Stop Trying to Save Indigenous People
It has been commonplace for people or institutions to make sweet gestures towards a native community, and then frame it as a major effort towards achieving indigenous rights. For instance, paying indigenous people to build a traditional structure of theirs inside a museum. Sometimes even simple things like showing up at their settlement and saying hello, taking school kids to visit, or buying jewelry from them becomes a major political statement. It’s not. It’s basic decency, like paying for goods and services, or treating someone else as a human being. Instead of seeking applause for everyday actions like treating people like people, perhaps a more effective way of bringing about change is to focus our energy elsewhere. Indigenous people are doing their thing, and they have persevered for centuries completely of their own merit and efforts, not ours.
Leaving them alone doesn’t mean doing nothing. Indigenous people don’t need to be saved, but they do deserve reparations. And one way of ensuring that happens is to engage, not with natives, but, with those who try to destroy native populations.
Among conservatives in Brazil, it is commonplace to argue that indigenous people practice infanticide, bury babies alive, and other unimaginable cruelties. International NGOs, under the pretext of preserving these ‘backward’ and ‘savage’ cultural practices, help demarcate indigenous land. This demarcation, in turn, leads to valuable, resource-rich land to fall in the hands of foreign entrepreneurs – as opposed to the hands of Brazilian entrepreneurs or the Brazilian State, where it ‘rightfully’ belongs.
This rhetoric not only aims to hoard the process of profiting from and exploiting the forest, it aims to subjugate native communities and their culture. The process of domination and resource extraction is essentially the same as it was during colonialism some hundreds of years ago, but, this time, under the guise of modern institutions. In Brazil, these institutions are categorized in 3 sectors. Unlike the approach of dividing nation’s activities as raw material extraction, manufacturing and service industries, we discuss sections of institutional power as 1-State, 2-Business and 3-NGO.
Companies and Corporations (Business sector) use the 3rd sector to bypass State tax (1st sector investment). The 1st sector may encourage this because when it outsources to the 3rd sector, it alleviates its inefficacies. One example of this would be tax-deductible donations to Planned Parenthood, which is an NGO that alleviates one aspect of the excrescent failures of US health and education systems.
The 2nd sector appreciates this dynamic because if they are going to pay tax, they prefer to choose a cause that directly or indirectly results in more profits to them. One example of this would be a peanut butter company getting a tax break as it donates to peanut allergy research.
Meanwhile, the 3rd sector gets to generate capital from not-overtly-profitable (social) goods and services, without relying on election cycles and government bureaucracies. Here is where things can range from straight-forward social services like Habitat for Humanity, which builds homes with the power of Christian good-will. To more complex, hybrid structures of financing and Multinational corporate interests, such as Humans in the Loop, which is both, a for-profit recruitment agency, and a non-profit foundation that trains people to enter the workforce.
Humans in the Loop is a social enterprise based in Europe that trains refugees and people displaced in war zones to do remote work annotating images on behalf of AI companies. This model was replicated in Latin America to cope with mass Venezuelan migration into Brazil, much of which is of indigenous peoples, by a HITL partner organization called DignfAI.
In this ‘hybrid’ scenario, the term non-profit is used to vaunt a for-profit enterprise – in order to generate more profit. All the tax-deductible money put into the Foundation (not an NGO because it doesn’t execute the social service, it only holds the money that is used for it) directly translates into a well-trained workforce that can generate profits for the very company or oligarch family which has money in that 3rd sector institution. In other words, the Humans in the Loop Foundation is just a branch of the for-profit enterprise that offers its customers a tax break. Meanwhile, the whole operation frames it as aid to communities in “distress” due to “armed conflict and forced displacement” in places like Syria and Iraq.
The narrative this company created was that, in training “IDPs” (internally displaced persons, or refugees who haven’t left their countries), they are helping to insert them into the HITL field – 'Human in the Loop’ Learning. IDPs are being trained to enter a booming new industry – the sorting of data used in AI, aka, the human touch in machine learning – for minimum wage. They not only generate profits for companies who need qualified workers, they also mitigate the effects of warfare. In other words, it’s the 3rd sector channelling human resources into the 2nd sector, while providing a palliative solution for the aftermath of war, which is a hot potato for the 1st sector.
Indigenous people in Brazil are, in a way, IDPs for the simple fact that they don’t comply with the principle of land division based on real estate or national borders – for that, they are “internally displaced”. This modern 3-sector structure sustains the same colonial principles of exploiting people who were displaced by the forceful occupation of their territories. What was once enslaved people working the land native people lived in for millennia, we have, too, exploited workers handling Data in war-torn regions where they have also lived for millennia. One of the most powerful tools that maintain this structure is the narrative that all of this is actually the developed West saving the underdeveloped Other, as opposed to “racially charged” exploitation.
Perhaps instead of trying to save Other people from destruction, we ought to stop destroying. And this is work we have to do for ourselves, not for the other.
Brazilian conservatives that claim native land demarcation is a scam may have good reasons to doubt the work of NGO’s and international foundations. They do often meddle and profit from vulnerable people. But when that is conflated with a desire to eradicate (through assimilation) peoples with ‘inferior cultural practices’, the picture looks quite different. It looks like a ploy to force displaced people to comply with the national values of property – the cornerstone of a for-profit economic system. The motivation behind these suspicions towards the global 3rd sector is to win in the dispute for power and profit, at the expense of indigenous peoples – by annihilating them or using them as pawns.
This right-wing narrative goes even further to argue that indigenous people ‘want’ to assimilate, but can’t because they are trapped by a conniving 3rd sector. The only possible scenarios seem to be ones where indigenous peoples have no will of their own and are at the mercy of what ‘developed’ Western institutions decide.
As supporters of Indigenous peoples and their rights, we may unconsciously engage in this fallacy – where it is us who need to grant them space in a so-called developed framework of institutions. We think we can do that by validating them, giving them a thumbs up, and publicly displaying our support. But perhaps what we ought to be doing is impeding these Western institutions from meddling with these peoples lives, their lands and livelihoods.
Violence against indigenous peoples is not a natural disaster, and they need not be rescued from it. To be rescued from violence doesn’t end violence, it only temporarily keeps certain people safe from it. Germany's post-war efforts to combat fascism, though flawed, was effective in framing its efforts — not around ‘rescuing’ Jewish people through strenuous debate about their worth — but around the eradication of Nazi ideology and antisemitism. In Brazil, we are yet to coin a term for the segments of the population and the government who are hostile towards natives and act against the longevity of its peoples.
We need the eradication of the paradigms which threaten Indigenous peoples more than we need to tell Indigenous peoples we validate them.
MIRNA WABI-SABI
is a writer, political theorist, editor, teacher and translator. She’s site editor at Gods and Radicals, and managing editor at PLATAFORMA9.