Indigenous Peoples and the Third Way

8/7/2019 Indigenous Peoples and the Third Way

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INDIGENOUS PEOPLES and the THIRD WAY

By Aidan Rankin

If now I sit once more for a brief quarter hour on the parapet of the bridge from whichas a child I dangled my fishing line a thousand times, I am powerfully gripped by anawareness of how beautiful and remarkable was the experience of possessing aplace to call my own. Just once to have known in one small corner of the globe eachhouse and every window in them, and every person behind each window! Just onceto have felt inseparable from a particular corner of the world, much as a tree is boundby its roots to its own particular spot.Herman HesseThe ahatai [settlers] have always coveted Llakha Honhat [Our Land], and they haveused deceit and violence in order to take it from us. ... They did not plant the trees;they do not keep the bees; the wild animals and fish do not belong to them. ... We

have always lived here, since the time of creation -- we are as much a part of LlakhaHonhat as the trees that grow on it. Our land belongs to us because we belong to theland.Oral History of the Wichi Indians (Northern Argentina)Our roots are deep in the lands where we live. We have a great love for our country,for our birthplace is here. The soil is rich from the bones of thousands of ourgenerations. Each of us was created in these lands and it is our duty to take care ofthem, because from these lands will spring the future generations of our peoples. Wewill walk about with great respect for the Earth, for it is a very Sacred Place.Sioux, Navajo and Iroquois declaration, USA, 1978

THE ISSUES

The struggle for indigenous peoples' rights is not about rights in the narrow, Westernliberal sense -- the "right" to be assimilated in a 'multicultural society', the 'right' toparticipate in a global marketplace, the 'right' to citizenship of a remote, impersonal,irrelevant state. Indigenous peoples' rights are about land, community and self-determination, the rights of peoples to preserve their distinctive cultures andidentities.

From Siberia to Sudan, Brazil to Bangladesh, indigenous populations demandnothing more -- or less -- than the right to relate to the world around them on theirown terms. This simple, very natural desire has placed them in violent conflict withcentralising governments, rapacious transnational corporations, agro-industrial"experts", fundamentalist missionaries, 'politically correct' teachers -- a plethora ofevil-doers and do-gooders who assume the right to interfere in their lives.

When they assert their right to self-rule, indigenous peoples face at bestambivalence, at worst hostility and scorn from the so-called 'civilised world'. This isbecause their movements elude the facile, right/left stereotypes of conventional

political discourse. They are opposed to capitalism and view their land as commonproperty, positions that might suggest affinities with the left. Yet their emphasis on


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roots, on tradition and continuity, on language, culture, ethnic identity and spirituality,is conservative in the true and best sense of the word. It is a conservatism that wouldprobably have been understood by Edmund Burke, who spoke of the successfulstate as one that builds upon foundations of inherited wisdom :By preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve,

we are never wholly new; in what we retain, we are never wholly obsolete. .... wehave given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; .... adopting ourfundamental laws into the bosoms of our family affections; keeping inseparable ....our state, our hearths, our sepulchres and our altars.

Indigenous societies are not static. They evolve like any other human groups,perhaps more than most. They have complex histories of convulsion and change, bethat change political or climatic. They create art and literature, make music, adaptthemselves to some of the harshest conditions known to man. Their respect fortradition as a humanising influence, their opposition to arbitrarily imposed change ofunproven worth is anathema to both the neo-liberal right and the multicultural left.

Burke's conservative defence of the organic community is drawn from his best-knownwork, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), a timely exposure of the waythat abstract, rootless 'rights' can become instruments of tyranny. More than thirtyyears earlier, in 1756, Burke wrote another book, A Vindication of Natural Society,where he attacked the idea of 'development' for its own sake and (in languagefamiliar to indigenous activists today) expresses his supreme belief in a nature which"if left to itself were the best and surest Guide". He later repudiated this early work,which had been praised by the anarchist pioneer William Godwin. The connectionbetween respect for nature and traditionalist conservatism is perhaps more easilyunderstood in our own age, the butt-end of the industrial revolution.Like true anarchists -- and indeed true conservatives -- indigenous peoples do notrecognise divisions between state and community, between politics, the arts andeveryday life. Some societies, like the Pygmies of the central African forest, aremade up of highly individualistic hunters and warriors, whose communal bonds areloose. Others, like the Kalahari Bushmen and the Wichi of Argentina cited above,practise forms of 'primitive communism' that reconcile individual creativity andstrength with an ethic of social responsibility. The Tuareg of North-West Africa arenomads with a proud warrior tradition and a rigid hierarchy. Were they to meet, thesedisparate peoples would doubtless celebrate the many differences betweenthemselves. The more discerning among them, might, however, recognise common

