[WSF-Discuss] Belém 2009: Indigenizing the Global at the World Social Forum

[CACIM]

Belém 2009: Indigenizing the Global at the World Social Forum

*By Janet Conway*

Publié par : *massicot* | mars 2, 2009

@
http://unialter.wordpress.com/2009/03/02/belem-2009-indigenizing-the-global-at-the-world-social-forum/

The 2009 World Social Forum took place January 27 to February 1 in the
equatorial city of Belém do Pará. It was the fifth time the world event took
place in Brazil, but the first time outside the southern city of Porto
Alegre, the homeplace of the World Social Forum. As with the earlier events,
Belém attracted hordes of participants— 130,000 of them from 142 countries
but well over ninety percent of whom were Brazilian, many of them from Pará
and neighbouring states in the Brazilian North.

The local newspaper reported participation by 1900 indigenous persons from
120 ethnic groups and 1400 Afro-descendents. Although these numbers
represent breakthroughs by the WSF’s historical standards in Brazil, the
Forum remained an overwhelmingly light-skinned, young, urban, Brazilian and
Portuguese-speaking space—in these respects, disappointingly parochial.
Paradoxically, it was this Forum’s novel and clear-eyed focus on the host
locality that also was the occasion for its most significant political
advances. While the global financial meltdown has displaced all other
discussions among the cosmopolitan left within and beyond the WSF, a wide
diversity of issues and debates marked the Forum. Climate change, resource
extraction and the plight of indigenous peoples were particularly prominent.
As always, there was no one place to stand from which to see it all. My
focus in this Forum was the question of indigenous participation.

Belém is a city of 1.4 million inhabitants and is best known as the gateway
to the Amazon. It is located at the confluence of three major rivers as they
meet the Atlantic ocean. In late January, temperatures regularly climb to 45
degrees Celsius with 98% humidity and torrential rains daily. The Forum was
held on two university campuses, contiguous, but vastly different in their
built environments. The Federal Rural University of the Amazon (UFRA) is a
sprawling site, with huge green spaces of varying kinds of vegetation and a
few small scattered buildings. Fenced areas of dense brush warned of
poisonous plants and animals and discouraged wandering off the beaten path.
The ribbon of blacktop that wound through the site became, for the days of
the Forum, a river of humanity with currents diverging and converging toward
one or another of the 2600 events. At UFRA, the 45-minute walk from end to
end in blistering heat or tropical downpour could be eased by perching on
the back of one of the numerous bicycles that careened through the crowd
with whistles shrieking.

Indigenous peoples, forest peoples, afro-descendents and stateless peoples,
the international human rights movement and the pan-amazonian region were
among those housed in thematic tents with their own roster of activities,
running alongside the more than two thousand self-organized activities. The
UFRA also hosted the Intercontinental Youth Camp, a sea of pup tents and
clothelines, 15,000 young bodies hanging out, playing music, selling
T-shirts and jewelry, and reveling in a time outside of time and shared hope
in another possible world. The youth culture in Belém prominently included
injunctions to vegetarianism, sexual pleasure and experimentation and
marijuana use, none of which had been such visible elements of the Camp’s
politic in the past.

The Federal Public University of Para (UFPA) offered quite a different
scene, with a much more urban feel. Dense clusters of buildings were laid
out along roads open to traffic. For reasons known only to the organizers,
there appeared to be a division of political labour between the two sites.
With most of ‘the movements’ occupying the tents and green spaces of UFRA
and the talking heads assigned to the classrooms of UFPA, each site had its
distinct political culture. Given the difficulty and time involved in moving
across the two sites, there was too little opportunity to partake in both,
resulting in de facto segregation of different political actors,
problematics and modalities. Interestingly, among the few movement spaces
assigned to UFPA was ‘the world of work’ tent where trade unionists from
around the world congregated in close and convenient proximity to those
debating the global financial melt-down.

One of the significant features of the Belém event was its unabashed focus
on the host locality as one of global importance. In the lead-up, this WSF
was billed as a pan-Amazonian event, recognizing the global environmental
significance of the river and the rain forest and the transnational
political character of a bio-region that traverses the frontiers of Brazil,
Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, French Guiana, and
Suriname. This World Social Forum event built on a pan-Amazonian process
that had seen four social forums organized in the region between 2002 and
2005. The first day of programming was dedicated to the Amazon and its
peoples and the threats represented by climate change, mega-projects and
extractive industries. This explicit and intentional political attention to
a particular place on the planet was a novel development for the World
Social Forum, especially in its Brazilian enactments which have regularly
been more cosmopolitan in their aspirations and internationalist in the
discourses and practices of the organizers.

