steelhead trout in an Oregon stream. A new agreement restores buffer zones along streams where pesticides cannot be sprayed. | credit: Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife
Environmental groups and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced an agreement Friday reinstating rules meant to protect salmon and steelhead from insecticides.
The agreement sets streamside buffers prohibiting aerial spraying within 300 feet and ground spraying within 60 feet of salmon and steelhead streams. The restriction applies to five different insecticides: diazinon, chlorpyrifos, malathion, carbaryl, and methomyl.
“The agreement provides more certainty to farmers about how to protect fish. We know that our Northwest farmers and growers are good land and water stewards,” said Kim Leval, executive director of the Northwest Center for Alternatives to Pesticides, whose lawsuit along with other environmental groups prompted the agreement to restore the regulations on a temporary basis.
The center first sued the EPA 14 years ago, claiming the federal agency that regulates pesticides failed to consult with the National Marine Fisheries Service about how many different pesticides affect salmon. A settlement of that case resulted in a 2004 court-ordered injunction that first established the streamside buffers.
After that injunction expired, NCAP and other groups sued again in 2010, claiming the EPA failed to adopt permanent protections required by the fisheries service.
“It’s a long struggle to protect fish that really can’t wait to be protected,” Leval said.
The buffers remain in place until the Fisheries Service completes its analysis of how the five pesticides affect fish, at which point the EPA must implement permanent protections based on the Fisheries Service analysis.
Photo by Pat Bolduc, courtesy A Tribe Called Red Ian Campeau, aka Deejay NDN, wears a shirt that an irony-impaired critic has called ‘racist.
Indian Country Today
Ian Campeau, better known as Deejay NDN of A Tribe Called Red, is an outspoken cultural critic, both as official mouthpiece of the DJ trio and a twitter provocateur. Campeau was instrumental in getting the Nepean Redskins football club to change its name (they’re now the Nepean Eagles), and sports mascots is one of his favorite topics to discuss.
It has to be a sign that you’re being heard when an irony-impaired curmudgeon calls for a boycott.
In a recent Instagram post, Campeau shared a note apparently written to the organizers of Westfest, a music and arts festival taking place June 13-15 in Ottawa’s Westboro Village. A Tribe Called Red is scheduled to play the final concert Sunday night.
“So we’re supposed to play Westfest next Sunday,” Campeau wrote. “The organizers have been receiving thinly-veiled threatening emails in protest to me performing. Here’s one of them. This is my hometown. So disappointing.”
Here’s the image of the letter, in which a critic complains, anonymously that the group is “divisive” and that Campeau is a “racist hypocrite” who wears a “racist t-shirt”:
A letter calling for a boycott of Westfest over A Tribe Called Red’s “racism.”
We’ve seen Campeau in a few different ironic t-shirts over the years, but the one that this individual is referring to is likely the “Caucasians” design (sold by Shelf Life Clothing), featuring a white version of the Cleveland Indians’ controversial Chief Wahoo mascot. Campeau wears the shirt in some frequently-used publicity photos:
A Tribe Called Red (left to right): DJ Bear Witness, DJ Shub, Deejay NDN (Ian Campeau). Photo by Pat Bolduc.
FILE – This Nov. 29, 2009, file photo, shows Chester Nez talking about his time as a Navajo Code Talker in World War II at his home in Albuquerque, N.M. Nez, the last of the 29 Navajos who developed an unbreakable code that helped win World War II, died Wednesday morning, June 4, 2014, of kidney failure at his home in Albuquerque. He was 93. (AP Photo/Felicia Fonseca, File)
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — The language he once was punished for speaking in school became Chester Nez’s primary weapon in World War II.
Before hundreds of men from the Navajo Nation became Code Talkers, Nez and 28 others were recruited to develop a code based on the then-unwritten Navajo language. Locked in a room for 13 weeks, they came up with an initial glossary of more than 200 terms using Navajo words for red soil, war chief, braided hair and hummingbird, for example, and an alphabet.
Nez never tired of telling the story to highlight his pride in having served his country and stress the importance of preserving the Navajo language. The 93-year-old died Wednesday morning of kidney failure with plenty of appearances still scheduled, said Judith Avila, who helped Nez publish his memoirs. He was the last of the original group of 29 Navajo Code Talkers.
