The past decade has seen “a consistent, sustained pattern" of violence against Indigenous people who oppose corporate human rights abuses.
Although Indigenous peoples make up 6 percent of the world population, they accounted for one-fifth of the crimes documented in the report. They also were more likely than others to be killed, particularly in Brazil, the Philippines, and Mexico.
Fossil fuel companies were hardly the only offenders, however. Dobson and her team identified several cases involving renewable energy sectors, where projects have been linked to nearly 365 cases of harassment and more than 100 killings of human rights defenders.
But mining, including the extraction of “transition minerals,” leads every sector in attacks on defenders. Forty percent of those killed in such crimes were Indigenous, a reflection of the fact that more than half of all critical minerals lie in or near Indigenous land.
The report: Defending rights and realising just economies: Human rights defenders and business (2015-2024)
archived (Wayback Machine):
It’s pretty arbitrary. In the broader sense, the word refers to any native flora or fauna that evolved in that location, and so its use in the human context doesn’t make much sense. Basically, people use the term to mean any group of people who were living in a place before Europeans or other imperialists arrived. People commonly accept that humans did not originate in the Americas, but still the people whose ancestors were there before white people are called “indigenous” even though their ancestors also came from somewhere else. In Japan, it’s the Ainu who were there before the next group of people from the mainland arrived. And so on.
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