Thursday 9 May 2019

Indigenous peoples conquest and revival

This longer article was written by Alison Skinner, a member of Leicester Friends of the Earth, to give an overview of the history of indigenous peoples. 



Summary

The UN estimates that there are currently around 370 million indigenous people living in over 70 countries. Most of us are aware of the way in which our European ancestors exploited indigenous peoples in the lands they conquered, but we also need to think about the new methods of social and economic oppression which are happening right now. It is also the case that indigenous people in many countries are not just passive victims of this process and where possible are acting individually and collectively to preserve their homes, communities and culture.






This process began with the Norse Greenland travellers Leif Eriksson in the C10 and Thorfinn Karlsefni in the C11th who reached Vineland in Newfoundland having been told of a land of boundless resources. They were soon in contact with the local inhabitants, and although some trade took place, misunderstandings soon led to hostility and aggression with men killed on both sides. The Norse withdrew back to Greenland realising the land was too well defended to be settled at this time. The disparaging term Skraeling they used to describe the inhabitants means barbarian although it could also refer to the cries the people made and the animal pelts they wore.



Conquest


Even this early encounter illustrates the characteristics which informed later interactions, including on the European side a sense of superiority and entitlement based on their interpretation of the Christian religion, superior technology in the shape of metal weapons and gunpowder and political self-confidence. The urge to find useful economic resources for the societies back home drove the exploration and they also brought European notions of property and ownership to countries and societies where they did not previously exist. The initial instinct to trade soon changed to occupation and annexation. The Portuguese and Dutch took action to safeguard trade in the Indonesian Spice Islands in the C16 and C17 which displaced and killed local people who resisted.

The subsequent history in north, south and central America from Columbus onwards was a depressing one of European economic exploitation and settlement with the original First Nation peoples who were inconveniently in possession of the land displaced, enslaved, killed, infected with disease, or resettled in less favourable places. A similar trajectory was followed in the Pacific in Tahiti, Australia and New Zealand affecting their people in the C18-19.  The Sami people, the oldest indigenous people of northern Europe, were also on the receiving end of Protestant missionary activity in the C17 which sought to replace their animist and shamanic beliefs and practices with varying degrees of success. The San people in South Africa - the oldest in Africa - suffered a similar experience during the C19 colonial period with appropriation of land they inhabited by European settlers. The inevitable sexual encounters between settlers and indigenous people in all places provided an additional layer of social stratification and exploitation of women.



Assimilation


By the end of the C19 and early C20 governments who no longer felt under physical threat started to take stock of the condition of their First Nation peoples. Although greatly reduced in numbers, people still survived and in more enlightened times there was a desire to improve their conditions. Anthropologists and folklorists began to appreciate the value of their cultural beliefs, stories and practices and started to record them, although hostile attitudes persisted among the general population.

A policy adopted in North America, Canada, Australia and a lesser extent in New Zealand, was the establishment of residential schools from the 1870s to 1950s designed to assimilate the children of First Nation people into the dominant culture and provide them with the education which it was hoped would give them greater opportunity in their countries. Many children of mixed heritage were involved in this process on the grounds that they might be better able to benefit from it and in many places, there was a degree of compulsion with children forcibly removed from their communities. Children were routinely forbidden to use their native language, their culture was generally disparaged and discipline was strict. It has emerged that these residential settings, as in other places, provided opportunities for sexual and physical abuse of children and autobiographical accounts emerging speak of the profound psychological dislocation of individuals who experienced them.

Although more people have managed to get the secondary and university education which enabled them to serve their communities in a variety of professional roles, too many others remained caught between two worlds without the skills to survive in either a traditional subsistence economy, or the modern world, with drug and alcohol use widespread.  



The modern era


The 1970s probably started the sea change in the way in which First Nation people were viewed by the people who now lived alongside them. The organisation Survival International which campaigns for the rights of indigenous people was founded in Britain in 1969. The general stew of new political and spiritual ideas swirling about in the late 1960s and 70s in Europe and North America became very sympathetic to First Nation cultural beliefs and artefacts, something which has persisted to the present day.  This does not necessarily mean however that these were properly understood or reproduced by the enthusiastic new converts. The habit continued of non-indigenous people wanting something from these people, be it culture, spirituality, artefacts or land.  Having been disparaged for generations as backward, primitive and savage, North American Indians started to find that Americans with the smallest sliver of First Nation blood were anxious to reclaim their heritage and take place in cultural activities from pow wow gatherings to drug taking ceremonies, having found their own European culture increasingly unsatisfying. However, this can be seen in some cases as perpetuating different ways of exploitation. For example, once a market emerged for First Nation art and artefacts in places like North America and Australia, many examples were acquired by collectors and their agents in the early days for comparatively small sums, where the retail value increased considerably on resale with little benefit to the original producers.

