The
U.S. Role In Indigenous Exploitation
By Max Kantar
02 May,
2008
Countercurrents.org
When it comes to reporting
important international events in which the United States plays an
enormous role, the mainstream corporate media is once again fulfilling
its propagandistic function to protect elite interests by refusing
to cover the facts and issues.
Over the past couple weeks, thousands of delegates have been meeting at the United Nations for the Seventh Session of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII). Representing over 370 million indigenous people worldwide, the forum serves as an arena for addressing pressing issues that indigenous people face across the world with a special focus on the most imperative current crisis: global climate change.
Although it went virtually unreported in the U.S., last September, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the "historic" U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Among other things, the declaration calls for nation-states to include and seek approval from indigenous peoples and nations in the constructing and implementation of any policy or "project affecting their lands or resources."
The U.N. member states voted overwhelmingly in favor of the declaration with a vote of 143 in support and four opposed. Not surprisingly, the four nations opposed to the declaration, Canada, The United States, New Zealand, and Australia, stand as some of the biggest violators of indigenous human rights.
Because of the immense power of the U.S. in the United Nations, this call for indigenous rights is not legally binding. Being far from the first time, the massive dominance of the United States in determining new international policy and norms has once again blocked efforts at extending human rights and democracy.
U.S. spokespersons noted that document was too broad and didn't "establish a clear universal principle."
These assertions are simply embarrassing to any literate teenager who read the Declaration. The message from the U.S. power structure was very clear in that the indigenous people should not play any meaningful role in decisions that effect them and that the U.S. government does not have to be accountable to the marginalized populations of native peoples.
In regards to the discussions currently taking place at the United Nations, which have not been visible through the U.S. corporate media lense, indigenous people argue that they have been "the worst hit by global warming but remain the least responsible for causing it," as reported at democracynow.org.
Casey Camp-Horinek, an American Indian from Oklahoma and delegate to the United Nations on behalf of the indigenous environmental network, noted on Democracy Now! that corporate exploitation and invasion of indigenous lands and resources are substantially breaking down the "ability of [native peoples] to naturally sustain themselves."
According to Camp-Horinek, who is attending the current two week indigenous meetings at the U.N., the "disproportionate effect of fossil fuels" has violently disrupted weather patterns within a "single generation" thereby destroying native life all across North America, which relies on cooperation and coexistence with the natural setting for human subsidence.
The UNPFII notes that "indigenous peoples are among the first to face the direct consequences of climate change, due to their dependence upon, and close relationship, with the environment and its resources."
For example, in the Himalayas, due to their high altitudes, rapid glacial melting is in the long term depleting hundreds of millions of people's water supply as the glaciers shrink at unprecedented rates.
For indigenous people in the Arctic region, the depopulation of traditional animal species and the disappearance of natural food sources are destroying the cultural and social foundation of historic native civilization while also imminently threatening indigenous human survival in the region.
With countless global examples of the exploitation and destruction of indigenous people and their land, the discussions of indigenous issues at the U.N. are not only newsworthy, but pertinent to the survival of hundreds of millions of human beings.
While the
United States continues to block efforts in the international arena
to include native peoples in important political and economic decision
making that holds unwavering implications for their continued existence
on this planet, it is the job of the people to stand in solidarity
with the struggling indigenous masses to assure that the power structure
of government and corporate tyranny will not finally complete their
historic genocide of native people everywhere.
Max Kantar is a freelance writer and an undergraduate
of sociology at Ferris State University. He can be contacted at [email protected]