“It’s one of the greatest parts of history that we used our own native language during World War II,” Nez told The Associated Press in 2009. “We’re very proud of it.”
Navajo President Ben Shelly ordered flags lowered across the reservation in honor of Nez from sunrise Thursday to sunset Sunday.
Nez was in 10th grade when he lied about his age to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps not knowing he would become part of an elite group of Code Talkers. He wondered whether the code would work since the Japanese were skilled code breakers.
Few non-Navajos spoke the Navajo language, and even those who did couldn’t decipher the code. It proved impenetrable. The Navajos trained in radio communications were walking copies of it. Each message read aloud by a Code Talker immediately was destroyed.
“The Japanese did everything in their power to break the code but they never did,” Nez said in the AP interview.
Nez grew up speaking only Navajo in Two Wells, New Mexico, on the eastern side of the Navajo Nation. He gained English as a second language while attending boarding school, where he had his mouth washed out with soap for speaking Navajo.
When a Marine recruiter came looking for young Navajos who were fluent in Navajo and English to serve in World War II, Nez said he told his roommate “let’s try it out.” The dress uniforms caught his attention, too.
“They were so pretty,” Nez said.
About 250 Navajos showed up at Fort Defiance, then a U.S. Army base. But only 29 were selected to join the first all-Native American unit of Marines. They were inducted in May 1942 and became the 382nd Platoon tasked with developing the code. At the time, Navajos weren’t even allowed to vote.
After World War II, Nez volunteered to serve two more years during the Korean War. He retired in 1974 after a 25-year career as a painter at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Albuquerque. His artwork featuring 12 Navajo holy people was on display at the hospital.
For years, Nez’s family and friends knew only that he fought the Japanese during World War II.
Nez was eager to tell his family more about his role as a Code Talker, Avila said, but he couldn’t. Their mission wasn’t declassified until 1968.
The accolades came much later. The original group received Congressional Gold Medals in 2001 and Nez often joked about pawning his. He measured the accuracy of the movie “Windtalkers,” based on the Code Talkers that came out the following year, at 78 percent and said the Navajo spoken by Adam Beach was hard to understand but “he tried his best.”
Code Talkers have appeared on television and at parades and they are routinely asked to speak to veterans groups and students. They are celebrated on the Navajo Nation with a tribal holiday.
Nez threw the opening pitch at a 2004 Major League Baseball game and offered a blessing for the presidential campaign of John Kerry. In 2012, he received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Kansas, where he abandoned his studies in fine arts decades ago after tuition assistance he received for his military service ran out.
U.S. Sens. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich, and Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, of New Mexico, praised Nez for his bravery and service to the United States in a statement Wednesday. The Code Talkers took part in every assault the Marines conducted in the Pacific, sending thousands of messages without error on Japanese troop movements and battlefield tactics.
Once while running a message, Nez and his partner were mistaken for Japanese soldiers and were threatened at gunpoint until a Marine lieutenant cleared up the confusion. He was forbidden from saying he was a Code Talker.
“He loved his culture and his country, and when called, he fought to protect both,” Udall said. “And because of his service, we enjoy freedoms that have stood the test of time.”
Despite having both legs partially amputated, confining him to a wheelchair, Avila said the humble Nez loved to travel and tell his story.
“It really was a good thing, such a good experience for him,” she said. “He said he would do it over again if his country needed him.”
A public viewing is scheduled Monday evening in Albuquerque. A Mass is scheduled Tuesday in Albuquerque, with burial to follow at the Santa Fe National Cemetery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. (AP) – The race to become president on the nation’s largest American Indian reservation has drawn a crowded field of seasoned politicians, a woman, political newcomers and the incumbent.
Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly will be challenged by 16 others in his bid for a second term. Among them are former President Joe Shirley Jr., tribal lawmakers Kenneth Maryboy and Russell Begaye, Carrie Lynn Martin and the third-place finisher in the 2010 primary, Donald Benally.
Navajos will choose two candidates on Aug. 26 to move on to November’s general election. They will also narrow down the list of those seeking a seat on the 24-member Navajo Nation Council. One lawmaker, Jonathan Nez, is running unopposed while other legislative races feature up to nine candidates.
At stake is management of a vast reservation that covers 27,000 square miles and representation of about 300,000 tribal members, not all of whom live on the Navajo Nation. Presidential candidates often focus their platforms on education, services for veterans, ensuring Navajos have a voice in their government and economic development in an area where half the workforce is unemployed.
