UN to discuss Alberta’s Lubicon Cree
February 19 2007
www.630ched.com

GENEVA/630 CHED - A UN Committee has started hearings in Geneva with one of the items on the agenda the Lubicon Cree of Northern Alberta.

The small band, which lives in an oil-rich area east of Peace River, has never signed a treaty with the federal government.

The problem is that oil companies and logging companies have moved in to traditional Lubicon territory. Land the Indians say they haven’t given up title to.

Two UN committees have already declared Canada to be in violation of international agreements — an agreement on civil and political rights …

Oil expansion threatens Colombia’s indigenous
by Bill Weinberg
Indian Country Today

NEW YORK - Colombia’s U’wa indigenous people, in the forested mountains overlooking the oil-rich and war-torn eastern plains, are facing reversal in a hard-won land rights victory over the state oil company. The move comes just as the company is to be partially privatized to fund a new thrust of expansion. Meanwhile, despite a supposed ”demobilization” of the right-wing paramilitaries, illegal gunmen continue to threaten Indians and campesinos organizing to defend their lands from oil development.

The U’wa victory came in May 2002, when Occidental Petroleum Corp. announced at its annual shareholder meeting …

HOUSTON, Jan. 31 — Indigenous leaders from the Peruvian Amazon, environmentalists and human rights groups today called on the Peruvian government to suspend its tendering of oil concessions that threaten to devastate a vast swath of pristine tropical rainforest and the native communities that live there.

They arrived in Houston today to speak out as Perupetro, Peru’s state- owned oil company, launched its 2007 roadshow in Houston timed to coincide with the NAPE Expo, the oil prospecting industry’s semi-annual trade show. Perupetro plans to tender 11 Amazonian blocks, covering approximately 22 million acres of intact primary tropical rainforest.

Three of those blocks …

From www.cbc.ca - Northern First Nations are calling for a halt to further development in Alberta’s oilsands, saying the massive industrial growth is hurting their land, their water and their people.

Dehcho First Nations Grand Chief Herb Norwegian told a news conference in Fort McMurray Tuesday the effect of the massive development can be felt downstream along the Mackenzie River system.

“When our people go visit their fish nets or harvest their waterfowl they’re definitely seeing a problem with the water,” said Norwegian, who is meeting with native leaders from northern Alberta this week.

The health of the Mackenzie River system is paramount …

QUITO, Ecuador, January 12, 2007 (ENS) - To protect indigenous groups who voluntarily isolate themselves from the modern world, the Ecuadorian government has declared a two million acre zone in an oil-rich region of the Amazon off limits to oil development and logging.

The Presidential Decree signed last week by outgoing President Alfredo Palacio is intended to protect the core territory of the last two groups of indigenous peoples in Ecuador known to live in isolation.

Both the Tagaeri and Taromenane are renowned for their giant spears and regarded as among the fiercest tribes on Earth. There is a bloody history of …

Half the Peruvian Amazon Leased for Petroleum Development
http://www.ens-newswire.com
December 4, 2006

Conservation groups based in Washington warned today that the Peruvian government is signing so many contracts with multinational oil companies that half the rainforest of the Peruvian Amazon is now covered with oil leases.

The Peruvian Amazon contains some of the most pristine and biodiverse rainforests on Earth, says said Dr. Matt Finer of Save America’s Forests, who has spent years working as an ecologist in the rainforests of Peru and Ecuador.

“Over 97 million acres of the Peruvian Amazon, roughly the size of California, is now zoned for oil and …