The Lhaqtemish people of Lummi Nation have lived in a reciprocal relationship with Xw’ullemy (the Salish Sea bioregion) since time immemorial. They are people of the sea whose culture, sacred sites, and life ways are tied to their territorial waters, and to the orca whales and salmon who share those waters. 

The Lummi term for “orca” is “qwe’lhol’mechen,” which loosely translates into “our relations under the waves.”  Lummi teachings hold orca whales are simply people in whale regalia, and that Lummi people and the resident orcas are bound by ties of intermarriage, society, and spirit. Lummi and qwe’lhol’mechen cultures mirror each other in many ways: we both rely on Chinook salmon; our teachings and rituals are passed down through the generations; and our families are tight.

Another way in which Lummi and qwe’lhol’mechen experiences are similar is the trauma of colonization and child abduction.  Many Lummi children were stolen from their families and placed into boarding schools where they were forced to hide their language, culture, and spirituality. Our qwe’lhol’mechen also went through a  time when their children were stolen.

50 years ago, a young qwe’lhol’mechen was violently taken from her family in the Salish Sea. She was stolen from her mother, from her resident orca relations, and from her Lummi relations. She was captured by men and sold to the Miami Seaquarium. Her captors called her “Tokitae;” the Miami Seaquarium gave her the stage name “Lolita.”  Her Lummi name is Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut.

She has been held in a tiny concrete tank for 50 years and made to perform daily for her food. For decades, many people and organizations have fought to free her, but have been unsuccessful in their attempts. Now, however, two Lummi women are invoking their unique legal rights as Indigenous people, as well as their cultural, spiritual, and kinship rights, to bring Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut home to her Salish Sea family. Squil-le-he-le (Raynell Morris) and Tah-Mahs (Ellie Kinley) are backed by the expertise of the Earth Law Center and the Whale Sanctuary Project.

Bringing Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut home will help heal her, her family, the Lummi people, and the Salish Sea. This act of healing will resonate with other acts of healing throughout the world, wherever Indigenous people are working to save the lands and waters they call home. This is not simply practical or legal work, it is spiritual work.  For this reason, we are holding an international, collective ceremony for Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut.

We are respectfully asking if you might hold ceremony, in your own cultural way, for Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut. For Tah-Mahs and Squil-le-he-le, holding ceremony for Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut means placing cedar boughs on the sea waves and saying a prayer for Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut, but we honor whatever way you hold ceremony, and are grateful for your spiritual and cultural support. We would be further honored if you might video your ceremony and allow us to share a clip during our virtual event on September 24th, as well as post it on our Ceremonies for Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut Facebook page.This way, people around the world can witness one another’s ceremonies, and we can send a collective prayer to her.

Hy’shqe! (Thank you).

Facebook page “Ceremonies for Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut”: https://www.facebook.com/Ceremonies-for-Skalichelh-tenaut-111624844000057

Compilation and maintenance of the list of small-numbered indigenous peoples of the Russian Federation became another function of the governmental system of monitoring in the sphere of interethnic and interreligious relations and early conflict prevention to be operated by FADN (Federal Agency of Ethnic Affairs). An appropriate ruling was signed by the Russian Prime Minister, Mikhail Mishustin.

The system of monitoring of the interethnic sphere was launched at the end of 2016. By the end of 2017, it was implemented in all regions of the Russian Federation. At the same time, the Government approved the goals and objectives of the monitoring system in the sphere of interethnic relations.

According to the new amendments, “one more function of the monitoring system, besides the identification of and response to the conflict situations, will be “registration of persons belonging to the small-numbered indigenous peoples of the Russian Federation” and “compilation of the list of persons belonging to them.”

These amendments concluded the many years of work aimed at creating united registry of the small-numbered indigenous peoples of Russia, which was handed over to the Federal Agency of Ethnic Affairs last June.

The authors of this governmental ruling assume that the registry will resolve one of the main problems of indigenous peoples by simplifying their access to the natural resources they traditionally use. They would also not have to collect and submit documents every year because the list will contain all relevant information.