Nine of the presidential candidates are from the Arizona portion of the reservation, seven are from New Mexico and one is from Utah.
Some of the candidates share hometowns. Shirley and Myron McLaughlin are from Chinle; Chris Deschene and Dale Tsosie are from LeChee; and Begaye, Donald Benally, Duane” Chili” Yazzie and Dan Smith are from Shiprock, New Mexico.
The other candidates are tribal elections director Edison Wauneka, former lawmaker Kee Yazzie Mann, Hank Whitethorne, Edison “Chip” Begay, Moroni Benally and businessman Cal Nez.
On May 30, the Atlanta Dream kicked off its new initiative Heritage Fridays and celebrated Native American Night in honor of Shoni Schimmel.
The rookie guard, Umatilla, told ICTMN that she really appreciated the showing of support and called Friday’s event “Awesome.”
Native supporters filled an entire section of the Phillips Arena in Atlanta, and fans wore blue T-shirts donning Schimmel’s name and number, 23. And the first 2,000 fans received a turquoise Shoni Schimmel wristband.
“We are proud of the cultural diversity of our team and we look forward to celebrating that this season and beyond,” Dream President and General Manager Angela Taylor told WNBA.com.
Atlanta snapped a two-game losing bump with an 80-69 win over the Seattle Storm to improve to 3-2 overall, the team’s post game notes said. The Dream is now 2-1 in home games, and has won 20 of its last 25 regular-season games at Philips Arena.
Schimmel managed one assist for the night, but she’s averaging 9.3 points per game. Her season total of 38 points is tied for the most in WNBA history for a player in her first five career games, WNBA.com said.
At halftime, the Red Road and Elks Soldiers performed and Schimmel energized the crowd by taking a few photos with her biggest supporters and fans.
After the game, Schimmel revealed to ICTMN that when she’s not on the court, she manages her own blog, whcih you can read here. On her blog, Schimmel posted a photo of Native American Night. She’s posing with a crowd of fans, dancers, and WNBA staff.
“It was great getting to see the fans come out and support!! She wrote. “Thank you all for coming, and see you next time!!”
Jacoby Ellsbury’s name will go down in history. Not as the greatest Native baseball player to ever play the game, (and perhaps it will) but in a more personal way.
The Yankee’s center fielder donated copy million to his alma mater. According to an Oregon State press release, Ellsbury, who is Navajo and Colorado River Indian tribes, made the donation to expand the baseball team’s locker room facilities.
“OSU Baseball has given me so much,” Ellsbury told OregonLive.com. “I am thrilled I am able to help my alma mater carry on its proud tradition; and perhaps, this expansion will convince a few more Pacific Northwest recruits to wear OSU orange and black.”
OSU also plans to name its locker room facilities after the former Beaver.
Goss Stadium is in need of a few updates, including its overall infrastructure. The project is expected to cost $2.8 million and the enhancements are for the locker room, equipment room, a team meeting space and a new recruiting area. Ellsbury’s contribution accounts for 1/3 of the cost, SBNation.com says.
“We are tremendously thankful,” coach Pat Casey said in the release. “Great facilities are at the core of great programs, and with Jacoby’s generous gift we will be able to continue to offer our student-athletes a world-class experience.”
“Oregon State is where I got my start,” Ellsbury said. “It’s where I learned — from Coach Casey, teammates, and assistant coaches — how to be a successful athlete, a successful person. For that, I am forever grateful.”
TULALIP — Santana Shopbell has eight siblings, most of them grown. She is the second-youngest child, but she is about to distinguish herself with a big first.
When she graduates from Tulalip Heritage High School on Saturday, Santana will be the first in her immediate family with a high school diploma.
“It was a struggle. I had my doubts,” said Shopbell, 18.
Her focus on a goal — to graduate, and to set an example for more than 20 nieces and nephews — grew until doubt was edged out by accomplishment. “I just kept at it,” she said.
Her toughest course was geometry. Math teacher Jennifer Ham was a great help.
She went all four years to the small school that shares a campus with Marysville’s Arts & Technology High School and 10th Street Middle School. Heritage has fewer than 100 students. “You get one-on-one time with teachers. You learn more about your culture, and other cultures,” she said.
