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General News    H3'ed 8/9/24

Tomgram: Aviva Chomsky, A Modern Fossil-Fuelized Version of Colonialism?

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Tom Engelhardt
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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

I'm the grandson of a Jewish immigrant who arrived in New York City in the 1890s as a young man with -- so the family story went -- the equivalent of a German fifty-cent piece in his pocket. His son, my father, grew up in Brooklyn, so as a kid in the 1950s, when it came to baseball, I naturally rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Had I, however, lived in Cleveland, I would undoubtedly have rooted for the Cleveland Indians; in Milwaukee, for the Milwaukee Braves; or, in the nation's capital, in football season, for the Washington Redskins. And that was anything but atypical of that moment. Sadly, the best "Indians" around, culturally speaking, were those sports teams with "mascots" that often played havoc with the ways of the truly native Americans by prancing "on sidelines, mocking the religious rituals of what a dominant white culture viewed as a vanishing red one." The worst" well, those I learned about at the movies.

After all, in the early 1950s, in the days before the Internet when you were lucky if you had a black-and-white TV in your house, part of my lesson in becoming an all-American boy was to go to the movies. Often enough, what I saw there were double-feature cowboy and cavalry films in which the Indians were the bad guys (though there were rare exceptions). You know, the ones who launched the sneak attacks on the white cowboys or cavalrymen, and then were blasted to smithereens as they circled the wagons of the pioneers or charged the cavalry, crying out in weird ways.

In my background, I was anything but Indigenous myself, but that, in those years, was how I was introduced to the Indigenous people of America. And in mocking them, trivializing them, or coating them in evil, I couldn't have been more "normal" then. Nearly three-quarters of a century later, today, as TomDispatch regular Aviva Chomsky writes, it is the International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples and, sadly enough, as she reports, the "cavalry" sent out, especially by this planet's fossil fuel companies, is still treating them the way the pioneers and cavalry did in those ancient films I once saw. Today, Chomsky considers the ongoing fate of the Indigenous on this planet as they endure a fossil-fuelized version of colonialism. And what a sad tale it is to tell. Tom

The Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples
Getting Beyond the Stereotypes from Colombia to the United States to Gaza

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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 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 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 to 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 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.

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

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