Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten.

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 26 2017 (IPS)

As the 10-year anniversary for the Declaration on Indigenous Rights approaches, UN indigenous rights activists came together to assess the many challenges that still remain on the ground.

The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007, is the first of its kind to recognise and highlight the importance of indigenous rights.

“The UN Declaration is a declaration that contains the collective nature of the rights of indigenous peoples. (It) is meant to bring about remedies to kinds of historical and current injustices that indigenous people suffer,” said UN Special Rapporteur Victoria Tauli-Corpuz during a press briefing on 26 January.

Though it is not legally binding, the declaration guarantees indigenous groups rights to self-determination, land, and to live free from any kind of discrimination.

However, Tauli-Corpuz noted that there are “serious retreats” in the implementation of indigenous rights, including the threat of tribal land being taken away by extractive industries.

U.S. President Donald Trump has recently announced plans to green light the controversial Dakota Access (DAPL) and Keystone XL (KXL) pipelines, projects previously halted by President Barack Obama due to concerns for the environment and lack of consultations with Native American groups.

Issues around DAPL even reached the halls of the United Nations, prompting Tauli-Corpuz to call on the U.S. government, in accordance with its commitment to implement the Declaration, to consult with indigenous groups who were denied access to information and excluded from the planning processes.

She reiterated this call, stating: “It’s regrettable that now in spite of those demands that have not yet been met…that kind of decision has to be again consulted with the indigenous peoples themselves because at the end of the day, they are the ones who will be directly affected.”

Special rapporteurs are independent experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council – they are not UN staff.

Though the Department of the Army announced that it has begun an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on the $3.8 billion project, critics say that plans for DAPL were initially fast tracked as the U.S. Corps of Engineers did not adequately assess the potential for oil spills or its impact on the environment.

According to federal data, pipeline spills are fairly common, increasing the risk of water contamination. Between 2010 and 2013, there were almost 2000 incidents of leaks, amounting to an average of 1.6 incidents per day. Oil extraction, transport and combustion also accelerate emissions of methane and carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming and climate change.

In response to President Trump’s executive orders to continue the construction of DAPL, Chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe David Archambault II said: “We are not opposed to energy independence. We are opposed to reckless and politically motivated development projects, like DAPL, that ignore our treaty rights and risk our water.

“Creating a second Flint does not make America great again,” he added referring to the town in Michigan where drinking water is still contaminated with lead.

Friends of the Earth’s President Erich Pica said that the decisions reflect President Trump’s disregard for the “millions of Americans who fought to protect our land, water, sacred cultural sites and climate from dangerous pipelines.”

Tauli-Corpuz also criticised a proposed North Dakota bill that would legalise accidentally running over protestors standing on the road, introduced in response to DAPL protestors blocking roadways.

“This law…is really not consistent at all with international human rights law…how can you justify running over or violently treating a protestor when every person has the right to protest?” she said, adding that indigenous people are simply protecting the rights to their lands.

Tauli-Corpuz stressed the need for countries to incorporate the UN Declaration into national plans and legislation in order to ensure indigenous rights.

“My message is for indigenous peoples to continue to assert and claim their rights as enshrined in the UN Declaration, but also to call in the States to really fulfill their obligation to comply and implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” Tauli-Corpuz stated.

“What we need to do now is to really use this 10^th year of the celebration of the UN Declaration to further strengthen dialogue,” she said.

Guests at an indigenous cultural event during the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Credit: Aruna Dutt/IPS.

By Aruna Dutt
UNITED NATIONS, May 20 2016 (IPS)

The United Nations Indigenous Forum is one of the UN’s most culturally diverse bodies yet its inclusion within the overall UN system remains limited.

“Thousands of people who come to the forum throughout the years do not have the opportunity to express their concerns,” said Alvaro Esteban Pop Ac, Chair of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, here Thursday.

Over 1,000 Indigenous people from all over the world came here for the 15th session of the  Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) held from May 9-20.

“The demand by indigenous peoples is to have a new category as observer,” said Joan Carling, Member of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

Carling said that while indigenous people are not states or NGOs, according to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, they “have the right to self-determination.”

