World Environment Day - a day to push for Indigenous rights

 

“This land is our great home, a paradise, where we can find ourselves as Siekopai people.”

Today, on World Environment Day, we bring you a special video message from Andrea Payaguaje, a twelve-year old Indigenous activist from the Siekopai nation in the heart of the Amazon rainforest.

 

https://twitter.com/AFrontlines/status/1665764557611061249?utm_source=Amazon+Frontlines&utm_campaign=3bfbfbf717-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_Siekopai_jun_3_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_df6926ddb5-3bfbfbf717-190039065

 

 

As Andrea says, “this territory is sacred for us”. Across the world, Indigenous communities are reminding us that forests and rivers are sacred spaces of life - they are sources of food, water, and spiritual connection with the natural world.

Over the past century, the Siekopai were enslaved in their ancestral homelands by rapacious rubber tappers, then forcibly displaced by military conflict between Ecuador and Peru in the 1940s, and ultimately corralled by evangelical missionaries into small rainforest villages downriver from polluting oil operations. They were then prevented from returning to their ancestral homelands since the Ecuadorian government assumed ownership over their ancestral territory by creating a National Park in the area in the 1970s, without the consultation or consent of the Siekopai.

At Amazon Frontlines, we work to support Indigenous communities to recover, reconnect with and thrive on their lands. For decades, colonizers and state authorities have promoted a false environmentalism, claiming that nature is best protected in national parks, stripped of people. Dozens of Indigenous communities, from the Congo Basin to the Amazon rainforest, were robbed of their territorial rights to make way for protected conservation areas. Yet this colonial understanding of ‘nature conservation’ ultimately fails to protect both ecosystems and the rights of people.

https://twitter.com/AFrontlines/status/1665764557611061249?utm_source=Amazon+Frontlines&utm_campaign=3bfbfbf717-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_Siekopai_jun_3_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_df6926ddb5-3bfbfbf717-190039065

 

Across the upper Amazon, Indigenous communities are fighting to recover and secure rights over their territories, increasingly at risk from encroaching extractive interests. They are demanding #landback, spearheaded by the Siekopai nation and its community members, including Andrea.

 

https://twitter.com/AFrontlines/status/1665764557611061249?utm_source=Amazon+Frontlines&utm_campaign=3bfbfbf717-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_Siekopai_jun_3_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_df6926ddb5-3bfbfbf717-190039065

 

If the Siekopai win their legal case to recover their ancestral homeland of Pekeya, it could be a major precedent.