values -- respect for craftsmanship and custom, traditions of story-telling, belief inman as part of nature, not above or beyond it. Those rendered 'politically aware' bypainful contact with the West might also see their disparate societies as pockets ofresistance to globalisation, to the ideology of 'market forces', part death-cult, partvirus, that infests our 'civilisation' and threatens even the remotest regions of theEarth.

Indigenous peoples and their allies could, like the young George Orwell, legitimatelycall themselves 'Tory anarchists'. Their anarchism is close to that of Proudhon andCourbet, for thinker and artist alike found inspiration in the rugged, fiercelyindependent peasant communities of the Franche-Comte. In our own century,

indigenous anarchism accords well with the philosophy of Paul Goodman, whodismissed the 'compulsory mis-education' of children with the wise remark that


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students could learn more from the cafe than the classroom. In a similar vein, theBritish anti-authoritarian Colin Ward has written for over thirty years about co-operatives, communes and other oases of human values within our unsustainableconsumerist society (for his humanity and vision he was sacked from the NewStatesman and Society in its revamped, technocratic form).

The spirituality of indigenous peoples, like that of pre-Christian Europe, is founded onreverence for natural forces, the need for man to live within natural bounds -- anawareness, in other words, that 'small is beautiful'. This would suggest a naturalaffinity between indigenous peoples' organisations and the green movement in'developed' societies. Such an alliance, potentially of great moral and political force,is thwarted by the influence on green politics of left-wing cultural prejudice. Feminists,for instance, use government 'aid' programmes, UN agencies and the charity sectorto promote a universalist model of 'liberation' that takes no account of local custom orthe distribution of power within tribal societies. This model assumes that theextended family and the tribe are inherently oppressive to women. It presumes that

indigenous women are sitting in villages waiting to be 'empowered' by their whitesisters, so that they can don suits or overalls to pursue Western-style careers.Ironically, women in tribal societies often have powers beyond the wildest dreams oftheir counterparts in the 'developed' world. Among the Tuareg, women are thepurveyors of history and myth, while it is the men who wear veils! Indigenouspeoples, female or male, correctly identify the factory and office as insidious forms ofslavery. Similarly, the green left is guided by a romantic suburban pacifism that seeshunting and trapping as unconscionable attacks on 'pristine nature'. Recently, ayoung woman teacher originating from Ontario told her Innu Indian primary schoolstudents in Labrador, Canada, that hunting beaver or any other animal was evil....

Who is the greatest predator of all? she asked them. We are! she answered, whenthey refused to respond.

Were she transferred to Inner London, this same teacher would no doubt ban classicchildren's books in the name of 'multicultural awareness' or 'equal opportunities'. Her'progressive' conditioning prevents her from seeing the centrality of hunting to Innulife, or realising that the Innu respect and value the animals they hunt, incorporatingthem in their folk religion, giving them qualities of courage and wisdom. Thus, with allthe best intentions in her limited little world, she places herself in a long line ofoppressors of the Innu: the missionaries who trampled upon their folk traditions, the

bureaucrats who forced them to live in houses and buy junk food from supermarkets,the NATO airforces that shatter their peace with incessant low-level flights over theirland. Contrast her approach with that of John Seymour, a true ecologist untainted by'political correctness'. In his book The Ultimate Heresy (1989), he understands thatJoseph, his Bushman friend, revered the gemsbok as he hunted it with a spear :Though he would probably not have put the prayer into words, it might have runsomething like this : The life force ordains that your kind shall crop the grass after therains and munch the tsava melons.... You destroy these things so that they shouldbecome part of a higher form of life, and the life force ordains that I shall kill you, myBrother, and partake of your flesh, so that I can live too.


