Extractive Industries and Indigenous Peoples: Special Issue Fourth World Journal

Extract from the latest Issue of the Fourth World Journal

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Fourth World Peoples worldwide face the daily challenge of whether they have access to the land that provides food, shelter, clothing, and safety. And if they live in cities or complex, large communities next to people who have never known life on the land, the challenges people face are not necessarily less overwhelming. People face structural, economic, and political inequalities though direct reliance on the land that ensures food, shelter, clothing, and safety is quite remote. All human beings directly or indirectly rely on the Earth’s nurturing lands for life.

When natural disasters violently force indigenous peoples to escape dangers threatening death or deprivation, they suffer. When human-created disasters violently force Fourth World peoples to escape the dangers of environmental breakdown, mass murder, destruction of villages, and or dislocation, they suffer. Fourth World peoples are suffering the consequences of human-made disasters because of transnational corporations engaging in mining, deforestation, petroleum, and agricultural exploitations conducted on Fourth World nations’ lands. “Land Rights” has for centuries remained the leading alarm called out by Fourth World peoples because of imperial and state expansion into and on top of native peoples’ territories.

Since the 1960s, international institutions have agreed to the lawful requirement that when a state’s government or state-created agent such as a corporation undertakes administrative, legislative, or judicial actions, they must negotiate an agreement with affected nations before proceeding. Suppose prospective actions adversely affect the lives and properties of indigenous peoples. In that case, before the state or corporation can take action, the affected nation must first give its consent to the activity. Obtaining consent requires negotiation between the interested state, corporation, and nation parties. Without the consent of Fourth World nations, corporations currently extract raw materials in the territories of nations with the complicit endorsement of state governments, banks, and investors. The state-supported corporations extract natural minerals, metals, wood products, and conduct agribusiness on nations’ lands destroying lands, dislocating peoples, promoting violent attacks on communities, breaking down biodiversity, and causing greenhouse gas imbalances. Millions of Fourth World peoples in more than 63 countries experience unregulated activities of transnational extractive corporations.

Recognizing that Fourth World peoples suffer at the hands of extractive industries that exploit their resources and directly and indirectly cause violence against communities, many non-governmental organizations advocate recognizing nations’ rights to their lands. They call for implementing the principle of “free, prior and informed consent.” Yet, “advocacy without enforceable solutions” has had little or no effect beneficial to Fourth World nations. International bodies such as the United Nations that hosted the establishment of conventions and other international laws requiring negotiated consent of nations go unenforced. Indeed, Dr. Deborah Rogers, leader of the vital organization Initiative for Equity, has reported that the UN responds to violations of Fourth World nations’ territories and peoples by corporations by saying controls “are out of our hands.” Dr. Rogers and her organization provided essential insights and on-the-ground revelations helpful to this Special Issue. She offered analysis, especially from her experience in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where transnational corporations exploit resources harming the lives and properties of the Twa and other peoples to extract gold, oil, and other raw materials.

Prompted by experiences and requests from Fourth World nations in Africa, Central America, Melanesia, the United States, and Canada, the Center for World Indigenous Studies formally undertook the Extractive Industries Initiative Panel beginning in April 2021. We set out to investigate possible strategies Fourth World nations can implement to reverse transnational corporation violations of their peoples and territories. We formed the Panel of Associate Scholars and advisors to conduct a 10-month investigation and a series of remote weekly colloquies to identify potential strategies. The initial result of our work in the spirit of activist scholarship is this Special Issue of the Fourth World Journal. The initial conclusions of the Extractive Industries Initiative Panel are presented in our overarching article, “Nations’ Land Rights vs. Corporate Exploitation,” followed by the graphic illustration work of Irene Delfanti and then full-length essays by several of the Associate Scholars, including Dr. Hiroshi Fukurai, Dr. Sabina Singh and Dr. Melissa Farley.

Publication of this Special Issue focused on extractive industries is intended to inform Fourth World nations directly and provide the basis for direct action by the nations themselves. The working premise of our analysis is that those who have capability must support Fourth World nations when invited by specific nations in a direct fashion to enhance their capabilities to prevent and regulate harmful extractive industry actions inside their territories. This transfer of technical support becomes essential since states and most corporations are unwilling to act on their own to regulate the consequences of extractive enterprises. We will reach out to non-governmental organizations, responsible states, and responsible corporations, urging their participation in actively supporting nations when those nations request support.

Contents

Our authors have undertaken deep inquiries to give active meaning to solutions.