Perhaps because of these orientations, the World Social Forum in Brazil has
been historically weak on environmental questions. The Belém event offered
some important correctives to this in its focused attention to ‘place’ and
the global significance of place-based struggles.

Expressions of this ranged from the spectacular to the mundane, the precious
to the problematic: Amazon Watch, a Northern-based international
environmental NGO, orchestrated an aerial photo of a thousand Amazonian
indigenous people spelling out ‘Save the Amazon’ with their bodies; a “fuck
for the forest” campaign in the Youth Camp; drum-beating, flag-waving
vegetarians invading the food courts; the Brazilian Minister of Justice
arriving with a police escort and hovering helicopters to hear Amazonian
indigenous leaders’ protests about land invasions by settlers and
multi-nationals despite constitutional protections. Whatever one’s reactions
to any one of these occurrences, and they were heated and varied among
participants, that hundreds of less spectacular events wove a novel politics
of environmental justice through the WSF programme in Belém was
indisputable.

The choice of Belém as a site helped propel the appearance of these
discourses among entities that had not before attended much to questions of
climate change, resource extraction or indigenous peoples. It also provoked
a new prominence within the Social Forum of international environmental NGOs
like Amigos de la Tierra and Amazon Watch, indigenous peoples in general and
indigenous groups of the Brazilian Amazon in particular, and
indigenous-environmental coalitions like Allianza Amazonica. It is
interesting to note in the lead-up to the event, the official rationales for
the choice of Belém by Forum organizers made no mention of indigenous
peoples beyond vague references to the bio- and cultural diversity of the
region. By the time of the Forum however, local indigenous groups had
assumed a highly visible, although not unambiguous role in the constitution
of the Forum.

Historically, indigenous peoples and their perspectives have been
exceedingly marginal at the World Social Forums in Brazil.
Demographically, they are fewer than 350,000 in Brazil, about .1% of the
national population. In the early years in Porto Alegre, they were most
visible selling crafts or performing in cultural spectacles, a role that has
been decried as merely ‘folkloric’ by indigenous and non-indigenous
participants alike. The Indian organizers of the WSF in Mumbai in 2004 were
far more intentional and successful in politically incorporating mass
movements of tribal peoples. Discourses of indigenous land rights and
critiques of development emerged powerfully in the Mumbai event but were not
sustained in Porto AIegre the following year. In the Americas, hemispheric
social forums in Quito, Ecuador in 2004 and Guatemala City in 2008 were
deeply informed by the presence and political perspectives of indigenous
movements of the host countries. In the WSF in Brazil however, despite a
serious effort to organize an indigenous peoples’ space at the 2005 event in
Porto Alegre, indigenous perspectives have been barely audible. This,
however, is changing, assisted both by the choice of Belém as a site and
developments within the indigenous movements themselves.

Fueled by events over the last decade in Ecuador and Bolivia in which
indigenous peoples have been central protagonists, there is a continental
indigenous movement in formation, with strong leadership emanating from the
Andean region. The Co-ordinación Andina, in partnership with Amazonian and
Guatemalan entities, assumed major responsibility for orchestrating the
historically-unprecedented indigenous presence in Belém. The indigenous
peoples’ tent was the site of vibrant and diverse discussions, prominent
among them a series of events on “civilizational crises.” What was
extraordinary in the context of the Forum, and perhaps more generally, was
the assertiveness with which indigenous leaders articulated alternatives
central to imagining other possible worlds: concepts of plurinationality and
buen vivir (living well—not better), indigenous knowledge of climate change
and sustainable interaction with natural environments, radical perspectives
on post-development, and direct action in defense of their lands and their
survival as peoples against developmentalist governments, land-hungry
settlers, and rapacious corporations.

