For a lighter take on climate change and events at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference (‘COP-15’) you can watch a ‘televised’, rapped debate between Al Gore, Lord Monckton and presenter Robert Foster.

The debate pokes fun at Monckton’s views on climate change and Gore’s proposals to stop it, but makes the serious point that indigenous people, despite having a ‘60,000 years track record in ecology’, have been left out of climate change negotiations.

‘At what stage will we consult that missing voice?’ Foster raps. ‘In April an indigenous summit met in Anchorage pledging knowledge to enable us to handle this [climate change]. We have technology, but lack philosophy. How’s 60,000 years track record in ecology? To give COP-15 any kind of relevance, shouldn’t we invite the world’s true environmentalists?’

Foster’s last question echoes concerns expressed by Survival in its latest report ‘The Most Inconvenient Truth of All: Climate Change and Indigenous People’.

Jacir de Souza, a Makuxi Indian from Brazil, has won the 2009 Chico Mendes Environment Prize, awarded by the Ministry of Environment.

One of Brazil’s most courageous and dedicated indigenous leaders, he campaigned for 30 years for the successful recognition of Raposa-Serra do Sol, the Land of the Fox and Hill of the Sun, home to the Makuxi and other tribes.

Despite meeting popes and presidents and travelling the world advocating for his people’s rights, Jacir has always remained deeply rooted in the land and especially his community, Maturuca which sits high in the mountains near the Guyanese border.

It was here he developed his vision for the future based on strengthening indigenous identity, organisation and economic self-sufficiency.

Survival has worked with Jacir and the Indigenous Council of Roraima, which he founded, for many years.

The prize is named in honour of Chico Mendes, the rubber tapper who organised protests to stop the destruction of the Amazon for cattle ranches.

Mendes lobbied for the creation of ‘extractive reserves’ where rubber tappers could harvest rubber trees and make a living without harming the forest.

Testament to his legacy are the many sustainable reserves in the Amazon today. He was brutally gunned down outside his house almost 21 years ago.

President of Peru Alan Garcia.

Peru’s President Garcia has just announced the discovery of oil in the north of the country. According to Garcia, the discovery was made by Canadian oil company Talisman, working in an area called, in oil-speak, Lot 64.

‘God has heard Peru’s need and Talisman has found light oil that can be mixed with heavy oil in the lots run by Perenco and Repsol between 100 and 200 kilometres away,’ Garcia said.

In other words, this new discovery will make it easier to exploit oil already discovered elsewhere.

But the regions where both Perenco and Repsol-YPF are working include territory inhabited by at least two uncontacted tribes. The companies’ presence there could be fatal for the tribes and violates their rights under international law.

Perenco, recently nominated for a spoof Friends of the Earth award, doesn’t believe the tribes exist. So too Garcia. Other than killing people, can you imagine a more effective way of denying them their rights?

Garcia is determined that Perenco’s work should go ahead – so determined that he is prepared to claim God is backing Perenco too.

Last week we received news of the sad loss of Ururú Akuntsu. She was one of the last remaining members of the Akuntsu tribe who live in a small reserve in Rondônia state, western Brazil. There are now just five of them.

They have suffered as their forest home, friends and families were massacred over many years by ruthless ranchers in pursuit of land. Today they live in a territory recognised by the government and protected by FUNAI (government indigenous affairs department).

Altair Algayer, head of the nearby FUNAI outpost, remembers Ururú.

His brief recollections conjure the image of an astounding woman who had endured the worst that humanity can give, whilst retaining a gentle, warming spirit.

We know little of what Ururú’s life was like. We know that in the last 14 years that we have been with her that she was a happy, spontaneous person, a friend who was always attentive and receptive to our presence. She was a person admired by the whole group.

From what Konibú, Ururú’s brother has told us, she recounts that she had four children who were all shot dead during the massacre. We don’t know who her husband was or how he died. Afterwards when they were spotted in the forest they were persecuted like animals.

Their gardens were constantly destroyed and they had to move place every year. Their gardens were located by the ranchers in their airplanes and afterwards people went there on foot to destroy them. The Akuntsu lived by hiding; even so they resisted and didn’t leave their territory.

Their reaction at first contact with us (FUNAI) was to make signs that we should go away, and very slowly Ururú walked away from us, off into the forest. She didn’t react by running away, probably because of her physical condition. She was already of a certain age and not like a young person. But that was only in the first moment of contact.

Contact in some ways brought various problems for the Akuntsu and they will still face many in the future. But today they have more tranquility and fewer worries. No longer do they have to hide.

They can grow their gardens where they like without worrying about the ‘parabia’ or white man. Whenever they have a health problem they always come to our post for treatment. They show little interest for the material goods of the whiteman beyond our post or their indigenous territory.

