Sergio Campusano is the elected President of the Diaguita Huascoaltinos

by Megan Kinch

Barrick Gold is trying to create ersatz Indians at their Pascua-Lama mine in Chile, in the name of corporate social responsibility. Ironically, this is being done in an attempt to undermine the actually existing Indigenous leadership. That photo Sergio is holding? Those are community members, but that’s not traditional dress. In fact, those outfits are completely made up, according to Sergio Campusano, president of the Diaguita Huascoaltinos .  It was created as an idea of what “Indians” should wear. An examination of the photo, taken from Barrick’s “Corporate Social Responsibility” literate,  bears this out: if you look closely, they do look ridiculously clean and unworn.

Sergio said during his statement in the Barrick shareholder meeting :  “The mining company Barrick Gold has for several years conducted a process of reinvention of ethnic Diaguita which is intended to make the public believe that they have the support of the Diaguita Huascoaltinos. In this process the company has brought outside professionals to conduct training on the Diaguita’s own ancestral traditions and has manipulated these teachings for their own convenience, inventing a nonexistent Diaguita culture and denying the ethnicity of our community. They have raised false leaders, who are now attending meetings with the company and appearing in Barrick’s newsletters, and have discredited our real leaders, creating irreconcilable divisions among our people and weakening our neighbors and community’s identity.”

After the shareholder meeting, Sergio told a group of us that the company has also hired outsdiers to teacher “traditional” dances and to make pottery.  This pottery is not anything that the Diaguita’s actually make, or have ever made. Barrick claims that it is sponsoring workshops in “local crafts” (Barrick, Beyond Borders-December2007, 9).

This whole process seeks to discredit their actual elected leaders, who are against things like melting glaciers which feed rivers to get at minerals. Apparently, the people in the outfits are actual members of the community, but the clothes are made up, as they are not the actual leaders: classic divide-and-conquer tactics.

I think this speaks to the immense desire for photos of smiling, indigenous people in traditional dress in corporate literature. Whereas actual indigenous people, because they are wearing normal clothes and aren’t fitting in the with the caricature, are de-legitimized. So when there is no traditional dress, the mining company simply invents it, just as they invent dancing and pottery.

This reminds me of how, when I was working in Guatemala I was supposed to create a powerpoint to illustrate ILO 169 (The UN declaration on Indigenous Peoples). And while some of my slides did have colorfully dressed people, some of them had guys in t-shirts and baseball caps. And my boss was all pissed off with me because not every slide showed colourful outfits. Even though, in Guatemala as in many other countries, that’s what the vast majority of indigenous men wear. Indigenous people throughout the world often wear T-shirts and jeans, or western suits, or dresses.

Anyway, so while Barrick’s tactic of creating a ‘traditional’ dress and dance and pottery for people is particularly awful, it’s part of a larger essentializing tradition. People want colourful pictures of ‘Indians’ doing traditional dances, not actual people who cause disruptions the smooth functioning of corporate power.

Megan Kinch is a graduate student in Social Anthropology at York University who studies Canadian mining companies in Latin America.

From Al Jazeera English:

People & Power speak to native and environmental groups, as well as government and oil industry spokespeople about the impact Alberta’s oil sands development is having on the environment.

“Our Land, Our Life” presents the struggle of Carrie and Mary Dann, two Western Shoshone elders, to address the threat mining development poses to the sacred and environmentally sensitive lands of Crescent Valley, Nevada.  Produced by Oxfam America.

Lake Cowal is situated 47km north-east of West Wyalong, central western New South Wales and is the biggest inland lake in the state. It is protected under two international agreements on migratory birds with Japan (JAMBA) and China (CAMBA), it is also listed on the national heritage register as a significant wetland, and home to many native and endangered species. Lake Cowal is an ephemeral lake that floods into the Lachlan river catchments which leads to the Murrumbidgie and Murray Rivers.

Canadian Gold mining company Barrick has proposed to mine at Lake Cowal using cyanide and lethal chemicals. This mine will be an open cut mine 1km long, 325m deep (the height of Centre Point Tower) and 825m wide on the very edge of the lake. The low-grade ore that is dug up is sprayed with a cyanide solution that leaches out tiny gold flecks; the waste cyanide is then transported through pipes to tailings dams 3.5km from the Lake. The dams are left open so that cyanide can break down. There are close to a hundred toxic chemicals that are breakdown products of cyanide, there are also heavy metals that remain from this process which are a threat to health. One teaspoon of a 2% solution can kill an adult human.

Activists travelled to Lake Cowal in October 2004 to challenge Barrick and act in solidarity with local indigenous people

Robertsville, Ontario Canada
Note: This interview with retired Algonquin Chief Bob Lovelace gives insights into why we have to oppose the destructive and unnatural extraction of dangerous minerals like uranium to protect all citizens. First Nations Law forbids the abuse of our Mother Earth, just as the Natural Law of most nations should.

video by Wanyee Kinuthia

The Alangan forest people on the Philippine island of Mindoro are frightened. The sound of test drilling can be heard several places in the jungle they are dependent on. The land they have inherited from their ancestors is threatened by Norwegian mining operations.

