The Loneliest Man on Earth

by Juan Francisco Moreno “Economic efficiency” in the use of natural resources without concern for the justice of its distribution, or the scale of its extraction is just bad fiction, just like the story of the internalization of externalities. Hopelessly, the exploitation of the Amazon has always entailed a process of dispossession of those whose …

Bolsonaro Calls for Carnage and Environmental Holocaust in Brazil

by Felipe Milanez Brazil's extremist candidate in the upcoming presidential elections feeds hate, promises to arm murderers, and plots a massive land grab in the Amazon ― one that would amount to genocide and ecocide. This article first appeared in Carta Capital. It was translated and updated. The assassination of peasant leader Aluisio Sampaio on …

More Shamans, less intolerance! An Indigenous Manifesto at Berlin Film Festival

by Felipe Milanez The premier of the movie Ex-Shaman by Luiz Bolognesi at the 68th Berlin International Film Festival becomes the occasion for spreading a manifesto by Indigenous People of Brazil denouncing racism, violence and the loss of traditional knowledge: Shamans must exist and be respected, before it is too late, the world is devoid …

Bolivia: the ever-expanding frontier of extractivism

by Marta Musić The re-authorisation of a 300 km long highway cutting through the TIPNIS is part of an extractivist-development model that the MAS administration of Evo Morales has been pursuing since the beginning of its mandate, while paradoxically denouncing capitalism and its disastrous ecological consequences. Indigenous and environmental social movements are staging protests across the …

Indigenous Science

On 22 April 2017, the March for Science will be held in Washington, D.C. and over 500 other cities across the world. ENTITLEblog endorses the call by original peoples and their allies to march not just for Science but for Sciences; to acknowledge the multiple other ways of knowing that play an essential role in …

Weaving musical spaces of indigenous resistance for environmental justice

By Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares* The author proposes a journey to explore environmental justice movements through music amongst indigenous peoples from all over the world. Environmental protest songs enact different ways of telling that can connect ecological, political, spiritual and place-based meanings of environmental issues in  unanticipated ways. Through history, protest songs have shown to be a …

Xingu, the clamor coming from the forest in Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival

By Barbara Arisi & Felipe Milanez * Much to the chagrin of ranchers and agribusiness, one of Rio de Janeiro’s popular samba schools, Imperatriz Leopoldinense, is making visible the terrible consequences of agribusiness and hydropower dams on the Xingu Indigenous Park in this year’s Carnival. It’s the biggest party on earth. The greatest multitude of …

Encountering Arturo Escobar

By Isabella M. Radhuber* Workshops were recently held in Barcelona with Arturo Escobar to discuss two of his key texts. Isabella shares some important reflections on the social and political role of researchers, what it means to place oneself as an academic and how we, more broadly, understand and relate with the world. I felt …

The Few Remaining: Genocide Survivors and the Brazilian State

The death of Konibu, an elder Akuntsu shaman and political leader, forces us to consider what has been the role of the Brazilian state in this ongoing genocide, and what can be done to stop it. Konibu was an elder Akuntsu, shaman and political leader. He died last Thursday 26 May 2016. The death of Konibu brought …

Decolonisation and the Munduruku Protocol: It’s time to listen and to respect

International conventions, in particular the International Labor Organisation Convention 169 (ILO169), establish that local communities should be consulted when a planned project will affect their territory. Consultation with indigenous peoples, as written in Article 6, should be undertaken through appropriate procedures, in good faith, and through the representative institutions of these peoples. This statement is followed by the article …