Wall Streets Indians

Indigenous Fronts for Capital

By Jay Taber

With so much focus on the BINGOs and RINGOs promoting the climate week hoopla, their
counterparts that comprise the indigenous wing of the non-profit industrial complex sometimes get
overlooked. While not nearly as well-funded, foundation brokerages and money laundries that co-
opt and corrupt indigenous activism similar to the function played by TIDES for the BINGOs and
RINGOs also have a role to play in the three-ring circus September 19-26 in New York.
Combined, the Peoples Climate March, World Conference on Indigenous Peoples, and World
Summit on Indigenous Philanthropy promise to be a dazzling display of the power of Wall Street to
co-opt and corrupt international institutions, global markets and social networks. Much like Warren
Buffett used 350 to herd the climateers into the KXL distraction so his oil-by-rail empire could
develop, indigenous fronts for capital, too, have been busy interfering with authentic activism on
behalf of Wall Street.

First Peoples Worldwide (FPW), funded in part by Shell Oil, and run by Rebecca Adamson, is big on
promoting the Corporate Social Responsibility theme. As advocates for oil and refinery development in
indigenous territories, FPW serves to undermine key concepts vital to indigenous sovereignty, thus
furthering the neoliberal model of development that the Clinton, Gates and Ford foundations support
through UN initiatives like the Millenium Development Goals. As FPW and its funders know,
privatization of indigenous communal property rights is integral to destroying their cultural
continuity.

Rebecca Adamsons value to energy extraction corporations is that of broker, helping multi-national
corporations to corrupt tribal leadership through corporate buy-ins. By making grants to tribes
through investments in Adamsons international NGO, FPW, Shell Oil and other notorious
corporations pave the way for industrial development in the Fourth World. While extortion might
be too strong a word to use in describing Adamsons quid pro quo in whitewashing corporate
development, her entrepreneurial brokerage is nevertheless a form of poverty-pimping akin to what
the Black elite did during the Civil Rights Movement.

While Buffett, Soros and Rockefeller are the deep pockets behind mostly white NGOs like 350, Ford
Foundation is heavily involved in backing indigenous fronts for capital. As an ideological supporter
of the World Bank (a mega co-developer of dams, mining and plantations on indigenous territories),
and a UN Millenium Development Goals supporter, Fords co-opting of indigenous peoples is a key
objective of neoliberal privatization that undermines the collective cultural and economic human
rights of Fourth World nations. As indigenous nations and modern states prepare for the World
Conference on Indigenous Peoples, corporations like Shell Oil and foundations like Ford are
spreading money around to indigenous activists and NGOs, to ensure they will not challenge the
capitalist system in anything but moral theatrics.

Indeed, some of the recipients of Ford Foundation money have already demonstrated a willingness
to attack indigenous governing authorities in order to protect state-approved, foundation-funded,
indigenous NGO privileges at the UN. Two of the Ford-funded brokerages are International
Funders for Indigenous Peoples and the Seventh Generation Fund. What Ford tries to accomplish by
this corruption is to shape public opinion in favor of neoliberalism; supporting capitalist-oriented
humanitarianism is essential to that psychological warfare. No longer able to simply exterminate
indigenous peoples with impunity, the UN and its member states now rely on instruments of Free
Trade and market economics to alienate indigenous peoples property and to terminate indigenous
nations. The devious schemes of philanthropic foundations that fund opportunists, charlatans
and troublemakers help create the illusion of consensus where none exists.

Jay Taber is an associate scholar of the Center for World Indigenous Studies, a
contributing editor of Fourth World Journal, and a featured columnist at IC Magazine.
Since 1994, he has served as communications director at Public Good Project, a
volunteer network of researchers, analysts and activists engaged in defending
democracy. As a consultant, he has assisted indigenous peoples in the European Court
of Human Rights and at the United Nations.