CONSEJO INTERNACIONAL DE TRATADOS INDIOS

Commission on Human Rights
59th Session, March 17 to April 25, 2003
Agenda item 7, The Right to Development
Written intervention by the International Indian Treaty Council

The Right to Development under International Law is an inalienable human right by virtue of which every human person and all peoples are entitled to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy. Article 1 of the Declaration on the Right to Development characterizes the Right to Development as a right "in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized." Thus the full realization of the political right of peoples to self determination, including the exercise of their inalienable right to full sovereignty over their natural wealth and resources, are fundamental to the Right to Development.

Water has been increasingly recognized internationally as an essential element of the right to development. The 1987 Brundtland Commission (The World Commission on Environment and Development) proposed "sustainable development" to the world, and identified water as a key issue among global environmental concerns. The Water and Environment Conference held in Dublin in 1992, extensively discussed water and environmental issues. The Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil also devoted Chapter 18 to water as an urgent environmental concern.

Development that is consistent with the Declaration on the right to development and truly sustainable must protect and sustain not only the physical environment. Indigenous Peoples’ unbreakable cultural and spiritual relationships with water and the natural surroundings upon which their ways of life and their very identities are based must also be sustained.

Mr. Kee Watchman, Dineh (Navajo) elder and spokesperson for the traditional Dineh Cactus Valley/Red Willow Springs Sovereign Community of Big Mountain, Arizona, United States that the following statement be presented by the IITC to the members of this Commission concerning the devastating social, cultural, environmental and spiritual impacts of continue coal mining on his Peoples’ traditional lands and water:

“We, the traditional Dineh people, are still holding on very strongly to our religious rights on our ancestral homeland. Everything on this Land is connected to our prayers, our songs, and our culture. So we are very strongly protecting our Land because the energy company, Peabody Coal Company, as well as the U.S. government, the Navajo and Hopi Tribal governments, and the BIA are looking at this land - Cactus Valley/Red Willow Springs Sovereign Community/ Big Mountain are to be strip mined in the next 2-10 years.

“We have only a very small piece of our Land left. This Land has a lot of things that are still here with us as part of our traditional way of life: ceremonial herbs, the different colors of rocks/stones used for ceremonial sand painting, sacred springs that are used for ceremonials, and also our shrines, offering places, and burial sites. Many of the elderly still follow our religion and pass it on to the young generation.

“After Peabody Coal Company destroyed those places and those things by putting up the strip mine, every one of those medicine people who lived there lost their lives because their prayers and songs and the place where they connected with the Spirits was destroyed. This is what we have seen. This is why we need the Land to be protected under the International Human Rights and Religious Freedom laws. We need to ask the International Body to do more research and take strong action on our concerns.

“In our religion we have our songs and prayers about the rain and the water and the Mother Earth, to use in the ceremonials. We feel like our prayers and our songs have all been wasted by the strip mining, drained with the liver (coal) of the Mother Earth over 287 miles away by coal slurry line. The power from this coal is used by millions of people in the big city.

“However, our Grandfathers and Grandmothers are still holding a bundle to pray for the water to return, and to bring back a good rain and a good snow for the Land, for the people who remain on the Land, for their grandchildren and the animals.

“Our Grandmother said, "the Mother Earth needs healing. Black Mesa needs to be healed, because she had a big surgery. Her liver (coal) and other things have been taken out. This is why we, the Grandmothers, can't heal ourselves even if we try to pray." This is what our Grandmother used to say, Roberta Blackgoat. Even though she left us for another spirit world we still respect her words and keep it alive on these sacred lands.”

We call the attention of the Commission to a water compact presently being negotiated by the State of Montana, United States, and the Fort Belknap Indian reservation, for the traditional homelands of the White Clay Peoples, known as the Gros Ventre.

The White Clay Peoples, as a sovereign Nation entered into a treaty wiht the United States in 1855. The Treaty never ceded any land, natural resources or water rights. The Supreme Court of the United States, in Winters v. United States, agreed with the White Clay Peoples, that no cessation of waters had been granted in this treaty or any other act or agreement. The Court created the so-called “Winters doctrine” in this case, that has been applied to other Tribes and Nations in subsequent litigation defining Indigenous Peoples’ water rights, declaring that Indigenous Peoples had the use of their water “for a use which would be necessarily continued through years,” or as re-stated by a White Clay elder, “for our needs and the needs of our future generations.”

Now, the state of Montana, in spite of the findings of the United States Supreme Court, that the state of Montana has no right or interest in Reservation waters is being allowed by the United States to “negotiate” a water compact with the Reservation that would wipe out the Winters Doctrine. Notwithstanding that the water compact does not address the White Clay Peoples’ traditional and treaty rights to waters from the Missouri River or other major sources of water and groundwater established under the treaty, the water compact would bar any future claims to water by the White Clay and other Indigenous Peoples.

The White Clay Peoples sources of water have already been devastated by an open pit gold mine, allowed to the multi-national Pegasus Gold Mines by the United States, the spiritual and material relationship to their lands and water already severely affected by the pollution and depletion of surface and groundwater and the complete destruction of a Sacred Mountain. The full extent of the pollution and depletion is not yet known, even though the mine has been closed as now “unprofitable.” Remediation efforts have proven to be all but impossible with regard to surface and groundwater. And the Sacred Mountain has been destroyed.

In Sonora Mexico, the eight pueblos of the Yaqui Indian Nation continue to be denied their water rights, and therefore their right to development. In 1939, pursuant to an agreement with the Yaqui Nation, by decree, President Lazaro Cardenas recognized Yaqui territory as well as Yaqui rights to half of the water from the Yaqui River, in perpetuity. Since then, the Mexican government has violated this agreement by allowing the construction of dams and water diversion projects upstream from Yaqui lands. Today little or no water from the Rio Yaqui reaches the Yaqui communities, who have depended on farming as their primary traditional means of subsistence since time immemorial. They now face increasing poverty and malnutrition in their communities as a result.

We call upon the United States and Mexico to honor their agreements, their own laws, and international standards. We call upon these States to respect the right to development, particularly the right to life giving water, of the Dineh, White Clay and Yaqui Peoples.

“Our knowledge and laws and ways of life teach us to be responsible at all times in caring for this sacred gift that connects all life. In ceremony and as time comes, the Water sings. Her songs begin in the tiniest of streams, transforms to flowing rivers, travels to majestic oceans, and thundering clouds, and back to earth, to begin again. When Water is threatened, all living things are threatened.”

The IITC is following with interest the World Water Forum, at Kyoto, Japan, in March of this year, encouraged by the Forum’s commitment to sustainable development.

We are also encouraged by the Commission on Sustainable Development’s stated goal for their 11th Session, of identifying constraints in the implementation of Agenda 21 and making practical recommendations on ways to overcome them. We urge the CSD to heed Chapter 18 of Agenda 21, on the protection of water, and Chapter 26, recognizing and strengthening the role of Indigenous Peoples, particularly with regard to water.

The IITC urges the High Commissioner for Human Rights, in his annual report to the Commission on the right to development, as well as the Commission’s Working Group on the right to development, to examine fully Indigenous Peoples’ right to development, and water as a fundamental element of that right.

for all our relations..