This will be the first example of compilation and maintenance of a nationwide list of the small-numbered indigenous peoples in Russian history. Historically such registers existed locally in some regions only.

Compilation of the indigenous peoples’ registry was actively supported by the Russian Association of indigenous peoples of the North (RAIPON) and its president and deputy of the RF State Duma Grigory Ledkov. In one of the interviews, he said that “this federal law will let the Association pursue systemic activities to improve the lives of indigenous peoples.”

It should be noted that the development of monitoring the sphere of interethnic and interreligious relations was started in 2015. In February 2016, the President of Russia instructed the FSB (Federal Security Service), General Prosecutor’s Office, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications, Roskomnadzor, and FADN (Federal Agency of Ethnic Affairs), with other Federal Government stakeholders, to submit their proposals on the organization of information threats’ monitoring on the Internet. 

This instruction was given to Alexander Bortnikov, FSB Director, Yuri Chayka, RF General Prosecutor, Alexander Konovalov, Minister of Justice, Nikolai Nikiforov, Minister of Telecom and Mass Communications, Alexander Zharov, Roskomnadzor Director, Igor Barinov, Director of the Federal Agency of Ethnic Affairs. However, Alexander Bortnikov, FSB Director, was appointed an official in charge. 

According to the Federal Agency of Ethnic Affairs, the national system of monitoring the inter-ethnic and inter-religious relations and early prevention of the conflict situations created by FADN is designed primarily to identify illegal online activities. All regions of the Russian Federation are connected to the system; 48 of them had their municipal units connected to it, which, according to FADN, enables the maximum use of artificial intelligence.

Among the system users are the Administration of the Russian President, the institute of President’s Representatives in Federal Districts, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, the National Antiterrorism Committee, the Russian Ministry of Defense. The system’s database includes over 25 mln. entries. It has information on 90 thousand media, 220 thousand NGOs, 3.2 thousand Cossack organizations, 2.1 thousand communities of the small-numbered indigenous peoples (data as of 2018). 

It should also be noted that no such indigenous peoples’ registries exist in international practice. The only similar local population registry was created in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China (earlier Eastern Turkistan) populated by the Uyghurs, a Turkic-speaking people belonging to the Sunni branch of Islam.

Source – iRussia

Amid the pandemic, six Indigenous villagers, including Kinipan community leader Effendi Buhing, and two Indigenous youth, were arrested by the Central Kalimantan Police, in Indonesia, for defending their customary forest against the expansion of PT Sawit Mandiri Lestari (PT SML), a palm oil company. Buhing was arrested on August 26, while the other five were arrested on August 15.

All of them were released, but are now facing criminal charges for the alleged theft of chainsaw owned by the palm oil company. This chainsaw was confiscated by the villagers to stop the PT SML from further destroying their customary forest.

Indigenous Peoples Rights International (IPRI) and Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara – AMAN (National Alliance of Indigenous Peoples of the Archipelago – Indonesia) strongly condemn these recent arrests and criminalization of the Kinipan villagers, which violates their internationally recognized right to their lands, territories, and resources.

The unwarranted act by the police was in retaliation to the protest actions and growing resistance of Kinipan villagers against the forcible eviction from their lands by palm oil company.

In response to the encroachment of PT SML into Laman Kinipan customary territories, the community registered their customary territories to the Customary Territory Registration Agency in March 2017. A certificate for the land was also given to the Laman Kinipan Indigenous Peoples community on July 27, 2017. 

According to AMAN, the Laman Kinipan community found out that their forest was being taken over by PT SML in April 2018. Consequently, the community imposed customary sanctions against the company after it destroyed their customary territory, and filed complaints to the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, National Human Rights Institution Komnas HAM, and the Office of the Presidential Staff (KSP).

The complaints of the Laman Kinipan people are yet to be acted upon. However, when PT SML filed unwarranted charges of theft against Indigenous leader Buhing and the other five villagers, the police were quick to make the arrest and file the charges.

The arrest of Kinipan Community Leader Buhing clearly shows the double standards of the police forces. The arrest is used as a tactic to criminalize legitimate dissent so as to push for the illegal operations of PT SML into Laman Kinipan Indigenous Peoples customary lands. This tactic is being used globally to silence Indigenous Peoples in the face of the onslaught against their rights.