Shopbell lives with her father, Rockey Shopbell, an older sister, a younger brother and an uncle. When she was 11, the family suffered a terrible loss. Her mother, Peggy Jones Shopbell, died.
It was love of family that helped her through. Today, family is everything. “I like hanging out with friends — and my friends are my nieces, nephews and cousins,” she said.
She also loves her community. A member of the Tulalip Tribes, she recently volunteered at a luncheon for tribal elders. She has helped with children through Tulalip Youth Services and has volunteered at the Marysville Community Food Bank.
She expects her next academic step to be Everett Community College but doesn’t plan to enroll until next spring. “I want to take a break,” she said. She hopes to get a job and a car, and do some traveling.
A high school highlight was playing basketball her senior year. Her Heritage team went to the state B basketball tournament in Spokane. She had never played before.
She also played volleyball in high school, was a student-body ambassador and president of the science club.
Someday, she hopes to work in tribal government. A role model is Deborah Parker, a member of the Tulalip Tribes board of directors.
“She is an inspiration,” Shopbell said. “I want to come back and work for my people.”
First, she’ll celebrate. “We’re having a big graduation party with lots of family. They are really proud,” she said.
Jawless and eel-like with concentric rings of teeth, the Pacific lamprey’s unsavory looks may be one reason why populations have declined. Now, some people are taking charge of restoring the fish.
While it’s an important source of food for juvenile salmon and contribute to rivers the way earthworms do to soil, the Pacific lamprey is not exactly a charismatic animal.
“When I first saw these fish, I thought, ‘My gosh, it looks like that Sarlacc mouth in Return of the Jedi.’ It just looks like something that’s going to swallow you up,” said Sean Connolly, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Portland, and collaborator on a 1o-year project to restore the fish. (In case you were wondering, a Sarlacc mouth is a gaping abyss of tentacles and teeth.)
“On the flip side of it, it has these incredible blue eyes. It has this look of something remarkable you’ve never see. And when you study these organisms and see them, they actually look quite vulnerable,” Connolly said.
They are vulnerable. In the past few decades, regional populations plummeted, hitting an all-time low in 2010. In the ’60s, people decided the lamprey was an eel-like river vermin worthy of extermination.
“Back in the ’60s and ’70s, people dropped rotenone in the rivers and streams to try to kill all the trash fish. Because that’s what they’re considered: trash fish,” said Patrick Luke, a biologist with the Yakama Nation Fisheries. “But at the same time, they tried to increase the production of trout, salmon, sturgeon, those types of species.”
As big hydropower project began to come online in the northwest, dams were problematic, too.
“When folks were building those facilities and thinking about passage for salmon and steelhead, they weren’t really thinking about a fish like a lamprey, which can’t jump,” Connolly said. “And so what we’ve seen is some pretty substantial declines, over time and definitely historically.”
Those declines were sharp enough to earn the lamprey the nickname “the lost fish.” Emily Washines, who works with the Yakama Nation Fisheries, says she remembers when they they started disappearing from the dinner table.
“It would be the equivalent, I guess, of going to a Mariners game and not having hot dogs anymore,” Washines said of the lamprey’s absence. “It was so much a part of our ceremonies, so much intertwined in our lives that to have the numbers sharply decrease, just within my generation, is so noticeable.”
The Pacific lamprey’s invasive cousin, the Sea lamprey, hasn’t helped. It has marauded Great Lakes waters for a while now. But here in the Pacific Northwest, where the fish is native, the larvae feed juvenile salmon and steelhead, rather than feeding on them. That’s one reason why tribes and government agencies have funded the Pacific Lamprey Restoration Plan, which involved releasing buckets of them into Yakama streams. It’s funded by government grants and through the 2008 Columbia Basin Fish Accords with Bonneville Power Administration.
“Just think what the earthworms do on land,” said Patrick Luke. “These lamprey larvae do the same thing in the substrates of rivers and streams: they aerate, they fix nutrients for microbes and organisms that feed salmon and other aquatic organisms.”
His goal is to get the fish populations back up, though maybe not to the level that earned them the nickname “Columbia River hot dog.”