An important part of the reconciliation process began by documenting the history of First Nation people in the Americas “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” by Dee Brown (1971) and “The Conquest of the Incas”(1970) and “Red Gold” (1978) by John Hemming,  all had an impact. 



New economic exploitation


Despite this new support, traditional economic exploitation of land and resources occupied by First Nation people persisted.  Fracking, mineral extraction, coal mining and oil extraction, ranching and palm oil are all new factors affecting their lives in North and South America and Indonesia.  In the same way that animal species are being affected, habitats are shrinking to levels which may become unsustainable to support groups such as Indians in South America and the Penan in Borneo. Although people who resist are still being murdered for their activism, 44 killings in Brazil alone in 2017 (Observer 21.01.18), from the 1990s onwards new political groupings and networks in countries and continents are now emerging in which indigenous people can band together to lobby and agitate their governments for the right to control economic activity on their lands. These include the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People and the Indigenous Environmental Network. While this won new recognition of rights for Sami, Inuit, Aborigines and North and South American Indians, the onslaught from multinational companies continued. The following are some illustrations of the new economic front line.

 Sami people in the upper reaches of Finnish Lapland fear plans to build a £2.9 billion railroad to the EU's first Arctic port in Norway will provide mining and logging companies with the infrastructure to venture further into wilder untouched parts of Lapland – disturbance of reindeer pastures could undermine traditional ways of life. Prospectors in Finnish Lapland are already finding new sources of minerals.  (Guardian Weekend  25 February 2019).

The Peruvian government passed a law in 2014 that weakened the country's environmental regulations and made it easier for mining companies to enter the lands of indigenous people and rural farmers. In Brazil, the new President Jair Bolsonaro who wants to weaken some of his country's protection of indigenous people for the benefit of economic growth, sparked protest and marches on the capital by Indians in full traditional dress.

The Indonesian government is sanctioning coal mining in Indonesian Borneo where the regional Friends of the Earth is working to get mining permits revoked where companies break the law. In Colombia where the El Cerrejon opencast mine in north east Colombia is located, the Wayuu people have spent many years negotiating over resettlement and have secured the right to new houses, but the mine's huge water use is putting too much pressure on the region's only water resource.



Biopiracy


In modern times pharmaceutical companies have realised the potential value of plants used by indigenous people to cure various diseases.  As a result of sustained investigation in developing countries and lab work they have identified molecules and elements which have subsequently been synthesised into valuable drugs mostly benefiting western populations, such as treatment for malaria which originated in French Guyana. Companies then file patents on the drugs which enable them to retain ownership with little or no benefit received by the community or country which supplied the knowledge. The Convention on Biological Diversity ratified by 193 nations in 1993 and subsequently the Nagoya Protocol of 2014 aims to provide some safeguards for local communities involved in these activities and some legal recompense where necessary, but many loopholes still exist. Unsurprisingly the US is not signed up to either protocol. (The Exploitation Game  Biopiracy, Mark Rowe,  Geographical Magazine, March 2018).

Some indigenous people have taken the view that total separation from the modern world is the only way of protecting their communities, cultures and habitat from the unwanted effects of modern life. Many small Indian groups in the Amazon remain uncontacted, (Brazilian estimates of around 100), only emerging when forced to do so.

One tragic outcome of this practice was the killing of John Allen Chau, an American missionary in November 2018 who made contact with the inhabitants of North Sentinal Island in the Andaman Islands. The Indian government had enforced a no contact zone around the island to protect the inhabitants who are hostile to visitors as a result of previous experiences, which was disregarded in this case. Missionaries, Indigenous People and Cultural Exchange (2018 University of Sussex) documents the variable outcomes of historic and current missionary work.



