Sacred Land News & Reports From the Field
In a major victory for indigenous land rights, India’s environment minster on Aug. 24 struck down a controversial mining project in eastern Orissa state that would have threatened the survival of the 8,000-member Dongria Kondh tribe.
Citing violations of environmental and human rights laws, Jairam Ramesh denied permission for London-based Vedanta Resources to build an open-cast bauxite mine in the Niyamgiri Hill range. The company had set up an alumina refinery in Orissa in 2008 with the expectation that it would be allowed to annually extract three million metric tons of bauxite, the raw material for aluminum.
The Dongria Kondh consider the remote hills — home to their god, Niyam Raja — sacred, and they also depend on the hills for their livelihood. For the past eight years they have been fighting to protect their land and way of life. The tribe had gained the support of NGOs including Amnesty International and Survival International, which ran a successful global campaign comparing the Dongria Kondh’s plight to the Na’vi tribe in the award-winning James Cameron film “Avatar.” (Watch Survival’s film “Mine,” embedded below.)
Vedanta had claimed the mine would cause little disturbance to the hills and that, along with the refinery, it would help alleviate poverty in the region. However, in a report commissioned by Ramesh, a committee of experts found that the project would “drastically alter the region’s water supply, affecting both ecological systems and human communities,” and threaten “the very survival” of the Dongria Kondh. The committee found that Vedanta had acted illegally and with “total contempt for the law,” and that to allow the mine to go forward would be “illegal.”
Vedanta reportedly intends to push for an alternative mine site in the region. “There is no question of abandoning this project,” CEO Mukesh Kumar said. The alumina refinery, which has polluted rivers and damaged crops along with the livelihood of the local people, will also continue to operate.
SLFP Project Director Toby McLeod discussed his experiences filming Losing Sacred Ground and In the Light of Reverence and shared his thoughts on human relationships with sacred natural places on the July 27 edition of the weekly radio program “A World of Possibilities.”
The program, titled “Saving Sacred Lands,” also featured interviews with Gathuru Mburu, director of the Institute of Culture and Ecology in Kenya; Silvia GĂłmez a consultant for Gaia Amazonas Foundation in Bogota, Colombia; and
Liz Hosken, director and co-founder of the Gaia Foundation in London.
Listen to the full program here.
Widespread illegal harvesting of mahogany — bound for the United States and other world markets — continues inside a Peruvian reserve for uncontacted indigenous tribes, according to a report released this month by the nonprofit Upper Amazon Conservancy.
The UAC’s year-long investigation documented logging settlements and felled trees throughout the 1.2-million-acre Muruanahua Territorial Reserve for Indigenous People in Voluntary Isolation. The reserve and adjacent Alto PurĂşs National Park are part of the largest network of protected areas in Peru and home to at least three uncontacted groups, the largest concentration of isolated tribes in Peru and possibly the world.
UAC initially discovered a large logging operation in the headwaters of the Mapuya River, near the border with Alto PurĂşs, in March 2009. In April of this year, a flyover observation revealed large rafts of recently cut mahogany boards, indicating that the settlement continues to be used as a transport center for illegal wood. The group also identified a separate logging settlement on the lower Mapuya. Both sites, according to local people interviewed by UAC, have been in use for several years.
The report notes that loggers are also targeting titled indigenous community lands along the Yurua River, adjacent to the reserve. In recent years, logging companies have “aggressively pursued” logging agreements with these communities, which contain “some of the last commercially viable mahogany stands anywhere in Peru outside of protected areas.” Unfortunately, loggers often employ exploitative practices with the communities. According to the report, “a vast network of logging roads” crosses the area, “providing a fleet of over a dozen tractors with easy access to the forests all along the Yurua.”
Ironically, along the route out of this remote area, the wood passes a forestry control post constructed specifically to stop the transport of illegal wood. However, according to the report, “the wood is laundered with forestry permits intended for legal logging operations in registered timber concessions and community lands… thus, when the wood is finally trucked to Lima, it contains export documentation required by the United States.”