Indigeneity is an unusual way to think about International Relations (IR). Most studies of world politics ignore Indigenous perspectives, which are rarely treated as relevant to thinking about the international (Shaw 2008; Beier 2009). Yet Indigenous peoples are engaging in world politics with a dynamism and creativity that defies the silences of our discipline (Morgan 2011). In Latin America, Indigenous politics has gained international legitimacy, influencing policy for over two decades (Cott 2008; Madrid 2012). Now, Indigenous political movements are focused on resisting extractive projects on autonomous territory from the Arctic to the Amazon (Banerjee 2012; Sawyer and Gómez 2012). Resistance has led to large mobilized protests, invoked international law, and enabled alternative mechanisms of authority. In response, governments have been busy criminalizing Indigenous claims to consultation that challenge extractive models of development. Indigenous opposition to extractivism ultimately promotes self-determination rights, questioning the states’ authority over land by placing its sovereignty into historical context. In that sense, Indigeneity is a valuable approach to understanding world politics as much as it is a critical concept to move beyond state-centrism in the study of IR.
The Consolidation of Indigenous Resistance against Extractivism
Indigenous peoples are contesting extractive projects in various, complementary ways. Collective marches have multiplied as an immediate means of resistance throughout the Americas. In 2012, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador led thousands of people on a 15-day, 400-mile March for Life, Water, and the Dignity of Peoples, demanding a new water law, the end of open-pit mining, and a stop to the expansion of oil concessions. Within days, a similar mobilization took over Guatemala City. The Indigenous, Peasant, and Popular March in Defense of Mother Earth covered 212 kilometers to enter the capital with nearly 15,000 people protesting mining concessions, hydroelectric plants, and evictions. In Bolivia, various marches demanded consultation as the government prepared to build a highway within the Indigenous Territory and National Park Isidoro Sécure (TIPNIS). From Canada’s Idle No More movement to the protests against damming the Xingú River Basin in Brazil, Indigenous movements are rising and demanding they be allowed to participate in decisions affecting their territories.
Protests are at the core of global Indigenous agendas. In 2013, the Fifth Continental Summit of Indigenous Peoples of the Abya Yala encouraged communities to step-up resistance in light of the threat posed by state-sponsored extractivism. This is what Indigenous women were doing when they walked from Amazon territories to Quito, Ecuador, denouncing government plans to drill without consultation in the Yasuní reserve. Local protests are not trivial or irrelevant in world politics. Rather, they are part of a larger effort to transform local concerns into international politics.
Indigenous peoples have remarkable expertise in international law and are savvily leveraging their rights to consultation and self-determination guaranteed in the ILO Convention 169 (1989) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) (UN General Assembly 2008). They have won emblematic legal battles at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), at times obliging states to recognize Indigenous territorial authority. In the decade-long case of Sarayaku v. Ecuador, the IACHR upheld the right of free, prior, and informed consent with a binding sentence against the Ecuadoran State for allowing a foreign oil company to encroach on ancestral lands without consultation during the 1990s. A 2011 petition by communities of the Xingú River basin led the IACHR to order Brazil’s government to halt the construction of the Belo Monte Dam. The Mayan Q’eqchi’ expanded jurisdiction by taking Hudbay Minerals to Court in Canada for crimes committed at an open-pit nickel mine in Guatemala. In Canada, two Manitoba First Nations used their own legal systems in 2013 to serve eviction notices to mining companies operating illegally on their land.1
International pressure is significant, yet states frequently eschew what they perceive to be uncomfortable mechanisms of accountability. Courts may validate Indigenous resistance, and UN reports warn against the catastrophic impact of extractive industries, but Brazil continued to build the Belo Monte Dam and Peru’s government did not consider suspending the Camisea gas project of drilling 18 wells on protected territories that have been home to Amazonian peoples in voluntary isolation (Feather 2014). Nevertheless, states that evade prior consultation obligations only foster Indigenous inventiveness. In the absence of official mechanisms of consultation, people establish autonomous ones. Local communities of the Kimsacocha area took matters in their own hands after years of being ignored, demanding Ecuador’s government consult them on a mining project in the highlands. In 2011, they organized a community-based consultation without the authorization of the state that was nevertheless legitimized by the presence of international observers (Guartambel 2012). The community voted 93% in favour of defending water rights and against mining in the area. Autonomous forms of prior consultation are increasingly common in Latin America. In Guatemala alone, there have been over sixty community-based consultations since 2005 (MacLeod and Pérez 2013).