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Few Western ecologists display the generosity or wisdom of the redoubtable MrSeymour. For indigenous societies, 'political correctness' is colonialism in greenwrapping paper.The idea of indigenous rights cuts like a scalpel across the outdated boundaries ofWestern political thought. It is conservative, in its respect for history and tradition,

green in its respect for ecological limits, and archist in its advocacy of autonomous,human-scale communities. It is also separatist, because it is based on thefundamental right to self-rule, and nationalist, in the broadest, most generous senseof this word, affirming the connection between land and identity, between cultural andterritorial integrity. Indigenous peoples, by their very survival within an increasinglyuniform world, present a powerful human challenge to the two most inhumanideologies today: economic liberalism, and multiculturalism. The first of thesereduces individuals and peoples to slaves of 'market forces', the second destroys anddilutes all cultures under the pretext of 'tolerance' and 'inclusion'. Amazon Indiansworking as cheap labour for oil multinationals, eating at McDonalds, and listening tothe Spice Girls through Sony Walkmans -- that is the 'globalist' ideal. By asserting

their right to exist, indigenous peoples show that there are such things as societies,that they can be defended, that the notions of 'progress' and 'growth' that havebrought misery to the West can be successfully opposed.

WHO ARE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES?

The term 'indigenous peoples' is one that I am using for convenience to describe the300 million people throughout the world who live in communities based on land andtribe, outside the mainstream of the world economy, remote from the established

centres of political power, and possessing distinctive cultures which predatecapitalism and socialism. Many other terms are used to describe such societies :Survival International refer to 'tribal peoples', whilst many Native American groupsunderstandably prefer 'First Nations'. With apologies all round, I shall stick to'indigenous', because it is the most familiar term and because -- as we shall see -- itsdefinition can be broadened. There are so many peoples that fall into this categorythat the examples I use are bound to be somewhat arbitrary. For this reason, I haveisolated three characteristics which indigenous societies can be said to share :

i.) CONNECTION WITH THE LAND

Indigenous peoples regard land as the basis of national or tribal identity, religion andculture, of life itself. It is treated as collective property, transcending in importancepersonal possessions. Argentina's Wichi Indians refer to Llakha Honhat (on theborders of Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay) as "the land of their ancestors' bones".Recovery of that land, stolen from them by settlers for intensive farming, is central totheir struggle for survival as a people. Similarly, the Guarani-Kaiowa Indians ofSouth-Western Brazil experience deforestation of their land as a form of religiousdesecration, because the forest was created by their life-giving spirit, Nande Ru. InWest Papua (called 'Irian Jaya' by its Indonesian occupiers), the Freeport McMoRanmining site, part-owned by RTZ, encroaches on land sacred to the AmungMe people,because it is the home of the ancestral spirit Jo-Mun Nerek. Land-based spiritualitygives indigenous communities a special awareness of the environment and the folly


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of trying to overthrow nature. This letter from the Hopi people of Arizona to the UnitedStates government in 1984 shows an early awareness that 'civilisation' is playingRussian Roulette with the climate :

We have tried to warn you again and again that some white men will cause great

suffering for all life if they continue to violate and desecrate the great spirit's laws forthis land and life. Already the forces of nature are hitting your cities and towns withgreater intensity and violence. Big winds, earthquakes, tornadoes, volcanoes,severity of seasons changing, droughts, floods, fires, freezing-cold weather, blazingheatwaves. All your scientists have not been able to predict these natural forces, norcan they stop them!

ii.) MALE / FEMALE BALANCE

The prominence of women in indigenous societies has been noted with admiration in

the West. We have seen already with the Tuareg of North-West Africa -- a Muslimpeople -- that women are educators, story-tellers and myth-makers, so are lookedupon by men as sources of knowledge as well as life. Tuareg society is stratified,with political discourse confined to the highest castes. Within those castes, however,women exactly the same powers as men, and are included in discussions at everylevel. Throughout the indigenous world, female creativity in music, painting, story-telling, child-rearing and village politics is regarded as central to the community'sexistence. In the words of another Hopi petition :

The family, the dwelling house, and the field are inseparable because the woman isthe heart of these, and they rest with her.

