing colonial powers in order to justify immoral acts against Indigenous peoples that were carried out, at times, without opposition from ecclesiastical authorities," the statement added. "It is only just to recognize these errors, acknowledge the terrible effects of the assimilation policies and the pain experienced by Indigenous peoples, and ask for pardon."
Indigenous leaders—who for decades demanded the Vatican rescind the discovery doctrine—welcomed the move, while expressing hope that it brings real change.
"On the surface it sounds good, it looks good... but there has to be a fundamental change in attitudes, behavior, laws, and policies from that statement," Ernie Daniels, the former chief of Long Plain First Nation in Manitoba, Canada, told CBC Thursday.
"There's still a mentality out there—they want to assimilate, decimate, terminate, eradicate Indigenous people," added Daniels, who was part of a delegation that met with Pope Francis last year in Rome and Canada.
The pontiff—who is currently hospitalized with a respiratory infection—apologized last July in Alberta for the church's human rights crimes against First Nations and asked for forgiveness "for the wrong done by so many Christians to the Indigenous peoples."
Ghislain Picard, an Innu leader and the regional chief of the Assembly of First Nations for Quebec and Labrador, told CBC that the Vatican's move is mostly symbolic.
"The Vatican seems to be washing its hands of its role in the whole colonization of our lands, and to me it would be so simple to just accept the fact that they played a role," he said. "Reconciliation is a buzzword. But how it impacts current policy is really what's at stake here."
Discovery doctrine is rooted in a trio of papal decrees issued in the second half of the 15th century authorizing the Portuguese and Spanish monarchies to conquer land and enslave people in Africa and the Americas if they were non-Christians and dividing the Americas between the two burgeoning empires.
Nullified by the Vatican in the 16th century, the papal decrees nevertheless underpinned centuries of colonial conquest by Europeans and Euro-Americans.
In 1823, United States Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in Johnson v. M'Intosh that Indigenous people could not sell land to whites because Indians' "power to dispose of the soil at their own will to whomsoever they pleased was denied by the original fundamental principle that discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it."
The precedent set by Johnson was cited as recently as 2005, when then-Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg notoriously cited doctrine of discovery in Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation, an opinion decried by many Native Americans.
In a Thursday interview on Indian Country Today's newscast, Arizona State University law professor Robert Miller, who is Eastern Shawnee, said that "what the church did is an important worldwide educational moment, but it doesn't change the law in any country. It doesn't change titles to land anywhere."
"It's gonna take far more than just the pope repudiating these 600-year-old papal bulls to make real changes for Indigenous peoples," he added.
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'Economic Crime': Cost of Canada's Trans Mountain Pipeline Soars by Billions, Again
"Everybody warned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau if he bought this white elephant pipeline it would turn into a financial and political boondoggle," said one climate campaigner.
Mar 13, 2023
Climate, environmental, and Indigenous advocates in recent days condemned the skyrocketing cost of expanding the Canadian government-owned Trans Mountain oil pipeline, which is now expected to carry a CA$30.9 billion price tag—44% higher than last year's estimate and nearly a six-fold increase from the original appraisal.
Trans Mountain Corporation said Friday that the project—which will add more than 600 miles of new pipeline and will nearly triple existing capacity from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels per day—is currently close to 80% finished and should be completed by the end of the year. The company blamed the project's soaring cost on numerous factors, including floods in British Columbia, supply chain difficulties, inflation, and the discovery of major Indigenous archaeological sites along the pipeline route.
"Everybody warned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau if he bought this white elephant pipeline it would turn into a financial and political boondoggle," Peter McCartney, a climate campaigner at the Wilderness Committee, said in a statement Friday.
"I don't want to hear from any federal official that bold, transformative climate action is too expensive ever again."
In what critics called a betrayal of his purported commitment to tackling the climate emergency, Trudeau's government bought the pipeline from Houston-based Kinder Morgan in 2018 for $4.5 billion.
"Honestly, I really hate to say we told them so because there are far better things we should be doing with over $30 billion than exporting a polluting product the world has agreed to abandon as fast as possible," said McCartney.
"In the last year alone, the price tag for this pipeline—already the most expensive industrial project in Canadian history—has gone up almost $10 billion," McCartney added. "If the Liberal government doesn't abandon this pointless albatross now, how do we know taxpayers won't be looking at even more cost overruns and further delays a year from now?"
