Claremont – Prominent activists from around the world will gather at Scripps College this weekend to explore the history and impact of colonialism on indigenous people.
Among the participants will be the leader of a Colombian tribe that once threatened mass suicide over a planned oil project near its ancestral home.
“Natural Sources, Native Rights” begins today and runs through Saturday, part of a semester-long symposium sponsored by the Humanities Institute at Scripps. This weekend’s events explore the myriad issues surrounding the often controversial issue – from the environment to racial identity through talks and poetry readings. Participants, nearly all scholar-activists, are from the United States, Australia, Colombia and other regions.
Friday’s speakers include Roberto Perez, president of the U’wa Traditional Authority, who begins a U.S. speaking tour at the conference. The battle between the 5,000 members of his tribe, which lives in the Andes mountains of Colombia, and Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum began in 1992 when Occidental and another oil company were granted exploration rights by the Colombian government on land within the tribe’s ancestral territory, said Kevin Koenig, a campaigner for Amazon Watch.
For the U’wa, the fight to prevent the oil project and to protect their homeland and culture is a matter of life and death, Koenig said.
“What they have stated is they are willing to die for this,” he said.
Besides land issues, the tribe is concerned the oil project will trap members in the cross-fire of a civil war between the Colombian government and the National Liberation Army, a Marxist-Leninist group that has been waging a revolutionary campaign for decades. This week, about 100 employees of the company were possibly kidnapped by the guerrillas. In the past, the group has used mass abductions and frequent bombings of pipelines to press the Colombian government for concessions in peace talks.
“The key point that the U’wa have continued to make is if oil development comes anywhere near their territory, oil infrastructure becomes a strategic target in an ongoing civil war,” Koenig said.
Another featured speaker is Haunai-Kay Trask, professor and founder of the Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. The poet and author, who is a key player in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, said she will focus on the effect the military and tourism industries are having on the island’s land and native culture.
Tourism accounts for $10.8 billion of Hawaii’s economy. By contrast, pineapple and sugar together amount to about $269 million. The Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau estimates that a $7.87 million advertising campaign it mounted resulted in 757,000 tourist trips to the island over a two-year period, $1.07 billion in visitor spending and $75.5 million earned in state and county taxes.
Tourism fuels environmental damage, cultural oppression and a high cost of living, painful when tourism wages are low, Trask said. It brings development that wastes land and depletes water resources, a critical issue because “unlike California, we’re not in a position to steal water from other states,” she said.
But stewardship of the land, turning it into an agricultural powerhouse, and exploration of environmentally friendly ways to develop the fishing industry could provide an economic alternative, she said.