‘Mine’ – Story of a Sacred Mountain with Joanna Lumley from Survival International on Vimeo.

What will one tribe have to do to save everything they know?

Mine, narrated by Joanna Lumley, tells the story of the remote Dongria Kondh tribe’s struggle to protect the mountain they worship as a God.

London-based mining company Vedanta Resources plans a vast open-cast bauxite mine in India’s Niyamgiri hills, and the Dongria Kondh know that means the destruction of their forests, their way of life, and their mountain God.

They need your support. Take action and spread this film:

survival-international.org/films/mine

Someone Else’s Treasure: Indigenous Resistance from allan lissner on Vimeo.

Indigenous leaders from Chile, Papua New Guinea, and Australia, traveled great distances to speak at the annual shareholders’ meeting of Barrick Gold — the world’s largest gold mining corporation — and voice their complaints about Barrick’s operations on their ancestral lands.

Complaints include the killing, rape, and arbitrary detention of villagers in Papua New Guinea, the destruction of spiritual sites in Australia, and the theft of indigenous lands in Chile.

Affected communities are calling on all Canadians to reject the harms done by Canadian mining companies and become active in pressuring Canadian companies to respect international human rights and environmental standards.

Speakers:
Sergio Campusano is the President of the Diaguita Huascoaltinos Indigenous and Agricultural Community. Since he assumed the role of president, Sergio has been fighting against the greed of the mining corporations and the local agriculture companies in order to mantain the rights of his people.

Native to the rocky highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG), Jethro Tulin is a popular organiser and founder of the Akali Tange Association (ATA), a human rights organization documenting abuses at the Porgera mine, owned by Torontos Barrick Gold.

Neville “Chappy” Williams, Wiradjuri elder and spokesperson for Mooka and Kalara United Families, the traditional owners of the Lake Cowal area in NSW Australia.

UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, Eighth Session

Intervention by: Jethro Tulin, Executive Officer of Akali Tange Association (Porgera, Enga Province, Papua New Guinea)

Supported by: Asia Caucus, Pacific Caucus, Western Shoshone Defense Project (Nevada, USA), Peoples Earth, Society for Threatened Peoples International (ECOSOC), Indigenous Peoples Link

Item 4: Human Rights
New York, May 27, 2009.

Madam Chair, this is my second time at this UN forum, and today my message is more urgent than before. In my homeland in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, the Ipili and Engan people have seen their traditions turned upside-down by the influence of a large-scale mining project. In one generation, the mine has brought militarization, corruption, and environmental devastation to a land that previously knew only subsistence farming and alluvial mining.

Last year, I explained that mine guards and police were killing locals and raping our women; there have been five more killings and many more rapes since. Last year, I described how our food sources were threatened by mine waste dumped directly into the river system and how my people were exposed to dangerous chemicals like cyanide and mercury; today, those practices continue. Last year, I complained that the mine is directly next to our homes; and just three weeks ago, the Papua New Guinea government, motivated by reports presented by the mining company, unleashed “State of Emergency,” a police and military operation that saw hundreds of homes of indigenous land owners surrounding the open pit mine razed to the ground.

This is a textbook case of what can go wrong when large-scale mining confronts Indigenous Peoples, ignoring the impacts of its projects and resorting to goon squads when people rebel against it..

The increasing global power and influence of trans-national companies like the Canadian Barrick Gold, managers of the Porgera mine means that they, alongside the PNG government, must be responsible for upholding human rights within their spheres of influence.

The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the National Goals and Directive Principal that underlie the PNG constitution codify, not only the moral responsibility to uphold rights of affected Indigenous Peoples in PNG, but also is increasingly seen as implying their legal liability as organs of society to respect, promote and secure human rights.

In addition to wreaking havoc on local communities, these mines pollute vital water sources and require an immense amount of energy to run. The Porgera mine alone produces over 400,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases and consumes over 7 billion gallons of water a year, which it continually dumps – polluted – into a 800 km-long river system, eventually leading to the Gulf of Papua and reaching the Great Barrier Reef.  In a time of impending climate change, this environmental devastation affects us all.

We recommend that the Permanent Forum:

1. Urge the Permanent Forum to write urgently to the Government of Papua New Guinea and Barrick Gold Corporation of Canada appealing for an urgent halt to the State of Emergency and the destruction of peoples homes.

2. Endorse the recommendations put forth in the report of the expert group meeting on extractive industries, Indigenous Peoples’ rights and corporate social responsibility, which met in March 2009 in Manila, Philippines;

3. Calls for activation of the World Bank 2005 Extractive Industries Review and for activation of the previous interventions to address the impact and legacy of extractive industries on Indigenous Lands, territories and natural resources;

4. Investigates how to set up an Indigenous arbitration system, a regulatory regime, to control the practices of the trans-national mining companies, other extractive industries, forestry and fisheries;

5. Forms an agency to evaluate the amount Indigenous communities involuntarily subsidize the mining industry and other extractive industries through their natural resources, which are seized with minimal compensation, if any, by forms of colonialism perpetrated by trans-national companies;

Thank you.

Jethro Tulin, Akali Tange Association Inc.
Porgera Enga Province, Papua New Guinea

May 27, 2009
New York