It has begun: Belo Monte Dam

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Human No More

...yet that doesn't make them some kind of 'perfect people'. With how you talk about similar examples, you'd think they never had disease, famine or crime, or indeed, even warfare; yet they do. .... they shouldn't be considered 'special', just different, which should be enough in itself to protect their right to make their own decisions.

That is the whole point. I do know that they do have issues of their own. I do believe that overall, pre-contact indigenous peoples have less disease and violent crime, that some cultures that have diversified food sources (as opposed to ones completely reyling on agriculture, fishing or herding) have little famine and that certain types of cultures do have less warfare that is more ritualized. But that does not matter in this case or in any similar case. The point is that a nation state claims by the right of conquest and occupation that the land these tribes have lived on in a sustainable way for many centuries or even milennia is now part of that nation state and that they can do with that land as they please. Of course they may have the physical power to do so, but that does not make it the right choice. They are special in that they have a culture that is sustainable, that has been there probably longer than the state of Brazil and that they obviously are still very rich people - because they inhabit a large piece of land. That is what is always happening - indigenous people are very very rich - if you would calculate how much land they live on and divide it by the number of people, I doubt many could afford that much land. If you look at all what people nowadays call "resources" on that land - trees, animals, fish, medicinal plants, minerals, clean water, soil - these people are unfathomable rich. And now the colonizers come and take that away and try to make them poor - that is not justice, that is theft. Just because people living in other countries have consumed everything and in the process grown to such large numbers that their landbase cannot support them and their lifestlye anymore does not give them the right to invade others.