Contemporary enclosures and resistance: Women in struggle in Ireland,Scotland and Brazilian Amazon

Abstract

This article traces a discussion between women to the fore of struggles against contemporary enclosures in Ireland, Scotland and Brazil. The forms of resource capitalization, wildcat and corporate mining, ‘rewilding’ schemes and ‘green’ energy infrastructures, lead to different material effects and subjective experiences for those who inhabit the zones of intrusion, expansion and encroachment. They lead also to differentiated motivations for – and forms of – resistance by individuals and communities whose histories, cultures and livelihoods interdepend on the territories in which new movements are born or reborn. A discussion with women taking and remaking collective actions in their particular places reveals distinctive challenges, strategies and successes in the face of acute power inequalities and highlight capital-labour antagonisms that lie outside of conventional readings of industrial and worker organising. The interconnectedness of the experiences across disparate territories that are shared here helps to make visible the current wave of capitalist enclosure and the effects on rural, island and forest communities. Furthermore, the dialogue unveils the effective and positioned methods by which women make and remake communities of resistance on the grounds on which they tread and create recognition, affection, solidarity and commitment with others across territories in ways that, as the article concludes, point to revitalisation of a much-needed global solidarity, from below.

Introduction

This gathering took place as residents of Greencastle in the north of Ireland continued the occupation of the entry site to a planned gold mine; as the strategy by one of Scotland’s largest landowners to benefit from carbon-offsetting schemes gained momentum, while in Brazil, the Pastoral Land Commission recorded 1,056 land and water conflicts in the Legal Amazon region between January and June 2024, the second highest level since 2015. There, the police investigation into the murders of Dom Philips and Bruno Pereira in that region continued.

The increasing scale and pace by which land, water and forest resources are captured for energy, for mined and cultivated commodities – the contemporary enclosures of the title – returns emergent struggles by those whose histories are etched in these landscapes and whose livelihoods co-create and interdepend on these spaces currently facing capitalisation. The innate link between the cultural heritage of these politically marginalised areas and local socio-economic priorities and the threat to familial and communitarian reproduction by encroaching projects may or may not explain the centrality of women in the organised resistance to new enclosures. Their leadership, however, is a current reality and is practised often at considerable risk across these differentiated spaces of conflict.

An invitation to leading women from these different locales to share their stories arose from a 4-year period of intermittent engagement with and between peoples from the Sperrin Mountains in Ireland, Isle of Skye, Scotland and the Amazon basin of Brazil between 2020 and 2024. This included remote solidarity work between May and July 2020 when Amazonian communities were taking self-protective measures against Covid-19; visits by representatives of indigenous and traditional communities in Brazil to Isle of Skye, Scotland, 22–28 April 2022, and to the University of Strathclyde, 12–14 April 2023, and fieldwork conducted in the Tapajos region of the Amazon in February 2023.

During the aforementioned visits, space was made for participants to address the distinctiveness of their particular struggles, to articulate the diverse perspectives, local histories and activities, but also consider if and where commonality is to be found. The spectre of colonialism and its violent forms and consequences between Europe and Latin America were named. So too were the contradictions of clearance and dispossession for the people of Gaelic origins in Scotland and Ireland, whose oral, musical and written traditions speak to oppression but also of co-option as agents of overseas colonial ‘settlement’. The indigenous understandings and designations of territory, that contrast with the treatment of land as ‘property’ resonated with rural communities on the eastern board of the Atlantic, frustrated with the slow pace of land reform, or the enduring dominion of an English king over subsoil resources. The role of the state as an enabler for new enclosures via policy instruments and corporate protection on one hand, and through its negligence in newly grabbed spaces looms large in the testimonies to follow.

Background to the cases

Approximately 14,000 Munduruku inhabit the Brazilian Amazon region, concentrated in the upper and middle courses of the Tapajós River, covering the municipalities of Itaituba, Trairão and Jacareacanga, in the southwest region of Pará and the municipality of Apiacás, in the State of Mato Grosso. Some 155 villages are located between the Upper Tapajós River and Lower Teles Pires River, mainly in the Munduruku, Sai Cinza and Kayabi Indigenous Lands. In the Middle Tapajós, there are the Sawré Muybu and Sawre Ba`pim Indigenous Lands, as well as the Praia do Mangue and Praia do Índio Reserves (Vega et al. 2022).