Keith Stewart, a senior energy strategist with Greenpeace Canada, told Reuters that the pipeline was "always a disaster from a climate change perspective."
"But this is now an economic crime that has stolen $30 billion of public funds from real climate solutions," he added.
According to the Wilderness Committee:
When Trans Mountain first proposed its expansion in 2012, American company Kinder Morgan estimated the construction costs at $5.4 billion. In 2018, when the federal government bought the pipeline it had a forecast price tag of $9.6 billion, on top of the $4.5 billion purchase. Last year, the company announced costs had risen to $21.4 billion, and now it predicts it will cost $30.9 billion in total to finish the project with about a year left to go. That means the price of this pipeline has ballooned almost six times.
"How deeply ironic it is for this fossil fuel company that climate disasters have led construction costs to spiral out of control," McCartney said. "I don't want to hear from any federal official that bold, transformative climate action is too expensive ever again."
According to the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, at least 58 Indigenous sites—including former villages and burial grounds—were destroyed during the pipeline's construction in the early 1950s.
Completed in 1953, the Trans Mountain Pipeline carries crude tar sands oil, often called the world's dirtiest, over 700 miles from Alberta to the British Columbian coast. Activists have urged the Canadian government to cancel the expansion, arguing that it will further fuel the climate emergency, threaten the environment, and desecrate sacred Indigenous lands. Additionally, pipeline workers sometimes murder, rape, traffic, and perpetrate other crimes against First Nations women, girls, and two-spirit people.
On the same day Trans Mountain Corporation announced the revised estimate for the pipeline's cost, Calí Tzay, the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, ended a 10-day visit to Canada and published a report linking the project to human rights abuses.
"A large number of megaprojects in Indigenous territories proceed without good faith consultation and in the absence of obtaining Indigenous peoples' free, prior, and informed consent as, in the case of Trans Mountain Pipeline," Tzay wrote. "I am also concerned about the ongoing militarization of Indigenous lands and the criminalization of Indigenous human rights defenders resisting the Trans Mountain and Coastal GasLink pipelines in British Columbia."
"I urge the government of Canada to end these violations," Tzay added, "and to adopt adequate measures to guarantee Indigenous peoples' right to consultation and free, prior, and informed consent, and their rights to lands, territories, and resources."
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Canada's Big Banks Are Secretly Supporting Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion
"Once again, we see that Canadian banks are leading the world in financing climate-destructive, Indigenous rights-violating projects," said one campaigner.
May 31, 2022
An analysis published Tuesday revealed that six of Canada's largest banks are financing the construction of the Trans Mountain tar sands pipeline expansion, partially fulfilling a promise by the center-left government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to secure private funding for the highly controversial project while calling into question the administration's pledge to cap oil and gas emissions.
"Our big fossil banks and the federal government have been working in tandem for a long time behind the scenes."
Based on data from Bloomberg Terminal, the grassroots advocacy group Stand.earth found that the banks--TD Securities, RBC Capital Markets, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, BMO Capital Markets, Scotiabank, and National Bank of Canada--quietly agreed last month to lend CAD $10 billion (U.S. $7.9 billion) to Trans Mountain Corporation after the country's Department of Finance guaranteed taxpayers would foot the bill if anything went wrong.
The government then waited three weeks to inform the public of the deal and has refused to confirm who is behind the loan.
"Once again, we see that Canadian banks are leading the world in financing climate-destructive, Indigenous rights-violating projects like the Trans Mountain pipeline and tanker project," Stand.earth climate finance director Richard Brooks said in a statement. "It's time for them to choose sides--are you going to help us reach our national climate goals, or do everything possible to hold us back?"
The approximately 1,150-kilometer (715-mile) pipeline, which was completed in 1953, is owned by the Canadian government through its Trans Mountain Corporation and carries crude oil from the tar sands of Alberta to the British Columbian coast. Tar sands oil is often called the world's dirtiest.
The expansion will add 980 kilometers (609 miles) of new pipeline, nearly tripling its carrying capacity from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels per day, according to the crown corporation.
Climate activists have called on the Canadian government to cancel the expansion, arguing that in addition to exacerbating the climate emergency and threatening the environment, it desecrates sacred Indigenous lands, and workers housed in "man camps" sometimes murder, rape, traffic, and perpetrate other crimes against First Nations women, girls, and two-spirit people.
