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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."
\u201cDo you know how huge this is???!!!! The Doctrine of Discovery legalized the Catholic Church and European colonists to loot, kill Indians and claim conquest to Native lands!!! Now that this has happened!!!!! It\u2019s freakin huge!!! \nFreedom, recompense, https://t.co/4K7DySAo9n\u2026\u201d— Brandi Morin (@Brandi Morin) 1680192993
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.
\u201cToday, the Vatican announced the repudiation of its centuries-old Doctrine of Discovery, which was used to justify colonization and land theft across the globe. NCAI responded to the announcement. Read full statement: https://t.co/CxI1Vrsgpx\u201d— National Congress of American Indians (@National Congress of American Indians) 1680217681
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."
\u201c"The Doctrine of Discovery was a papal statement and not a justification to allow Canada to unilaterally claim sovereignty over our peoples and our lands and commit genocide. And today, the Vatican finally said what our peoples have always known,\u201d said FSIN Chief Bobby Cameron.\u201d— FSIN (@FSIN) 1680189634
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."
\u201cWATCH: ASU Law Professor Robert Miller calls the repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery an important worldwide moment, saying "but it doesn't change the law in any country."\u201d— ICT (@ICT) 1680221937
"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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