Protecting our planet, defending our communities!

This is a time of great struggle for Indigenous peoples. On September 13th 2007, the governments of Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia voted against the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which calls on countries to give more control to tribal peoples over the land and resources they traditionally possessed, and to return confiscated territory, pay compensation, or just say “sorry” for all the abuses.

It is not hard to see why. New Zealand’s government has just unleashed its anti-terror security forces on Maori activists in New Zealand, while the Australian government reinvaded Aboriginal land in the Northern Territory under the guise of “child” protection. Both these governments use their influence in the Pacific to open up communal lands in Aboriginal nations as well as Pacific Island nations to Australian and Canadian mining interests.

Throughout the Americas, from Great Turtle Island down through Latin America, from the Tahltan of Canada to the Mapuche of Chile/Argentina, from the Quechua /Aymara  to the Kulin, Wotjobaluk, Mara and Kurnai Nations of Australia in the south, Indigenous peoples are under greater pressure than ever from multinational corporations’ interests (mining, forestry, fuel), free trade agreements and the security apparatus of settler governments, determined to finally put an end to centuries of struggle against dominant elites and against economic rationalism in the form of neoliberal capital policies.

Indigenous peoples are fighting back, organising, and teaching new generations what they have learned from hundreds of years of unending struggle against land expropriation, exploitation, assimilation and the various attempts to wipe them out from our planet.