Campaigners note that Trudeau--who has often come under fire for his fossil fuel-friendly policies--pledged at last year's United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland to lower Canada's carbon footprint by committing to a cap on emissions from the country's oil and gas industry.
According to the federal agency Statistics Canada, oil and gas extraction contributes about 5% to the country's gross domestic product, and over 20% of the provincial economies of Alberta and Newfoundland and Labrador. Canada is the largest single source of U.S. imported petroleum and refined products.
All six of the banks named in the new report also claim they are committed to climate action. TD, for example, declares it is "continually working to embed responsible business practices," including "working toward achieving our target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions associated with our operations and financing activities by 2050," while CIBC says it is "committed to collaborating with carbon-intensive sectors for a successful transition to net-zero" and Scotiabank proclaims it is "ensuring we are lowering our environmental footprint in our operations."
Canadian taxpayers have already contributed CAD $17 billion (U.S. $13.3 billion) toward the Trans Mountain pipeline, which the government purchased from Texas-based energy infrastructure giant Kinder Morgan in 2018. Earlier this year, Canadian Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland promised not to spend any more public money building on the project.
In February, the government announced that the pipeline's price is expected to nearly double to over $21 billion. Other analyses suggest the cost could be even higher.
"Clearly our big fossil banks and the federal government have been working in tandem for a long time behind the scenes, with no oversight or scrutiny by any members of the public, despite all Canadians owning this pipeline," Brooks said Tuesday. "Why have they been so secretive? Should we not have transparency at Canadian crown corporations when we are all on the hook for this massive, climate regressive, Indigenous rights-violating investment?"
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First Nations Land Defenders File Submission to UN Human Rights Council
"Wet'suwet'en is an international frontline to protect the rights of Indigenous peoples and to prevent climate change."
Feb 07, 2022
First Nations land defenders on Monday filed a submission to the United Nations detailing how their territory and human rights are being violated by Canadian and British Columbian authorities in service of a fossil fuel corporation's gas pipeline.
"We are intimidated and surveilled by armed RCMP, smeared as terrorists, and dragged through colonial courts. This is the reality of Canada."
The submission to the United Nations Human Rights Council was filed by the Gidimt'en--one of the five clans of the Wet'suwet'en Nation--who for years have been fighting to stop the construction of Coastal GasLink's pipeline through their territory in northern British Columbia.
The filing notes that "ongoing human rights violations, militarization of Wet'suwet'en lands, forcible removal and criminalization of peaceful land defenders, and irreparable harm due to industrial destruction of Wet'suwet'en lands and cultural sites are occurring despite declarations by federal and provincial governments for reconciliation with Indigenous peoples."
All five Wet'suwet'en clans oppose the pipeline, which is being built on tribal land that the Canadian Supreme Court acknowledges as unceded. Canadian authorities, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), have answered nonviolent Wet'suwet'en land defense with heavily armed officers employing heavy-handed removal tactics.
Scores of Wet'suwet'en land defenders, including four hereditary chiefs, have been arrested and charged, as have journalists and legal observers. In December, Coastal GasLink dropped charges against two journalists who were arrested while covering a militarized police raid last November 19.
More than 30 land defenders are scheduled to appear in the British Columbian Supreme Court in Prince George, built on the site of a burned Lheidli T'enneh village, next week.
Meanwhile, construction continues on the 416-mile pipeline, which will carry gas from Michif Piiyii (Metis) territory in northeastern British Columbia to an export terminal in coastal Kitimat, on the land of the xa'isla wawis (Haisla) people.
"By deploying legal, political, and economic tactics to violate our rights, Canada and B.C. are contravening the spirit of reconciliation, as well as their binding obligations to Indigenous law, Canadian constitutional law, UNDRIP, and international law," the Gidimt'en submission states, referring to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Gidimt'en Checkpoint spokesperson Sleydo' said in a statement that "we urge the United Nations to conduct a field visit to Wet'suwet'en territory because Canada and B.C. have not withdrawn RCMP from our territory and have not suspended Coastal GasLink's permits, despite the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination calling on them to do so."
