Threatened habitats of indigenous peoples

The unique cultures of the indigenous forest-dwellers of tropical Asia and Africa, including those commonly referred to as Negritos (Aeta and indigenous inhabitants of Malakka and Andaman Islands), Weddids, Pygmies (Batwa and Bambuti) and Pygmois, are among the oldest on earth. The primary threat to these particularly vulnerable peoples is that posed by the destruction of their habitat, a process which has reached devastating proportions during the 1970s and 1980s. The result of the continuation of this onslaught will be certain genocide. The impact of deforestation has already risen to the level of ethnocide in some areas. Indigenous rain forest peoples in South and Central America face a similar fate. In spite of the presence of indigenous peoples in the world's tropical forests for thousands of years, the forests continue to be considered legally as terra nullius.

It was reported in 1995 that more than 60 North American, European, Japanese and South African mining companies joined the gold rush in the Guiana Highlands of Brazil and Venezuela, where as much as 10% of the planet's gold reserves may lie. They are destroying the home of the last unassimilated Indian tribes in the New World and one of the planet's richest rain forests.

1. The gold mining companies are trampling the rights of Venezuela's Pemon Indians, like those from the village of Uaiparu, whose hunting and fishing lands were taken by YellowJack Resources, a Canadian concern. When Pemons from another village, accompanied by three German reporters, went to investigate the site, a YellowJack employee offered to shove their car off a cliff with his tractor.

2. Minas Guariche in Venezuela, a strip-mining operation, is partly owned by the Venezuelan explorer and naturalist Charles Brewer-Carias, a highly respected research associate of the University of California and the New York Botanical Gardens. Mr. Brewer has a reputation in North America as a saviour of the Yanomani Indians, yet he has been running open-pit mines on more than 12,000 acres in the environmentally protected headwaters of the Cuyuni River. The Venezuelan police charged that in 1984 he was using unsalaried Miquiritares Indians in illegal mining operations in the Amazon forests. A Venezuelan congressional commission said that Mr. Brewer had used scientific expeditions as a cover for illegal mining. He brought anthropologists from the University of California to the last uncontacted cluster of aboriginal villages in the Amazon without quarantine precautions or medical follow-up. Three Venezuelan Air Force colonels asserted that these trips were "to extract gold". Venezuela's assistant attorney general for indigenous affairs said that the expeditions were conducted without the knowledge or permission of Venezuela's Indian affairs agency, as required. Since 1993, the vice president of Minas Guariche was Robert Friedland, who used to own the Summitville gold mine in Colorado, which went bankrupt in 1992 and today is a toxic mess (a lake of cyanide, a ruined river and a polluted reservoir) that would cost more than US$100 million to clean up.

1. Expropriation of land from indigenous populations
2. Endangered cultures

1. Threatened taiga forest habitats
2. Endangered habitats of the Leuser ecosystem

1. Ethnocide
2. Abandonment of sustainable traditions

1. Unprotected vulnerable economies
2. Restriction of indigenous populations to reservations
3. Natural gas production environmental hazards
4. Lack of economic adaptation of indigenous systems
5. Fragmentation of natural habitat
6. Exclusion of indigenous peoples from natural resource management
7. Environmental impacts from mining
8. Ecotourism
9. Destruction of wildlife habitats
10. Denial of right of indigenous peoples to participate in political processes
11. Loss of plant cover

1. Threatened forest habitats

1. Researching forests

1. Threat
2. Endangered
3. Destructiveness