S10, Ep8: In Brazil, A Tale as Old as Colonization: Why Indigenous Land Defenders Are Particularly Targeted by Extractive Industries

Amy Westervelt: [00:00:00] A theme that comes up over and over again if you look at environmental protest throughout history is the way it often intersects with the fight for Indigenous sovereignty, and the way that makes the backlash to protest more severe. From Oceti Sakowin people in the U. S. to the Wet'suwet'en in Canada, the Lenka people in Honduras, the Tuhoe in New Zealand, Indigenous led efforts to stop environmentally harmful projects often help drive wider movements for Native people's rights.

And when the backlash comes, efforts to repress environmental activism end up targeting Indigenous rights movements, too.

Nick Estes: This is Nick Estes. I am an assistant professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, co founder of Red Nation, and I'm also an enrolled member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe.

Amy Westervelt: Nick Estes was [00:01:00] deeply involved in protests at the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation against the Dakota Access Pipeline. which a lot of people pinpoint as a key starting point of the modern climate movement in the U. S. And it was a really big deal. Thousands of people from all over the world showed up in North Dakota to protest the pipeline and stand up for indigenous land and water rights.

There were celebrities there too, politicians. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has cited it as the moment that sort of radicalized her in the climate fight. People camped out for months, they participated in multiple direct actions, and the police response was intense. There was militarized gear and helicopters, attack dogs, private security forces from the pipeline company, and even counterinsurgency tactics that were being used to try to deter and suppress protest.

The [00:02:00] Standing Rock protests were also explicitly cited when politicians started to pass laws criminalizing protests in the years following it. It became a verb. People said they didn't want to get Standing Rocked. Despite its significance, Estes sees Standing Rock as more of a continuation of a centuries long battle for Indigenous sovereignty.

Nick Estes: This country not only, you know, exported war, but had been sort of founded on a longer war called the U. S. Indian Wars of the 19th century. I would argue that it continued very much into the 20th century and the manifestations. of which are also very prevalent in the way that police agencies throughout the country track, surveil, and police Indigenous led movements.

Amy Westervelt: He also sees it as the culmination of a more recent fight to protect Native land and water rights that had been going on for several [00:03:00] years before the Standing Rock protests began in 2016.

Nick Estes: Back in the early 2010s, I had been getting involved in like local tribal politics and things that were happening on the reservations.

There were other protests that were going on. The IRS threatened to seize land from the Crow Creek Sioux tribe. And it was in the middle of a winter. I remember, uh, Brandon Sazoo, who was the tribal chairman at the time. He later went to Standing Rock, you know, he was in a trailer by himself in the middle of a snow storm.

And we used to go and bring him coffee and he was on a trailer on that land that they're supposed to seize.

Amy Westervelt: Sazoo camped out in that trailer to block the IRS from seizing the land it was on. And during those same years, there were various fights over tribal water rights, too.

Nick Estes: There was always a question around the jurisdiction of the river, control of the river and water rights, especially for the [00:04:00] Lakota and Dakota reservations on Minnesota, the Missouri River.

And there was a consciousness around it because The Army Corps of Engineers kind of abolished our jurisdiction and then asserted its own and then sort of has say over flowage and what kind of erosion prevention are put on the river. And it may seem like sort of a mundane kind of thing, but back in 2011.

There was massive flooding in the Missouri River Basin, and the Army Corps of Engineers sort of patted itself on the back and said, Hey, we did a really good job managing the floods. And had it not been for these dams, we would have lost lives, and there were no lives lost. But that's actually not true.

There were At least half a dozen lives lost on my reservation because of infrastructure being damaged because of floods.

