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THE DAY OF THE WORLD’S INDIGENOUS PEOPLES  
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Aviva Chomsky
August 9, 2024
TomDispatch
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_ On the 30th anniversary of the UN declaration of Day of the World's
Indigenous Peoples, we need to get beyond stereotypes, from Colombia
to the United States to Gaza _

"Coal mining in Cerrejón", by Hour.poing (CC BY-SA 3.0)

 

On August 9, 2001, in Colombia, riot police and private security
forces from the Cerrejón coal mine — one of the largest open-pit
coal mines in the world — surrounded the remote community of Tabaco.
They then dragged residents out of their homes and bulldozed what
remained of that town’s structures. There was, after all, coal under
the town and the mine’s owner, Exxon Mobil Corporation, wanted to
access it. Since that date, the displaced residents of Tabaco have
been fighting for compensation and (as guaranteed by both Colombian
and international law) the reconstruction of their community. So far,
no such luck.

Note that August 9th was then and is now the International Day of the
World’s Indigenous Peoples, as the United Nations first declared in
1994. That was, in fact, the day when the newly formed U.N. Working
Group on Indigenous Populations had its initial meeting in 1982.

Indigenous peoples have, of course, been under siege by colonizers for
hundreds of years, even if their struggles for land and sovereignty
only gained true international recognition in the late twentieth
century, a time when, ironically enough, they were experiencing new
assaults on their lands globally. Since World War II, the
unprecedented growth of both the world’s population and global
consumption levels have pushed resource use far beyond any limits once
imagined. And that scramble for resources only accelerated starting in
the 1990s, which meant further encroachment on Indigenous territories
— and, of course, an onrushing climate catastrophe.

Since then, however, the growing visibility and power of Indigenous
movements have created enormous potential for fundamentally changing
our world in a positive fashion. While the struggle of the inhabitants
of Tabaco has in many ways been emblematic of Indigenous struggles
against extractivism, the story is more complicated. First, Tabaco
itself is not, in fact, an Indigenous community but one largely
descended from Africans brought to the New World as slaves. A narrow
emphasis on Indigeneity can make it hard to take in non-Indigenous
land and environmental struggles. Moreover, not all Indigenous people
are rural and the stereotype flattens the realities of such movements.
Finally, popular but misguided ideas about indigeneity underlie the
claim to a Jewish “Indigenous” presence in Palestine, one that
divorces Indigeneity from its historical context.

A deeper dive into colonialism and Indigenous peoples can help clarify
the nature of such movements today and, curiously enough, some of the
debates around the Israeli-Palestinian question as well.

DEFINING INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

Indigenous peoples today live under the jurisdiction of nation states
and those countries define them in varying ways. In the United States,
you are Indigenous if you belong to a federally recognized tribe.
Colombia formalized legal recognition of Indigeneity in its 1991
constitution 
[[link removed]]and laws
that outlined the specific requirements a group must fulfill to become
an official “Indigenous community.” Like other Latin American
countries, it also legally recognizes
[[link removed](Law%20of%20the,of%20Afro%2DColombian%20territorial%20rights.] Afro-descended
communities like Tabaco. In the case of Israel and Palestine, there is
no legal “Indigenous” status at all, though the concept has become
a weapon in a political debate about who has rights to historic
Palestine.

Indigenous peoples in the Americas were first identified as
“Indians” by European colonizers. Those so defined had no prior
sense of common identity, which only developed through the historical
experience of colonization. In the United States, pan-Indian
organizations initially emerged in response to the creation of
residential boarding schools
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forcibly “assimilate” Native American children in what were
functionally educational versions of prisons. Starting in the late
nineteenth century, children from widely varying homelands speaking
different languages were forced into the same regimented schools.

The more radical American Indian Movement emerged in the late
twentieth century among Indians from different nations thrown
together, thanks in part to the 1950s Voluntary Relocation Program
[[link removed].] that
brought more than 100,000 Native Americans to cities like Chicago,
Denver, and Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, collective Indigenous
identities in the United States drew not on long-standing language,
cultural, or ethnic affinities but on the common experience of
conquest and dispossession.

Only in the 1980s did international law begin to recognize a common
historical experience among Indigenous peoples globally. The U.N.
Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Affairs offered
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has become a foundational definition of Indigenous peoples, even
though the United Nations never formally adopted it: “Indigenous
communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical
continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed
on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors
of the societies now prevailing on those territories.” This
formulation was later expanded to acknowledge the Indigenous peoples
of Africa and Asia whose experience of “subjugation,
marginalization, dispossession, exclusion, or discrimination”
generally came from the independent nation-states that governed their
territory rather than directly from European colonization.

Two important innovations in international law, the ILO Convention
169
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1989 and the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
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of 2007, reflected the growing strength of global Indigenous activism
and acknowledged the growing threat of extractivist assaults on
Indigenous lands. ILO 169 created a legal requirement for “prior
consultation” — that is, a requirement that governments offer
Indigenous communities a voice in any development projects that might
affect their lands. The UNDRIP strengthened that provision by giving
communities the right to veto projects they opposed by mandating that
governments obtain “free, prior, and informed consent” before
embarking on any project affecting Indigenous lands.

