Meeting of young indigenous leaders from Klamath River Basin and Xingu region. Photo by Aaron Vincent Elkaim
farms. Meanwhile, California Governor Jerry Brown has suspended environmental regulations and is currently pressing for a project called the Twin Tunnels, which would enable a volume of water larger than the Sacramento River itself to be diverted to Central California farmlands. A dam raise threatens to further flood Winnemem Wintu sacred sites, and Chief Sisk reports that both Nestlé and Crystal Geyser intend to harvest water from Mount Shasta. Back on the Klamath River, scarce water and irresponsible mismanagement in late 2013 led to a near repeat of the 2002 fish kill, when 70,000 salmon were killed due to low water flows. Despite the threats from all sides, tribes in Northern California and Southern Oregon have been actively fighting for the health of the rivers and the salmon. This struggle has been an inter-tribal one within the local region, but is also international. “When water becomes the issue,” says Chief Sisk, “it becomes a global issue.” In the journey to bring the salmon home, the Winnemem Wintu Chief has formed relationships with indigenous peoples of Canada, New Zealand, Mexico, Peru, and Hawai’i. Klamath River Basin peoples, too, are spreading their experience of colonization and resistance internationally. Most recently, their journey has taken them to the Amazon rainforest in Brazil.
From the Klamath to the Amazon In February, Dania Colegrove and a delegation of young indigenous leaders from the Klamath River Basin flew down to the Amazon rainforest to meet with indigenous leaders of the region. They learned from the struggles in the Xingu River region and shared lessons from their own home. “We are fighting the same fight,” said Colegrove. With the first hydroelectric dam on the Klamath River being built in 1918, tribes of the region have seen the direct
result of the dams. Almost a century later the first hydroelectric dam of the Xingu River is now being built. It is another act of violence against indigenous people, of which Colegrove knows well. “We are bringing lessons of devastation,” she said in an interview with the Earth First! Journal. “We have faced genocide for the last onehundred years.” The construction of the Belo Monte dam in the Xingu River started in July 2011 after more than twenty years of resistance to the project. The first dam proposal, proposed during Brazil’s military dictatorship, was defeated in 1989 by a strong alliance between indigenous and non-indigenous activists, but was re-proposed in 2003 and approved by the Brazilian Congress in 2005. The project threatens the land and livelihood of between 25,000 and 50,000 indigenous people from forty different ethnic groups along the Xingu River, a tributary of the Amazon River. Sheyla Juruna, a member of the Juruna Tribe in the Xingu region, spoke to the Earth First! Journal about the odds indigenous people are against in the Amazon: “Speaking of our struggle here in Brazil, I can say in the first place that it’s an unequal fight, since we are fighting against the great capitalism. Unfortunately, we are struggling against a giant that does not permit us the right to speak or choose.”
Against the Giant On June 18, 2012, indigenous people, activists, fishers, and other supporters took action to free the waters of the Xingu River. In the early morning hours, they occupied the construction site and began digging until, finally, a stream rolled through the earthen dam. This was one of many actions taken by indigenous people on the Xingu River, including about ten other occupations of the dam site since 2011. In spite of the unequal fight against the powers of the state and capitalism, indigenous-led
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resistance to the destructive project has been unrelenting. “It’s shameful for us as indigenous people to take care of our land but not to have autonomy over it. We are caring for the Earth to survive and also working to stop the government that takes our territory to implement their giant projects that will leave irreversible impacts on our lives,” said Sheyla. Along with direct action to free the river, people have utilized diverse tactics— from globally circulated online petitions to different forms of sabotage at the construction site. At a public hearing with Kayapo Indians in 2008, a hydroelectic engineer was cut with a machete. One indigenous resister, Partyk Kayapo, responded to the incident: “They want to make a dam, and now they know they shouldn’t.” Legal challenges to the dam are also being utilized, and have helped to postpone construction for several years. Even with a rich history of resistance amongst indigenous peoples, negotiations and “buy-offs” of indigenous leaders have already led to “a visible increase on alcoholism, cultural disintegration, internal divisions, conflict, and many cases of depression” in indigenous communities, notes Amazon Watch in their article “Brazil’s Belo Monte Dam.” Colegrove does not expect the Brazilian government, or the corporations, to follow through with any of their promises to indigenous communities—just like on the Klamath. “With the government, once you get too involved, there’s not a lot to say,” says Colegrove. Already, indigenous peoples in the Amazon are being displaced from their homes and made to assimilate into urban life, stolen away from traditional ways of living, and forced into a relationship of dependence, “like here on the rez [in the US]” says Colegrove of the Hoopa Valley Tribe. “I don’t see forty to fifty thousand