The Munduruku people are one of the Indigenous Peoples most affected by land invasion, illegal mining and resultant conflict and facing further disruption and displacement from commodity infrastructures, such as the Grain Railroad designed to increase soya trade and export. The silting and contamination of rivers is exacerbated by the use of mercury in the illegal gold mining in the region. In 2020, the Tapajós region witnessed an alarming increase in deforestation due to gold mineral extraction in the Munduruku and Sai Cinza Indigenous Lands, in addition to increasing persecution and threats to leaders who oppose this activity. There was an intensification of mining applications with the National Mining Agency, focusing on gold, cassiterite (tin ore) and copper, both by individuals and foreign companies. In May 2021, the Jacareacanga municipality encouraged pro-mining demonstrations, and there were consequent armed attacks on the Fazenda Tapajós village, where an important leader of the Munduruku people, Maria Leusa Kaba, lives with her family. Two months earlier, the headquarters of the Wakoborũn Association, Munduruku Ipereğ Ayũ Movement and other resistance organisations in the group were vandalised due to the work carried out locally.

Sperrins

The Curraghinalt gold deposit is located in the Sperrin Mountains, near the village of Greencastle (known as ‘Sheskinshule’ in Irish Gaelic, which means ‘moving bog’), County Tyrone in the north of Ireland. The village sits at a crossroads in the foothills of the Sperrin Mountains with the Owenkillew and Owenreagh rivers running nearby. It has a population of approximately 160 people. The Sperrin Mountains, which run from the western shores of Lough Neagh in County Tyrone to the north Derry coast, are designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

The Canadian mining company Dalradian Gold Ltd, purchased in 2018 for $437 million Canadian dollars by the New York–based investment fund Orion Resource Partners, proposes to establish an underground mine at the site which could have a lifespan of 25 years and beyond. They plan to invest £750 million building and operating the mine to extract high grade gold deposits of 6.1 million ounces, valued at up to £6 billion. Ireland is being actively promoted as hosting opportunity for mineral exploration and five mining companies currently hold 15 prospecting licences for different locations across the north of Ireland.

Skye

Skye is the second-largest island in Scotland after Lewis and Harris with a long history of land contestation. The population was impacted heavily by Clearances and by Famine; between 1840 and 1880, at least 30,000 people were evicted and forced to migrate. The population today is one-third of what it was in 1840. The resistance of the rural poor was depicted vividly by the Battle of Braes, in which police were dispatched from Glasgow to suppress those that had ignored a ban on grazing their livestock, refused to pay rent to their landlord until this was resolved, and then forced the Sheriff’s officer to burn the eviction notices he had intended to serve. This and similar revolts eventually led to the Napier Commission and the passing of the Crofter Act of 1886 to guarantee certain rights to the rural populace (Newby 2007). A census of 1921 showed that 75% of the population were Gaelic speaking, although this subsequently declined due to suppression of the language and more recently from inward migration.

Despite 21st-century Land Reform legislation, land concentration in Scotland is the highest in western Europe, with half of all privately owned rural land in the hands of just 433 individuals or companies, the equivalent of 0.1% of the population controlling 50% of the land (The Guardian 2024). In Skye, the effectiveness of community-oriented policies is brought into question in the face of the local stresses on space, housing and culture from excessive tourism (Herald), construction of large scale wind farms and the recent trend towards forestry plantations for tax breaks and carbon credit schemes that favour large landowners.

Method and a note on solidarity

Solidarity is an often used, but seldomly interrogated concept. A liberatory solidarity from below has been discussed in detail by Virginio et al. (2022). This collective form of deliberate, conscious, reciprocal intent and action hinges on: (a) recognition of the structural preconditions that give rise to oppressive situations through which solidarity is invited (Lowy 1988; Pickford 2019); (b) validation of the subjective agency of the oppressed towards social change (Fanon 1986; Freire 1993; Mohanty 2003); (c) a commitment to egalitarian engagement with the episteme (Gonçalves & Leff 2015), ‘social’ cartographies and histories (Quijano 1997) that confront western constructions and interpretations of an individualised, liberal solidarity (Dussel 2003). While the ‘false universalizing and masculinist assumptions’ of Eurocentricism are rejected by Mohanty (2003: 516), a liberatory solidarity from below can avoid deepening societal divisions that have been a successive feature of contemporary capitalism (De Lissovoy 2010) in the search for a common project of connectiveness, a radical interdependence (Galgael 2021) and solidarity (Dei 2000; Maldonado-Torres 2012).