Amy Westervelt: So there were these long standing issues between the tribes and the U. S. government over water rights. And then in 2011, the Keystone XL Pipeline united Indigenous [00:05:00] opponents in the U. S. and Canada

Nick Estes: You had tribes coming from our First Nations coming from Canada and talking about the destruction of their homelands from the tar sands extraction that was happening in Alberta. And they signed a treaty to protect the sacred, uh, down in the country and on the Yankton reservation where They all committed, including the Great Plains Tribal Chairman's Association, which our tribe is party to as well, to prevent tar sands transportation across our treaty territories.

That's a pretty bold move. I mean, there's like very few things in Indian country that unite. grassroots people and tribal chairmans like that we can all kind of agree on.

Amy Westervelt: That fight was ultimately successful, but it went back and forth for a decade. Biden just finally canceled the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline in [00:06:00] 2021.

And of course, five years before that, Standing Rock began.

Nick Estes: Standing Rock is an interesting case because Standing Rock. You know, historically has been united in the sense that it allies itself, the council allies itself with the grassroots people. And so they were, you know, inviting people in. We didn't just show up uninvited.

There was a public invitation and there was a public sort of hosting of people in this particular space. And they found land that was belonging to the Corps of Engineers. That, you know, we, we had never formally ceded to the Corps of Engineers. So when we look at Standing Rock in that, in that context, just by asserting treaty authority, just by asserting our right to exist and to, you know, live by the laws that we determined for ourselves, not somebody from the outside.

That becomes a criminal act. It's actually just, like, criminalizing the Oceti Sakowin. It's [00:07:00] trying to make being a water protector an illegal act.

Amy Westervelt: The intense push by the fossil fuel industry to criminalize protest in the wake of Standing Rock was very much in line with how the industry has dealt with indigenous protest in other countries.

So much so, that it was a topic of conversation around the fire at one of the Standing Rock protest camps.

Lindsay Ofrias: So in 2016, I visited Standing Rock during the height of the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Amy Westervelt: This is Lindsay Ofrias, an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker who's making a film about how laws are used to suppress protest.

She traveled to Standing Rock with two land defenders and leaders of the Sequoia people in Ecuador who had been fighting first Texaco and then Chevron over oil spilled and dumped throughout the Amazon there for decades.

Lindsay Ofrias: So two of those [00:08:00] people, Humberto Piaguaje and Carmen Zambrano, I went with them to Standing Rock in 2016.

Part of the idea was for coalition building and also trying to think about what is possible outside or beyond this whole vortex of the law that kind of sucks everything into it. And so something that I will always remember is that around the fire one evening, where, you know, everybody would come and sit around the fire and share stories.

Humberto and Carmen gave kind of like a warning about what they had gone through and, you know, that it's likely to come to pass once again, now that this RICO precedent has been set.

Amy Westervelt: RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, was created to prosecute the mafia in the U. S. It's been used in civil cases too to go after white collar crime and prosecute corporate corruption.

But it's [00:09:00] had some surprising usage in legal battles around climate change and protest as well. It was used against Umberto and Carmen and their co plaintiffs in Ecuador to block them from collecting a settlement after they defeated Chevron in court. That case stemmed from a decades long fight with first Texaco and then Chevron.

It began all the way back in the 1960s when the American oil company Texaco brought the oil business deep into the Ecuadorian Amazon, disrupting centuries of indigenous culture and tradition.

Marcos Orellana: The indigenous peoples in the Amazon, the Guarani, the Kofan, other indigenous peoples, they lived in a pristine rainforest environment prior to the arrival of, uh, of Texaco and, and the oil boom in, in Ecuador in the 1960s and, and early 1970s.

Amy Westervelt: This is Marcos Orellana, an international law expert, [00:10:00] professor at American University, and the UN Special Rapporteur on Toxics and Human Rights.

Marcos Orellana: The extraction of oil by Texaco and Petro Ecuador was without regard to the protection of the environment. It was without regard to the rights of affected Indigenous peoples. First operated by Texaco, as I mentioned, and then taken over by Petro Ecuador, oil operations severely impacted Indigenous peoples traditional lands.