Like European pagans, indigenous peoples worship goddesses as well as gods, andthe spirits of the forests, mountains and rivers are as likely to be female as male. Thismale/female balance is not based on sameness, but difference, between the sexes. Itvalues differences between men and women rather than seeking to obliterate alldistinctions like orthodox feminism in 'developed' societies. The masculine attributesof spontaneity, inventiveness, craftsmanship and military prowess, and the femaleattributes of nurture, resourcefulness and life-affirming wisdom are seen ascomplementary principles holding together the structures of extended family, villageand tribe. Friendships between men and co-operation between women are often as

important, sometimes more important, than marital ties. It would not occur to aYanomami, Wichi or 'Pygmy' woman that preparing food, or looking after the youngand the old, somehow made her 'second-class'. Nor would it occur to her husbandand brothers that hunting gave them special privileges.

iii.) PEACEFUL BUT NOT PACIFIST

Attachment to land necessarily implies a willingness to defend it. Indigenous peoplestherefore regard the idea that they should lay down their weapons as equal inabsurdity to the notion that they should stop hunting for food. Like all human groups,

indigenous communities have gone to war with each other. Their conflicts, althoughoften bloody, pale into insignificance in comparison to the wars waged against them


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by governments and corporations. In 1996, when a group of Europeans werekidnapped by a secessionist movement in West Papua, the British press describedthe indigenous Papuans as 'primitive tribes' of 'stone age' people who had onlyrecently given up 'head-hunting'. Yet an AmungMe tribesman staring into the cratergouged from Mount Grasberg by the Freeport mining corporation might himself view

the destruction of nature as primitive and brutal. To the AmungMe, land is valuable inits own right, but to the Indonesian dictatorship and its backers at Freeport and RTZ,land is no more than an exploitable resource. They do not see the forests andmountains, merely the copper and gold beneath them. In 'developed societies',defence is largely about control over resources, people and arbitrarily-drawn borders.Indigenous defence, by contrast, is about protecting ancestral lands, ancestral spirits.Indigenous societies have strong warrior traditions, and are not afraid to use theseagainst states and corporations settlers or 'politically correct' busybodies whothreaten their lands and lives.

Indigenous populations vary immensely in numbers, structure and geographical

location. It is dangerous to depict them with anything other than broad brushstrokes,for the right to be different lies at the heart of indigenous politics. Yet as well assharing some common characteristics, indigenous peoples face common dangersfrom similar enemies. Here I have identified four of the most significant indigenousstruggles against the forces of centralisation, economic 'growth' and 'inevitableprogress'.

I.) Against Transnational Corporations

When it comes to corporate investment, indigenous peoples' lands suddenly cease tobe the remote, inaccessible enclaves of Western travel literature and becomelucrative 'opportunities' for economic plunder and cultural intervention. In WestPapua, the Freeport mine is sustained by a US $1,250 million injection from London-based RTZ. This mining corporation, the world's largest, has a 12% share in Freeportand a seat on the company's board. Freeport, in turn, enjoys a mutually beneficialrelationship with West Papua's Indonesian colonists -- who have imposed a regime oftorture, detention without trial, and disappearance since the late 1960s. According toFreeport chairman James (Jim-Bob) Moffett, the company and its Indonesianbackers are "thrusting a spear of development into the heart of West Papua". Insimilar vein, the Peruvian government of President Alberto Fujimori hands over large

tracts of Indian land to Mobil, including land belonging to Indians who have never hadcontact with non-indigenous peoples. These 'uncontacted' populations areparticularly vulnerable to the disease and social dislocation that oil prospectors andsettler colonies will bring.