With this ambition, the discussion that follows traverses the distinct territories in Brazil, Ireland and Scotland, to which histories, languages and cultures are stitched and intertwined with the past and present taking, reclaiming and remaking of land and community. The participants were asked three questions: What is the cause of conflict in your lands? How is this manifested? What are the actions taken within the community to address and redress this situation? A reflection on these contributions was then invited in the spirit of making and articulating important connections. This process follows a deliberate and liberatory solidarity that begins with subjective experiences of the historically oppressed (Fanon 1986) and recognises that the knowledge constructed and shared through anti-colonial or decolonial struggles (Maldonado-Torres 2012) can contribute to a restorative and transformative process. Positioning these experiences within the contemporary structures and processes under neoliberal globalisation is a necessary step and a social praxis within and beyond the academy that recognises labour as a historically transformative force that can assist in making visible the unequal structures and consequences of contemporary capitalisation (Blomley 2008; Harvey 2001; Mitchell 2008; Napoletano et al. 2020). Important in this regard is the recognition of these antagonistic labour-capital relations that exist beyond the realms of waged labour, yet that similarly require that subjects can locate themselves within and against structures of power (Thomaz & Garvey 2022), a process that EP Thompson (2009) observed to be an essential but not inevitable element for transformation. In each of the cases presented below, beginning with Fidelma’s accounts from Ireland, followed by Catherine’s experiences in Scotland’s Isle of Skye and then Maria Leusa and Rosamaria’s testimonies from Brazil, this awareness is augmented by long-standing grievances, inequalities and considerations of indigeneity. There is a rejection of colonial and patriarchal norms (Altuna-Gabilondo 2013) in favour of an interconnectedness (Jaramillo & Carreon 2014; Maldonado-Torres 2012), a territorial interconnectedness, so well captured in Marcela’s final reflections, that acknowledges difference but identifies and re-envisions politics, ontologies and methods of collective resistance (Roshanravan 2018) towards socially and ecologically committed futures.

Fidelma

We would be very, very much a traditional sort of Irish community, rural, in the mountains in the western part of North of Ireland. We’re in the part of Ireland that’s ruled by England, and that has brought us some challenges, let’s say . . . I suppose its people would see themselves almost as indigenous, and that there is the native Irish language spoken in our area up to the 1950s, and there’s actually quite a revival of it at the moment.

So, this Canadian Exploration Company came at the end of 2009 or the beginning of 2010, but we weren’t aware of it being here until really at probably the end of 2013, and during that period they had been working away under the radar, and, you know, getting into favour with people of influence and the community and with politicians.

They had got prospecting licences to explore for minerals, for all minerals, over 300,000 acres in the counties of Tyrone and Derry. That’s a huge area [. . .] the company got what’s called option lease agreements from the Crown estate. And again, I suppose that annoys people, you know, especially farmers who believe they own their piece of land. And to think that the King of England actually has the rights to the precious metals below the ground. I suppose I should have said, really, that the government here in the north of Ireland supports mining. The economy comes before the environment, and there has been policy capture because the gold mining company provides the expertise to the government departments.

You know, it’s not a traditional industry here, and so the government doesn’t have the expertise. But the gold mining company has allied themselves with the different departments. There’s a Fraser Institute in Toronto that ranks some countries in terms of their attractiveness to mining. And Ireland, both North and South, comes really in the top five every year, and that’s because of all the incentives that they offer. For example, they write off all development and exploration costs. They provide capital allowances of up to 120%.

And now, with Dalradian, we’ve got a different coloniser. Now they’re using money and promises of well-paid jobs to split the community. Even families and neighbours have been split. The company also has got two public relations companies, and they are constantly writing in the newspapers, putting advertisements, a greenwashing. In 2015 [. . .] they set up a community fund and really use money and gifts and sponsorship, and they give it out to groups, schools, clubs, individuals, and in return, people agree [with their presence].

They (Dalradian n.d.) really put in a huge amount of paper in their first planning application in 2017 that was 10,000 pages. It was the largest planning application ever in the history of Ireland, north or south. Then they followed this with, in 2019, a first addendum of 15,000 pages, and in 2020 they had a second addendum with 20,000 pages. So, the reality is, you know, there’s not many people that will read that. Maybe your academic people would read that. But most people in our community wouldn’t read that amount. So it took us a very long time to actually go through it and to try and pick out what we thought were fair points that we could maybe write an objection on.

