Decolonial Matters | Indigeneity and resistance to mining

Indigenous protest, Quito, March
2012, after a 15-day march

demanding an end to open pit mining
and new oil concessions.

Photo credit: Links Journal    

Moderator’s
Note: Over the years I have covered
local and global struggles against extractive industries because these
represent one of the most destructive forces of environmental violence on the
planet. This violence is the result of colluding forces involving corrupt neoliberal
states and their brutally efficient corporate partners.

On occasion our coverage of indigenous struggles
against extractive colonialism invites a thoughtful theoretical intervention
and so I present the work of Manuela Picq, a Latin Americanist at the Institute
for Advanced Study at Princeton, who presents a compelling argument for the
privileging of Indigeneity as a category for the articulation of human and
ecosystem rights. Her principal argument is that indigenous resistance is a
threat to the established Westphalian order that is the basis of state
sovereignty in Latin America. Picq states:

Indigeneity disrupts state
sovereignty…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 thus also a barrier to the spread of
neoliberal enclosures – the privatization of territories that mining and other
extractive industries require in order to operate. This resistance may also be
seen as disruptive of the second contradiction of capitalism – the tendency to
destroy the environmental and human sources of its own productivity.

We must support indigenous peoples in their resistance
to mining because in doing so they are helping to preserve the planetary stock
of biocultural diversity and the capacity for ecosystem resilience. This is the
real challenge that Indigeneity presents to the normal course of discourse in
the field of International Relations (IR).

Picq’s analysis reveals that Latin American
post-neoliberal politicians are just as likely to kowtow to corporate interests
as any “liberal” American version like Obama. She reminds us that “[o]pening
Ecuador to mega-mining financed much of President Correa’s third re-election.”
Sounds very “American”.

This article
was originally published in E-International Relations' free-to-download Edited
Collection, Restoring Indigenous Self Determination: Theoretical and Practical
Approaches. Republished under a Creative Commons License; the article appeared
on –line on June 2. 2014.

Self-Determination
as Anti-Extractivism

HOW
INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE CHALLENGES WORLD POLITICS

Image credit of Earth
warriors rising

Manuela Picq | Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton | June 2, 2014

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

Protesting Bello Monte Dam.

Photo credit: Colegio
Web

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.

Article originally published in E-IR’s
free-to-download Edited Collection, Restoring
Indigenous Self Determination: Theoretical and Practical Approaches.
Republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) license

References

Banerjee, S. (2012) Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point. New
York: Seven Stories Press.

Beier, J.M. (2009) International Relations in Uncommon Places:
Indigeneity, Cosmology, and the Limits of International Theory. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.

Casaús, M. E. (2007) Guatemala: Linaje y racismo. Guatemala: F&G
Editores.

Chakrabarty, D. (2008) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Cott, D.L.V. (2008) Radical democracy in the Andes. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Deneault, A., Denis, M. and Sacher, W. (2012) Paradis sous terre:
comment le Canada est devenu la plaque tournante de l’industrie minie`re
mondiale. Montre´al: E´cosocie´te´.

Feather, C. (2014) Violating rights and threatening lives: The Camisea
gas project and indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation. Moreton-in-Marsh,
United Kingdom: Forest Peoples Programme.

Guartambel, C.P. (2012) Agua u oro: Kimsacocha, la resistencia por el
água. Cuenca, Ecuador: Universidad Estatal de Cuenca.

Guevara, F. E. (2013, December 10) “La explotación del Yasuní:
reprimarizacioón de la economía del Ecuador.” Opción- Ecuador.

Hobson, J.M. (2012) The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics:
Western International Theory 1760-2010. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jackson, P.T. (2010) The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations:
Philosophy of Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics. New
York: Routledge.

MacLeod, M. and Pérez, C. (2013) Tu’n Tklet Qnan Tx’otx’, Q’ixkojalel,
b’ix Tb’anil Qanq’ib’il, En defensa de la Madre Tierra, sentir lo que siente el
otro, y el buen vivir. La lucha de Doña Crisanta contra Goldcorp. México:
CeActl.

Madrid, R.L. (2012) The Rise of Ethnic Politics in Latin America.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Morgan, R. (2011) Transforming Law and Institution: Indigenous Peoples,
the United Nations and Human Rights. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate.

O’Brien, J.M. (2010) Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of
Existence in New England. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota
Press.

Peace Brigades International. (2011) “Mining in Colombia: At What Cost?”
Colombia Newsletter, 18: 1–47.

Ryser, R.C. (2012) Indigenous Nations and Modern States: The Political
Emergence of Nations Challenging State Power. New York: Routledge.

Sassen, S. (2008) Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global
Assemblages. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Sawyer, S. and Gomez, E.T. (2012) The Politics of Resource Extraction:
Indigenous Peoples, Multinational Corporations and the State. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.

Shadian, J.M. (2013) The Politics of Arctic Sovereignty: Oil, Ice and
Inuit Governance. New York: Routledge.

Shaw, K. (2008) Indigeneity and Political Theory: Sovereignty and the
limits of the political. New York: Routledge.

Tickner, A.B. (2013) “Core, periphery and (neo)imperialist International
Relations.” European Journal of International Relations, 19(3): 627–46.

Tickner, A.B. and Blaney, D.L. (2013) Claiming the International. New
York: Routledge.

UN General Assembly. (2008) United Nations Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples resolution / adopted by the General Assembly. 2 October
2007, UN. Doc. A/RES/61/295.

Van de Sandt, J. (2009) Mining Conflicts and Indigenous Peoples in
Guatemala. The Hague: Cordaid.

Wallerstein, I.M. (2006) European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power.
New York: The New Press.

Zibechi, R. (2013, October 27) “Latin America Rejects the Extractive
Model in the Streets.” Americas Program. Available at:
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/10983 (Accessed 29 January 2014).

Endnotes

1 A delegation from the Red Sucker Lake First Nation
descended on the work camp of Mega Precious Metals, Inc., a mineral exploration
company, to stop them from working and demand that they vacate the land
immediately. The Mathias Colomb First Nation issued a similar order to Hudbay
Mining and Smelting Co., Ltd. and the Province of Manitoba.

2 According to the company’s own social and
environmental impact report, the Marlin mine consumes about 250 thousand liters
of water every hour (MacLeod and Pérez 2013).