“The main aim of the resolution is to really ensure that effective participation of indigenous peoples is afforded in the UN system.”

“We need to be able to participate in decision-making processes in the UN  to be able to express our specific conditions and our aspirations as peoples. That deserves the space at the highest level,” she said.

The contributions that Indigenous peoples are making, to areas such as peace and environmental protection, are not reflected in their level of participation at the UN.

“We are contributing to the resolution of conflict, we are contributing to sustainable development, we are contributing to the cultural diversity of the world which benefits everyone, but these contributions are not being recognized and protected,” said Carling.

“The issue of conflicts and the issue of injustice will continue because decisions are being undertaken at global level where we don’t have any participation, that is the thing that we want to rectify,” she added.

Indigenous peoples still cannot make recommendations directly to Security Council, only through the Economic and Social Council.

Carling, an indigenous activist from Cordillera in the Philippines, said that the situation of Indigenous women in particular should be addressed by the 15-member UN Security Council, arguably the most powerful organ within the UN system.

Violence against Indigenous women was a major theme of the 2016 forum.

Throughout history, Pop Ac said, “Indigenous women have lead indigenous dialogue. Women play a key role in keeping the community together. We promote our issues through women,” said Pop Ac.

He pointed to Northeast India, where there is a heavy presence of more than 70 armed groups and 500, 000 military troops, which have been related to the rampant sexual abuse and trafficking of indigenous women.

Jacob Bryan Aki from Peace Child International-Hawaii and the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement was one of the young Indigenous people who participated in the forum.

“We come here, we learn, and the work doesn’t stop,” said Aki.  “The two weeks we have here sets us up for the rest of the year, to go back home, to work with our family and our communities, to take the opportunities we have had here to those who do not. These messages need to be heard from youth.”

“We are the next generation of leaders and scholars,” said Aki. “It is very important for us to engage in this international level because in 10-20 years we are going to be thrust into these leadership roles and this is preparation to lead and learn how to make this world a better place for our people.”

With over 5000 different cultures and an estimated 7000 different languages, Indigenous peoples represent much of the world’s cultural diversity.

Yet despite their cultural differences Indigenous peoples – who make up five percent of the world’s overall population – have many shared experiences.

“The first criteria which defines an indigenous peoples, is a peoples that have survived colonization,” said Pop Ac.

“Humanity needs a different logic and ethic in defining wealth” Pop Ac added.

“It is human greed which is destroying the environment.”

Indigenous peoples are the “guardians of life” and are working to protect their environments, he said.

Next year will be the 10th anniversary of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples which was established by the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).

This hunter is a member of the Waorani community, an Amazonian indigenous people who live in eastern Ecuador. Credit: Courtesy Nicolas Villaume, Land is Life

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, May 8 2015 (IPS)

In the course of human history many tens of thousands of communities have survived and thrived for hundreds, even thousands, of years. Scores of these largely self-sustaining traditional communities continue to this day in remote jungles, forests, mountains, deserts, and in the icy regions of the North. A few remain completely isolated from modern society.

According to United Nations estimates, upwards of 370 million indigenous people are spread out over 70 countries worldwide. Between them, they speak over 5,000 languages.

“Living well is all about keeping good relations with Mother Earth and not living by domination or extraction." -- Victoria Tauli Corpuz, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
But as the fingers of economic development reach into ever more distant corners of the globe, many of these communities find themselves – and their way of life – under threat.

The march of progress means that efforts are being made both to extract the resources on which these communities rely and to ‘mainstream’ indigenous groups by introducing Western medical, educational and economic systems into traditional ways of life.

“There are two uncontacted communities near my home but there is the threat of oil exploration. They don’t want this. For them, taking the oil out of the ground is like taking blood out of their bodies,” Moi Enomenga, a Waorani who was born into an uncontacted community, told IPS.

The Waorani are an Amazonian indigenous people who live in eastern Ecuador, in an area of oil drilling activity. No one knows how long they existed before the first encounter with Europeans in the late 1600s.

“Indigenous peoples will continue to work in our communities to strengthen our cultures and resist exploitation of our territories,” Enomenga stressed.