• Associate Scholars in the Extractive Industries Initiative Panel Muhammad Al-Hashimi, Sabina Singh, Hiroshi Fukurai, Amelia Marchand, Melissa Farley supported by advisors Irene Delfanti, Deborah Rogers and Aline Castañeda joining Resident Scholar Rudolph Rÿser engaged in intensive dialogue, and research to jointly write Nations’ Land Rights vs. Corporate Exploitation – Extractive Industries Initiative Panel. In this essay published in English and Spanish the Panel members comment on the nature of the unregulated extractive industries problem and its manifest danger to the survival of Fourth World peoples as well as the sustainability of biodiversity and changing climate.
• The complexity of extractive industry relationships is hard to understand when communicated in the written word alone. Graphic illustrations that depict connections between industries, states’ government political leaders, male dominated temporary company towns that promote prostitution and violence against women, involvement of militates attacking indigenous communities and violently polluting and destroying the environment may help advance understand when words alone are insufficient. In Relationship of Extractive Industry to Exploitation of Nations: A Graphic Reality, Irene Delfanti uses the spider web to graphically illustrate the connections and consequences of extractive industry activities.
• Dr. Hiroshi Fukurai, a professor of Legal and Social Studies at the University of California–Santa Cruz describes another form of corporate harm committed against Fourth World peoples in his essay The “Vaccine Genocide” of Indigenous Nations and Peoples, The Intellectual Property (IP) Regime. Dr. Fukurai explains how “intellectual property rights” shields pharmaceutical corporations from sharing the formulae for COVID-19 vaccines enhancing their profits. The lack of vaccine supports in Fourth World nations leave them to be exposed to infections by infected extractive industries and individual workers illegally mining, cutting trees resulting in deforestation, and agribusinesses. Fukurai offers specific alternatives for controlling the onslaught and disease disaster.
• Dr. Melissa Farley reveals in detail the exploitation of lands, and resources in Fourth World territories including the exploitation of women through prostitution and the consequences of poverty in communities. In “Exploiting Indigenous Peoples: prostitution, poverty, climate change, and human rights” Dr. Farley describes how prostitution is the act of selling one’s body and sex for food, shelter, drugs, cash, or other things of value. She defines trafficking as business of “pimping and third-party control over another person.” She describes how indigenous women from Fourth World communities are the “bottom of the brutal race and class hierarchy” and the business of resource extraction
• In Unregulated Corporate and State Capitalization of Nations’ Land by Rudolph C. Rÿser provides an in-depth discussion of the drive to capitalize on Fourth World nations lands and resources at nations’ expense while benefiting states’ politicians, corporate leaders, investors, banks, and commercial outlets mainly in northern hemisphere countries. Rÿser identifies the countries most targeted for exploitation and the nations harmed by corporations registered in northern countries such as Canada, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Russia, PR China, and the United States.
• When unregulated mining, deforestation, agricultural businesses conduct exploitive activities in Fourth World territories men are the main workers employed and located at extractive sites. “Company towns” are created and made up of men with women imported from Fourth World nations and sometimes more distant locations prostituted for sex and male comforts. Women become a commodity exploited and often killed when out of favor. In Exploiting Indigenous Peoples: Prostitution, Poverty, Climate Change and Human Rights. Melissa Farley, PhD the body and spirit of Fourth World nations is exploited to the disastrous harm of women, their families, and their communities.
• Describing Canada’s extractive industry policies as “continuing down the road of colonial governance,” Dr. Sabina Singh examines how governments actively work to gain control over new mining industries for increasing financial benefit while permitting them to “trample” on Fourth World nations in her Green Colonialism. Drawing on examples offered by Lukas Bednarski’s suggestion that First Nations and the corporations could benefit each other and nature too agreeing to building capacities for recycling batteries, computers and other existing sources of lithium, nickel, copper to fill the new needs for electric cars, computers, Iphones and other electricity dependent and climate friendly products urgently needed to replace petroleum dependent products.
• Published in English and Spanish Rudolph Rÿser’s “A Framework for implementing the Principle of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) – Comity or Conflict” explores the limitations of the international community’s principle of FPIC, the dynamic requirement of negotiations between Fourth World nations, states’ governments and corporations and the need for a specific mechanism to implement the principle. Rÿser describes in detail steps for establishing a mechanism to monitor and facilitate negotiations providing for specific steps that determine the consent of nations with measures for enforcing agreements. He suggests that state and corporate XX is proved to be insufficient to ensure honest and fair exploitation of Fourth World lands, peoples, and resources. Enforceable structures and agreements are needed to prevent and restrain violent and destructive exploitation that harms Fourth World peoples and, in the end, all peoples in the world.
• BOOK Reviews: In “ORIGIN” by Jennifer Raff we review the benefits of intercultural collaboration to conventional genetic science and indigenous nations’ sciences revealing more accurate facts about the peopling of the western hemisphere. And in our review of “Born on Lakes and Plains” by Anne F. Hyde we discuss the role of native women determining through their actions and their “mixed-offspring” the survival of Fourth World nations facing colonization of North America in the period of 16th to the 20th Centuries.

We are grateful to the authors in their roles as Extractive Industries Initiative Panel members for their intensive participation in colloquies and narratives in the Joint Essay that leads off this issue of FWJ and as authors of insightful essay for this Extractive Industries in the Fourth World Special Issue.

For Spanish-speaking readers, two articles are also provided in Español.

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