The oil boom in Ecuador has imposed loss of life, health, territory, and culture. Indigenous peoples have not received reparation for the violation of their rights.

Amy Westervelt: When the Sequoia and Kofan tribes banded together with local farmers to sue Texaco, which later became Chevron, for the damage that had been caused in the Amazon, they won.

And then the oil company immediately accused them of corruption and [00:11:00] collusion and held up the settlement in a decades long RICO case back in the United States. They have still not collected that settlement. It turns out Umberto and Carmen's warning was prescient, some 20 years after their ordeal began, a similar thing happened to Standing Rock protesters. Energy Transfer Partners, the pipeline company, tried to use RICO against individual water protectors and non profits like Greenpeace.

Deepa Padmanaba: In August of 2017, a suit was filed by Energy Transfer, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, and this was for $300 million for allegedly orchestrating the resistance at Standing Rock.

Amy Westervelt: Deepa Padmanaba is Deputy General Counsel for Greenpeace USA.

Deepa Padmanaba: Energy Transfer brought claims under the Federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO. Um, [00:12:00] and as many know, RICO was a law that was created to go after the mafia for organized crime. And what made RICO even more dangerous was that it allowed for the recovery of treble damages. So we were suddenly looking at an almost $1 billion lawsuit. And Energy Transfer was alleging that our advocacy work to uplift indigenous voices at Standing Rock constituted organized crime.

Amy Westervelt: All the court cases and laws that were passed in the wake of Standing Rock could not stop the one thing that oil company executives and right wing politicians seemed absolutely terrified of. Indigenous people and allies of all kinds rising up against them.

Nick Estes: The subversive nature of being a water protector isn't Just because, you know, the Oceti Sakowin was leading this, you know, resistance against a pipeline, but they were also creating a sort of universal identity [00:13:00] that was grounded in indigenous values, but didn't necessarily mean it was just for indigenous people, because anybody who walked through the gates of, you know, Oceti Sakowin camp or Sacred Stone camp became a water protector by default.

Amy Westervelt: Estes says this sort of resistance was prophesied a long time ago.

Nick Estes: The Black Snake Prophecy comes from several sources, but one of them, it has to do with the Minnesota, the Missouri River and. There were ideas that what they call unchegula, which are like essentially water monsters, snakes were kind of banished to the river and also sort of promised their return and they would come back as a black snake.

And, you know, I don't think a lot of people really fully understood it. And what LaDonna Brave Bull Allard told me is that at one point people thought it was the interstates. Because they were using a lot of asphalt. Um, but then when the [00:14:00] oil pipelines were being built, it was like, Oh yeah, this is like, in some ways like dinosaur blood, you know, so the prophecy, as it was told during these times would actually unite people in a kind of historic resistance and it would unite all people, not just the Oceti Sakowin. As Phyllis Young said, the Hunkpapa Oyate was, you know, the horn, um, of the buffalo or the horn of the camp circle, the Oceti Sakowin, and they would be sort of the vanguard of the nation, but also this movement. I think there's, you know, some truth to that.

Amy Westervelt: The connection of the pipeline fights to the fight for Indigenous sovereignty really seemed to supercharge the industry's response. Which makes sense if you look at how entwined the industry's history has been with colonialism. In his book, Anointed by Oil, historian Darren Dochuk at Notre Dame University chronicled how U. S. [00:15:00] oilmen dealt with Indigenous nations, both in the U. S. and when they first started to look beyond the country's borders for oil. One key tactic was to connect fossil fuel extraction with religion.

