Lapis Magazine

Intro to Teach-In on Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Economic Globalization by Jerry Mander

A penetrating analysis of the short-term thinking that threatens to destroy the world’s last remaining areas of unexploited nature. The indigenous peoples inhabit many of these regions and they are deeply committed to upholding their stewardship of their ancient lands despite huge economic, legal and political pressure.

Jerry Mander, Founder and Board Member of the International Forum on Globalization (www.ifg.org), and Senior Fellow at the Public Media Center, introduces the Teach-In on Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Economic Globalization, A Celebration of Indigenous Sovereignty: Victories, Rights & Cultures, that took place at Hunter College, NYC, on November 18, 2006.

The event was jointly presented by the International Forum on Globalization and the Tebtebba Foundation (Indigenous Peoples' International Centre for Policy Research and Education). Tebtebba, a word used by the indigenous Kankana-ey Igorots of the Northern Philippines, refers to a process of collectively discussing issues and presenting diverse views with the aim of reaching agreements, common positions, and concerted actions.

The following article is a transcription of his talk at the event.

Thanks so much, Ralph [ed.: Ralph White, co-founder of the New York Open Center and Editor of Lapis Magazine Online], and thanks to Cooper Union, and thanks to all our co-sponsors. We’re so happy to be here in this place.

I’m standing at the Lincoln podium, where Abraham Lincoln announced his presidency in the 1860’s, his run for the presidency. Of course, that was at a time when everything west of the Mississippi, or many things west of the Mississippi, were still Indian country and, arguably, some people may feel that it should have remained that way.

I have the high honor of being able to kick this event off and set a context for the nine- or ten-hour marathon today, focused on Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Economic Globalization.

This is an amazing, complex, multifaceted story with lots of fast-breaking news. It will be told by 35 of the leading players in local situations from most continents on the planet. We will get updates in the battle going on here in New York right now at the United Nations, over passage of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples – a profoundly important document in my view – that has been the source of struggle for 13 years now. But it just may get passed this week. You’ll hear a lot more about it and Vicky [ed.: Victoria Tauli-Corpuz] will talk about it very shortly [ed.: see note regarding Declaration at end of article].

In these nine hours, we’ll only scratch the surface unfortunately, but we’d better get going. So, I’m going to start with some basic facts. No communities of people on this earth have been more negatively impacted by the world’s global economic system of today, than the world’s remaining 350 million indigenous peoples. And no communities of peoples have so courageously and lately, successfully, resisted these invasions and pressures. It is our central purpose with this event today to convey both the scale of the problem that they face and the successes and visions of the resistance, and to try to stimulate non-indigenous support for these movements.

Here’s the root of the problem: economic globalization, which some people see as the modern-day version of the old global colonialism of the past 500 years since Columbus, though a more “ramped up,” higher-speed version. But the economic model is of the global corporations and central globalization institutions, like the World Trade Organization, World Bank and others that drive this machine. These global corporations and institutions literally cannot survive without an always-increasing growth and profit. This growth itself depends on an ever-increasing supply of the world’s remaining resources, much of which, unfortunately, is on indigenous lands: oil, natural gas, coal, uranium, timber, minerals of every kind, from copper, zinc, lead to gold, and now coltan [ed.: the ore for tantalum, used for consumer electronic products] for our computers, fish from rivers and seas now in a very depleted state, genetic diversity from our wilderness regions for our pharmaceutical industries, fresh water (the world is fast running out of that), arable lands for massive export-oriented industrial agricultural experiments.

These resources are the basic building blocks for global corporate industrial activity in the modern world. Without them they can’t keep making more and more “stuff” for consumers and industrial markets. They can’t grow and the system starts to fail. A globalized corporate system also requires infrastructural development in pristine areas; new roads, pipelines, massive dams, electricity grids, airports, seaports are needed to take the resources and carry them across vast landscapes and oceans and factories and markets in still other countries – that’s globalization.

Without this growing rate of resource extraction, and modern global transport polluting the oceans, the macroeconomic model we call economic globalization really can’t live. In fact, the whole architecture of the globalization model is built upon a really rickety platform requiring never-ending exponential growth in resource use, which is actually impossible on a finite, quite-small planet.