Contesting States of Extraction
Indigenous resistance has been the target of severe government repression, ranging from judicial intimidation to assassinations of activists. Mobilizations against the Congo mine in Cajamarca, Peru, led President Ollanta Humala to declare a state of emergency and unleash military repression. An estimated 200 activists were killed in Peru between 2006 and 2011 for resisting extractivism (Zibechi 2013). Colombia’s government, in turn, declared protests against the mining industry illegal. In Ecuador, about 200 people have been criminalized for contesting the corporatization of natural resources. Many have been charged with terrorism. Violent repression against TIPNIS protesters in Bolivia revealed that even Evo Morales, Latin America’s first elected Indigenous president, is willing to use force to silence demands for consultation. Various activists opposing the multinational mining giant AngloGlod Ashanti have been assassinated. Argentina’s Plurinational Indigenous Council, which calls for an end to extractivism, has recorded eleven assassinations since 2010. The Observatory of Mining Conflicts in Latin America (OCMAL) estimates there are currently 195 active conflicts due to large-scale mining. Peru and Chile lead the list with 34 and 33 conflicts respectively, followed by Mexico with 28, Argentina with 26, Brazil with 20, and Colombia with 12. Mega-mining alone affects nearly 300 communities, many of which are located on Indigenous territories.
This wave of intense criminalization indicates the expansion of the extractive frontier. In Peru, where anti-extractivist unrest toppled two cabinets under the Humala government and led to the militarization of several provinces, mineral exploration expenditures increased tenfold in a decade. In 2002, 7.5 million hectares of land had been granted to mining companies; by 2012 the figure jumped to almost 26 million hectares, or 20% of the country’s land. Nearly 60% of the province of Apurímac has been granted to mining companies. In Colombia, about 40% of land is licensed to, or being solicited by, multinational companies for mineral and crude mining projects (Peace Brigades International 2011). According to OCMAL, 25% of the Chile’s territory was under exploration or operation as of 2010. In 2013, Mexico’s government opened the state-controlled energy sector to foreign investment, changing legislation to allow private multinationals to prospect for the country’s oil and natural gas resources for the first time since 1938.
The problem is that governments are largely licensing Indigenous land. In 2010, the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues reported that Colombian mining concessions had been awarded in 80% of the country’s legally recognized Indigenous territories. Colombia’s government has 8.8 million hectares of Indigenous reserves designated as oil areas and granted 168 mining licenses on Indigenous reserves in 2011. Extractive industries lead to evictions, toxic waste, and resource scarcity, creating conflicts over water, soil, and subsoil. Open-pit mining uses unsustainable amounts of water. The controversial Marlin mine, partly funded by the World Bank in 2004, and today fully owned by Goldcorp, uses in one hour the water that a local family uses over 22 years (Van de Sandt 2009).2 In Chile, mining consumes 37% of the electricity produced in the country – which will reach 50% in a few years – compared to 28% for industry and 16% for the residential sector. This requires the Chilean State to continually expand energy sources, thereby accelerating displacement and the transfer of agricultural land to hydroelectric projects.
Conflicts against extractivism should not be dismissed as only concerning Indigenous peoples. They encompass larger debates about the role of extractivism in politics and contest a development model based on the corporatization of natural resources. In particular, they reveal the continuous role of resource exploitation as a strategy to finance states. Governments are prioritizing extractive industries as key engines of growth, although there is ample evidence that extractive industries create relatively few jobs. President Juan Manuel Santos promised to turn Colombia into a mining powerhouse because it attracts quick investment. Opening Ecuador to mega-mining financed much of President Correa’s third re-election. In fact, his unexpected policy shift to approve drilling within the Yasuní Reserve is explained largely by his government’s urgent need for cash. China, which holds over 35% of Ecuador’s foreign debt and financed 12% of its budget in 2013, buys about 60% of the country’s oil and is expected to pre-buy Yasuní oil (Guevara 2013).
Indigenous claims against extractive projects contest a world system based on predation and usurpation. In Guatemala, mining is managed by long-standing political elites and inscribed in the colonial genealogy of power. In many instances, the entrepreneurs promoting mining today are the scions of the same oligarchical families that have controlled Indigenous land and peoples for centuries (Casaús 2007). The political economy of extractivism encompasses global inequalities of exploitation, within and among states. About 75% of the world’s mining companies are registered in Canada, and most operate in the so-called Global South (Deneault et al. 2012). Extractive industries in the North rely on alliances with national elites to exploit natural resources of peoples and places historically marginalized from power politics.