"Wet'suwet'en is an international frontline to protect the rights of Indigenous peoples and to prevent climate change," she added. "Yet we are intimidated and surveilled by armed RCMP, smeared as terrorists, and dragged through colonial courts. This is the reality of Canada."
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'We Will Not Stop': First Nations Land Defenders Take Direct Action Against Trans Mountain Pipeline
"Today we stand on unceded, unsurrendered, illegally occupied Secwepemc land to show that we will not stop until the pipeline is terminated and the land is returned to the rightful title holders."
Apr 03, 2021
A pair of Indigenous land defenders locked themselves to equipment at a fossil fuel pumping station in British Columbia on Saturday, vowing to continune resisting a government-owned oil pipeline that is harming the climate, the environment, and First Nations peoples whose unceded lands it traverses.
"We have never provided and will never provide our collective free, prior, and informed consent--the minimal international standard--to the Trans Mountain Pipeline Project."
--Tiny House Warriors
The pipeline protesters--self-described on social media as "accomplices" of the Braided Warriors and Tiny House Warriors--locked themselves to a crane at Trans Mountain Corporation's Blue River pumping station.
The Trans Mountain Pipeline--which is owned by the Canadian government through subsidiary Trans Mountain Corporation--carries crude oil from the tar sands of Alberta to the British Columbian coast. It is widely considered the world's dirtiest oil.
In addition to the harm done to the climate and environment, the pipeline has grave social costs. According to First Nations advocates, it desecrates sacred Indigenous land, and transient workers housed in man camps are often perpetrators of crimes against Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people. Murder, rape, human trafficking, and other crimes abound, contributing to the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people (MMIWG2S).
Secwepemc land defenders have strategically built tiny houses along the route of the 518 km (321 mile) pipeline "to assert Secwepemc law and jurisdiction and block access to this pipeline."
"We have never provided and will never provide our collective free, prior, and informed consent--the minimal international standard--to the Trans Mountain Pipeline Project," the Tiny House Warriors website declares. "The Tiny House Warrior movement is the start of re-establishing village sites and asserting our authority over our unceded territories."
Kanahus Manuel, a Secwepemc land defender and Tiny House Warrior, told The Sparrow Project--a nonprofit grassroots public interest newswire focused on amplifying stories from struggles for social, economic, racial, and environmental justice--that Trans Mountain does "not not have consent from the Secwepemc and failure to recognize Secwepemc title, land rights, and Indigenous jurisdiction will only result in more conflict, direct actions, blockades, and Indigenous land occupations, which will increase the risks and economic uncertainty for Trans Mountain and its construction deadlines."
The Braided Warriors, an Indigenous organization that promotes First Nations rights and sovereignty in the Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish, and Musqueam territories, said on its Instagram page that "we are in solidarity with the Secwepemc people in their fight to stop foreign invasion of their lands and protect their lands, waters, animals, and peoples."
"It is our role to be accomplices to Indigenous land defenders and put ourselves on the line to stop the ongoing colonization of Indigenous territories and peoples."
--Braided Warriors
"It is our role to be accomplices to Indigenous land defenders and put ourselves on the line to stop the ongoing colonization of Indigenous territories and peoples," said Braided Warriors. "This pipeline will affect all of us and all future generations, but first and foremost will impact the nations and peoples along this route, including Secwepemc people."
"Today we stand on unceded, unsurrendered, illegally occupied Secwepemc land to show that we will not stop until the pipeline is terminated and the land is returned to the rightful title holders," they added.
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Anger and Confusion After Facebook Suspends Environmental and Indigenous Groups' Accounts Ahead of Pipeline Protest
"Facebook is actively suppressing those who oppose fascism and the colonial capitalists," said one First Nations activist.
Sep 22, 2020
Environmental groups reacted with confusion and anger after Facebook temporarily suspended their accounts over the weekend, just days after the social media giant announced an initiative aimed at combating climate misinformation.
The Guardian reports some of the largest and most respected progressive groups--including Greenpeace USA, Rainforest Action Network, and Climate Hawks Vote--were among the hundreds of accounts of Indigenous, climate, and social justice organizations that Facebook suspended.
"Calls for violence by militias in Kenosha are allowed to persist on Facebook, yet, we are banned and receive threats for posting a petition."