The idea of constantly expanding this activity and doing it forever is absurd on its face and it takes the highest degree of denial and alienation and a lot of misguided economics courses (in universities like at Columbia where I went to school) to even imagine that it could work in timeframe but the very, very short run. But the corporate timeframe is the very, very short run. Short-term profits and growth are what keep corporate investors happy. In the long run it can’t continue. We already see the beginning of the end in such things as climate breakdown and peak oil and we’re also seeing other spectacular declines in many of the world’s key resources, leading to fierce global competition over the remaining supplies, even wars, as in Iraq over oil and elsewhere soon over water and land. The limits of the planet are becoming visible.

To stake the future of all life on Earth on such a clearly unsustainable model is ridiculous, ecologically disastrous and a little bit insane. But for indigenous peoples, the situation is particularly serious and very immediate, because in the world today, a very high percentage (some believe at least 50%) of the remaining critical resources in the world are found on indigenous lands, places where native peoples have lived successfully for centuries or longer. And so now, even more than in past colonial contexts, indigenous peoples are direct targets for corporate resource raiders. That’s one of the prime focuses of this event today and also this book Paradigm Wars that Vicki and I edited, that’s just been released as well. (Purchase Paradigm Wars here.)

These are the roots of some very serious conflicts: invasions, forced removals, cultural and political assaults and, very often, extreme violence. You could characterize all this as “resource wars.” But in our new report we’re calling it “paradigm wars,” deeply based in opposite understandings of how human beings should be living on the Earth. There’s a great and tragic paradox here: the very reason that native people have become such targets for corporate resource exploration is exactly because indigenous peoples have been so successful over millennia in maintaining traditions, cultures, economies, philosophies and practices that are not built upon some ideology of rapid expansion, economic growth or short-term profit-seeking or the gaining of individual personal wealth.

Generally speaking, intact indigenous cultures have not sought to mine every last square inch of the natural world where they live; nor do they ship mountains of resources like logs or oil across oceans to foreign markets. Indigenous peoples, even when generally very different from each other, have all tended toward philosophies and economic formulas that include such primary values as these:

• The central importance of community values, collective ownership, collective governance, above individualistic values and personal acquisition;

• Integration, rather than alienation from the natural world;

• Reciprocal relations with nature, economies of limits and balance.

Those traditional indigenous values and others are diametrically opposite to those of the dominant society – so even after millennia of living in one place, nature’s resources are still there. But to global corporate players these resources call like sirens as corporate existence depends upon them.

That’s the bad news. Here’s the good news: native peoples are now strongly resisting and increasingly with great success. And so, in the Amazon jungles and the mountains of the Andes, where the issues may be oil or minerals or forests or pipelines and infrastructure development; in the tundras of the far North, where it’s oil, gas, minerals and climate change; or in the forests of Canada and the central plains of Alberta where oil is the issue; as well as in Siberia and Indonesia or on the small islands of the Pacific where militarism, ocean exploitation, tourism and climate change may be the issues; or in the agricultural lands of the Philippines, Guatemala, Mexico and the US; and in the grasslands of Africa, where diamonds are an issue (now unfortunately also where coltan is found); in all these places, we find native peoples facing grave threats to their lands, forests, wildlife, minerals, waters and themselves, but actively resisting and battling back and succeeding in many cases.

Remarkably, because of their growing convictions and with the support of amazing new collaborations among indigenous groups of different regions, as you’ll hear about today, and with added help of indigenous and non-indigenous organizations, indigenous peoples are actively trying to reverse this tide.

OK, what are they asking for? You’ll hear a lot about that today. I’ll just summarize by saying native peoples are demanding a few key things:

• Confirmation of their rights to full sovereignty, both internal and external, and the rights to self-governance in all cases;

• For the rights to collective ownership and processes;

• They seek protections for a recovery of the languages, cultural and religious practices and artifacts that may have been invaded;

• And for control of their resources and traditional knowledge and science;

• But arguably, the single most important demand of indigenous peoples of the Earth right now, is to globally codify their control of all decisions about their ancestral lands and the rights to determine when, and if ever, the resource removal or any other economic, cultural or political intrusion is to be allowed, and under whose terms.

This is the so-called “Right of Free Prior and Informed Consent,” presently denied in most parts of the world. This single issue is the basis for hundreds of struggles in domestic and international contexts. All of these points are extensively discussed in the book and will be discussed today, but they are also very important ingredients of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples being fiercely debated up the street [ed.: UN headquarters are located less than two miles north of Cooper Union, the site of this forum].

