Barrick Gold and the Western Shoshone: Millstone Award for April

Barrick Gold, a Canadian mining corporation, is conducting gold mining operations in Nevada. There is a problem: they are mining on the sacred lands of the Western Shoshone people, without their permission. In fact, they are also doing this in contravention of a recommendation by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), issued in early March.

An article posted on Oneworld reveals that CERD told the Canadian government to take "appropriate legislative or administrative measures to prevent the acts of transnational corporations on indigenous territories."

In addition,

The United States recognized Shoshone rights to their land under the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley. However, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1979 that the pact gave Washington trusteeship over tribal lands.

The federal government justified its position by saying that tribe members had abandoned traditional land tenure and practices and cited "gradual encroachment" by non-natives as evidence to claim much of the land as federal territory.

The Western Shoshone, in their petition to the UN panel, countered that "gradual encroachment" in fact took place as part of a U.S. policy to steal their lands, and that this constituted racism.

The Geneva-based panel agreed with the Shoshone by noting that Washington's claim to the land "did not comply with contemporary international human rights norms, principles, and standards that govern determination of indigenous property interests."

The Western Shoshone Defense Project posts an article discussing how Harry Reid and James Gibbons, both Nevadans, pushed the Western Shoshone Distribution Bill through the House on July 7, 2004. The Bill gave the Western Shoshone peoples $145 million in exchange for forcibly subsuming the rights to 24 million acres of land.

From Straightgoods, Canada's "leading independent online newsmagazine, "the US government has declared most of Shoshone territory to be federal public land open to resource extraction and other commercial activities. The treaty protecting the original Western Shoshone territory some 60 million acres from southern Idaho to California's Mojave Desert is still valid, but the government has gotten around the treaty by invoking a principle it calls "gradual encroachment." This legal tautology has been discredited by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, but the United States has ignored those findings...."

Reid, a Democrat, and Gibbons, a Republican, have much to answer for, as do all their colleagues in Congress who passed this bill. Christians, especially, cannot allow indigenous peoples' rights to be trampled upon, and their land siezed. We claim spiritual relationship to the Jews, who were forcibly removed from their native lands to Egypt, and systematically exploited. Our missionaries to the Americas, Carribean, and the Pacific Islands have been especially complicit in allowing, or even facilitating, the exploitation of the native peoples of those regions. We have helped make them strangers in their own lands. We must never forget, we are the immigrants here. And the least we can do is to hold ourselves, our corporations, and our leaders responsible.

Oxfam America has a link where you can email Barrick Gold here. While you're at it, Oxfam is involved in relief in Darfur, and could use donations and prayers. Read about it here.

Meanwhile, I realize I've been behind in the Millstone awards. This month's award goes to Barrick Gold and all the other gold mining corporations involved in mining operations on stolen native lands, and to the governments who facilitate that theft (here, the US and Canadian governments).