Rep. Deb Haaland: Indigenous peoples are under attack in Donald Trump's America

Monday, March 18, 2019  

Rep. Deb Haaland (D-New Mexico), one of the first two Native women in Congress, and Joênia Wapichana, the first Native woman in Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies, are taking aim at President Donald Trump of the United States and President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil.

Haaland, who hails from the Pueblo of Laguna, and Wapichana, who is Wapixana, co-authored an opinion that was published in The Washington Post on Monday. The two leaders say Trump and Bolsonaro represent a threat to indigenous peoples in the U.S. and Brazil:

On Tuesday, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro will meet with President Trump at the White House. Both administrations are pushing a host of policies that are detrimental to the rights of indigenous people. As two of the first female indigenous members of Congress in the United States and Brazil, respectively, we are concerned about these policies and the mounting threats facing our communities. We must stand up against toxic rhetoric and brutal attacks on the rights of indigenous peoples.

Indigenous communities from Standing Rock to the Amazon are leading the way on protecting our Earth. Recent research has found that indigenous peoples in control of their lands are the most effective stewards of climate-regulating tropical forests. In the United States, Standing Rock was a culmination of indigenous people organizing to protect their resources. More recently, indigenous groups in New Mexico helped prevent the lease sale of Chaco Canyon for oil and gas development, defending sacred lands and heritage from harmful extraction.

Yet indigenous environmental defenders face tremendous risks, encountering pushback and even criminalization for simply protecting critical family resources. We saw it in Standing Rock, when police had confrontations with peaceful protesters. We see it now in Brazil, which is the deadliest country for environmental defenders in the world, with intimidation and lethal violence falling heavily on indigenous peoples and land rights activists.

Among the many parallels between their administrations, Bolsonaro and Trump are both taking extreme action to strip the hard-earned rights of indigenous peoples to the benefit of extractive industries and commercial farming. These policies present threats to our communities, the integrity of ecosystems on our lands and the stability of our climate. Perhaps nowhere is this more concerning than in Raposa Serra do Sol and Bears Ears National Monument, our ancestral homes.

Deb Haaland and Joênia Wapichana: Protecting indigenous lands protects the environment. Trump and Bolsonaro threaten both. (The Washington Post March 18, 2019)