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Buy the Book
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You probably won’t be surprised to learn that neither the United
States nor Israel ratified
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169 and neither supported the UNDRIP. Colombia, on the other hand,
ratified ILO 169, incorporating
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into its 1991 Constitution and extending such protections beyond
Indigenous peoples to Afro-Colombian communities like Tabaco. Yet, in
reality, as Tabaco’s experience shows, such legal rights continue to
be violated.

Even as Colombia and other Latin American countries strengthened
Indigenous rights, reformulating their nation-states as proudly
multilingual, multicultural, and plurinational, Israel’s 2018
nation-state law
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ethnonationalism there.

FOSSIL COLONIALISM

Fossil fuel use creates massive levels of toxic waste, including (but
not limited to) the greenhouse gas emissions now overheating our
planet. Increasing fossil fuel use — the industrial revolution in
each of its phases — also accelerated the use of other resources.
Industry can keep producing more and better stuff, but only by
extracting more resources and producing ever more waste. As a result,
geographical expansion — whether labeled Manifest Destiny,
colonialism, or globalization — has been inseparable from the
increasing use of energy, while both were also intimately tied to a
500-year assault on Indigenous lands and ways of life that continues
today.

Remarkably enough, despite centuries of colonial expansion, Indigenous
peoples still control about a quarter
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the planet’s land — mostly (you won’t be surprised to learn)
areas ignored by industrial colonizers because they were too cold, too
hot, too wet, too dry, too high, too low, or too apparently
resource-poor to be deemed useful. However, this century’s
relentless push for coal, oil, and natural gas, as well as the growing
demand for “clean” energy resources like biofuels, copper,
lithium, and rare earth elements, dams for hydropower, and land for
solar and wind farms, has pushed the geographic reach of extractivism
into new Indigenous territories. And the toxic waste from extraction
and production, including greenhouse gas emissions, is at the heart of
the present environmental catastrophes that affect us all, but
disproportionately Indigenous, poor, and marginalized communities.

Tabaco’s history reflects the experiences and fates of so many
self-liberated Afro-descended peoples who established their own
communities, some in still-autonomous Indigenous territories,
throughout Latin America over the past centuries. Like Indigenous
communities, they were rural-, land-, and subsistence-based. And like
Indigenous communities, their communities predated the nation-states
that later engulfed them. Today, like Tabaco, they find themselves
under threat from a modern fossil-fuelized version of colonialism.

ARE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE NATURAL ENVIRONMENTALISTS?

The resistance of Indigenous peoples to extractivism has made them
crucial protagonists in today’s environmental and climate movements.
But that’s only part of the story.

Colonial ideologies long romanticized Indigenous peoples as living in
harmony with the land and nature — the “noble savage” who
inhabited an idealized past. This view had a dark side, too: Europeans
also labeled them lazy, indolent, standing in the way of progress, and
in desperate and eternal need of European tutelage.

Such colonial constructions offered useful rationalizations for
destroying even imperial, technologically advanced Indigenous polities
like the Aztec and Inca empires that controlled and transformed nature
every bit as profoundly as did contemporaneous European societies.
Conquest of what they called “the new world” turned European
fantasies into reality, as Indigenous hierarchies were flattened and
Indigenous peoples dispossessed, enslaved, marginalized, or ruralized.
What began in 1492 would only continue with the Indian removal of the
1830s [[link removed]] in the United
States, Argentina’s “conquest of the desert
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in the late nineteenth century, and what some Indigenous scholars have
termed the fourth (or fifth) conquest
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today with neo-extractivism.

Fossil colonialism created a world in which socioeconomic and ethnic
categories came to overlap — but not completely. Ramachandra
Guha identified
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peoples,” whose economies and cultures were based on long-term
symbiotic relationships with their lands (and they were not all
Indigenous). Then, of course, there were the industrializing
“omnivores” whose technological and geographical reach knew (and
knows) no bounds. Whether European or not, such voracious omnivores
were also colonizers and industrializers. Rural, land-based ecosystem
peoples, whether Indigenous, Afro-descended, or neither, tend to
possess environmental values that look quite different from what
passes for environmentalism among so many industrialized omnivores.
Theirs is about changing the global economic system, not giving
corporations in the global north yet more incentives to extract more
from the global south.

Today, Indigenous people are indeed frequently “land-based,” but
they remain Indigenous even if they have been displaced, whether
voluntarily or not, from their rural communities (or in the United
States, their reservations). Most Indigenous people in the Americas
now do not live in peasant or rural communities but in urban areas.
Some Native American tribal governments and members have
even embraced extractive industries
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oil and coal on their reservations and they are still Indigenous, even
if they don’t match the colonial stereotype.