With the United States receiving more than 80 percent of Peru’s mahogany exports, the 2008 amendment to the Lacey Act — which outlaws the import, possession and sale of illegally sourced wood — is almost certainly being violated. The illegal logging means that Peru is also failing to uphold its forestry obligations under a 2009 U.S. free trade agreement, as well as violating the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.
Illegal logging harms uncontacted tribes by invading the lands that sustain them. The UAC report also notes that the encroachment of loggers into Murunahua homelands is likely driving some members of the tribe to join settled communities on the Yurua River. But what’s more, loggers bring diseases against which the tribes have no natural defenses. According to Survival International, after the isolated Murunahua tribe came in contact with loggers in the 1990s, more than half the population died, primarily from transmitted infections.
The UAC report urges Peruvian authorities to do more to combat illegal logging, but notes that the illegal activity, and resulting endangerment of vulnerable indigenous tribes, will likely continue “until the U.S. government unilaterally rejects questionable Peruvian mahogany.”
Likewise, Survival International’s David Hill, in an interview with Mongabay.com, said, “The only ways to stop this happening is for U.S. buyers to reject any Peruvian mahogany, or the U.S. government to ban exports temporarily. Until that happens, people in the U.S. have no idea where the wood they’re buying is actually coming from.”
Learn more about illegal mahogany logging and its impact on indigenous tribes in our Alto PurĂşs sacred site report.
After a two-day court hearing, the traditional custodians of Phiphidi Waterfall last week won an injunction to halt the construction of a tourist resort at their sacred site for 20 days, allowing them to prepare for further legal action.
The Ramunangi clan, in South Africa’s Limpopo Province, has been waging a years-long battle to protect the Phiphidi Waterfall area from tourism and other forms of development. The latest threat began on April 19 when bulldozers broke ground on a tourist complex that would include eight chalets, a restaurant and a bar at the head of the falls. (See June 22 story.)
After unsuccessfully seeking other remedies, the Ramunangi and members of Dzomo la Mupo, custodians of a larger network of sacred sites in the Venda region of which Phiphidi is a part, petitioned the Limpopo High Court for an injunction. Construction is being carried out by Tshivhase Development Foundation Trust, which is run by a relative of Venda king Kennedy Tshivhase.
According to the Ramunangi’s legal representative Roger Chennells, the judge, after hearing testimony from both sides, agreed to conduct an on-site inspection of the construction in response to the defendants’ claim that Phiphidi Waterfall was not a sacred site and that the Ramunangi were not the traditional custodians.
Dzomo la Mupo member Mpatheleni Mapaulule said that upon visiting the site and witnessing Ramunangi elders performing a ritual, “the judge said we must not disturb them.” She noted that the judge could see that the whole area, including the surrounding forest, was sacred: “He said the church is the yard, the altar is not only sacred but the whole surrounding.”
For background on this story, read our Phiphidi Waterfall sacred site report.
Update: Read more in this Aug. 1 article from BBC News.
Winnemem Wintu Tribal Leader Mark Franco is calling all supporters to sign a petition to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) asking for assistance in navigating federal bureaucracy so the tribe can hold their upcoming puberty ceremony without interruption or interference. The McCloud River is sacred to the Winnemem Wintu, who take their name from it: Winnemem or “middle water.” The ceremony is held on the McCloud, on what is now Forest Service land. The Forest Service is declining to allow the tribe exclusive access to the campground and the stretch of river where the ceremony takes place. Sign here to support the Winnemem. To learn more about the Winnemem and the McCloud River, read our sacred site report.
From Cultural Survival:
Defend Indigenous Rights and Protect Marine Life in Papua New Guinea
The government of Papua New Guinea doesn’t want to hear from us. It has authorized a Chinese mining company to dump toxic waste into the sea, and it is determined to stifle dissent from every quarter. It hired scientists to assess potential harm to marine life, but when the scientists warned that the damage could be widespread, it suppressed and ignored their findings. When coastal Indigenous land-owner clans challenged the mining company’s “deep submarine tailings placement” project in court, the government passed a law that denies citizens the right to appeal any permit granted by the Department of Environment and Conservation, no matter how it might affect their health, livelihoods, and cultures. PNG’s license to the Chinese Metallurgical Construction Company (CMCC) violates national laws and international agreements, but the PNG government isn’t listening – yet.
