'Civilization', 'progress', 'development', 'modernity'. . . These are all concepts and practices that have been used and abused to justify removing indigenous people from their land.
The reason? More often than not, it has been to access and exploit the natural resources on or under indigenous territory. These resources include gold, silver, rubber, oil, gas, timber, water etc.
But how do you remove people from their land if they refuse to go? Over the years, governments, companies and others, or those doing their dirty work, have found all kinds of ways:
- imprison them
- beat them
- torture them
- rape them
- hold them to gunpoint
- kill them
- bomb their homes
- destroy their crops
- poison their rivers
- spread diseases among them
And the latest? Or rather, the latest to attract the mainstream media's attention? Buzz them with light aircraft and spray pesticide.
That has just happened in Paraguay. The Ava Guarani have been sprayed with pesticide after refusing to leave their land - wanted by Brazilians to grow soya.
'An aeroplane arrived and sprayed directly above their homes with what are believed to be pesticides normally used on soya crops,' said Amnesty International.
According to reports, more than 200 people were affected: nausea, diarrhoea, vomiting, and loss of consciousness.
See this CNN story for more details: http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/11/10/paraguay.pesticide.attack/index.html#cnnSTCText
30 Nov 2009
24 Nov 2009
WANTED: Ray Hunt, in person, in the Amazon
Published at Intercontinental Cry:
http://intercontinentalcry.org/wanted-ray-hunt-in-person-in-the-amazon/
http://intercontinentalcry.org/wanted-ray-hunt-in-person-in-the-amazon/
9 Nov 2009
When not shooting the 'natives' is not acceptable
Ansel Adams's photographs of Yosemite National Park are well-known: striking, ethereal prints of streams, rock-faces, flowers, waterfalls, and trees.
But there's something missing from these photos. Or rather, someone.
I mean the people who called Yosemite home. The people who had lived there for at least 4000 years. The indigenous Miwok.
Adams deliberately avoiding photographing them, even though they were rarely out of his sight when he was in Yosemite valley and he knew they had lived there for a long, long time. The reason? According to a new book by American journalist Mark Dowie, called Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples, it was because he didn't think they belonged there. For Adams, Yosemite should be a 'pristine', unspoilt 'wilderness': no room for any people.
Why does this matter? Principally because this view of 'wilderness' has led to at least 5 million, and probably millions more, indigenous people around the world being driven off their land to make way for parks and reserves in the name of 'conservation'. Ergo: 'conservation refugees.'
How could this have happened? According to Dowie, Adams's view of 'wilderness', a 'fiction' he 'fed' by shooting Yosemite in the way he did, was shared by many American conservationists and later exported globally so there are now 110,000 'protected areas' worldwide.
Time and time again, people lost their land and homes. Sometimes it was to conserve 'megafauna' like lions, tigers and gorillas. Sometimes conservation served as an excuse for other, more nefarious reasons.
Some of these 'protected areas' are very famous. Yosemite is just one. The Serengeti and Maasai Mara national parks, on traditional Maasai land, are others.
The last Miwok left Yosemite in 1969, but the evictions started 100 years before that. Their crops were destroyed. 'Paramilitary' forces shot at and killed them.
'So few of us know what 'had to be done',' writes Dowie, with heavy irony, 'to create the national parks and wildlife refuges we truly believe are ours to enjoy.'
The irony is important. One of Dowie's central arguments is that the conservationists laboured under a misapprehension: saving the 'megafauna' did not, and still does not, require removing the people who live in the 'wilderness' with them.
Worse, Dowie writes, it is still happening today. It is still 'having to be done.' Let's make sure that if we visit a park we're not increasing the number of the world's refugees, or no one's being shot so we can shoot our own photos, like Adams, with no one in them.
But there's something missing from these photos. Or rather, someone.
I mean the people who called Yosemite home. The people who had lived there for at least 4000 years. The indigenous Miwok.
Adams deliberately avoiding photographing them, even though they were rarely out of his sight when he was in Yosemite valley and he knew they had lived there for a long, long time. The reason? According to a new book by American journalist Mark Dowie, called Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples, it was because he didn't think they belonged there. For Adams, Yosemite should be a 'pristine', unspoilt 'wilderness': no room for any people.
Why does this matter? Principally because this view of 'wilderness' has led to at least 5 million, and probably millions more, indigenous people around the world being driven off their land to make way for parks and reserves in the name of 'conservation'. Ergo: 'conservation refugees.'
How could this have happened? According to Dowie, Adams's view of 'wilderness', a 'fiction' he 'fed' by shooting Yosemite in the way he did, was shared by many American conservationists and later exported globally so there are now 110,000 'protected areas' worldwide.
Time and time again, people lost their land and homes. Sometimes it was to conserve 'megafauna' like lions, tigers and gorillas. Sometimes conservation served as an excuse for other, more nefarious reasons.
Some of these 'protected areas' are very famous. Yosemite is just one. The Serengeti and Maasai Mara national parks, on traditional Maasai land, are others.
The last Miwok left Yosemite in 1969, but the evictions started 100 years before that. Their crops were destroyed. 'Paramilitary' forces shot at and killed them.
'So few of us know what 'had to be done',' writes Dowie, with heavy irony, 'to create the national parks and wildlife refuges we truly believe are ours to enjoy.'
The irony is important. One of Dowie's central arguments is that the conservationists laboured under a misapprehension: saving the 'megafauna' did not, and still does not, require removing the people who live in the 'wilderness' with them.
Worse, Dowie writes, it is still happening today. It is still 'having to be done.' Let's make sure that if we visit a park we're not increasing the number of the world's refugees, or no one's being shot so we can shoot our own photos, like Adams, with no one in them.
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