--Delee Nikal, Wet'suwet'en member
According to Greenpeace USA, other affected groups include: Presente.org, Rising Tide North America, Seeding Sovereignty, Stand.earth, United For Respect, Wet'suwet'en Access Point on Gidimt'en Territory, Wet'suwet'en Solidarity U.K., and many others.
Greenpeace said the affected people and organizations were informed that they would be blocked from posting on Facebook for three days due to violations described as "copyright infringement." As of Monday, dozens of the affetced accounts had not been reinstated, the group said.
Facebook explained in a statement to The Guardian that the affected accounts had been "mistakenly removed" by its systems, and that "they have since been restored, and we've lifted any limits imposed on identified profiles."
All of the affected accounts have one thing in common: the groups or individuals all took part in a May 2019 Facebook event targeting KKR & Co., a U.S. private equity firm and majority funder of the 416-mile (670 km) Coastal GasLink pipeline being built in northern British Columbia. Greenpeace said that the affected accounts were blocked a day ahead of another scheduled online protest against KKR.
"We are not surprised by the actions that Facebook has taken," Delee Nikal, a Wet'suwet'en band member of the Gitdimt'en clan from the Witset First Nation, said in response to the suspensions. "This once again exposes the white supremacy inherent in the system. Videos of extreme violence, alt-right views, and calls for violence by militias in Kenosha, Wisconsin, are allowed to persist on Facebook, yet we are banned and receive threats for permanent removal, for posting an online petition."
"Facebook is actively suppressing those who oppose facism and the colonial capitalists," Nikal continued. "We have to remember this also shows the power that we have as a collective: Our voices were heard by KKR and it was threatened enough to take legal action. What we are doing is working. The defund actions will continue. We will continue to live on our territories as we always have and protect our territories for future generations."
Greenpeace USA executive director Annie Leonard said in a statement that "fossil fuel companies and their funders will use every tool in their toolbox to attempt to silence us."
"But they are struggling to counter the Indigenous-led resistance to end our addiction to oil and gas and instead respect Indigenous sovereignty," she continued. "We are fighting drawn-out and expensive legal battles, laws that make righteous protest illegal, and aggressive law enforcement in response to peaceful protest."
"Enlisting powerful and underregulated tech giants to do their bidding and silence dissent might be the latest tool, but it is no match for our movement," Leonard added.
The Coastal GasLink pipeline has drawn intense opposition from many Wet'suwet'en First Nations people, whose territory it will cross. Some Wet'suwet'en support the project.
Over the past two years, Wet'suwet'en Earth protectors have been repeatedly attacked by Canadian authorities protecting pipeline interests, despite a 1997 Canadian Supreme Court ruling affirming that the Wet'suwet'en had not given up their homeland in the province, even after centuries of European settler colonization and sometimes violent dispossession.
"The pipeline is set to cut through sovereign Wet'suwet'en land, defiantly ignoring assertions from the hereditary chiefs of their rights, title, and consent for the project," said Greenpeace. "The project would lock us into decades of increased fracked gas and the impacts to climate, air, water and the risks posed to Indigenous girls, women, and two-spirit people by man camps built along the route."
Dozens of Wet'suwet'en people and their allies have also been arrested at solidarity protests across Canada that have affected the nation's rail transportation.
The Facebook suspensions came just a few days after the company launched a "climate science information center" with the goal of "tackling climate misinformation." However, some critics say the company has not done enough to truly combat climate change denialism, with some activists citing a 2018 video denying that human activity is causing global heating that was viewed five million times on Facebook.
Facebook has also been accused of designating false or questionable articles and posts about climate change as "opinion," exempting them from being blocked by the company's fact-checkers.
"Actions speak louder than words and once again Facebook has taken actions that are in stark contrast to public statements from the company," Elizabeth Jardim, senior corporate campaigner at Greenpeace USA, told The Guardian.
Facebook has also come under fire in recent months for marking factual articles and posts about the coronavirus pandemic as "spam," and for censoring--and not censoring--certain content.
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Swiss Company Ditches 'Climate-Wrecking' Trans Mountain Pipeline
"Zurich's decision to walk away from the pipeline just underlines how risky this project has become."
Jul 23, 2020
Climate campaigners and Indigenous activists celebrated after reporting from Reuters revealed on Wednesday that the Swiss insurance giant Zurich will soon stop providing coverage to the Canadian government-owned Trans Mountain Pipeline, increasing the pressure on other insurers to also ditch the existing tar sands pipeline and long-delayed expansion project.