The goldmine really split the community between those in favour of the mine and those opposed to the mine. And it reminded us of the divide and conquer strategy. It had historical resonance. You know what this was, a tactic used by England as a colonial power throughout history and Ireland. They were the coloniser. Now we have a new type of coloniser – the corporate sector – which has been given more rights than local communities.

Protectors

And another strategy used by the mainland company that has affected us greatly has been the criminalization of people who oppose the gold mine. [. . .] and the police are really on the side of the gold Mining company. They issued a statement to say that they are providing free security since 2021. And that way they get us. They [the company] call the police, and we’re charged with petty offences like blocking the road, resisting arrest. [. . .] I mean, for example, one man chained himself to the gates of the mining company’s compound on a Saturday evening when no one was working, and he was in court 30 times, and he’s a lorry driver, and he’s paid by the day. So he had to take a day off work, you know, every time he was up in court, and this dragged out, and my husband has been up lots of times as well, and then I have to go with him to make sure he doesn’t get into further trouble

It’s shocking. that’s the difference, and also the police ignore the crimes that are committed against us, you know, for example. Well, they came and told us three men, including my husband got death threats, as did my children, and they just told us to take security precautions, and some of our people have been knocked down by vehicles driven at them by the company’s employees or supporters. Some of them have been physically assaulted, and some of it was caught on CCTV. And again they got very leniently dealt with. We have been followed at night by suspicious cars, and that happens more to the women than the men.

Strategy

I know that I said that it has split the community. But, [. . .] there’s more people who oppose the gold mining than support it, and I suppose we feel we have developed a new sense of community, because we’ve got to know each other better, and we feel we’ve grown stronger together. And I suppose we have also had really rediscovered the value of the nature of the scenery, of the mountains, of the rivers, of the fresh air, the clean water that we had, the beauty we have in our area, and I think that that has made us pull together better. The other thing is that people in our area have a sense now, being a sacrificial community, those are the type of words they use. They’ve been politically abandoned. So you know it is sad, but you know we’ve got to be strong and try and see what we can do to overcome it.

So, we’d let people know there was something happening here, and we produced information leaflets and posters over a number of years. And we’ve held public meetings, and you know, to inform people. We wrote sample objection letters. We have organised pickets and protests. Dalradian would be very generous and giving out money, and they often sponsor prizes and events. So we go along and picket outside. We took direct action a number of times. I mentioned the man chained himself to the gates. Another man chained himself to the drill ring and stopped work; four men climbed on the roof of the compound. A protest camp was set up on the proposed site, in February 2018, a caravan appeared on it, and it was manned all the time prior to Covid.

We have researched gold mining throughout the world, really. And we have networked nationally and internationally, and I mean from places like Colombia, Peru, Honduras, Mexico, Greece, Romania, Finland, Australia, New Zealand, Papua, New Guinea, Philippines, Ecuador, and we say to people, you don’t have to believe us, research it for yourself, and you will find out. Look at the effects of gold, mining on water, on air, on health, on land, and you will find out for yourself. So, we’re currently preparing for a public inquiry into the gold mining application [. . .] and fundraising to get experts to help us present our case. It was in 2017, they applied for their planning permission. We’re now at the end of 2023 and they haven’t got planning permission yet. This public inquiry is to make a recommendation about it. So we’re currently focusing our efforts on that. And if we can learn from other groups, we’re more than willing to do so.

Catherine

Skye’s really complex. Generally, Skye is a commodity resource for multiple things. It has been so for hundreds of years by Britain in which an internal colonisation of people took place. There’s big debate in Scotland at the moment – not least because we (from the Highlands) could be very good at colonising too, but this impacts on us today, and legacies of colonialism are still hanging over us.

Just when Fidelma mentioned there about political abandonment, that’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about, and in relation to the Scottish Government deal with the Green Party. The Highlands tend to get banded as this, like romantic, you know, and empty place where they’re looking at these massive, massive, rewilding schemes for carbon offsetting [. . .] We seem to have more faceless corporations starting to extract from the islands.

Like, there’s two existing wind farm projects, and they’re proposing, and another 7 new wind farms [. . .] and they’re all by different companies. And so, it’s not one company. It’s loads of them, just like landing on us loads of legislation, loads of paper about different plots of land, which also means different communities are affected. If the full capacity is delivered in our island would provide enough electricity for 970,000 homes! Yet, we currently pay one of the highest rates per unit in Europe for electricity. So just, for example, in summer my electricity is £254 a month. So, there’s different campaign groups working on this. But it’s causing a bit of division within the island.

