Indigenous people reclaiming their mountains

Abstract

Mountains may be simultaneously viewed through multiple logics – sacred or secular, dead property to be commodified or living and powerful community members, for example – unless and until one of those logics is used to destroy them. Drawing examples from global mountain regions on different continents, and shared experiences of social, economic and political marginalization of mountain communities spread over different nation states, the chapter compares the way these logics figure in environmental justice movements. Based on the research conducted in Odisha, India, and examples drawn from the Appalachian region and other American Indian reservations of the United States, the chapter analyses how the mountains and surrounding land have been treated as commodities in the state neo-liberal economy. In this comparative discussion across global mountain regions, the focus is on challenges faced by indigenous communities in relation to nation states and private corporations and the resistance strategies they have used to maintain their sustainable environment. For centuries, indigenous communities have been exploited by the state in the name of nation building and economic development, seeing the benefits of neither the state projects nor economic development. Despite the many differences among these mountain regions, they share experiences of colonization, marginalization, discrimination, oppression and exploitation. In the process, they have lost their land and livelihoods, and their identity is in danger. The chapter draws examples from the ethnographic research in Niyamgiri, Odisha, India. Here mountains – considered sacred and alive – have served as partners in a successful movement by Dongria Kondh women in Odisha to stop the destruction of the Niyamgari hills through aluminum mining. In the second example, while competing logics include views of mountains as sacred in the United States, a capitalist logic through which mountains are considered dead and without a role in acting on their own future, has prevailed in extensive coal mining through the destructive method of mountain top removal.