By Liliana Usvat
Blog 282-365
Blog 282-365
The destruction of the world’s remaining native forests and related ecosystems threatens the existence of forest-dependent and indigenous peoples around the globe.
Indigenous and rural communities rely on native forests for water, food, medicines, shelter, livelihoods, and culture.
Indigenous communities all over the world have been forcibly displaced from their ancestral lands to make room for dam mega-projects, mining operations, oil extraction, plantations, logging o
operations, bio-prospecting, and other forms of land, resource and cultural theft.
The new focus on wood as a future source of biofuel (cellulose ethanol) is becoming the newest great threat to the world’s forests and Indigenous Peoples. The existing demand for wood-based products is already causing massive deforestation around the world. Creating a huge new demand for wood to produce ethanol will exponentially increase this global deforestation. The world’s forest-dependent peoples will pay the highest price for the consumption of the North.
Existing plantations of trees and future plantations of genetically engineered (GE) trees also threaten native forests and indigenous communities. Contamination of native forests with GE tree pollen or seeds will upset the ecological balance of forests leading to wide ranging impacts. Some studies suggest that pollen from certain GE trees may be toxic to people who inhale it.
Indigenous and rural communities rely on native forests for water, food, medicines, shelter, livelihoods, and culture.
Indigenous communities all over the world have been forcibly displaced from their ancestral lands to make room for dam mega-projects, mining operations, oil extraction, plantations, logging o
operations, bio-prospecting, and other forms of land, resource and cultural theft.The new focus on wood as a future source of biofuel (cellulose ethanol) is becoming the newest great threat to the world’s forests and Indigenous Peoples. The existing demand for wood-based products is already causing massive deforestation around the world. Creating a huge new demand for wood to produce ethanol will exponentially increase this global deforestation. The world’s forest-dependent peoples will pay the highest price for the consumption of the North.
Existing plantations of trees and future plantations of genetically engineered (GE) trees also threaten native forests and indigenous communities. Contamination of native forests with GE tree pollen or seeds will upset the ecological balance of forests leading to wide ranging impacts. Some studies suggest that pollen from certain GE trees may be toxic to people who inhale it.
Additional studies have found that eucalyptus trees can host a deadly pathogenic fungus:Cryptococcus gattii. This fungus can cause fatal fungal meningitis in people that inhale its spores. Huge plantations of eucalyptus for paper or biofuels may present a serious health threat to nearby communities by creating excellent habitat for this pathogenic fungus. Industry is currently engineering eucalyptus trees for plantations in Brazil and the U.S. South, where they could pose a threat to communities and forests.
Indigenous peoples in Canada, the United States and throughout the Americas hold valuable land and water resources that have long been exploited by the provincial, state and federal governments and by corporations trying to meet the energy needs of an industrialized world.
Indigenous peoples have disproportionately suffered impacts due to the production and use of energy resources – coal mining, uranium mining, oil and gas extraction, coal bed methane, nuclear power and hydropower development – yet are among those who benefit least from these energy developments. Indigenous peoples face inequity over the control of, and access to, sustainable energy and energy services.
Territories where Indigenous peoples live are resource rich and serve as the base from which governments and corporations extract wealth yet are areas where the most severe form of poverty exists.
Ten thousand years ago, ancestors of today’s Coquille Indians lived along the southern Oregon coast from Coos Bay to Cape Blanco and along the inland valleys of the Coquille River drainage. A common misconception among European Americans is that Indians lived passively within their environment, “at one with nature.” On the contrary, aboriginal peoples actively managed their landscape for their own objectives, using the technologies available to them.
n the middle decades of the 1800s, the Indians of the Oregon coast were abruptly cast out of their lands, and European American settlers moved in. Prairies became pastures, valleys became farm fields, forests were cut down, wild animals and plants were replaced with domestic ones. Property lines were inked on maps, the new owners halted Indian burning, and trees started to encroach on the meadows.
In 1851 and 1855, the Coquilles and neighboring tribes signed treaties that would have allowed them to keep some of their ancestral homelands. Congress never ratified these treaties. Instead, it passed land claim laws in the 1850s and 1860s that opened the door to white settlement of Indian lands. By 1856 most Coquilles had been forcibly removed to the Coast Reservation, north of the Umpqua River.
The next hundred years were ones of diaspora for the Coquilles. As the reservation’s lands were nibbled away piece by piece and offered to white developers, some Coquilles made their way back to their old homes, where they discovered that their traditional fishing and gathering places were now on private property. They joined remnant, mixed-blood families living around Coos Bay and up the Coquille drainage, descendants of Coquille women who had married white men in the 1850s and had not been transported to the reservation.