Tourism


With the new enthusiasm for all things tribal, shamanic and indigenous, tourists and film crews are beating a path to the remotest places in the world to record ways of life notionally still in harmony with the environment and authentic. This has uncovered new battlegrounds with issues arising about the payment of communities who act as hosts to these western visitors and how much of the modern world and a few of its benefits can be permitted to impinge on these groups, while still claiming an authentic way of life. Through documentaries, the internet and books, more knowledge is being transmitted about a South American drug called Ayahuasca with special properties which can induce self-knowledge and out of body experiences. This would only normally be used in controlled circumstances by the groups who knew it best but more Europeans and Americans are being drawn to find these groups and take part in the experience, with a subsequent loosening of access controls and unpredictable and sometimes tragic results.

Groups such as the Sami in Lapland and the Maasai in Kenya now demand more control over the way in which their lifestyle is presented to the outside world. Not all can claim the same benefit. Chris Packham was distressed to find that a girl he met in the Sumatran rainforest from the Orang Rimba tribe in 1998 had been displaced by loggers and faced an uncertain future as a mother with children when he went back to look for her in 2018.

The San people, although increasingly in demand by anthropologists and researchers into human origins for their hunting and gathering knowledge, have found that independent African governments are no more supportive of their lifestyle than British and South African ones were.  Their land can yield more revenue from wildlife tourism and they are being “encouraged” to adopt a more sedentary farming lifestyle away from their traditional hunting grounds. Something that betrays their entire reason for being.



Reconciliation


A recent development has been the official apologies by states and religious figures for their historic abuse of indigenous peoples. In 2008 both Australia and Canada apologised for the harm caused to individuals and communities by the introduction of residential schools and the forceable removal of their children. In February 2015 the American government finally apologised to the American Indian tribes for ill-conceived policies and acts of violence towards them and in July of the same year Pope Francis apologised and asked forgiveness from indigenous people of Latin America for crimes committed by the Catholic church and others during the conquest. An indigenous person's response to this might well be what about the present day?

In the countries where an historic responsibility for undesirable actions against indigenous people has been acknowledged, well organised groups are now starting to demand that museums who hold artefacts and human remains of indigenous people, collected often during the colonial era, repatriate them to the groups claiming ownership, for disposal in appropriate cultural ways. While this has sparked considerable debate and discussion it is starting to happen.

Resilient and resourceful First Nation people are continuing to protect and transmit their culture by preserving languages, making films, creating art and music, writing books and using every opportunity to act in solidarity and pass on their knowledge to their descendants. In Central and South America they have also managed a skilful fusion between their traditional beliefs and ceremonies and the Catholicism, originally forced upon them, but now an accepted part of their culture.



Environmental future


As we stare ahead into an uncertain environmental future, indigenous people are starting to take the lead in warning about the consequences of unlimited carbon emissions, through their detailed understanding of the lands they have inhabited for many centuries. Inuit peoples in the Arctic still living a traditional life, provided the first warnings about the erosion of sea ice. The Kogi people who have preserved a Pre Columbian way of life, living far up in the Sierra Nevenda de Santa Marta region in north east Columbia, made contact with the journalist Alan Ereira in 1990 to warn about the environmental changes they had observed in their land including the melting of glaciers and drying up of rivers. It was a warning from the people called the Elder Brothers to the Younger Brothers to change their ways as the survival of the earth was being imperilled.  They re-emerged in 2013 to make a film “Alluna” to highlight the same issues with even more urgency.

 The climate change campaigner Naomi Klein has drawn inspiration from the campaigns of First Nation peoples in her native Canada to protect their land from fracking and oil pipelines and their cultural understanding that the earth cannot be owned but is under our stewardship.

The survival wisdom of people who have endured so much must give us hope that we too may find a way through the looming crisis.



References

Survival International




Tribal Peoples for tomorrow's world  Stephen Corry

Freeman Press, 2011


The Heart of the World  Alan Ereira

Jonathan Cape, 1990

Account of the beliefs and message of the Kogi Indians of Colombia.

Documentary “From the Heart of the World” available on Youtube

Alluna, (2014)


Documentary initiated by the Kogi Indians of Colombia highlighting the growing and continuing impact of climate change on their land. This sequel is also available on Youtube.


Rabbit Proof Fence  (2002)

Film about the escape of 3 Aboriginal female children  who had been forcibly sent to a  residential school in 1931 and their return to their families.


Tawai  (2017)

Bruce Parry documentary featuring the Penan of Borneo and his reflections on the special quality of life in indigenous communities.

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