Although Ecuador has ratified the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which grants communities the right to consultation on extractive projects that impact their customary land, organisations say that mining and oil drilling projects have cast doubt on the government’s commitment to uphold these rights, and spurred protests by indigenous peoples.

Ecovillages: a step towards an indigenous lifestyle

Despite their long history all indigenous and local communities are under intense pressure to be part a globalised economic system that offers some benefits but too often destroys their land and culture.

The village of Ustupu in the semi-autonomous Kuna Territory located in the San Blas Archipelago of eastern Panama, points to a simple, sustainable way of life. Credit: Nicolas Villaume, Land is Life

Worse, it’s a system that is unsustainable, and has produced global threats including climate change, and biodiversity crises.

In the past four decades alone, the numbers of animals, birds, reptiles and fish on the Earth has declined 52 percent; 95 percent of coral reefs are in danger of dying out due to pollution, coastal development and overfishing; and only 15 percent of the world’s forests remain intact.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions due to human activity have increased the global average temperature 0.85 degrees Celsius and will go much higher, threatening human civilization unless emissions are sharply reduced.

Modern western culture has only been in existence some 200 years and it’s clearly unsustainable, according to Lee Davies, a board member of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN).

For 20 years GEN has helped thousands of villages, urban neighbourhoods and intentional communities live better and lighter on the Earth.

“Traditional indigenous communities offer the best example of sustainability we have,” Davies said in an interview with IPS.

GEN communities have high quality, low impact ways of living with some of the lowest per capita carbon footprints in the industrialised world.

Findhorn Ecovillage in the United Kingdom is one of the best known and has half the ecological footprint of the UK national average.

It includes 100 ecologically-benign buildings, supplies energy from four wind turbines, and features solar water heating, a biological Living Machine waste water treatment system and a car-sharing club that includes electric vehicles and more.

Carbon neutral eco-houses at the Findhorn Ecovillage in Scotland provide an example of communities modeling their lifestyle on indigenous peoples. Credit: Courtesy Findhorn Foundation

Ecovillages aren’t about technology. They are locally owned, socially conscious communities using participatory ways to enhance the spiritual, social, ecological and economic aspects of life.

Senegal has 45 ecovillages and recently launched an ambitious effort to turn more than 14,000 villages into ecovillages with full community participation.

Among its members, GEN counts the Sri Lankan organisation Sarvodaya, a rural network that includes 2,000 active sustainable villages in the island nation of 20 million people.

“This is all about finding ways for humanity to survive. Much of this is a return to the values and practices of indigenous peoples,” Davies said.

Simple communities, not big development projects

Life is hard for mountain-dwelling communities, especially as the impacts of climate change become more and more apparent, according to Matthew Tauli, a member of the indigenous Kankana-ey Igorot community in the mountainous region of the Philippines.

“We need small, simple things, not big economic development projects like big dams or mining projects,” Tauli told IPS.

The Philippines is home to an estimated 14-17 million indigenous people belonging to 110 ethno-linguistic groups, accounting for nearly 17 percent of the population of 98 million people. A huge number of these peoples face threats to their traditional ways of life, particularly as a result of forcible displacement from, or destruction of, their ancestral lands, according to the United Nations.

As everywhere in the world, communities from the Northern Luzon, the most populous island in the Philippines, to Mindanao, a large island in the south, are fighting hard to resist destructive forms of development.

Their struggles find echo in other parts of the region, particular in countries like India, home to 107 million tribal people, referred to locally as Adivasis.

“We resisted the government’s efforts to make us grow plantations and plant the same crops over wide areas,” K. Pandu Dora, an Adivasi from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, told IPS.

Andhra Pradesh is home to over 49 million people. According to the 2011 census, scheduled tribes constituted 5.3 percent of the total population, amounting to just under three million people.

Dora’s people live on hilltops in forests where they practice shifting cultivation, working intimately with the cycles of nature.

Neighbouring tribes that followed government experts’ advice to adopt modern agricultural methods with chemical fertilisers and monocultures are suffering terribly, Dora said through a translator.

With over 70 percent of the state’s tribal and farming communities living below the poverty line, unsustainable agricultural practices represent a potential disaster for millions of people.