Even during Covid-19 pandemic, several Indigenous Peoples communities have become targets of criminalization and violence to give way to the operations of large-scale projects involving agribusiness and extractive industries.

If PT SML will have its way, 190, 000 hectares of forest will be lost; thereby reducing one of the biggest rain forests in Southeast Asia and causing severe damage to climate, biosphere, and ecosystem.

Laman Kinipan Indigenous Peoples have long been protecting their forest and environment from total destruction, yet they constantly face threats and violence, arrests and detentions, and criminalization for defending their lands, forests, and territories.

We call on President Joko Widodo, the Minsitry of Environment and Forestry, Ministry of Agrarian and Spatial Planning, the Indonesian Parliament, and the Indonesian Police:

• To drop the trumped-up charges against Kinipan community leader Effendi Buhing and the other five villagers, and to ensure their safety against any further attacks;
• For the police and the PT SML to stop  the criminalization of Indigenous peoples for their legitimate actions to protect their right to their customary forest;
• For the Ministry of Environment and Forestry to revoke Decree on Forest Release for PT SML;
• For the Ministry of Agrarian and Spatial Planning to revoke the concession of PT. SML in Laman Kinipan’s territory;
• For the immediate and proper implementation of the Constitutional Court decision number 35/2012 to recognize customary territory in accordance with the provisions of the 1945 Constitution; and
• For  the Indonesian Parliament to enact the law on the rights of Indigenous Peoples to ensure the full implementation of the provisions contained  in the 1945 Constitution and the  the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

If you are interested to be a signatory, please sign on this petition or send your FULL NAME, TITLE/POSITION, and ORGANIZATION/AFFILIATION to ipri@indigenousrightsinternational.org or IPRIsecretariat@gmail.com.

You can sign on as an organization or as an individual, please indicate which options you are amenable to. Sign ons will close on September 15, 2020 at 16:00 (GMT +7), 05:00 (EST), 02:00 (PST), 17:00 (GMT +8).

NOTE: You are not required to donate to this petition.

(Photo credit: Laman Kinipan Community)

Source

The automotive industry is driving growing demand for nickel, critical for batteries, despite the pollution that production can cause.

As Tesla shares continued their stellar rise last month, a group representing indigenous communities in Russia sent a letter to Elon Musk.

“We are respectfully requesting that you DO NOT BUY nickel, copper and other products from the Russian mining company Nornickel,” they told the billionaire boss of the electric carmaker.

Citing the huge diesel spill from a Nornickel plant that turned Siberian rivers crimson this summer, they alleged that the world’s leading high-grade nickel producer was “a global leader in environmental pollution” and urged Tesla to rule out buying from the miner until it cleaned up its act.

The letter came in response to a striking plea that Mr Musk had made to mining companies weeks earlier. “Wherever you are in the world, please mine more nickel,” he said. “Tesla will give you a giant contract for a long period of time if you mine nickel efficiently and in an environmentally sensitive way.”

While concerns over child labour and corruption in mining cobalt for electric vehicle batteries are well-documented, Mr Musk’s comments have focused attention on the less-scrutinised market for nickel. The metal is every bit as critical for batteries — and presents its own concerns for ethically minded electric vehicle buyers.

Nickel is used in most lithium-ion batteries; it helps to provide higher energy density and to improve storage capacity. Today, batteries account for only about 7 per cent, or 150,000 tonnes a year, of global nickel demand, according to Wood Mackenzie; most nickel is still used to make stainless steel. However, the energy and mining consultancy expects battery demand to increase to 650,000 tonnes by 2030, helping to drive total nickel demand to 3.2 million tonnes a year, from 2.3 million tonnes at present.

Andrew Mitchell, head of nickel research at Wood Mackenzie, argues that the market is in fact oversupplied now and he does not “see a particular squeeze on the availability of materials” to meet growing demand. However, “if you then start to want to look at the ESG [ethical, social and governance] issues around your nickel, then that might start to pose you problems”.