Survival campaigner Fiona Watson has shared her thoughts in The Independent.

A South African woman recently sparked a minor international incident when she accused Botswana’s president, Ian Khama, of looking ‘like a Bushman’ (according to South African newspaper Sowetan).

Botswana President Ian Khama whose government has been criticised for human rights abuses.

An official at a Botswana border gate overheard the woman’s comments, and arrested her for ‘insulting the president’ and tried to charge her for ‘insults relating to Botswana’. After a few hours in a police cell, the woman was released and free to return to South Africa.

It’s hardly surprising that the official considered ‘Bushman’ to be such a grave insult. After all, successive Botswana governments (and President Khama himself) have been trying to rid their country of the Bushmen, its original inhabitants, for years.

Botswana’s last president, Festus Mogae, asked the world ‘how can you have a stone-age creature continue to exist in the age of computers?’ adding ‘if the bushmen want to survive, they must change, otherwise, like the dodo, they will perish.’

The minister for local government during this period said of the Bushman ‘sometimes I equate it to the elephants. We once had the same problem when we wanted to cull the elephants and people said no.’

Botswana’s current President is no better, calling the Bushmen’s way of life an ‘archaic fantasy.’

But just as the Dodo only disappeared after sailors hunted them to extinction, the Bushmen have no desire to abandon their way of life, so the government has been taking steps to force a change. In 1997, and again in 2002 and in 2005, Bushmen living in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve were rounded up and taken from their homes, dumped in ‘resettlement camps’ that they call ‘places of death.’ The government banned them from hunting, and destroyed a water borehole that they had been using for drinking water for years.

A Botswanan Bushman.
© Survival

Before these evictions, there were no known cases of HIV/AIDS amongst Botswana Bushmen. In 2002, more than 40% of deaths in one of the resettlement camps were attributable to AIDS.

The Bushmen eventually won a landmark legal victory against the government, for the right to go home and live as they choose. But still, the government bans hunting and forbids Bushmen from using their water borehole (although a tourist lodge in the area is allowed to use all the water it needs).

Hundreds have gone home anyway, somehow surviving without access to regular water. But many hundreds more are stuck in their ‘places of death’, too scared to go home until they know they can hunt and get water without prosecution.

Botswana’s treatment of the Bushmen has been internally and internationally condemned, but President Khama doesn’t seem interested in changing it.

Hunter-gatherers in Borneo blockade roads to keep oil palm companies off their land. . . the World Bank freezes loans to oil palm companies. . . and now the UK’s Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) has banned a ‘misleading’ advert calling oil palm the ‘Green Answer.’

‘The ad must not appear again in its current form,’ the ASA concluded.

The advert, placed by the Malaysian Palm Oil Council, claimed that accusations against Malaysia’s palm oil industry ‘of rampant deforestation, unsound environmental practices, unfair treatment of farmers and indigenous people’ were ‘protectionist agendas hidden under a thin veneer of environmental concern’ and ‘based neither on scientific evidence, nor, for that matter, on fact.’

Try telling that to the Penan, semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers in the Malaysian part of Borneo.

First, companies chopped their forests down for timber. Now they’re planting new ‘forests’ of oil palm.

‘When the logging started, we thought we had a big problem. But when oil palm arrived, logging was relegated to problem number two,’ a Penan man told one of my Survival colleagues recently. ‘Our land and our forests have been taken by force. Our fruit trees are gone, our hunting grounds shrunk, our rivers polluted.’

Penan armed with blowpipes block road as logging trucks owned by the Shin Yang company approach. © Survival

‘They clear the forest where we look for our food,’ said another Penan man. ‘They destroy our fruit trees, they bulldoze our land, and they use chemicals which run into our rivers and kill the fish. A lot of our food resources have been destroyed by oil palm plantations.’

Does that sound like the ‘Green Answer’ to you? Like ‘fair treatment’? ‘Sound environmental practice’?

It seems to me the ASA aren’t the only ones who would find the banned advert ‘misleading.’

The author of Survival’s ‘most racist article’ of 2009 now says he was ‘exaggerating’ when he suggested bombing Peru’s indigenous population with napalm.

‘When I wrote that I didn’t mean it literally,’ Andres Bedoya Ugarteche retorts in his column in Peru’s Correo newspaper. ‘When you tell someone that he or she’s f**king you, or that you’re going to ‘beat the shit out of them’, you don’t really mean it.’

Indeed. The question is, when isn’t he exaggerating? It’s difficult to know. After all, he describes ‘all human rights NGOs’ as ‘blood-sucking leeches’, and Survival as ‘communist excrement’ and ‘f**king communist swine’ who ‘worship’ the British royal family and want indigenous people to ‘remain in ignorance and misery’ so they ‘can be breastfed by them.’ Other pearls of wisdom: ‘Either we’re all indigenous or no one is’ and ‘When the Egyptians were building their pyramids, there were only llamas in Peru.’