An international outcry is needed. Toxic mine tailings dumped into the Bismarck Sea could undermine the marine food chain at its source, potentially rendering all fish unsafe to eat and destroying the livelihoods of the Indigenous people who depend on the sea. Could thousands of letters from world citizens get the attention of the PNG government? Please send your letter today. We must try.
Read more at Cultural Survival’s website.
As tourists flock to South Africa this month for the World Cup tournament, a tribe in the north of the country is urgently struggling to save a sacred site from being destroyed by tourism development.
On April 19, bulldozers moved in on Phiphidi Waterfall, one of the sacred sites of South Africa’s vhaVenda people, breaking ground on a project to build a tourist-chalet complex. The move was the latest blow in the Ramunangi clan’s years-long struggle to assert their role as traditional custodians of Phiphidi and protect their sacred site from development.
For years visitors, lured by government tourism marketing, have been literally trashing the site — trampling vegetation and leaving litter in even the most sacred areas — while the Ramunangi have been denied full access to perform certain rituals. In addition, a road-building project recently destroyed one of Phiphidi’s most holy areas, a rock above the falls.
The current development scheme was undertaken without the legally required consultations. After members of the community notified the developer that it was building on a sacred site, activity temporarily ceased. However, work resumed on May 31. The site is now locked, and the required notice board about the nature of the development, the implementing agency and the name of the developer is absent. According to one Ramunangi elder who visited the site June 8, the damage to this sacred place is already serious.
Phiphidi is part of a network of sacred sites that are central to the traditional belief system of the vhaVenda people. These sites are the home of ancestral spirits, which protect the people, ensure health and well being, and bring rain. The Ramunangi regard themselves not as owners of Phiphidi but as its stewards, with a duty to protect the site and perform rituals there for the whole of Venda. The waterfall, river and surrounding forest are part of a savannah biome in a region known as a biodiversity hotspot.
What You Can Do
The Gaia Foundation is collecting statements of support to aid the effort to obtain a court injunction. Go to their website to sign on to their statement or submit one of your own.
For background on this story, read our Phiphidi Waterfall sacred site report.
You may have heard that Sacred Land Film Project was at the BAVC Producers Institute, an intense new digital-media boot camp leading to a project presentation before a packed house at the The Center in San Francisco.
For 10 days our team was immersed in learning about emerging new media technologies, how to harness them for social and environmental justice, how to nurture and grow communities, and how to motivate positive action using these exciting new tools. Topics ranged from alternate, augmented, virtual and hybrid digital reality, web 3.0, the “intelligent web,” data visualization, interactive mapping, to twitter strategy and crowd sourcing. We were surprised to learn that we are no longer filmmakers, we are “screen content producers!”
The project we developed and then presented at The Center is a global application made for mobile devices, like a smart phone, that will take you on a tour of sacred sites that are now maintained as national parks or, in the case of urban tours, to discover where sacred sites have been paved over.
We partnered with Dorothy FireCloud, the Superintendent of Devils Tower National Monument, to create a tour prototype. With Dorothy’s guidance and the help of our amazing mentors, Anselm Hook, a leading augmented reality specialist, and Paige Saez, a designer and strategist, we created a working prototype and a long-term vision for a mobile phone application that could have a profound impact on our collective understanding of sacred lands.
The tour tells the story of indigenous culture through indigenous voices using video, audio, photos and augmented reality so that a hidden history is unveiled. Augmented reality is when an image is overlaid onto a physical environment, as you can see in the video below.
GPS data triggers your hand-held device to play stories relevant to your exact location. For example, in our Devils Tower prototype, you will be able to look through your smart phone and see an Indian village overlaid onto the modern-day physical environment, then raise the phone to the sky, where you can learn about Lakota star knowledge and see it through the phone.
We love the way this technology encourages people to get out and experience nature while learning a history that is buried, lost, hidden, erased or literally underground, and in doing so recapture what it means to be in connection with the land.
The government of Papua New Guinea dealt a harsh blow to traditional landowners on May 28 when it passed a pair of amendments to the country’s Environment Act barring legal challenges to mining and other resource projects.
