Who Owns the Amazon

My heart clenches and tears threaten to spill from my eyes as I look at pictures and videos of the Amazon on fire. I have always believed in the importance of the Amazon as a source of renewal for the global earth. But why? Many of us can point to movies about the Amazon, or stories of its importance.

But Bolsonaro's words push back against those stories calling them propaganda. For Bolsonaro, the issue of the rainforest, so he says, is about sovereignty.

“Our sovereignty is nonnegotiable.”
         --Otávio Rêgo Barros,
         Government Spokesman, Brazil

Sovereignty! What an interesting word! A powerful word!

As someone with Native American heritage, the idea of sovereignty is vital to me and to my thoughts of the indigenous people--the indigenous people of the Americas, North and South, and across the world.

But whose sovereignty is at issue in the Amazon?

To ask that question is to ask a slew of other questions about the nature of a nation, the idea of nationality and national independence, and about imperialism.

It is ironic for a person of primarily Italian and German descent to claim sovereignty for a nation created for Portuguese imperialism, while ignoring the sovereignty of the indigenous people of the Amazon. This irony becomes farce when we listen to the legitimate claims of those Indigenous people concerning the ways that Bolsonaro's government is trying to destroy them, to commit genocide.

But genocide is nothing new to the peoples native to the Americas.

Yet, what does it mean for people to have sovereignty over something like the Amazon?

What is it to own nature?

These are the questions that many native peoples have asked Europeans and European-origin peoples for hundreds of years.

Questions of sovereignty are important. But in the mouths of those in power, they are a red herring at best, meant to distract from the destruction of those not in power, meant to serve the destruction of the earth for the growth of profit.

Questions about nature, about the human relationship to nature, are the vital questions lost in these debates.

Yet, till we answer those questions, our lives are in jeopardy.

Until we remove those who threaten nature and who threaten the indigenous, we re only counting down the clock till we can no longer support human life in a changed climate.