Differences and tensions were apparent between indigenous entities from
different regions who are differently positioned in their own countries and
internationally. This was especially evident between the Brazilian
Amazonians and those from outside the region, from countries with sizable
indigenous populations, with longer histories of collaboration with one
another, and resulting cross-fertilization of discourses and perspectives.
The most advanced dialogues appear to be underway among indigenous women,
who listened carefully and respectfully to those from contexts different
from their own and support each others’ voices, especially with respect to
men in their communities. Indigenous women are preparing for the first
continental encounter of indigenous women which will take place in Puno,
Peru in late May in advance of the fourth Cumbre of indigenous peoples and
nationalities of Abya Yala (the Americas). The Cumbre process has enabled
this intellectual and political efflorescence of indigenous peoples and
indigenous entities are using the Social Forum process in the Americas to
advance the consolidation and expand the international reach of their
movement.

For the Amazonian indigenous peoples of Brazil and their relationships both
to non-indigenous movements and to the Social Forum process in Brazil, the
Belém event seemed a watershed event in the sheer numerical strength and
visibility of the former. They numbered well over 1000, mostly men, and
highly visible in their distinctiveness with painted bodies, feathered
headdresses, and hand-crafted weapons. In the indigenous peoples’ tent, they
often entered as groups, singing and dancing and were subsequently
identified according to what Brazilian state they hailed from. In one
extraordinary moment, a highly-respected older man was invited to come to
the dias. He was recognized by the moderator as a leader of national
stature. He was sent off from his place in the bleachers by his community
who stood and chanted, and he was escorted—danced– to the stage by two
warriors linked into him.

Another powerful moment occurred in the opening march through downtown
Belem. The march, like the Forum, was overwhelmingly peopled by young,
light-skinned Brazilians of the host region. From where I was for most of
the event, surveying the first two-thirds of the massive parade, there was
no indigenous presence of any kind. Following a large, raucous and diverse
indigenous peoples’ assembly at UFRA that same morning, their absence was
startling. Had they decided not to participate in the march? Was it
conceivable that they were at the end of the march—which in Canada would
have been an insult?

Suddenly, there appeared, singing and dancing, a group of perhaps thirty
Amazonian indigenous youths, moving as a bloc up through the stream of
demonstrators, stopping periodically to chant and bop before surging ahead.
And in their wake came a line of indigenous leaders stretched the width of
the march, armed locked and moving fast, opening a path through the crowd
through sheer force of their collective presence and momentum.

What was this about? Was this a political statement? Was this a normal mode
of being in a mass demo that I had never before seen? Was it a way of moving
to the front of a march where, in Brazil, as in many places, the front lines
are colonized by political parties of the left with their flags, banners and
chants? Its ambiguity intensified when, upon arriving at the march’s
destination, it became apparent that these same indigenous leaders were the
central actors in the opening ceremonies.

The opening ceremonies were noteworthy in their remarkable departure from
past practice. Unlike the highly professionalized and thoroughly
internationalized extravaganzas of music, song, dance and political speeches
in Porto Alegre, Mumbai or Nairobi, the opening in Belém was one hundred per
cent indigenous—vastly different in tone, mode and personnel. Although the
Andeans made an appearance, it was an event almost exclusively expressive of
indigenous groups from the Brazilian Amazon. Indigenous delegations were
identified and invited to move through the crowd to the stage, which they
did often by linking arms and snaking fluidly as groups through the throngs
of people. Group after group enacted greetings to the crowd through their
communal songs, dances, poetry and occasionally in a speech. What to make of
this—in terms of indigenous positionality in the Belém event, in Brazilian
movement politics, or in the World Social Forum process more generally,
remains an open question.

Like any World Social Forum, the event in Belém eludes definitive analysis.
It continues to provoke awe, critique, comparison and bafflement. No one
account can do justice to the vast array and richness of the processes
underway in any one iteration of the Social Forum, much less in terms of its
mutations and accumulations across time and space.

The fourth day of the Forum was ‘alliances day,’ an innovation of the 2007
event in Nairobi and expressed in Belém through sectoral assemblies, all of
which produced declarations. The indigenous peoples gathered at the WSF in
Belem issued a call for a global day of action on October 12, the
anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, in defense of Mother Earth
and against the commodification of life, and for a thematic social forum in
2010 on the crisis of civilization—notably including but not limited to the
financial meltdown. They are not standing still and neither is the World
Social Forum.

Janet Conway is Canada Research Chair in Social Justice at Brock University
and in writing a book on the World Social Forum. Comments welcome :
jconway at brocku.ca
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