"Insurers should protect us from risk, not accelerate climate change."
--Ross Hammond,
The Sunrise Project and Insure Our Future
"Zurich has done the right thing by refusing to insure the Trans Mountain Pipeline any longer. Hopefully Liberty Mutual and the other companies insuring it do the right thing before the end of August and drop it too," Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, president of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, said in a statement Thursday.
"Any company insuring Trans Mountain is complicit in violations of Indigenous rights," he explained, "because the proposed pipeline expansion does not have the consent of all impacted First Nations along the route."
"Zurich's decision to drop Trans Mountain demonstrates that it's waking up the risks of this toxic project to Indigenous land rights, local ecosystems, and the planet," said Elana Sulakshana, energy finance campaigner at Rainforest Action Network (RAN).
The decades-old pipeline has a long history of spills--including one at a pump station in British Columbia last month--and Indigenous groups and climate campaigners have spent years in court fighting against the expansion project known as TMX.
"Some of Zuirch's peers in the global insurance industry are also taking note, as eight companies now have policies that limit or end insurance coverage for tar sands," said Sulakshana. "It's way past time for Liberty Mutual and Chubb to follow suit."
Liberty Mutual is a top target of the Stop the Money Pipeline campaign, which was launched in January by a coalition of climate, youth, and Indigenous groups to pressure banks, insurers, and asset managers to "stop financing fossil fuels and deforestation and start respecting human rights and Indigenous sovereignty."
As Sulakshana explained in an op-ed for Common Dreams earlier this month, Trans Mountain's insurance policy is up at the end of August, so environmental advocacy groups, First Nations, and insurance campaigners have been calling on the 11 insurers that currently cover Trans Mountain to:
- Publicly commit to not renew their insurance policy for Trans Mountain for 2020-21;
- Moving forward, rule out insurance for all tar sands extraction and transport projects and companies;
- Adopt a policy to ensure that projects and companies they insure have obtained the Free, Prior, and Informed Consent of impacted communities.
The insurers for the pipeline that she listed are Zurich (Switzerland); Lloyd's (U.K.), Liberty Mutual (U.S.); Chubb (U.S.); AIG (U.S.), WR Berkley (U.S.); Starr (U.S.), Stewart Specialty Risk Underwriting (Canada); Energy Insurance Mutual (U.S.); Temple Insurance (Germany), a Canadian member of the Munich Re group; and HDI (Germany), which is owned by Talanx/Hannover Re.
"In late June, Talanx indicated that it already dropped the pipeline, and Munich Re signaled that it will not renew its policy," Sulakshana noted.
Reuters reported Wednesday that "Munich Re said it would review the contract given its new underwriting guideline on oil sands."
While a spokesperson for Zurich declined to comment on the Reuters report, a Trans Mountain spokesperson told the news agency that the Swiss insurer has decided not to renew its policy. According to Reuters:
The Trans Mountain Pipeline's annual liability insurance contract, dated August 2019 but filed with the Canada Energy Regulator on April 30, 2020, had shown Zurich was the lead insurer for the pipeline.
The insurance, which provides $508 million of cover, runs to August 2020, the filing showed.
Zurich was the sole insurer for the first $8 million of potential insurance payouts and the company provided a total of $300 million in cover with other insurers, the 2019-20 energy regulatory filing showed.
Despite Zurich's decision, the Trans Mountain spokesperson said that "there remains adequate capacity in the market to meet Trans Mountain's insurance needs and our renewal." Given that other insurers still plan to provide coverage, campaigners are maintaining pressure on both companies and the Canadian government to reconsider enabling the pipeline to continue operating and expanding.
"Insurers should protect us from risk, not accelerate climate change," Ross Hammond of the Sunrise Project and Insure Our Future wrote in a tweet welcoming the Swiss company's move.
"The Trans Mountain Pipeline puts communities, the climate, and billions of dollars in Canadian taxpayers' money at risk," said Sven Biggs, Canadian Oil and Gas Program director at Stand.earth. "Zurich's decision to walk away from the pipeline just underlines how risky this project has become."
Biggs added that "it's time for the Trudeau government to take another look at this project, and ask if this is the right time to spend over $10 billion on a pipeline that is rapidly losing the support of the financial sector."