Rushed through Parliament on a Friday night, the amendments shelter resource projects from legal challenges over environmental damage, labor abuse and landowner exploitation, and grant the government wide-ranging power to exempt resource developers from state environmental requirements. Thus, the legislation effectively strips citizen’s traditional and constitutional land rights while giving developers greater power and protecting them from liability.
The legislation, passed by a vote of 73 to 10, came after intense lobbying by China Metallurgical Group Corporation, developer of the $1.4 billion Ramu nickel/cobalt mine. Ramu landowners had recently won an injunction to stop a pipeline that would slurry waste from the mine out to sea off Madang Province, once the mine is completed.
Tiffany Nonggorr, a lawyer representing the landowners, said the battle is not yet over, as the matter is already before the courts.
For more detail check out the June 1 blog post by SLFP Director Toby McLeod about his recent trip to Madang Province to document the Ramu nickel mine story for the upcoming Losing Sacred Ground film series.
Note: The SLFP crew went to Papua New Guinea in April, 2010 to film a segment of Losing Sacred Ground. We are posting a few stories from that trip. 
The woman selling bananas smiles at me, warmly, excited. I snap her picture, then, like so many times before, I spin my camera around so she can see herself in the camera’s LCD display. Onlookers gather round. They point at the photo and nod excitedly, give me the thumbs up, and go back to studying the screen. The banana woman reaches out to shake my hand. “Thank you.” She pushes a bunch of bananas into my hand.
Traveling through Papua New Guinea, this scene replays itself with construction workers, fishermen, betel-nut sellers, toddlers, teenage boys carrying machetes and wizened men wearing traditional wigs decorated with flowers. All reacted with wonder, curiosity, surprise and glee at seeing their own photos.
Especially in areas without electricity (or photo development labs, for that matter) possession of these photos was extremely valuable. My husband brought a small photo printer, and whenever it spit forth its diminutive image, the recipient would retreat without another word to study his or her likeness. Friends would gather and comment, point and laugh, and we would usually leave them still staring at the print as our boat pulled away.
Ownership and control of one’s own image is not a new issue for documentary filmmakers, but it’s especially important in places like Papua New Guinea, where most people have little or no access to cameras, video and other technology. Tellingly, in the places where we spent the most time, the thing people wanted most from us (after first aid) was copies of our photos and video.
“It doesn’t matter if it takes a long time,” the Huli men from our guest house told us. “Please send us our photos.”
Having just completed the BAVC Producer’s Institute for New Media, we newly realized how many issues there are in this new era of filmmaking. YouTube and Vimeo make global distribution possible at the click of a button, and online tools make it possible for people separated by thousands of miles to share footage and collaboratively edit a film. In many ways that’s revolutionary — a plurality of voices, people telling their own stories, sharing and pooling resources to reach as wide an audience as possible.
But this “democratization” of the means of production also means that filmmakers can easily lose control over the images they create. And that could be a problem. Giving up your own likeness makes you vulnerable in surprising ways. The people who allowed us to take their images trusted that we would not misuse them. It would be negligent and unethical to share those images, especially the editing of them, in ways that the subjects haven’t agreed to.
In Papua New Guinea, that responsibility could easily be lost — since so many people so freely invited us to take their photos. In a country where Internet access is sparse and we saw no local television production, the need for media literacy and empowerment is taking a back seat to more urgent problems like health care, nutrition, schools, roads and violence.
But I believe that producing media and learning its power are also crucial elements in development. Of course, I’ll be a bit sad when my digital camera in a riverside village fails to elicit the simple, immediate thrill that it did this past April. But I would trade that for seeing kids using cameras to interview their elders, mothers telling their own stories, and people along the road taking pictures of the fascinating foreigners, instead of the other way around.
Chinese police in Markham County in eastern Tibet have reportedly cracked down on protesters attempting to block the resumption of mining operations on their sacred mountains.
Radio Free Asia reported on May 15 that five people were beaten and tear-gassed in protests against three gold mines in the county. Some 5,000 troops were in the area, with reinforcements expected.