(Of)Fences

But you may have seen a large portion of land advertised as a prospect for carbon capture? Some of our peatland. Some 240 hectares of traditional farm or croft land. And it’s currently on under phase one is just finished by McLeod Estate. So, in total, he’s going to be planting 372,000 trees.

On Sunday, I went through the kind of ancient, the traditional natural woodlands, and then hit this like track. And all this fencing, and then a big no entry sign. And I had a wee walk around. And it doesn’t look natural. It’s very rigid. So even it doesn’t quite fit what they’re saying that we’re gonna do [bring back native woodland]. But it could have been a collaborative project. He could have done this ‘rewilding’ scheme in connection with the land and the people, and a portion of the land could have been used for woodland crofts. Loads of people are really into woodland crofts, they are very popular at the moment, lots of research, about the benefits of grazing animals in there, and that would have given multiple homes [. . .]. I think eight potential community crofts could have been done. But these landowners they’re not going to do that.

We have particularly historic landowners that come from these very landed families, and that are legacies of colonisation and families, particularly at Macleod’s, that were involved in the clearances. And it feels at the moment it’s just these wealthy landed elites, and they’re inflicting cultural and personal damage to us. And it’s constantly under the kind of guise of some form of industrialization with environmentalism, you know, talking about the jobs with the gold mines there [in Sperrins], or with the wind farms here. So we’re going to build villages just for the workers and we’ve got a crippling housing crisis in Skye due to tourism and second homes. That’s a whole other form of capitalism that’s going on here [. . .]. If they wanted to invest in housing and energy, we could have done that a long time ago. Hence the political abandonment sounds familiar here again, and these wind farms will massively impact on the landscape and environment that we know it will, and meanwhile we’ve got schools shutting down. It will change forever. I was thinking, what will become of my 3-year-old niece? Will that be the only landscape she knows growing up?

And then, with in relation to the rewilding and carbon schemes, that’s taken away arable farmland. There was potential that could have allowed people to bring up their children there, grow food and also work in conjunction with the land, as we traditionally have. Instead, land prices go up, and they’ve always been quite high up here, anyway, because it’s romantic, and people like coming here. So, if you’re trying to do a community buyout, want to buy out this better land, but the budget for community land is so small, while prices are going up, and up and up.

Rebuilding

We’re trying to rebuild and protect our language and use that as a force to get people together. And for those who’ve moved into our communities to understand it. I would class myself as indigenous. I’m a Gael, I’m from Skye; but many, many people here aren’t. And there’s many folk here who don’t yet identify as a Gael or an islander, because that’s something, culturally, we’re trying to rebuild. The academic scholar, John McInnis, described what happened in the Highland clearances as cultural ethnocide, and it feels that we’re still under repair of that and this can be done kind of hand in hand.

And it’s getting more gentrified. A lot of people are moving in don’t have the same struggles around, and poverty or needing to use food banks. I was at a community meeting recently, and it was really challenging because it’s become quite divisive. It’s become incomer and islander, and I’ll say it’s become English White settler and Scottish. And so it’s you end up kind of spinning lots of battles, but I think it’s trying to get everyone to unite and talk, but also talk in a way that actually gets work done. The ideal way would be to get the whole island to get working together and to build community wind farms of a much smaller scale, generating electricity, but having a much bigger impact to the community within, where we’re in control, and we can make decisions about where they go and decide which bits of the land they go in.

And so how we’ve been organising to overcome challenges in relation to pressures from the outside in the community and the effects on these relationships. It’s very fractured at times, and we need to have an understanding of our history, culture, and politics of a place. And it’s essential to understand the levels of environmental stewardship, and our connection to where we live or have come from. And so those of us that live in the land, we need to have powers to make these decisions. And these will include community ownership and giving autonomy to us.

And we have been successful. We don’t want these wind farms, but for these, a massive power line upgrade was needed to upgrade the power line that connects Skye to the mainland [Scotland] essentially. And we’ve blocked it for now. And that was through a series of campaigning, letter writing workshops, sharing how to approach them, how to complain to Highland Council, and a lot of that was done via social media and meetings in the village hall. So, there was people doing community meals and activity days for families and music.