Nornickel could increase its production of battery-grade nickel in Russia substantially, but doing so would depend on it first securing long-term contracts with customers.

As for Nornickel’s own environmental record, Andrey Bougrov, head of environmental protection at the miner — which is facing a $2 billion fine over the diesel spill — said that the clean-up campaign was “in full swing”. He insisted that the company was “committed to environmentally sensitive production of metals”, was investing large sums in reducing hazardous emissions, but was “dealing with factories built in the Soviet times when architects largely ignored environmental aspects of the production”.

For environmental groups, it is paramount that such concerns are addressed. “The clean energy transition cannot be underpinned by dirty mining. It’s sort of its Achilles’ heel,” Payal Sampat, mining programme director at Earthworks, said.

Sorce

OZERPAKH, Russia — A row of stakes hundreds of feet long pokes out of the endless estuary of the Amur River on Russia’s Pacific coast, resembling the naked spine of a giant fish.

It is a piece of commercial fishing infrastructure reminding the people who still live here that nature’s wealth — in this case, millions of chum and pink salmon — belongs to the well-connected few.

“It’s as though they must exterminate these riches, mercilessly,” says Galina Sladkovskaya, 65, waiting in vain for a fish to bite at a levee about 20 miles upstream. “They only need money and nothing else. They don’t have a human soul.”

Along the Amur, one of Asia’s great waterways, Russians feel cheated, lied to and ignored. The wild salmon fishery that they once took for granted is gone, they say, because Moscow granted large concessions to enterprises that strung enormous nets across the river’s mouth.

People’s anger over their depleted fish stock is so widespread that it has been a driving force behind the anti-Kremlin protests that have been shaking the Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk, on the Amur, since early July.

“This was a gesture of people desperate to be heard,” Daniil Yermilov, a Khabarovsk political consultant, said of the protests. “People wanted to live how they used to live, so that they can catch fish again.”

The story of the Amur’s vanishing salmon also sheds light more broadly on why President Vladimir V. Putin’s popular support has fallen close to the lowest point of his 20-year rule.

Russians’ turn away from Mr. Putin revolves less around abstract concepts of freedom and geopolitics than the concrete instances of poverty and injustice they see in their daily lives — and the feeling that the country’s elite neither knows nor cares about their struggles.

On a dirt road recently near the Amur’s mouth, a green truck splashed by before Leonid, a fisherman, whistled the all-clear. Two boys, his sons, hustled out of their hiding spot in the reeds, dragging a sack of glistening salmon.

“We’re being forced to become poachers,” he said, cursing and refusing to give his last name because he was in the process of breaking the law. “What is Putin thinking?”

Residents say there is virtually no way for them to legally catch enough to eat of what little fish remains, amid ever-tightening regulations on recreational and Indigenous fishing.

The boards tied to the roof of Leonid’s aging blue hatchback were meant to provide an alibi — he was just out collecting wood scraps. His rear windshield carried the slogan of the Khabarovsk region’s summertime political awakening: “I Am/We Are Sergei Furgal.”

Sergei I. Furgal, a former scrap-metal trader, ran for governor of the sprawling Khabarovsk region in 2018 and beat the incumbent, a Kremlin ally, in a rare upset. He gained popularity with populist moves unusual in Russia’s top-down system of governance: He cut his salary, improved school lunches and held frequent listening tours, skipping the tie and posting copiously to Instagram.

By then, the Amur’s fish crisis was already brewing. Federal authorities had granted expansive salmon fishing rights to companies that installed huge, stationary nets in the estuary and at the river’s mouth.

In the fall, the legions of migrating salmon used to make it hundreds of miles upriver to Khabarovsk, filling apartment refrigerators with smoked fish and cheap salmon roe — a New Year’s Eve staple that Russians call red caviar — sold by the kilogram.

The catch topped out at 64,000 metric tons in 2016 but then dropped precipitously, to 21,500 metric tons in 2018, the World Wildlife Federation says. And few salmon made it to Khabarovsk or the spawning grounds on the Amur’s tributaries.

“People here right now can’t catch enough to put on the table, while commercial fishermen reap huge profits,” Mr. Furgal said soon after taking office. “We’re going to try to change this state of affairs.”