II.) Against Roads

In Britain and other 'developed' countries, roads are seen increasingly as symbols ofthe assault on nature by consumer capitalism. For indigenous, they can bring utterdevastation. In 1960, the 'developmentalist' Brazilian government bulldozed the BR-

364 through the savanna homeland of the Nambiquara people, allowing an influx ofsettlers and farmers to colonise Indian land. A 'reserve' was later created for the


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Indians, carved out of territory that should have been theirs, but the authoritiesconveniently chose an area so arid that nothing could grow. During the 1980s, theWorld Bank poured money into 'improving' the road, without thinking of consulting theindigenous population. The result is that farmers plough up Nambiquara land, loggerssteal wood, and game -- scarce even at the best of times -- has all but disappeared.

According to a Survival International report :

The 1,200 remaining Nambiquara are suffering from malnutrition and fatal diseases,including typhoid and yellow fever, brought in by the immigrants. Now gold minersare moving onto their land, polluting rivers and threatening their very survival.

Have the missionaries of 'progress' learned from such tragedies? Sadly not. TheBrazilian government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, left-wing economistturned rampant free-marketeer, still plans to develop the Pan American Highway,'opening the interior' to foreign investment at the cost of native lives and nativecultures.

III.) Against National Borders

For most indigenous peoples, independence from European colonialism has notbrought freedom. On the contrary, it has brought new, more extreme forms ofcolonialism, or enforced assimilation in federal unions or arbitrarily defined nation-states. The Tuareg, whose fierce resistance to French rule won international acclaim,found themselves divided between five new states: Algeria, Burkina Faso, Libya, Maliand Niger. To them, these borders have nothing to do with national identity -- theysee them as meaningless lines on a map. The Tuareg are a people who value theirright to roam; before the advent of borders and roads, they controlled the traderoutes across the Sahara. But the governments of Mali and Niger, where mostTuareg are concentrated, have continuously attempted to impose a 'settled' lifestyle.They call the Tuareg 'white nomads' and accuse them of clinging to the 'privilege' ofnomadism.

The Jummas of Bangladesh are a collection of largely Buddhist hill peoples whoresemble the tribal minorities of neighbouring Burma and Thailand. In colonial times,the British recognised their culture as distinctive, and protected their lands fromcolonisation. Since 1971, when Bangladesh became a fully independent state, its

governments have relentlessly persecuted the Jummas. They have moved settlersonto their land in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, sent troops to burn them alive in theirhomes and attempted to obliterate their religion. One third of the Jummas are now inexile, many in refugee camps across the Indian border. A similar situation is faced bythe Nuba of central Sudan. The Nuba are a mainly Muslim people, but ethnically theyresemble the Christian and animist peoples of the South rather than the Arab-dominated North. Their practice of Islam is considered unorthodox by the Khartoumgovernment, which incited local religious leaders to issue a collective Fatwa againstthem. The real motive is not religious, it is economic and territorial. The governmentwants the fertile pasture lands of the Nuba Hills for its friends in agri-business. It hasencouraged attacks on Nuba by neighbouring Arab peoples and moved them forcibly

to 'peace villages' that are little more than concentration camps. Nuba children havebeen sold into slavery in the North. Sudan's borders are arbitrary even for post-


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colonial Africa, forcibly uniting peoples who have no cultural or historic connectionwith each other except for the experience of British rule. Further West, the chaos ofNigeria presents a powerful warning of the dangers of federal union without popularconsent.

IV.) Against Settlers

Immigration by settler communities is a threat shared by almost all indigenoussocieties today. It is a tool of governments that wish to impose uniform patterns ofbehaviour within their borders, or to use 'remote' regions as dumping grounds for thecasualties of economic injustice. It destroys land, dilutes cultures, and weakens thesettler populations themsleves as well as the affected indigenous peoples. Inoppressing indigenous societies, settlers do the work of governments andcorporations for them at cheap rates.