And we’ve set up these gatherings once a month, and it’s a community meal with music, and it’s all free. It’s called the Revolting Crofters Social Club [. . .] based on a political movement from the mid or late 1800s of the revolt and crofters land agitation, and also cos some people do find crofters revolting [laughs]. So it’s very gently, slowly, getting people together. . .They’re from here, but they don’t have a voice seems to be a frequent issue.

Finally, we’ve done some creative responses, working with artists. There was a film that was screened in Skye, it was done by Andy Black ¹ and we’ve also had more recently a friend of mine, called Daniel Cullen, did a play called The Chariot, the Flag and the Empty, Empty Houses [. . .] The whole script came from the voices of young men on the island, so quite often not heard, and [. . .] we’re trying to highlight these and bring it out. It’s almost that by making people feel uncomfortable we can get the discussions going. So that is what’s happening.

Maria Leusa

I am from the Alto (Upper) Tapajós region of the Amazon. Our conflicts are various. Currently we are enduring invasions of the territory, by illegal miners, illegal loggers, but we continue our own self-demarcation processes and our monitoring of our territory, confronting a government that continues to work against us.

We demand our right to consultation, to Free Prior Consultation, that they don’t do, they never do. We have our own protocols for consultation, that they ignore. This past year we prevented, for now, the Marco Temporal (Temporal Benchmark) bill, the law that want to liberate mining in out territories, a law that wanted to bypass our occupation, our right to our lands.

Threats

We are at the moment struggling for the Sawré Muybu territory because of invasions, the illegal taking of timber and the illegal mining of gold. There are young people now in the front of our resistance, a resistance that we have endured for 1,500 years, that we have always had, that we will continue to have. We have travelled to denounce our own government. We occupied the capital, Brasilia, to protest, and also travelled to Europe to condemn its actions. Today, the young people and women, our organisations of resistance, are central to our fight. In the Mid Tapajos region, the territory is heavily invaded, for timber, gold, cattle, soya up-river. Without our movement, Ipereğ Ayũ, without this movement and our associations, our Wakoburũn, we would have already lost our territory.

This year, we have had a very strange year, the drought, the dryness of streams, the wells. We have recorded much video footage of fish dying, of rivers drying in a shocking way, it was very hard for us. Our organisations are in the frontline of this, our autonomous monitoring of our territory, our associations that lead the struggle

Assembly

It is in our assemblies that we discuss our problems, we plan our strategies and carry out our own actions and maintain our own front. We also work for our health, for our own generation of food, generation of income to allow us to survive. Our people are sick from malaria, from mercury brought by the miners, from malnutrition. We have to confront the very idea that these invasions, these projects bring some benefit when in fact they bring just harm to us.

In our assemblies, we organise to bring the aldeias [villages] together. We plan, first with the women who bring the people together for this point of participation, sharing experiences, from each aldeia, sharing experiences of the movement. We plan as we will do in the coming year when we as women will discuss the territory, the strengthen the resistance. We have to say no to these industries that will threaten us; whether it’s through hydrodams, mining, or these carbon credit schemes for the forest, we know they will continue to do so, so these assemblies are in themselves a way to form and reform the generations that resist these threats. They have to understand that we won’t negotiate our future but confront those that threaten it,

Rosamaria

I could add that the Munduruku Ipereğ Ayũ and the Wakoborũn Movement responds to several demands in the territory. On the one hand, it works to continue the self-demarcation of lands that the Brazilian State has not managed to designate entirely as indigenous territory. On the other hand, it carries out autonomous monitoring actions in the already demarcated territory in the Upper Tapajós, where more than 150 villages currently face ongoing processes of invasion. Each of these villages has its own form of governance, and the movement, therefore, is working to defend an extremely large area inhabited by multiple groups, and each with their own local autonomy. Maria Leusa also mentions the exchanges with the Pataxó, who are facing another process of struggle – that of reclaiming their traditional lands – highlighting another dimension of indigenous resistance.

It is worth noting that the Munduruku Wakoborũn Women’s Association, together with the Parirí Association of the Munduruku and the Yanomami People ² , activated international mechanisms for the protection of human rights in view of the growing violence and the Brazilian State’s failure to act in the face of threats to their territories and ways of life.

