A Lifetime of Injustice – History of the Belo Monte Dam Along with the struggles against the Narmada Dams in India, the struggle against the Belo Monte Dam in Brazil is one of the longest and most determined struggles in our times – and with good reason, for life itself, as the Xingu peoples understand it, is at stake. Here, given in the text below and at the link that the title also gives, is not just a ‘summary’ of the struggle but an extraordinary presentation of the timeline of the struggle. Check it out; even though life, history, and struggle are of course not two-dimensional – and are very difficult to really ‘represent’ - I think anyone working in or with movement will find this presentation fascinating. If there is one comment I have on the diagram (and on such diagramming in general), I think the presentation would have been / would be even richer if it were not to focus on the Belo Monte project alone but were to also give a few more milestones – to use a term from another culture entirely – in the evolution of the struggles of the Xingu peoples over these years, and more generally of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon; such as the entry / dateline you already have there for ‘The First Encounter of Native Peoples in the Xingu’ that took place in February 1989. Within my limited understanding, the protests and occupations by the Xingu against the Altamira and then the Belo Monte dam were certainly a part of this broader evolution, but from my own experience of being associated with the Narmada struggles for many years, and of documenting and studying other struggles in Brazil, there are so many other vital developments that took that surely contributed to, or came to contribute to, the struggles against the Belo Monte dam. To my understanding, this is crucial because as is all too little known (and/or overlooked), many of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon have only come to encounter so-called ‘civilisation’ over the past fifty years – since the 1960s-70s – and where they therefore have, within this blink of their and our history, had to not only struggle but also to learn how, as one of them once told me, to move from “fighting with arrows to fighting with words”… So what the Xingu peoples are going through is truly an epochal movement, in the most fundamental sense. And beyond this, as I see it the struggle by the Xingu peoples that is represented in this diagram by IR is not just another struggle against one more dam; it is truly no less than a crucial part of the evolution of human history itself. Just as illustrations, and without wanting to in any way essentialise or homogenise the history of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon, the following might be candidates for inclusion, for instance : The first meetings that perhaps ever took place among chiefs of different tribes of indigenous peoples in Brazil, in 1974 and 1975, organised by CIMI (the Conselho Indigenista Missionário) The historic formation in late 1986 of an ‘Amazonian Alliance of Peoples of the Forest’, between the rubber tappers and indigenous peoples of the Amazon The visit that two chiefs of the Kayapo Indians in Brazil, Paiakán and Kubé-i, made in early 1988 - accompanying US ethnobiologist Darrell Posey – first to an International Symposium on ‘Wise Management of Tropical Forests’ in Miami, Florida (and where they also spoke as consultants to Posey’s 12-year ‘Kayapo Project’ on traditional ethnobiological knowledge, and where “The assembly urged (them) to take their protests to the World Bank”; and then to Washington DC with Posey to meet World Bank Executive Directors and technical staff, to campaign against the Bank-funded ‘Altamira-Xingu Hydroelectric (which I think later became the Belo Monte project ?) Along with the meeting titled ‘The First Encounter of Native Peoples in the Xingu’ that appears in the timeline (February 1989), the fact that that meeting also issued a historic joint statement by the ‘Indians’ / indigenous peoples and by non-Indians titled ‘A Unified Strategy for the Preservation of the Amazon and Its Peoples’ The first ‘International Meeting of People Affected by Dams’ held at Curitíba, in southern Brazil, in March 1997 (and with which IR was of course so closely involved !), and even though the peoples of the Amazon were not much represented there And so on ! (And where you at IR of course even have one of the great scholars of the Amazon now working among you, Brent Millikan !) But even without all this, and as something of a veteran of trying to do such presentations (since the 1990s !; some 25 years now), I personally am so excited to see someone harness and use the amazing software we now have available to do this. Thank you for this, Zachary, Brent, Paddy, and Peter, and other friends and comrades at International Rivers ! And in the deepest solidarity with the struggles of the Xingu peoples - and with all indigenous peoples, everywhere – and in the oneness of struggle - JS
Posted on: Wed, 16 Jul 2014 10:50:03 +0000
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