Darren Dochuk: These missionaries are pushing into the jungles of the Amazon. They are coming in direct contact with petroleum geologists, for instance, with the Standard Oil Company, and they are going to collaborate. They're going to partner in terms of the flow of information, and the information is going to be about the environment. It's going to be about the ecology that they're encountering. It's also going to be anthropological. Both classes of explorers are going to be deeply invested in trying to understand the people that they are encountering in these regions, all with hopes of trying to get information from them to be able to kind of plumb the earth in a profitable way. So, it really accelerates in the 1920s and moving into the 1950s in the Cold War period. This pursuit of [00:16:00] black gold is going to be all the more intensified against the backdrop of the Cold War and the fight with communism and the fear that Latin America might lose itself to the great secular communist threat of the Soviet Union. So oil and pursuit of souls is going to become all the more important.

Amy Westervelt: Author, lawyer, and law professor Judith Kimerling documented similar behavior in the Ecuadorian Amazon in the 1970s.

Judith Kimerling: One of the… groups, the Bayuaeri, they had no contact with the outside world until 1970. And they were subjected to a program of forced contact because after Texaco discovered commercial quantities of oil in Lago Agrio, it The company knew that it would want to expand its operations into Huarani territory and the Huarani who lived in those areas had no contact with the outside world. And so [00:17:00] the company collaborated with U. S. missionaries and Ecuador's government to subject the Huarani to a, to a forced contact. The missionaries would get into planes, Texaco planes. They would fly over the forest. They would look for Huarani houses. I've actually heard reports too that they threw dynamite out of the planes to try to scare the Huarani away.

And, of course, the missionaries wanted the Huarani to come live with them in settlements because the Huarani were nomadic, semi nomadic people. Um, so the missionaries wanted them to live in permanent settlements with the missionaries and become Christian. Texaco just wanted them out of the areas where they wanted to operate.

And, you know, the government of Ecuador wanted… Texaco to be able to find more oil and extract more oil.

Amy Westervelt: What we've seen from Ecuador to Standing Rock, India to Saudi Arabia, Nigeria [00:18:00] to British Columbia, is that when Indigenous peoples fight back against the plundering of their land, the backlash is swift, often violent, and comes with a huge side of colonialist entitlement. Today, we're going to travel to the Brazilian Amazon, where the Uru-eu-wau-wau people are trying to defend the last of their territory from agribusiness and logging.

The excellent team behind the National Geographic documentary, The Territory, have shared footage with us to help tell that story. That's coming up after this quick break. This is Drilled, the The Real Free Speech Threat. I'm Amy Westervelt. Stay with us.

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In the heart of the Amazon, the Uru-eu-wau-wau people have seen their community decline from thousands to just [00:19:00] around 200 people. Those remaining descendants are trying to hold on to and protect the tribe's ancestral lands in the Amazon. which faces increasing threats from the country's large agricultural industry.

The big agricultural companies know better than to go after Indigenous rights directly. Instead, they pay small farmers to sneak into protected territory, slash and burn, and set up homesteads. Once they've made inroads, the big companies come in and take over, clearing large segments of the forest to either grow soybeans or graze cattle.

The documentary, The Territory, documents the fight between farmers and the tribe, particularly under former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who made undermining the rights of indigenous people part of his platform.

Bitaté: (in Portugeuese) You have to [00:20:00] produce, you have to raise cattle, you have to bring them down to do it. I think that, for me, is wrong. The forest, the rivers, are our home, where we stay.

Amy Westervelt: This is Bitaté, a young Uru-eu-wau-wau leader. He says non Indigenous people always say the same thing, that Indigenous people have too much land, and that we should clear the trees and raise cattle.

But I don't agree, he says. The forest and the rivers are our home. They support us.

Alternating between footage of the Uru-eu-wau-wau and some of the settlers and farmers trying to invade their land, the film highlights themes we see turning up in every environmental fight. After we hear from Bitaté, we meet Sergio, a farmer who talks about the forest as prime farmland that [00:21:00] Uru-eu-wau-wau.

(Sergio in Portuguese)

Amy Westervelt: The indigenous people aren't doing anything with the land, Sergio says. They're not planting, they're not producing. All they do is live there. Robert Miller, a citizen of the Eastern Shawnee tribe and a professor of Indian law at Arizona State University, says the tension between settlers and indigenous people over living in relationship with the land Versus extracting from it has been going on since colonization began.