The Canadian arm of 350.org, in a tweet Wednesday, put the insurer's renewal decision in the context of not only the climate emergency but also the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and campaigners' calls for a just recovery from the public health crisis.
Nearly 200 groups in Canada including 350.org unveiled their demands for a just recovery in late May, arguing that "recovery efforts must not take us backward; they must accelerate the transition towards a more healthy, sustainable, and equitable society."
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Who's Insuring the Trans Mountain Pipeline?
A new campaign is demanding these companies respect Indigenous rights and drop their coverage
Jul 04, 2020
Rainforest Action Network recently uncovered a document that lists the 11 companies that are currently insuring the controversial Trans Mountain tar sands pipeline in Canada. These global insurance giants are providing more than USD$500 million in coverage for the massive risks of the existing Trans Mountain pipeline, and they're also lined up to cover the expansion project.
The existing Trans Mountain pipeline is a major environmental and public health hazard with a long history of disastrous spills. Earlier this month, 50,000 gallons of crude oil spilled from a pump station located above an aquifer that supplies the Sumas First Nation with drinking water.
The Trans Mountain Expansion Project would multiply these risks tremendously. Though it is officially called an "expansion," this is no minor renovation. The Canadian government, which owns Trans Mountain, is attempting to build a parallel pipeline that would ship more than 890,000 barrels per year of highly-polluting tar sands crude oil to the coast of British Columbia.
For more than a decade, the expansion of Trans Mountain has been delayed in the face of powerful, Indigenous-led resistance on the ground and in the courts. It has not secured the Free, Prior, and Informed Consent of Indigenous communities that are directly in the pipeline's route. Right now, the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, Squamish Nation, and Coldwater Indian Band are actively engaged in legal challenges on the project, and land defenders are asserting their rights and title along the route.
Furthermore, pushing forward this project flies in the face of Canada's commitment to cut emissions in line with the Paris Agreement. To keep global warming under 1.5oC, we must stop expanding tar sands - and all fossil fuels - and instead invest in a just transition to phase out existing operations.
In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, the government and corporations are doubling down on their destructive plans to build new fossil fuel projects. Bulldozers that are laying the initial pipe on Trans Mountain have not quieted, even though this construction poses major risks to Indigenous and rural communities in its path, as well as workers that are housed together in close quarters. In Alberta, viral outbreaks have been linked to man camps at tar sands extraction sites, and yet the province's energy minister proclaimed that now is a great time to construct a pipeline, due to social distancing protocols that limit public protest.
The risks of these pipelines are so great that under federal law, the current pipeline and its expansion are not able to transport any oil without insurance. So if we can stop the flow of insurance money, we can stop the flow of oil.
We're ramping up the pressure on the insurance companies that are providing critical financial support.
Who's insuring the pipeline? (2019-2020)
Here's the list of insurance companies that are providing coverage from August 2019 through August 2020:
- Zurich (Switzerland)
- Lloyd's (UK)
- Liberty Mutual (US)
- Chubb (US)
- AIG (US)
- WR Berkley (US)
- Starr (US)
- Stewart Specialty Risk Underwriting (Canada)
- Energy Insurance Mutual (US)
- Temple Insurance (Germany), a Canadian member of the Munich Re group
- HDI (Germany), which is owned by Talanx / Hannover Re
These insurance policies are being arranged by the biggest insurance broker in the world: Marsh. Fun fact: Marsh is also currently under fire for facilitating insurance for the Adani Carmicheal coal mine in Australia.
Trans Mountain's insurance policy is up at the end of August, so we are urgently calling on these companies to:
- Publicly commit to not renew their insurance policy for Trans Mountain for 2020-21;
- Moving forward, rule out insurance for all tar sands extraction and transport projects and companies;
- Adopt a policy to ensure that projects and companies they insure have obtained the Free, Prior, and Informed Consent of impacted communities.
We've made some progress. In late June, Talanx indicated that it already dropped the pipeline, and Munich Re signaled that it will not renew its policy. These two German insurers recently adopted policies restricting tar sands business.
A global coalition of environmental NGOs, First Nations, and insurance campaigners is demanding that the rest of Trans Mountain's insurers follow suit and stop being complicit in the violation of Indigenous rights, spread of COVID-19, and the desecration of sacred waterways and the global climate.
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