Brazil's governments, civilian and military, have always seen Amazonia as anuncharted frontier through which problems of poverty, homelessness and urbancrime will miraculously resolve themselves. It is of little relevance to them that diversepopulations of hunter-gatherers and farmers have lived there successfully for manyhundreds of years. Most of the problems faced by Amazon Indians, from the randomkillings of the Makuxi to the poisoning of the Yanomami's water supply, stem from thepresence of settlers who practise small-scale logging and amateur gold mining. Theyare landless peasants or migrants from urban slums, lacking affinity with the land andunwilling to learn from the native peoples they have been conditioned to regard asinferior. In 1991, after a twenty-year campaign by supporters of indigenous rights, aPresidential decree at last provided for the demarcation and official protection ofIndian land. But now a new edict, Decree 1771, allows settler populations, loggingcompanies and gold miners to 'challenge' these demarcations -- and to squat onIndian land in the process.

Argentina's Wichi, who had hunted, farmed and fished sustainably for generations inthe dry Chaco region of their country's border, have seen their land this centuryreduced to an inhospitable dust-bowl. This is because the settlers, known as criollos,introduced intensive cattle ranching to an area where it was wholly inappropriate. Asthe Wichi history shows, they brought with them fences and rifles -- which they haveused to exclude the Indians from their own land :

Some said they had come to buy iguana skins and they would go at the end of theseason. But soon they set up trading stores and stayed -- without even mentioning itto us, as though we didn't exist.... One colonist even threatened us with war. "Indians,what will you do without weapons if we make war on you?" he asked.

In recent years the Wichi have experienced a remarkable cultural revival and havedeveloped a strong political organisation, called Lhakha Honhat, after theirhomeland. They have reclaimed their oral history, had it transposed into writing forthe first time, and produced a giant map of their colonised land which they are usingto lobby governments. In 1994 a Wichi representative, Francisco Perez, travelled to

Geneva to address the UN Commission on Human Rights -- no mean achievementfor a people who only ten years earlier were barely acknowledged to exist.


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WE ARE ALL "INDIGENOUS PEOPLES" NOW!

By their very existence, indigenous societies hold up a critical mirror to the dominantculture of consumerism. They prove that human beings can find material and spiritualsatisfaction without the aid of the market or the state, television soap operas,packaged foods or prozac. In this sense, they are a living embodiment of the ThirdWay, rejecting both global capitalism and state socialism, practising decentralisation,living within natural bounds and viewing land as a sacred possession, not a merepiece of real-estate. They are the cutting edge of resistance to multiculturalimperialism, the universalist, levelling-down ideology of corporations, governments,mass-media and 'political correcters' alike. Multicultural imperialism is more insidiousthan traditional forms of colonial rule because it uses the language of egalitarianismand tolerance to promote uniformity of thought. It values 'inclusiveness' over diversity,

scorns attachment to land and place, and seeks to break down rather thanstrengthen traditional cultures. Most Western greens have yet to realise whatindigenous peoples have understood for some time -- that the global market andglobal 'political correctness' are but two sides of the same coin.

Why should we, in our stressful, urban-centred societies, be interested in theseremote and disparate cultures of which we know little? The answer is that thepeoples of our supposedly 'advanced' societies face problems increasingly similar totribal peoples: discrimination, exclusion, the erosion of identity, alienation frompolitics and work. Like the world's poor, we are locked into trade treaties --

Maastricht, NAFTA and GATT -- that deprive us of control over our lives anddestinies. We confront the menace of 'gigantism' -- ever-larger companies, bloatedbureaucracies, and the absorption of nations and peoples into artificial, soullesssuperstates lacking either cultural foundations or democratic legitimacy.

In Britain, the idea of citizenship has always been nebulous, at least since Normantimes; the radical republican factions of the Civil War identified the 'Norman Yoke' asthe root of centralised oppression. Whether it happens to lean to 'left' or 'right', ourpolitical establishment behaves more as a colonial power than as a democratic polity.In the names of 'progress' and of multiculturalism, our countryside is destroyed byroads, our history rewritten, our cultures denigrated, our right to self-determination

signed away. In the name of 'political correctness' our voices are silenced, ourlanguage castrated. Land and identity are subordinated to 'market forces',male/female balance to a life-denying cult of 'gender neutrality'. The struggles ofindigenous peoples have become ours, too....

Indigenous Peoples and the Third Way

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