New Research Calculates the Relentless Breach of Indigenous Communities' Rights

In what has been an ugly U.S. and Canadian tradition for centuries – a new study published earlier this summer illustrated just how destructive modern agricultural and industrial practices are toward Indigenous communities. Desecrating Native American and First Nation Indigenous land, culture, and practices proved to be a framework for other countries to do the same to Indigenous peoples around the world.

According to the journal Science Advances, Indigenous people make up only about 6% of the world’s population, but they are negatively impacted by at least one-third of all industrial development projects globally. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, is based on data collected over the past decade by the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas), an initiative coordinated by ICTA-UAB that has identified and mapped a total of 3,081 socio-environmental conflicts around the world. This, according to researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain and nine other universities around the world.

The international study analyzed hundreds of Indigenous communities to see how land grabs or large-scale land acquisitions by investors for agriculture and other industries affected Indigenous communities. The study found that many industrial projects around the world negatively impacted Indigenous communities, including through the loss of land and livelihoods, with the biggest wrongdoers being mining, fossil fuels, agriculture and livestock.

The study covers more than 740 different indigenous groups affected by such activities, representing at least 15% of the approximately 5,000 groups worldwide.

The Quechua, Mapuche, Gond, Aymara, Nahua, Ijaw, Munda, Kichwa, Guarani and Karen communities are the ten indigenous groups that appear most frequently featured in the EJAtlas dataset. However, researchers believe that the actual number of affected Indigenous groups is expected to be much higher as “there are still significant data gaps, particularly in Central Asia, Russia and the Pacific, where data coverage is more limited”, explains Arnim Scheidel, ICTA-UAB researcher and co-author of the study who highlights the great effort made by Indigenous and non-indigenous researchers and hundreds of collaborators who have collected relevant information for the EJAtlas since its creation.

The multi-author study read, “Our results provide large-scale evidence of the magnitude of environmental burdens faced by numerous Indigenous Peoples worldwide and bring into focus the Indigenous rights violations associated with these burdens.”

The unfortunate reality here is that governments around the world aren’t doing enough to protect Indigenous communities from displacement. The statements made at the 16th Session on EMRIP held in Geneva this past summer proved this. While many countries have areas of land set aside for Native – Indigenous people, governments move swiftly to seize that land ,once they “need it” for industrial purposes.

According to the data collected, landscape loss (56% of cases), livelihood loss (52%) and land dispossession (50%) are reported to occur globally most often in conflictive development projects.

For the research team, the findings demonstrate the sheer size of indigenous rights’ violations associated with industrial ways of life, and recall that international instruments like the International Labour Organisation’s Convention C169 on indigenous peoples and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples play an important role for advancing indigenous rights. “However, current levels of ratification, implementation and monitoring are insufficient to ensure respect for such rights,” they argue.

Therefore, they emphasise the need for governments to implement measures that further promote Indigenous rights and support environmental justice by ensuring real compliance with existing conventions and the protection of their land rights. “Governments should apply a zero-tolerance policy towards violations of indigenous rights and seek trade agreements that are conditional on compliance with the responsibilities of the UN Declaration by the companies involved”.

Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares, scientist and co-author of the study, in a report about the research, “Governments should apply a zero-tolerance policy towards violations of indigenous rights and seek trade agreements that are conditional on compliance with the responsibilities of the UN Declaration [on Indigenous rights] by the companies involved.”

Forcing Indigenous communities to leave the land they’ve both lived on and stewarded for generations can impact their connection to their cultures in significant ways, but it also inevitably affects their well-being. In countries such as Indonesia, rampant deforestation forces Indigenous people to move to cities in often less-than-ideal conditions. In Brazil, violence, including kidnapping or even killing Indigenous people, can be used as tactics to seize Indigenous land and make way for industry.

The U.S. and Canada are infamous for swindling Indigenous people and their land, even when based on long-standing treaties. During former President Donald Trump administration, he tried several times to turn over sacred Indigenous land to mining companies, and the wall he wanted to build between Mexico and the U.S. would cut through hundreds of miles of Native American land.

Indigenous communities/tribes/nations deserve autonomy – declaring sovereignty is the foundational step for protecting Indigenous land rights. And should be led by the Indigenous communities that circumnavigate the world.