He called for new limits on commercial fishing, some of which were implemented, but the salmon have remained scarce. Then, early last month, a SWAT team from Moscow pulled Mr. Furgal out of his black S.U.V. and spirited him onto the eight-hour flight back to the capital.

He was accused of masterminding murders some 15 years ago, but Khabarovsk residents saw a naked Kremlin attempt to remove a maverick governor more loyal to his constituents than to Mr. Putin. Two days later they spilled into the streets in the tens of thousands in the biggest protests Russia’s regions had seen since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The protests, now in their second month, are driven by regional pride, economic frustration and fatigue with Mr. Putin. But their animating emotion, dozens of interviews across the region showed, was a sense of injustice, as encapsulated by the fish crisis: Salmon had been part of life here for generations, and now Moscow had taken it away and offered nothing in return.

“Putin only thinks about war and about his pockets,” said Andrei Peters, 53, a small-business man in the impoverished village of Takhta on the lower Amur. “No one thinks about the people.”

In the struggling fishing village of a few hundred people with no regular internet or road connection to the outside world, someone had printed out black-and-white Furgal posters on regular sheets of paper and affixed them to the wooden electricity poles. With their now ex-governor behind bars, residents said they feared they had lost the one person in power who heard their concerns.

Indeed, the few officials in the region who agreed to interview requests in the wake of Mr. Furgal’s arrest either dismissed their constituents’ fish-related anger or redirected the blame away from the Kremlin. In the Indigenous community of Sikachi-Alyan, an hour’s drive outside Khabarovsk, the village head, Nina Druzhinina, explained that “America is at fault for all of our sins.”

“The C.I.A. has inserted its services everywhere, and its spy network is probably highly developed,” Ms. Druzhinina said. Commercial fishermen were able to exploit the Amur River, she said, because of post-Soviet Russia’s American-inspired legal code.

In the regional parliament, the speaker, Irina Zikunova, said that many Khabarovsk residents “are guided by impulse, are guided by emotions, are guided by feelings” rather than by facts. She rejected the notion — heard virtually universally in interviews with residents along the Amur — that officials in Moscow had shaped fishing regulations to the benefit of well-connected businesspeople.

“In reality, this is a made-up problem,” she said.

One of the Amur’s main fishing magnates, Aleksandr Pozdnyakov, is chauffeured around Khabarovsk in a black Mercedes Maybach. He acknowledged in an interview in his tastefully dark-toned office that the Amur fishery is in crisis. But he said the problem was overfishing by local residents who preferred to “pay nothing and do nothing while catching as much as they want.”

Mr. Furgal, the Khabarovsk governor arrested last month, made things worse, he said, speaking “as though he’s doing everything for the people” and telling the public they had a right to the salmon in the Amur.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Mr. Pozdnyakov said of the tens of thousands protesting in support of Mr. Furgal, “I am confident that practically 99 percent of those going out are slackers who don’t want to do anything.”

Experts say there is truth to the notion that poaching by local residents is part of the problem. Olga Cheblukova, who coordinates the World Wildlife Fund’s Amur River studies, said the environmental group’s researchers have seen hundreds of dead salmon scattered near their spawning grounds, their bellies sliced open and their roe removed.

The fundamental issue, she said, is poor federal oversight that failed to detect a natural decline in the wild salmon population after the large catch in 2016. In the years that followed, regulators granted fishing quotas exceeding the actual migrating population, allowing runs of salmon to be virtually exterminated before they managed to reproduce.

In the fall of 2018, W.W.F. researchers counted an average of about 0.1 chum salmon per 1,000 square feet of river at their spawning grounds, compared to a norm of about 50.

To Khabarovsk residents, that failure of governance means more expensive fish — a parable for all of Russia, where official mismanagement and corruption often translates to bad roads, crumbling hospitals and polluted wilderness.

The protests in Khabarovsk show how easily public anger over those failures can now boil over — as it did for Evgeny Kamyshev, 32, a protester who blamed the Kremlin for the scarcity of salmon.

“The fish rots from the head,” he said.

Oleg Matsnev contributed research from Moscow.