“Thousands of local Tibetans — young, old, men, and women alike — have attempted to block the Chinese from resuming mining activities,” one local Tibetan source said. “But [Tibetan Autonomous Region] Party Secretary Zhang Qingli has given orders to ahead with the mining, even if this means using force against protesters.”
Last year in Markham similar protests took place against mining on a sacred mountain called Ser Ngul Lo, a site where Tibetans have historically worshipped. However, talks ultimately resolved the standoff with a promise to end mining operations.
According to another local source, on May 4 — the day the mining company was ordered to resume operations at the three sites — 13 Tibetans were detained. “All of those detained were Tibetan businessmen and leading figures who successfully blocked the Chinese mining company in 2009,” the source said.
What you can do
Go to the Intercontinental Cry website for a sample letter to send to China’s permanent representative to the United Nations, calling on the Chinese government to withdraw their police forces and protect the Tibetans’ sacred mountains.
To learn more about the history, beliefs and practices surrounding sacred mountains in Tibet, read our Mount Kailash sacred site report.
A major new assessment of the current state of biodiversity warns that unless urgent action is taken, the natural systems that support humankind are at risk of collapse.
The third edition of the Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3), released May 10 by the Convention on Biodiversity and the U.N. Environmental Program, confirms that governments around the world have failed to meet targets set eight years ago to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010. Instead, the five main pressures driving the loss — habitat change, overexploitation, pollution, invasive alien species and climate change — have either remained constant or are increasing.
“Humanity has fabricated the illusion that somehow we can get by without biodiversity or that it is somehow peripheral to our contemporary world,” Achim Steiner, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, said in a press release announcing the report. “The truth is we need it more than ever on a planet of six billion heading to over nine billion people by 2050.”
The report is based on 110 national biodiversity reports and other scientific assessments, including an analysis carried out by the Biodiversity Indicators Partnership, published last month in the journal Science, which represents the first assessment of how targets made through the 2002 Convention on Biological Diversity have not been met. That assessment noted that since 1970 the world’s animal populations have been reduced by 30 percent, the area of mangroves and sea grasses by 20 percent, and the coverage of living corals by 40 percent.
The GBO-3 outlines a possible new strategy for reducing biodiversity loss, learning the lessons from the failure to meet the 2010 target. It includes addressing the underlying causes of biodiversity loss, such as patterns of consumption, the impacts of increased trade and demographic change.
“The assessment of the state of the world’s biodiversity in 2010 should serve as a wake-up call for humanity,” Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive-secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, said. “Business as usual is no longer an option if we are to avoid irreversible damage to the life-support systems of our planet.”
The report will be a key input into discussions by world leaders at a special high-level segment of the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 22, as well as negotiations by world governments at the Nagoya Biodiversity Summit in October.
The GBO-3 draws attention to indigenous sacred sites, noting the thousands of community conserved areas around the world — including sacred forests, wetlands, and landscapes — and observing that “indigenous and local communities play a significant role in conserving very substantial areas of high biodiversity and cultural value.”
This deep association between sacred sites and biodiversity conservation is highlighted in many of SLFP’s sacred site reports. To learn more, check out our Beyul of the Himalaya, Gamo Highlands, Kaya Forests and Mount Sinai reports, among others.
The Free Land project and Indian Canyon with the Sacred Land Film Project, News From Native California and Heyday Books present “Ohlone Presence: An Evening of Storytelling, Theater and Song from Ohlone Land and History.”
8 p.m., Saturday, May 8
David Brower Center, 2150 Allston Way, Berkeley, Calif.
Tickets available at the door, $15-25 sliding scale
Enjoy storytelling from all perspectives and sacred spaces and places at this fundraiser for Indian Canyon. The event features:
- Ariel Luckey (Free Land)
- Ann Marie Sayers (Ohlone/Indian Canyon)
- Carl Anthony (Urban Habitat)
- Christopher “Toby” McLeod (Sacred Land Film Project)
- Janeen Antoine (Lakota Sicangu)
- Kanyon Sayers-Roods (Ohlone/Indian Canyon)
- Ken Brower (Author)
- L. Frank (Tongva/Ajachmen)
- Malcolm Margolin (Heyday Books)
- Melissa Nelson (Ojibwe)
- Paloma Pavel (Earth House Center), and
- Willie Underbaggage (Oglala)
Download the flier here.
