Page 46 - GIC Manifesto.m

GIC will be unyielding in demands that Free Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) be honored in
all instances with indigenous populations prior to the onset of a project on ancestral, sacred,
and treaty lands, or the exploitation of resources within a tribal nation’s current and ancestral
territory. As of January 2018, FPIC and required consultation protocols were still being
abrogated in accelerated uranium and gold mining operations in the Black Hills. In October
2017, federal administrators concluded that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission failed to
appropriately recognize and address fundamental concerns submitted by the Great Sioux
Nation during the licensing process for uranium mines in the southern Black Hills.
In January 2018, the South Dakota Board of Minerals and Environment approved permits for
gold mining operations to begin in the Black Hills on the edge of sacred Pe’Sla, a foundational
site in Lakota-Dakota cosmology and ceremonial lifeways. Mineral Mountain Resources began
drilling on its “Rochford Gold Project” the first week of February 2018. “The Target: Another
Homestake Mine,” the company proclaims. Until its closure in 2002, Homestake was the largest
and deepest gold mine in North America. The Homestake deposit was “discovered” by Fred
and Moses Manuel, Alex Engh and Hank Harney in April 1876, during the illegal Black Hills
Gold Rush, an invasion inspired by the 1874 Custer Expedition into the Black Hills. Both the
expedition and subsequent invasion contravened the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, and set the
devastating course of dispossession and oppression that prevails to the present-day for the
1868 treaty signatories, the Lakota-Dakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. GIC will not stand idle
and let this tragic and treacherous history be repeated and the consequences inflicted upon
our children and future generations.
Sadly, these examples are not unique. This pattern and precedent is replicated worldwide, and
is literally life or death to many. GIC is committed to defending uncontacted tribes. GIC
recognizes that what will befall these tribes upon contact, previously devastated our ancestors,
and resulted in the decimation of our populations and cultures, resulting in centuries of
dispossession, assimilation, and subsequent multigenerational trauma. In the Peruvian Amazon,
fifteen uncontacted tribes survive, but face imminent threat from the Peruvian government’s
“open door” policy to multinational energy companies, sanctioning energy exploration in the
territories of uncontacted tribes. Some 70% of the Peruvian Amazon has already been leased