It’s the historical continuity with people who inhabited a territory
prior to those who founded today’s nation-states that makes people
Indigenous. In Latin America, Afro-descended peoples share this
“priority” not by their ancestors’ presence prior to 1492 but
because of their marginalization by the nation-states founded in the
1800s.

ISRAEL AND PALESTINE: WHO IS INDIGENOUS?

When I first became involved with Palestinian rights activism during
the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the term “Indigenous” never
arose. There were hints, however. Zionists argued that biblical
history connected Jews to the land, and French historian Maxime
Rodinson
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European Zionism in its historical context of European colonialism and
colonial thought, presaging what later became settler colonial theory.

Today, the question of who is “Indigenous” comes up regularly as
Palestinians emphasize their family and ancestral ties to the land
from which they were displaced, while mainstream Jewish and Zionist
organizations claim that Jews are “native and indigenous
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to Palestine. They also insist that Israeli Jews cannot be considered
colonizers
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unlike other European ones, they “came to a homeland” and there
was and is “no ‘motherland’” to which they can return. Israeli
historian Benny Morris typically relied
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the narrowest definition of colonialism (as “the policy and practice
of an imperial power acquiring political control over another
country”) to insist that European Zionists couldn’t be colonizers
since they were not agents of a state exercising imperial power.

Such arguments fundamentally distort the scholarship of Indigeneity
and settler colonialism. Indigenous people are those whose presence
predates the nation-state formed on their territory: in this case, the
Palestinians. The Israelis, while cherry-picking from the scholarship
on Indigeneity, ignore the basic fact that the state is theirs.

European colonialism has had many faces. Scholars have distinguished
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colonialism (as with much of the British imperial project in India and
Africa), in which a small number of colonial bureaucrats cycle in and
out of a colony to enforce systems of governance and extraction, from
settler colonialism. A classic example of the latter is British North
America, where the goal was to eliminate, rather than rule over,
native populations, and replace them with a flood of European
immigrants.

Of course, such categories are “ideal” types (however less than
ideal they proved to be in reality). Most European colonial projects
had both settler and franchise characteristics. In fact, one thing the
“Jewish-Indigenous” argument about Israel omits is the British
Mandate’s (1920-1948) role in fostering the Zionist project in
Palestine. It also ignores the fact that most settler colonies were
populated not by direct representatives of the colonial power but by
unwanted populations of prisoners, religious or ethnic minorities,
enslaved people (mostly Africans), indentured or contract laborers,
or, in the case of Palestine, European and later Arab and other Jews.

Settler colonialism in North America began in the 1600s but continued
long after the United States became an independent country. After
that, it wasn’t an outside ruler but a national government that
promoted the mass immigration of often impoverished and excluded
Europeans to its shores.

Latin America’s history also offers overlapping examples of
different types of colonial enterprises. In addition to the Spanish
religious and royal officials sent to establish foreign rule,
adventurers and non-Castilians made their way to the Americas in both
official and unofficial capacities. The colonial governments
mistrusted American-born “Creoles” of European origin as promoters
of their own interests rather than that of the ruling imperial powers,
even if they were also natural allies in controlling recalcitrant
indigenous, African, and Afro-descended populations.

Creole elites played a major role in Latin America’s eventual split
with Spain and in establishing independent countries there in the
nineteenth century. Latin America’s new countries, like the newly
independent United States, did not, of course, offer much independence
for Indigenous and Afro-descended peoples. And like the United States
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they promoted European immigration to whiten their populations, while
continuing the project of conquering, missionizing, and otherwise
eliminating Indigenous peoples and identities.

Today, amid the brutality in Gaza, it’s worth remembering that the
creation of Israel in Palestine, its ongoing genocide in Gaza, and its
current settlement and immigration policies, share many parallels with
those earlier settler colonial projects. Israel’s extractivist
projects (especially of water
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the West Bank and gas
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the coast of Gaza) also place it firmly among today’s fossil
colonizers.

There are many reasons for Washington’s fervent support for Israel,
but what Secretary of State Henry Kissinger described
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the U.S. need for Israel as a reliable “cop on the beat” or, as
Secretary of State Alexander Haig
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put it, an unsinkable American “aircraft carrier” in the oil-rich
Middle East, certainly plays a major role. So does the colonial view
that Israel represents technological and ideological modernity in a
retrograde Arab world.

On August 9th, we honor the world’s Indigenous peoples. Let’s
move beyond stereotypes and recognize the ideas, movements, and rights
of all peoples formerly and still subject to the violence of fossil
colonialism.  That includes those displaced from the Colombian town
of Tabaco and those in the besieged territory of Gaza.

Copyright 2024 Aviva Chomsky

_AVIVA CHOMSKY [[link removed]],
a TomDispatch regular
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of history and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State
University in Massachusetts. Her latest book, Is Science Enough? 
Forty Critical Questions about Climate Justice
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is just about to be published._

_Tom Engelhardt launched TomDispatch in October 2001 as an informal
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