Why should protesting against human rights abuses – in this case, the systematic theft of land, the destruction of eco-systems and livelihoods, and the failure to recognise and respect peoples’ rights to self-determination – make you a communist?

It doesn’t. That’s an old, tired claim that has been trotted out by certain kinds of people ever since fear of the ‘Red Tide’ swept around the globe last century. It wasn’t true then – and isn’t true now.

More importantly, racist descriptions of indigenous people in the media, whether ‘exaggerated’ or not, make it easier for governments and companies to justify taking their land and ‘developing’ them without their understanding and consent – in ways often catastrophic to them. This has happened all over the world: it has led to poverty, disease, shorter life-spans, and the destruction of entire cultures and ways of life.

That’s why Survival’s ‘Stamp it Out’ campaign was launched. That’s why there’s an annual award. And that’s why Bedoya Ugarteche’s article is this year’s worthy winner.

The gist of his article, published in the aftermath of the protests and violence at Bagua earlier this year, is:

‘Peru’s indigenous peoples belong in the past!’

‘They’re stupid and can’t think for themselves!’

‘They have savage customs and ridiculous names and clothes!’

Most of this is music to a government’s ears – especially one like Peru’s that is hell-bent on exploiting as much indigenous land as possible.

In fact, the similarities between Bedoya Ugarteche’s caricature and the government’s, particularly President Garcia’s, is uncanny.

He says the protesters are ‘primitive’, ‘from the pre-agricultural age’ and ‘palaeolithic’. Garcia says they want to take Peru ‘back to a primitive age’.

He says they’re ‘savage’. Ditto Garcia.

He says they were fooled into protesting by a ‘pseudo-native’. Ditto Garcia.

He says they were fooled into protesting by ‘communists’, opposition politicians, and foreign interests. Ditto Garcia.

He says they’re ‘policemen-murdering wretches’. Garcia accuses them of ‘police genocide’.

Even animals come into it. Bedoya Ugarteche brands indigenous leader Alberto Pizango a rat. Garcia has likened them to dogs.

Bedoya Ugarteche even takes exception to the fact that some of the protesters were wearing ‘Lacoste shirts’ – a detail also, rather oddly, noted by Peru’s Embassy in Italy. ‘Some demonstrators took to the streets wearing Lacoste shirts,’ Mr Felix Denegri Boza told Italian media, as if that had anything to do with why they were protesting or the government’s response to it.

Might we suggest that Bedoya Ugarteche, Peru’s diplomatic corps and President García worry less about what shirts the protesters were wearing, and rather more about what they were protesting about?

It is indeed an emergency. The Kenyan government has passed down an ultimatum that will shatter the Ogiek, residents of the Mau forest for centuries. Authorities have ordered everyone to leave the forest by next month, or face arrest.

‘The government said it would spare no one, not even a goat or a chicken’, emphasised an Ogiek spokesperson. ‘This is very serious, the Ogiek have nowhere else to go. People are crying about the eviction.’

The eviction is taking place in the name of conservation. However, it is said that the greatest threats to the forest (marked on the map) come from loggers and tea plantations – including those owned by government officials.

This is in stark contrast with traditional use of the Mau forest shown in an international heritage project reflecting the ‘mental maps of approximately 120 Ogiek Peoples from the 21 clans. Elders populated the model with their memories dating back to 1925 and reconstructed the landscape as it was at that time.’

The deadline is closing in on the Ogiek who will soon end up as conservation refugees if this plan goes ahead. Please write a letter to the President of Kenya, urging him to change his plans and allow the Ogiek to live on their land.

For the next two weekends, London’s ICA brings back the Inuit film classic Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner (2001).

The film astounded critics from Cannes to New York who branded it ‘a masterpiece’, with performances of ‘a simple power that strikes us straight between the eyes, as fast and true as an arrow’ (Financial Times).

It depicts an ancient Inuit legend, passed down by intergenerational storytelling, that teaches ‘young Inuit the danger of setting personal desire above the needs of the group’.

Made by indigenous company Isuma Productions, the movie is billed as ‘Canada’s first feature-length fiction film written, produced, directed and acted by Inuit…in Inuktitut on location under extreme conditions’.

These stilted structures prop up the homes of the Penan people amongst the trees of Ba Kajau, Malaysia. The Penan are embroiled in a desperate struggle to save the forests which have provided them with food, shelter and a sustainable way of life for as long as can be remembered.

As ruthless loggers, oil palm plantations and dam construction sweep across their homeland of Borneo, the Penan face the prospect of starvation and destitution thanks to the systematic destruction of their life-giving forests.