The draft Declaration is a very profound document with remarkable political concepts including some of those that I named, such as collective governance, prior rights, free prior and informed consent. It has been thought about for thirteen years and now is on the verge of passage at the UN, except for the fierce opposition of guess who, John Bolton, as well as the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada (that otherwise wonderful human-rights Mecca), as well as some of the poorest countries of the world who are in an unfortunate position of getting rapidly bought off or at least people are trying to buy them off. We’ll come back to this often in the discussion and I know Vicki’s going to talk about it.

Finally, there are also amazing stories about political successes, particularly in such places as South America. That’s where indigenous resistance has been one of the most important factors in a continent-wide political shift that is truly beginning to shake the world and we have some substantial delegations from throughout South America here with us today, as well as Central America.

In only the last five or six years, we have seen new governments elected on anti-globalization platforms in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Uruguay and, of course, Bolivia, where indigenous uprisings against water privatization and the export of natural gas to the US, and for recognition of their agricultural needs, has led to an indigenous farmer becoming the president, Evo Morales, and we have a representative of that government here on the panel today.

In Ecuador, several presidents have lately been overturned largely by actions of indigenous peoples and there are shifts taking place in Peru and in Central America. When George Bush came down to sell the FTAA, he was basically laughed off the continent. And of course, Mexico, where the Mayan Zapatista uprising changed the political culture in that country profoundly. It arguably led directly to the election of Mr. Obrador, a few months ago, though he was denied his election in the manner of Bush vs. Gore.

Not everything’s been solved for indigenous peoples’ interests in any of these places, but the first major steps have been taken. Indigenous mobilizations against the excesses of globalization have been key factors in the changes of political power that are growing in these countries – changes to regional and local political systems as opposed to global. The ideas of local self-sufficiency and local control – these have all been greatly influenced by indigenous uprisings and indigenous philosophies, albeit in some places more than others.

As the ecological limits of the planet become ever more clear, the alternative visions of self-reliant, localized land-based systems as provided by indigenous economic, political and cultural forums will become ever more persuasive and viable. So, in my personal view, judging from the great tangible shifts in the world lately against the institutions of corporate globalization, the handwriting is on the wall: South America is only the first continent on the Earth to begin turning away from a failing globalization model, but it’s not the last. Soon all regions will be seeking alternative sets of practices that stand a better chance for a sustainable social, political and ecological future.

The role of indigenous peoples in this process is crucial, and it’s a main purpose of this event to make that clear. My personal plea is that all communities of activists will recognize that their own issues will be benefited if the indigenous struggles are included as their own. We must actively support these movements, and we must help fight for the passage of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, which sets a new high standard for international recognition and behavior. Some people say that declarations like that are not important as they have no real enforcement powers. If they are not important, why are John Bolton and the US Government and all these other governments fighting so hard to try to kill it?

So, thank you so much for coming and helping us to get this day launched. And now I’m going to turn it over to Victoria Tauli-Corpuz. Thank you so much.

+ + +

Note [the following statement is taken directly from www.iwgia.org/sw248.asp, where readers can find the final Declaration]: With an overwhelming majority of 143 votes in favor, only 4 negative votes cast (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United States) and 11 abstentions, the United Nations General Assembly (GA) adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples on September 13, 2007. The Declaration has been negotiated through more than 20 years between nation-states and Indigenous Peoples. Les Malezer, Chair of the International Indigenous Peoples' Caucus, welcomed the adoption of the Declaration in a statement to the General Assembly:

"The Declaration does not represent solely the viewpoint of the United Nations, nor does it represent solely the viewpoint of the Indigenous Peoples. It is a Declaration which combines our views and interests and which sets the framework for the future. It is a tool for peace and justice, based upon mutual recognition and mutual respect."

It was expected that the Declaration would be finally adopted by the General Assembly in November 2006. However, at this late stage it emerged that some African States had serious difficulties with the text of the Declaration and were not prepared to accept the recommendation made by the Human Rights Council to adopt the Declaration. Namibia presented an amending resolution, which called for the vote on the Declaration to be deferred to allow more consideration. To the great surprise of all this resolution was adopted, and the final vote on the adoption of the Declaration thus postponed.

Between Novermber 2006 and  September 2007, when the Declaration was finally adopted by the UN General Assemby, indigenous peoples and states supporting the Declaration have engaged in intense dialogue with African states in an attempt to clarify the doubts, and promote the adoption of the Declaration. In early September 2007, an agreement was reached between the co-sponsors of the Declaration and the African Group of States on nine amendments to the text as adopted by the Human Rights Council in June 2006. This agreement, and the amended text, formed the basis for the draft resolution on adoption of the Declaration.