Update on environmental issues affecting indigenous people and their land

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From the #Indigenous Hashtag on Twitter:

Penan Community ancestral land destroyed

Hundreds of indigenous people in Borneo who are due to be evicted from their land to make way for a giant hydroelectric dam have discovered that the rainforest they hoped to move to is being destroyed.

The Penan are being forced to move by the Sarawak state government to allow the billion-dollar Murum dam project to go ahead. But the Penan say the the area to which they hoped to relocate is now being cleared for oil palm plantations.

The Murum dam is one of 12 megadam projects the Sarawak government hopes to complete to power its industrial development and economic growth. The plans have proved controversial as they involve the destruction of vast areas of rainforest, uprooting of indigenous people and have already been plagued with corruption.MORE

B.C. Indian bands give thumbs-down to Enbridge

Several B.C. Indian bands have rejected Enbridge (ENB-T55.60-0.13-0.23%)offer of a stake in its controversial Northern Gateway pipeline, throwing new hurdles before the project that would ship oil sands bitumen to Pacific Rim markets.

Calgary-based Enbridge is currently in regulatory hearings seeking approval for the $5.5-billion project. It insists it is discussing benefits packages, including a 10-per-cent equity stake, with the native communities whose traditional territory will be traversed by the pipeline.

On Thursday, several chiefs publicly rejected Enbridge’s offer of a financial stake in the Gateway development, and instead delivered a declaration opposing the pipeline – signed by representatives of 61 British Columbia native groups – to Enbridge’s Calgary headquarters.

“Our lands and waters are not for sale, not at any price,” said Chief Larry Nooski of Nadleh Whut’en First Nation.

“We want no part of Enbridge’s project and their offers are worthless to us when compared to the importance of keeping our lands, rivers and the coast free of crude oil spills. What Enbridge is offering is the destruction of our lands to build their project, and the risk of oil spills for decades to come which could hurt everyone’s kids and grandkids.

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Saami and the Finnish government sign deal to preserve rainforest

A long-running dispute between Finnish government Forest Enterprise Metsahallitus and Saami reindeer herders has been resolved in a landmark deal which will protect 80,000ha of pine forest in northern Finland.

The dispute over reindeer grazing forests in northern Finland has raged for eight years, with Greenpeace and indigenous Saami reindeer herders waging a campaign against harvester and forest manager Metsähallitus.

The deal will see 80% of the 107,000ha of reindeer grazing forests, mostly old growth, protected either permanently or for the next 20 years.

“Industrial logging has now been pushed out of the most important forest area in Finland,” said Greenpeace Nordic forest campaigner Matti Liimatainen.MORE

Why we try to protect our Land: Lessons from Barriere Lake

Take Barriere Lake, a small Algonquin community about 3½ hours north of Ottawa. This is an unceded first nation, meaning it never relinquished title to its land to the government by treaty or otherwise. Despite a very high unemployment rate and a far lower standard of living than the rest of Canada, these people, who call themselves the Mitchikanibikok Inik, are a proud group that maintains Algonquin as their first language and rely heavily on hunting, trapping and the land for subsistence.

The Algonquins of Barriere Lake have always been governed by a traditional, customary government, not by Indian Act band council elections. That is until last summer, when then-Indian affairs minister Chuck Strahl, against the wishes of the vast majority of the reserve, abolished it by imposing Section 74 of the Indian Act, an archaic provision not forcibly used since 1924. Polling took place 45 kilometres outside of the community and, in an act of group resistance, only 10 ballots ended up being mailed in. Despite all of this, a new chief and four-member council were put in place by the federal government. Three of the four new members weren’t even residents of the reserve.

In 1991, the traditional government of Barriere Lake signed a groundbreaking trilateral agreement with Quebec and the federal government. This United Nations-praised deal was meant to reconcile the pressures placed on the community by industrial logging and was geared toward taking into account the environmental and cultural needs of the Algonquin. To date, neither Quebec nor Ottawa has upheld any part of the agreement, including the sharing of natural resource revenues generated in this unceded Algonquin territory.

Before a new government was forced onto the people of Barriere Lake, the reserve held a number of peaceful protests to draw attention to the fact that government on all levels completely ignored their end of the trilateral agreement. Some of these protests included the blockading of a nearby rural highway. Instead of the desired negotiations culminating from this, men, women and children were tear-gassed by the provincial police. And now, with a new and unwanted council in place, community youth spokesman Norman Matchewan says this council has “started dealing with forestry companies and signing away parts of our land to be clear-cut without the community’s consent.”MORE