Already, climate change is wreaking havoc on planting and harvesting practices, disrupting the natural cycles that rural communities are accustomed to.

Unlike the farmers stuck in government-sponsored programmes, however, Dora’s people have responded by increasing the diversity of their crops, and remain confident in their capacity to innovate.

“We will find our own answers,” he said.

In drought-stricken Kenya, small farmers who relied on a diverse selection of crops continue to do well according to Patrick Mangu, an ethnobotanist at the Nairobi National Museum of Kenya.

“Mrs. Kimonyi is never hungry,” Mangu told IPS as he described a local farmer’s one-hectare plot of land, which has 57 varieties planted in a mix of cereals, legumes, roots, tubers, fruit and herbs.

It is this diversity, mainly from local varieties that produced edible products virtually every day of the year, that have buffered Kimonyi from the impacts of drought, he said.

Nearly half of Kenya’s 44 million people live below the poverty line, the vast majority of them in rural areas of the central and western regions of the country.

Embracing traditional farming methods could play a huge role in improving incomes, health and food security across the country’s vast agricultural belt, but the government has yet to make a move in this direction.

Protecting the people who protect the Earth

Traditional knowledge and a holistic culture is a key part of the longevity of many indigenous peoples. The Quechua communities in the Cuzco region of southern Peru, for instance, have used their customary laws to manage more than 2,000 varieties of potatoes.

“To have potatoes, there must be land, people to work it, a culture to support the people, Mother Earth and the mountain gods,” Alejandro Argumedo, a program director at the Quechua-Aymara Association for Nature and Sustainable Development (ANDES), told IPS.

The communities developed their own agreement for sharing the benefits derived from these crops, based on traditional principles. Potatoes are more than food; they are a cultural symbol and important to all aspects of life for the Quechua, said Argumedo.

But preserving this way of life is no easy undertaking in Peru, where 632 native communities lack the titles to their land.

For Mexican Zapotec indigenous communities located in the Sierra Norte Mountains of central Mexico, there is no private property.

Rather than operating their community-owned forest industry to maximise profits, the Zapotec communities focus on job creation, reducing emigration to cities and enhancing the overall wellbeing of the community.

Protecting and managing their forestlands for many generations into the future is considered part of the community obligation.

Local people run virtually everything in the community as part of their ‘duties’ as community members. This includes being part of administration, neighbourhood, school and church committees, performing all vital roles from community policeman to municipal president.

What makes this all work is communal trust, deeply shared values that arise from long experience and knowledge, said David Barton Bray, a professor at Florida International University in Miami.

“These kinds of communities will be more important in the years to come because they can address vital issues that the state and the market cannot,” Bray told IPS back in 2010.

Around the world the best-protected forests are under the care of indigenous peoples, said Estebancio Castro Diaz of the Kuna Nation in southeastern Panama. More than 90 percent of the forests controlled by the Kuna people, for instance, are still standing.

This does not hold true for the rest of Panama, which lost over 14 percent of its forest cover in just two decades, between 1990 and 2010.

“The forest is a supermarket for us, it is not just about timber. There are also broad benefits to the larger society for local control of forests,” Diaz said.

Since trees absorb climate-heating carbon dioxide, healthy forests represent an important tool in fighting climate change. Forests under control of local peoples absorb 37 billion tonnes of CO2 a year, Victoria Tauli Corpuz, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, told IPS.

“In Guatemala forests managed by local people have 20 times less deforestation than those managed by the state, in Brazil it is 11 times lower,” said Tauli Corpuz.

However many governments neither recognise indigenous land tenure rights nor their traditional ways of managing forests, she added.

Moi Enomenga, a Waorani leader from Ecuador, was born into an uncontacted community. Credit: Courtesy Brian Keane, Land is Life

The overarching issue when it comes to dealing with climate change, biodiversity loss and living sustainably requires changing the current economic system that was created to dominate and extract resources from nature, she asserted.

“Modern education and knowledge is mainly about how to better dominate nature. It is never about how to live harmoniously with nature.