On 11 December 2020, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights granted precautionary measures in favour of members of the Munduruku people ³ , recognising that they were in a situation of extreme risk, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the intensification of illegal mining, and the exposure to physical violence, threats, and persecution directed at their leaders. Later, given the persistence of violations and the inadequacy of the State’s responses, the indigenous organisations filed the complaint with the highest instance of the Inter-American System. The case was admitted by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which began to analyse the Brazilian State’s responsibility for systematic failure to protect the lives, health and territories of the affected indigenous peoples – representing an important milestone in the international recognition of the gravity of the situation, and the legitimacy of autonomous actions to defend indigenous territories. The lawsuit highlights how the fight for territory is linked to other dimensions of collective life, such as the health, security and sovereignty of indigenous peoples over their own destinies.

Reflections

Marcela

I think, one of the most interesting things that there are many problems, that really land on the territory, right? Like, if you’re talking about the gold mining, if we are talking about the rewilding, if you’re talking about the invasions, if you’re talking about the legal pleas and persecution and all that. If we stop and think, it all goes to land. These incursions, they land on the territory, right? And at the same time, if we look at it from the other side, we are exploring ways of reclaiming land, not just, juridically speaking, but reclaiming lands on the move and in the movement. It is clear from what has been discussed that people, in these lands, these territories, they build solidarity networks within the territory and also across territories. Like nationally, internationally, locally. So, this is, I think, a very, very powerful and important thing to highlight right in terms of organising [. . .] even if it is very hard to keep on organising [. . .]

Like Maria Leusa described, there are about 155 communities and [. . .] they spend a year visiting all these communities and hosting activities in all these villages so they could have the major Assembly that can last weeks. But even before the Assembly you have all these gatherings. And I think it really shows this, this organisation on the move. You like, strengthen the movements while you are yourself in movement. So politically, I think it’s very strong, because it keeps the pace. At the same time, it gets you to know the territory and to gather people in the territory [. . .] As you move from village to village, you can realise what the territory is and what is at stake. So, it’s not just a methodological theme, it is also part of the politics. How the politics ontologically is. You organise in terms of noticing what are the impacts [. . .] You are describing the struggles that are going on, and the difficulties, but also all the strategies, the word that Fidelma used. The strategies.

What are the strategies to organise like? It’s to block the street, it is to get people talking, but at the same time it’s work with the objections to which people can subscribe, can read, can divulge, and also to build on solidarity networks with so many other countries that are going through the same problems [. . .] Because the companies they too have their strategies, territorial strategies to expand because capital territorialises as it expands. But at the same time people resist by territorialising their strategies because their strategies are born there, they become, they really come from this territory. So, I think this is something that comes across [. . .] And I think it’s a has a tremendous potential in terms of first to show what are the strategies that capital uses to territorialise and expand.

The strategies that capital uses to territorialise [. . .] is very much related to new forms of appropriating nature and land, so like when Catherine was talking about rewilding in Skye, and also Maria Leusa in the last part of her speech talked about carbon credits, and when Fidelma is talking about mining and how it is related to the critical minerals policy at the EU level [. . .] The European Union is using [these strategies] to save this green image, as a green economic and political integration block, but at the same time creating all sorts of problems in terms of how it capitalises in these new ways in other areas in order to offset or compensate for the constant and ongoing growth inside the European Union. So, nothing changes in the end.

And this is really a frontier that it’s showing up to us in terms of appropriating nature, appropriating labour and appropriating people’s land [. . .] it’s not about restoring or nature restoration, and all that. It’s about another way of possessing, possessing land and dispossessing people of their territories and of their places, and legitimising the expansion of capital, being it in the Amazon and Skye, or North of Ireland. Right? We see these patterns, so we can see what is global in this.

But yet – and I want to reassert that – people also have territorial strategies to counterattack and to counterpose and to build their positionality to keep on going. But again, we can also see that the struggle against it will probably only work if it is a global struggle as well, departing from territories, but connecting the territories in and through the struggle. And finally, on this point, it is very interesting what Catherine brings to the table, and this is related to art, to videos, to art projects as a way to mobilise and to build sensibilities along with people that sometimes do not feel that they belong to the struggle. Even if they belong to the struggle, then they can see themselves as in the struggle, and feel more mobilised in the movement and as part of this movement. So, it’s also a way of landing the struggle in people’s lives, so that they feel that they belong to this movement to counterattack the hegemony and these new ways that capital uses to territorialise. So, listening to these three testimonies, and knowing one of these territories, I hope that I can know more of Skye, and I hope I can know Ireland as well, that I can observe these connections, and even to be a little bit of a part of them.