Robert Miller: The Doctrine of Discovery is one of the original international law doctrines that was developed in the 1400s to control the actions of European Christian nations. As Europeans began to sail outside the site of land, they began to be interested in acquiring empires in Africa and then into the Americas and into Asia.

They very rarely found lands that were truly vacant. They were claiming the lands of indigenous [00:22:00] peoples in Africa, in the Americas, and in Asia. So it wasn't finders, keepers, losers, weeper, here's a lost piece of property, I pick it up, I look around, there's nobody to claim it, so it's mine. No, they were mostly claiming settled lands, Cultures and nations had lived for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

The justification was Christianity and civilization. And it's hard to even understand what that means. But the civilization of Europe was somehow superior to that of every other indigenous peoples around the world. I mean, today it's ludicrous to even say that. But those were the justifications. That God wanted European Christians to own these lands, and that the Christian God intended that.

And somehow, Christian Europeans were superior to everyone around the world.

Amy Westervelt: As Europeans began colonizing various places, philosophers like John Locke also justified the taking [00:23:00] of Indigenous land by describing it as empty land. According to Locke, if land was not being farmed or used in some other way, it was empty.

Robert Miller: Terra nullius is a Latin phrase meaning empty land. That's exactly what John Locke was writing about. That's exactly what most Europeans assumed. They assumed the lands around the world was vacant. They could come here and make it their own by applying their labor to it.

In The Territory, we watch as the Uru-eu-wau-wau make use of the land too.

They fish, they bathe in the river, they drink the water, they weave roofs and baskets out of palm fronds, but the forest remains intact. When settlers and farmers come in, they use chainsaws to chop down trees and light fire to large areas of land to clear it. It's really striking to see the visual contrast between these [00:24:00] two opposing views of humanity's relationship with nature.

When farmers illegally farm in protected indigenous regions, they claim it's because they are poor and need the land. But Neidinha, a local environmentalist who fights alongside the Uru-eu-wau-wau and has for decades, says the farmers stories are not entirely truthful.

(Neidinha in Portuguese)

Robert Miller: She says they are often financed by Brazil's major agribusiness landowners. So once the small farmers complete the first invasion into the forest, these large landowners will take over and clear the rest.

As invasions increase, and the Indigenous Affairs Agency starts telling the news that nothing is happening, that the invasions are being made up by the Indigenous people, the tribe's new young leader, Bitaté, comes up with a novel idea.

Perhaps cameras are more powerful than [00:25:00] arrows or machetes. Pulling together a tribal patrol, he sets out into the forest using drones to track invasions and then documents all the evidence. The patrol finds and arrests some 30 people that they call invaders.

(Bitaté in Portuguese)

Robert Miller: Bitaté tells them, we don't want to hurt you, but you can't be here. Everyone knows this is indigenous territory.

The media picks up the story.

News Archival: (in Portuguese) The Indians had already expelled a group of about 30 invaders from the interior of the indigenous land.

Amy Westervelt: And the local group of farmers that had been trying to take over part of the territory loses its political support. They disband. Don't worry, I've left plenty of twists and turns out here, because I think everyone should see this film. This part of the documentary chronicles a huge win, [00:26:00] which you don't always get in these sorts of stories.

Despite that, the Uru-eu-wau-wau's future still feels pretty precarious. Bolsonaro is out of office now, but Bolsonarismo is going strong. At one point in the film, a settler references the Bible and his faith that this land is his. When his homestead is found and burned down by Bitate's patrol, he vows to keep rebuilding it.

Still, the country's new president does seem committed to supporting Indigenous rights and stopping deforestation, and so far the numbers are promising. In President Lula da Silva's first six months in office, deforestation dropped by more than a third. Will it be enough? We'll have to watch and see.