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced April 28 that the first offshore wind farm to be built in the United States has been given the green light.
The Nantucket Sound Cape Wind Project, opposed by the federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation and the Mashpee and Aquinnah Wampanoag tribes, will be allowed to proceed provided that measures be undertaken in the construction of the energy farm to minimize negative impacts. Efforts to this end include a reduction in the number of wind turbines from 170 to 130 to reduce visibility from Nantucket Island.
While local reaction to Tuesday’s announcement was mixed, the 2009 passing of Sen. Edward Kennedy, who was a strong voice against Cape Wind, may have played a factor in the Department of the Interior’s approval of the controversial project.
Read previous SLFP news coverage of this story from April 8 and January 17.
In a demonstration to show solidarity with the Brazilian indigenous peoples who will be gravely affected by the recently approved Belo Monte dam project, actress Sigourney Weaver will join members of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues to peacefully protest in front of the Brazilian Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York today, April 28, at 1:30 p.m.
On April 20, after a series of legal battles and last-minute injunctions from environmental and indigenous rights groups, the Brazilian government won out and awarded a domestic consortium—including the state-owned power generator and several construction firms—the $10 billion contract to build the Belo Monte dam on the Xingu River. (See our past stories.)
Construction could begin this year, with the project operational by 2015. Once complete, Belo Monte will be the world’s third largest dam. Its construction will flood some 200 square miles of rainforest while also drying up a stretch of the river—affecting an estimated 19,000 to 40,000 people, including 14 indigenous tribes that live nearby.
Indigenous groups are mobilizing to stop dam. A group of 150 Xikrin Kayapo Indians were moving last week to occupy the planned construction site. “We will build a permanent village there and will not leave so long as the project is on,” chief Luiz Xipaya told Agence France Presse.
Xipaya said he expects to have at least 500 Brazilian Indians there by end of month, with an ultimate goal of 1,000. “The indigenous people feel threatened by this project and are very agitated,” he said.
Since the construction contact was awarded, thousands of people have participated in protests throughout Brazil led by indigenous groups and environmental organizations including Greenpeace and Amazon Watch.
Take Action
If you’re in New York, you can join today’s protest at 1:30 p.m. in front of the Brazilian Permanent Mission to the United Nations at 747 3rd Avenue, between 46th and 47th streets.
You can also help by contacting the Brazilian embassy to express your concern.
- India Halts Controversial Mine on Tribe’s Sacred Lands
- Radio Program Features Interview With SLFP’s Toby McLeod
- Illegal Mahogany Logging Threatens Uncontacted Peruvian Tribes
- Court Halts Construction at Phiphidi Waterfall
- Support Winnemem Wintu Ceremony
- Cultural Survival Launches Campaign to Defend Landowners in Papua New Guinea
- Bulldozers Move in on South African Sacred Site
- Amberly: This sounds so cool — I can’t wait to see how this project evolves!
- Sacred Land Film: Thanks for your comment and additional information Ron!
- RON BEATY: PRESERVE NANTUCKET SOUND, RELOCATE THE CAPE WIND PROJECT As a colonial-rooted Cape Cod native who firmly...
- B.J.: The comment above fails to admit that if tribal members allow other “non-native” groups (i.e. evil...
- Redyeloblak: Im sure the elders new what they were doing Peter all with good cause. Not that it wasnt safe but to...
- Great blog - @Dadigan - about why we should care about the threats to the #Winnemem Wintu's puberty ceremony http://bit.ly/a4aOHi 5 days ago
- "The moment you change from ownership to relationship you create a sense of the sacred.” Great quote from Satish Kumar> http://bit.ly/bhlSf0 5 days ago
- “We have to shift our attitude of ownership of nature to relationship with nature." (part two follows) 5 days ago
- Mongolia's Ulaanbaatar encroaches on sacred site, but well be at the center of World Bank study. #travel #sacred #news http://bit.ly/b5DnKe 2010-08-02
- Indigenous groups occupy Brazilian Hydroelectric plant . http://bit.ly/cvgkXn 2010-07-26
- More updates...