Indigeneity as a Way to Rethink International Relations
Claims against extractivism are ultimately claims to the right of self-determination. The unilateral expropriation of land for mining today is a continuation of the Doctrine of Discovery. It conceptualized the New World as terra nullis, authorizing colonial powers to conquer and exploit land in the Americas. It also paved the way for a paradigm of domination that outlasted colonial times to evolve into a broader – and more resilient – self-arrogated right of intervention embodied by the modern state (Wallerstein 2006). Today, the idea of “empty” lands survives in extractivist practices. Large-scale mining by multinational corporations perpetuates the human abuse and resource appropriation initiated by Spanish colonizers centuries ago in the Bolivian mines of Potosi. International rights to self-determination may have replaced Papal Bulls, yet the political economy of looting natural resources on Indigenous lands continues, now in the name of development.
In this context, Indigeneity is a privileged site for the study of international relations. First and foremost, the extent and sophistication of Indigenous political praxis is relevant to any explanation of world politics. The rise of anti-extractivism as a politics of contestation against state exploitation calls for alternative sites of governance, such as the Inuit Circumpolar Council (Shadian 2013). Indigenous claims are shaping political practice, framing international legislation, and destabilizing assumptions about stateness. They seek the redistribution of rights as much as the uprooting of the concentration of power in the state. In that sense, Indigenous claims to consultation challenge the authority of states over natural resources as much as Westphalian forms of sovereignty.
Second, Indigeneity disrupts state sovereignty (Ryser 2012). The UNDRIP became the longest and most hotly debated human rights instrument in UN history because the expansion of Indigenous rights is intrinsically related to issues of state authority over territory. Rights to self-determination entail the recognition of plural forms of territorial authority in competition with states. Indigeneity is attributed to peoples who have historically been excluded from projects of state-making. Yet it contributes much more than making visible historically excluded groups. It refers to a politics that both precedes the state and lies outside of it. It is the constitutive “other” of the modern state, marked by a co-constitutive history that explains why Indigenous politics vary depending on different processes of state-formation. Consequently, Indigeneity is vital to a discipline dedicated to studying relations among states precisely because it is intrinsically related to state-formation. Standing outside of, and prior to, the state makes Indigenous standpoints valuable in terms of thinking critically about world politics and imagining what post-national political assemblages may look like (Sassen 2008).
Finally, Indigeneity is a strategic perspective in expanding scholarly debates on what constitutes IR. Indigenous experiences complement and broaden official national histories with forgotten or repressed narratives (O’Brien 2010), thus expanding methodological assumptions on how to do IR (Jackson 2010). Its precedence over the modern state encompasses alternative worldviews to think about the international beyond stateness. Indigeneity thus defies core epistemological foundations about power. In particular, it historicizes the state and sovereignty, moving away from Eurocentric conceptions of the world (Hobson 2012) and breaking with the discipline’s unreflective tendencies (Tickner 2013). The vibrancy of Indigenous struggles not only confirms the inadequacy of the state, echoing calls to provincialize Europe’s political legacies (Chakrabarty 2000), but it also provides concrete experiences of what the international can actually look like within and beyond the state (Tickner and Blaney 2013). Indigeneity is therefore doubly valuable for world politics. In addition to contributing alternative praxis of the international, it instigates critical theory to expand disciplinary borders.
Conclusion
Indigeneity is a valuable category of analysis for world politics. Indigenous experiences offer a fuller understanding of the world we live in. Integrating indigenous perspectives in the study of IR speaks to the ability to extend our political practice beyond the ivory tower. It is not a category of analysis that concerns merely Indigenous peoples, just as racism is not a matter for people of African descent only, or post-colonial studies the domain of previously colonized societies. The entire thrust of Indigeneity is that the non-state is the business of the state, and that there are alternative pathways available to decolonize the discipline.
Stripping IR of its state-centrism invites us to reflect upon the entrenched colonialism of international relations. Indigenous perspectives will hopefully inspire scholars to adventure beyond the conventional borders of the discipline. After all, opening an alternative locus of authority is nothing short of revolutionary.