“Living well is all about keeping good relations with Mother Earth and not living by domination or extraction,” she concluded.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

The Bonda tribe is one of the most ancient indigenous groups in India. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Gloria Schiavi
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 4 2014 (IPS)

The world’s 370 million indigenous people, who say they were marginalised in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), want to play a key role in the U.N.’s post-2015 development agenda, which will be finalised next year.

“The world can still benefit from [our] knowledge by including us in the journey for the next 15 years. And we want this to be an equal partnership, we do not want to be beneficiaries,” stated Galina Angarova, the New York representative of Tebtebba Foundation (the Indigenous Peoples’ International Center for Policy Research and Education).

In her speech at the closing session of the three-day conference of NGOs sponsored by the U.N. Department of Public Information (DPI) last week, she highlighted the need to include marginalised groups in development targets as well as in the on-going negotiations for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which will replace the MDGs in 2015.

"A lot of the corporations are eyeing [indigenous peoples'] territories for future profit. This is why free prior and informed consent is key. Because without it, they are just free to go and grab, and develop on those territories." -- Galina Angarova, the New York representative of Tebtebba Foundation (Indigenous Peoples' International Center for Policy Research and Education)
Indigenous peoples continue to fight for their right to self-determination, which is not a reality yet, despite being granted by the 2007 U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The outcome document of the DPI/NGO conference, drafted and amended through a participative process over the past months, will feed into the discussion about the post-2015 agenda and the SDGs in the General Assembly, the first World Conference on Indigenous People that will be held on Sep. 22-23, and into the Secretary General’s synthesis report to be issued later this autumn.

Although this declaration is not legally binding, it has strong power in terms of accountability and review mechanisms, which are key points in the SDGs.

“The fact that the resource document is based upon officially submitted positions by major U.N. groups and stakeholders gives it quite a strong voice,” Maruxa Cardama, co-chair of the conference declaration drafting committee, told IPS.

“I think that this document can take us very far if we understand the power of soft law and soft policy,” she added.

This year marked the 65th edition of the DPI/NGO conference, which returned to New York after seven years, and registered an unprecedented attendance from civil society: more than 2,000 representatives of international NGOs gathered from more than 100 countries. Among those present, indigenous groups and organisations managed to make a strong case for their inclusion in the development agenda.

According to Angarova, indigenous peoples’ territories cover 24 percent of the land worldwide, and host 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity.

“A lot of the corporations are eyeing those territories for future profit. This is why free prior and informed consent is key. Because without it they [corporations] are just free to go and grab, and develop on those territories,” she told IPS.

Indigenous people are then thrown into mainstream society without the means to survive.

Instead, advocates and representatives say they should be able to give their consent to any reforms that directly or indirectly impact governance in their community, or development in the lands they inhabit.

“This has to be done at all levels, starting from the sustainable development programmes; and then the national governments should derive the mandate from the U.N. level, from the multilateral level down to national government plans,” Angarova stated.

Harnessing these policies into the development goals of reducing hunger and achieving food security also has great potential.

Not only must these communities be able to access the natural resources but they also have to ensure the learning curriculum for their children includes traditional education and allows kids to spend time with elders to learn about the cycle of life, nature, harvesting and farming.

Their challenge is now to preserve their knowledge and pass it on.

“The knowledge and understanding that we have is really vital […],” Carmen continued. “Maybe the world will look at indigenous people and ask in a respectful way how to grow corn with no water.”

Myrna Cunningham, president of the Centre for Autonomy and Development of Indigenous People in Nicaragua, pointed out that indigenous people are not poor of their own accord, but have been impoverished as a result of the development paradigm that has been imposed on them.

For instance, about 600 indigenous languages have been lost in the past 100 years, roughly one every two weeks. As language is part of the biodiversity indigenous communities preserve, losing language means losing biodiversity. This is necessarily linked to a change in their relationship with the world.

Carmen explained to IPS that there is no translation in indigenous language for words like “intellectual property” or “human rights”, for example. These concepts have to be imported from a different culture.

So things have been literally lost in translation. Paradigms from other languages and cultures have been imposed over a reality that was perceived in a different way for centuries.

Now it is time to revisit this paradigm, as the world prepares for a decade of inclusive and sustainable development.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida