Set in the fantasy world of Pandora, Avatar tells the story of the Na’vi — a clan of blue-hued humanoids whose existence is threatened by a mining corporation which wants to exploit a vast store of mineral deposits which lies beneath a giant sacred tree.

In India’s impoverished but mineral-rich state of Orissa, hundreds of indigenous tribespeople are battling to stop London-listed Vedanta Resources Plc from extracting bauxite from what they say is their sacred mountain.

“The fundamental story of Avatar — if you take away the multi-colored lemurs, the long-trunked horses and warring androids — is being played out today in Niyamgiri mountain in India’s Orissa state,” said Stephen Corry, director of the British charity, Survival International.

“Like the Na’vi of Avatar, the Dongria Kondh tribe are also at risk.”

Vedanta says its mine would not violate the rights of indigenous tribespeople, saying that all its projects are conducted within the law and using international best practices.

“It is a myth that people don’t want development. The tribals want their children to go to school and have enough to eat,” said Mukesh Kumar, CEO of Vedanta’s alumina refinery, located at the foot of the mountain, which will process the bauxite.

“If the mine goes ahead, Vedanta will help them to achieve this.”

NGOs like ActionAid say around 8,000 people will be affected by Vedanta’s mining plans which have been stalled since 2005 due to legal wrangles over environmental and social concerns. Vedanta says it expects approval from authorities in the coming months.

Since 2007, four international investors — including the Church of England — have sold off their stock in the company citing ethical concerns over the project.

Last month, Britain’s Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust sold its 1.9 million pound share, saying Vedanta was “pushing industrialization to the detriment of the lives of local people.”

Industrialization

While the box-office hit’s story to save the Na’vi’s “Tree of Souls” is a battle between good and evil, the fight for Niyamgiri mountain appears more a dilemma of industrialization versus tribal rights.

The tussle in the lush mountain forests of Niyamgiri between the Dongria Kondh people and Vedanta highlights a broader standoff between industry and villagers and tribesmen in India’s mineral belt — made up of the country’s most underdeveloped states of Orissa, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh.

Steel companies like Arcelor Mittal and POSCO are facing resistance from establishing plants, not only from villagers and tribesmen, but from Maoist insurgents who for decades have been waging a war against industrialization.

Companies and the federal government argue that in a country where around 40 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, exploiting lucrative deposits of minerals such as iron ore, bauxite, coal and manganese is the only answer.

Last month, the mines minister said India planned to raise the compensation for people displaced by large mining projects in a move that could sooth opposition to leases but will raise costs.

Local Development

Vedanta, which has already built an alumina refinery at the foot of the mountain in Lanjigarh town, in anticipation of gaining clearance to mine, says the planned project will not affect the tribespeople or the environment.

And the multinational has also launched a campaign to win hearts and minds through a range of corporate social responsibility activities, which includes building schools, and health clinics and income-generation projects.

Vedanta’s Kumar says the impoverished town was a mere assortment of tribal villages with little infrastructure and public services before Vedanta arrived.

“The refinery has improved people’s lives,” said Kumar, adding that the number of malaria cases and families living below the poverty line has fallen since the refinery was established.

Signs on everything from roads and bridges to traffic police booths are adorned with the company’s name and logo. Schools, clinics and even electricity poles are labeled “Vedanta” in bold blue.

Many local tribespeople remain skeptical.

At a clearing at the foot of Niyamgiri, hundreds of Kondh tribespeople gather to worship the mountain god, Niyam Rajah — the provider of food, water, shelter and medicine.

Women, wrapped in brightly colored saris with gold rings pierced through their noses, emerge from the dense forests to join tribal men at the annual ceremony to pay homage to the mountain.

A bearded old man, wearing a white loin cloth and waving an axe, dances around an altar as the air fills with incense and the rhythmic beating of drums. His axe eventually falls on a goat — a sacrifice to their god.

“We have lived here for thousands of years and have always worshipped Niyam Rajah in our villages,” said Mukuna Majhi, a bare-chested elderly man, carrying an axe over his shoulder.

Centuries-old trees, hundreds of species of plants with medicinal properties and the scores of perennial streams which flow down the mountain will be lost, say activists.

While both activists and Vedanta claim the support of the local population, the Kondh tribes of Niyamgiri are divided.

“Some of the villages want the mine, but many do not,” said Tudu Majhi, 46, from the village of Khemdipadhar, near the planned site of the mine. “We want development but does it have to be at the expense of our mountain?”

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The Asháninka live along the Ene River in a remote area of Péru near the Brazilian border. Recently, a joint Peruvian-Brazilian development treaty has begun to threaten the lives of tribal people in the area.

This documentary looks at the efforts of the Asháninka to protect their lands against encroachment and plans by the Peruvian government to build a dam that would destroy their livelihoods and culture.

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The last known speaker of the Bo language in the Andaman Islands has died. The Andaman & Nicobar Islands are a group of volcanic islands in the Bay of Bengal, and are part of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Union Territory of India.

There are 576 islands in the group, only 26 of which are inhabited. The length of the island chain is 352 km and its greatest width is 51 km. The total land area of the Andamans is 6408 square kilometre|km². Though part of India, the islands are closer to Sumatra (part of Indonesia) than to India.

The Bo language forms part of an ancient family of human language found in the Andamans called Great Andamanese. These languages, ten in all, are believed to have originated in Africa, with some possibly 70,000 years old. In other words, they date back to pre-Neolithic times. The Bo language was part of the Northern Group and was spoken on the east central coast of North Andaman and on North Reef Island.

The story on the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of yet another human language from the UK Guardian:

The last speaker of an ancient tribal language has died in the Andaman Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world’s oldest cultures.

Boa Sr, who lived through the 2004 tsunami, the Japanese occupation and diseases brought by British settlers, was the last native of the island chain who was fluent in Bo.

Taking its name from a now-extinct tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to pre-Neolithic human settlement of south-east Asia.

Though the language has been closely studied by researchers of linguistic history, Boa Sr spent the last few years of her life unable to converse with anyone in her mother tongue.

Even members of inter-related tribes were unable to comprehend the repertoire of Bo songs and stories uttered by the woman in her 80s, who also spoke Hindi and another local language.

“Her loss is not just the loss of the Great Andamanese community, it is a loss of several disciplines of studies put together, including anthropology, linguistics, history, psychology, and biology,” Narayan Choudhary, a linguist of Jawaharlal Nehru University who was part of an Andaman research team, wrote on his webpage. “To me, Boa Sr epitomised a totality of humanity in all its hues and with a richness that is not to be found anywhere else.”

The Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, are governed by India. The indigenous population has steadily collapsed since the island chain was colonised by British settlers in 1858 and used for most of the following 100 years as a colonial penal colony.

Tribes on some islands retained their distinct culture by dwelling deep in the forests and rebuffing would-be colonisers, missionaries and documentary makers with volleys of arrows. But the last vestiges of remoteness ended with the construction of trunk roads from the 1970s.

According to the NGO Survival International, the number of Great Andamanese has declined in the past 150 years from about 5,000 to 52. Alcoholism is rife among the survivors.

“The Great Andamanese were first massacred, then all but wiped out by paternalistic policies which left them ravaged by epidemics of disease, and robbed of their land and independence,” said Survival International’s director, Stephen Corry. “With the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of the Bo language, a unique part of human society is now just a memory. Boa’s loss is a bleak reminder that we must not allow this to happen to the other tribes of the Andaman Islands.”

Boa Sr appears to have been in good health until recently. During the Indian Ocean tsunami, she reportedly climbed a tree to escape the waves.

She told linguists afterwards that she had been forewarned. “We were all there when the earthquake came. The eldest told us the Earth would part, don’t run away or move.”

There are some 7,000 languages worldwide. At least half of these are expected to disappear in this century marking the greatest extinction of human knowledge in history. At present, a human language disappears once every 14 days. India has a particularly rich linguistic tapestry accounting for 10 percent of all the world’s languages.

Eighty percent of people living in the world today speak the just 83 languages with Han Chinese having the most speakers. Only two-tenths of one percent interact in rare 3,500 languages.

Languages are under pressure worldwide. In Australia, there are 153 languages down to under 100 speakers. In Central and South America 113 languages are in danger of immediate extinction. Even in North America’s Northwest Pacific Plateau that includes British Columbia, Washington and Oregon there are 54 under pressure.

About a half of all world languages have never been written down. When the last person speaking a language dies, an entire body of knowledge is lost. Learn more at National Geographic’s Enduring Voices project.

Why Is It Important?
Language defines a culture, through the people who speak it and what it allows speakers to say. Words that describe a particular cultural practice or idea may not translate precisely into another language. Many endangered languages have rich oral cultures with stories, songs, and histories passed on to younger generations, but no written forms. With the extinction of a language, an entire culture is lost.

Much of what humans know about nature is encoded only in oral languages. Indigenous groups that have interacted closely with the natural world for thousands of years often have profound insights into local lands, plants, animals, and ecosystems—many still undocumented by science. Studying indigenous languages therefore benefits environmental understanding and conservation efforts.

Studying various languages also increases our understanding of how humans communicate and store knowledge. Every time a language dies, we lose part of the picture of what our brains can do.

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101 East looks at the Ainu, Japan’s indigeneous people, and their fight for cultural survival and acceptance. Over the last century, they have seen their traditions and their language stripped away, along with their ancestral lands. But after generations of oppression, racism and forced assimilation, change is in the air for the Ainu.

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Energy giant ExxonMobil has suspended work on a liquefied natural gas plant in Papua New Guinea after four local villagers were killed in a tribal dispute. A report from the Sydney Morning Herald:

The clash between two rival coastal villages near the capital Port Moresby occurred in an area where ExxonMobil is to build a plant to liquefy, store and load gas for shipment overseas.

The incident has forced the shutdown of road building works being undertaken by Curtain Bros, an Australian construction firm, to the planned plant site.

The fight erupted on Saturday afternoon after drunken Borea village youths threw stones at Porebada villagers as they were gardening in the area, half an hour’s drive west from Port Moresby.

Porebada villagers went to Borea village later that day to resolve the dispute, but four of them were shot dead.

PNG’s National newspaper reported the fight was linked to ongoing tensions regarding land ownership and LNG leases.

PNG’s Post Courier newspaper reported the two villages met on Sunday night, and Porebada clansmen vowed to close down the nearby LNG-related activities until the dispute was settled.

A spokesman for ExxonMobil in Port Moresby said a police investigation would provide more information about the “tragic event”.

“The safety and security of our workforce and the communities in which we operate are of the utmost importance and we are monitoring the situation closely,” he said.

“The project has temporarily suspended work in the area out of respect for the victims and their families.”

Last week the Post Courier reported 11 villagers were killed in PNG’s Southern Highlands Province (SHP) in a tribal fight tied to a land dispute over the LNG project.

ExxonMobil emphatically denied any LNG connection, while Oil Search, a partner in the $16 billion LNG project, said only two villagers died in the SHP clash.

Thousands of landowners from a variety of groups are set to profit from the LNG project, which will pump gas starting in 2014 from SHP to the plant site near Port Moresby 600km away, before shipping it to mainly Asian buyers for an estimated 30 years.

Landowners spent weeks last year cutting a deal with the PNG government, but some parties believe they missed out or were excluded from the talks.

The plant which will liquefy and load gas for export is expected to become a major pillar of the country’s economy.

But some people in the region are living in extreme poverty and activists say these large-scale projects will only benefit the rich instead of the poor, local population.

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The world’s 370 million indigenous peoples suffer from disproportionately, often exponentially, higher rates of poverty, health problems, crime and human rights abuses, the first ever United Nations study on the issue reported today, stressing that self-determination and land rights are vital for their survival.

Startling figures contained in The State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples include:

- In the United States, a Native American is 600 times more likely to contract tuberculosis and 62 per cent more likely to commit suicide than the general population.

- In Australia, an indigenous child can expect to die 20 years earlier than his non-native compatriot. The life expectancy gap is also 20 years in Nepal, while in Guatemala it is 13 years and in New Zealand it is 11.

- In parts of Ecuador, indigenous people have 30 times greater risk of throat cancer than the national average.

- Worldwide, more than 50 per cent of indigenous adults suffer from Type 2 diabetes – a number predicted to rise.

“Every day, indigenous communities all over the world face issues of violence and brutality, continuing assimilation policies, dispossession of land, marginalization, forced removal or relocation, denial of land rights, impacts of large-scale development, abuses by military forces and a host of other abuses,” the report’s authors said in a news release.

Although indigenous peoples make up only 5 per cent of the global population, they constitute around one third of the world’s 900 million extremely poor rural people. In both developed and developing countries, poor nutrition, limited access to care, lack of resources crucial to maintaining health and well-being and contamination of natural resources are all contributing factors to the terrible state of indigenous health worldwide.

Indigenous peoples experience disproportionately high levels of maternal and infant mortality, malnutrition, cardiovascular illnesses, HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis (TB), while suicide rates, particularly among youth, are considerably higher in many countries, for example up to 11 times the national average for the Inuit in Canada. The Inuit TB rate is over 150 times higher.

The study repeatedly identifies displacement from lands, territories and resources as one of the most significant threats for indigenous peoples, citing many examples, including in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Hawaii, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Colombia.

“When indigenous peoples have reacted and tried to assert their rights, they have suffered physical abuse, imprisonment, torture and even death,” it says, stressing that their rights to their own lands and territories must be respected while they need to develop their own definitions and indicators of poverty and well-being.

“Indigenous peoples suffer from the consequences of historic injustice, including colonization, dispossession of their lands, territories and resources, oppression and discrimination, as well as lack of control over their own ways of life. Their right to development has been largely denied by colonial and modern States in the pursuit of economic growth,” it adds, warning that the importance of land and territories to indigenous cultural identity cannot be stressed enough.

Of the world’s 6,000 to 7,000 languages, a great majority are spoken by indigenous peoples, and many, if not most, are in danger of becoming extinct, with some 90 per cent possibly doomed within the next 100 years. About 97 per cent of the world’s population currently speaks 4 per cent of its languages, while only 3 per cent speaks 96 per cent of them.

Indigenous peoples, who are the stewards of some of the most biologically diverse areas, accumulating an immeasurable amount of traditional knowledge about their ecosystems, also face the dual and somewhat contradictory threats of discrimination and commodification.

They face racism and discrimination that sees them as inferior, yet they are increasingly recognized for their unique relationship with their environment, their traditional knowledge and their spirituality, leading to external efforts to profit from their culture which are frequently out of their control, providing them no benefits, and often a great deal of harm.

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The five-year long fighting between government forces and Houthi fighters in the north of Yemen has cast a shadow on the future of this Arab country.

Houthi fighters, who are Zaidi Shia Muslims, are seeking independence from a government which they say is corrupt and too close to Saudi Arabia.

The latest round of fighting started in Yemen’s north last month and has continued primarily in Saada province.

It is estimated that more than 100,000 people have been displaced in the fighting in Saada and UN aid agencies are warning that Yemen is on the brink of a humanitarian crisis.

Just four hours after a truce was declared on Saturday, fighting had resumed with both sides claiming the other had broken the ceasefire.

Is Yemen heading for another civil war? And how are regional powers influencing events in a country considered a breeding ground for extremist groups?

Inside Story presenter Sohail Rahman is joined by Hakim Almasmari, the editor-in-chief of the Yemen Post, Tahar Qassim, the chairman of the Liverpool Arabic Centre, and Steven Park, the founder of Sema Group, a global security company.

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Armed with spears and blowpipes, hundreds of indigenous tribesmen in the jungles of Borneo island have mounted a last-ditch attempt to try to save their land from logging.

Al Jazeera’s Divya Gopalan reports from Sarawak on the Penan, some of whom still live as nomadic hunter-gatherers in the rainforests of this Malaysian province.

They have been battling loggers since the 1980s, when large-scale industrial logging commenced in the Malaysian state. At times the Penan have faced intimidation and violent crackdowns at the hands of security forces hired by logging firms and Malaysian police.

Meanwhile, vast tracts of Sarawak’s rainforest has been stripped of its valuable timber. Now forestry firms are eyeing forest lands for conversion to oil palm plantations, which will likely leave the Penan even worse off since these estates support less game than even logged-over forest.

More from Mongabay:

Malaysia’s deforestation rate is accelerating faster than that of any other tropical country in the world, according to data from the United Nations. Analysis of figures from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) shows that Malaysia’s annual deforestation rate jumped almost 86 percent between the 1990-2000 period and 2000-2005. In total, Malaysia lost an average of 140,200 hectares—0.65 percent of its forest area—per year since 2000. For comparison, the Southeast Asian country lost an average of 78,500 hectares, or 0.35 percent of its forests, annually during the 1990s.

The Malaysian government failed to provide FAO with figures showing the change in extent of primary forests during the period. Primary forests—forests with no visible signs of past or present human activities—are considered the most biologically diverse ecosystems on the planet.

Declining forest cover in Malaysia results primarily from urbanization, agricultural fires, and forest conversion for oil-palm plantations and other forms of agriculture. Logging, which is generally excluded in deforestation figures from FAO, is responsible for widespread forest degradation in the country, and green groups have blamed local timber companies for failing to practice sustainable forest management. In late 2005—despite photographic evidence suggesting otherwise—the Samling Group denied claims from NGOs accusing the timber giant of recklessly harvesting timber in one of its Sarawak concessions on the island of Borneo.

Forest cover has fallen dramatically in Malaysia since the 1970s. While FAO says that forests still cover more than 60 percent of the country, only 11.6 percent of these forests are considered pristine.

Logging

During the 1980s, rampant logging in the Bornean states of Sabah and Sarawak allowed Malaysia to temporarily outpace Indonesia and become the world’s largest exporter of tropical wood.

On paper, Malaysia has probably one of the best rainforest protection policies in developing Asia, but in practice logging still carries on as it always has. The majority of Malaysia’s remaining forests are managed for timber production, and each state is empowered to formulate forest policy independently. During the past two decades, sustainable forest management has been non-existent. While Malaysia has the policy framework for sustainable forest management in the form of the National Forestry Act of 1984, it has failed to enforce the legislation.

Peninsular Malaysia’s primary forests are mostly gone, though some magnificent forest still exists in Taman Negara, a national park. Scientists believe that at 130 million years old, the rainforests of Taman Negara are the oldest in the world.

Most of Malaysia’s remaining primary forest exists on the island of Borneo in the states of Sabah and Sarawak, but the majority of the forest area in Malaysian Borneo—especially the lowlands—has been selectively logged, resulting in reduced biodiversity. Loggers are now operating in more marginal areas on rugged mountain slopes, which increases the risk of soil erosion and mudslides. In Sabah (Northeastern Borneo), cutting has slowed over the years after a period of rapid deforestation. Timber production appears to have shifted to Sarawak (Northwestern Borneo), where about half the forest cover is slated for logging. About 8 percent of the land area in Sarawak is designated as reserves, but these protected areas are generally understaffed and threatened by illegal logging and encroachment by colonists who settle along logging roads.

In the 1980s, through roadblocks and sabotage of logging equipment, the indigenous Penan of Borneo attempted to stop logging in their traditional homeland. Their protests were ruthlessly and savagely put down by the Malaysian government, which blocked media access to the region until the unrest was settled and the forest dwellers cleared. The attacks on the Penan brought international attention to the logging of Borneo’s forests but appear to have had relatively little long-term impact, since logging increased dramatically in the following years.

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The government in Laos recently passed a new law making it easier for foreigners to invest in the country and buy land.

But some Laotians are concerned that the law puts the country in danger of being overrun, particularly by Chinese investors who have poured more than two billion dollars into Laos in the last nine years.

Al Jazeera’s Wayne Hay reports from the capital, Vientiane.

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Poverty is high in the small south-east Asian country of Laos, with 40 per cent of children stunted from malnutrition. But the country does have one trump card. Its mountains and rivers are ideal for dams, to produce energy that could be sold to power-hungry neighbours like Thailand.

Critics claim these dams will block fish migration, cause massive environmental damage and affect millions of people who depend on the rivers to survive. The Mekong River is the world’s most productive inland fishery and fears are the scores of dams projected will impact the productivity of the fishery.

But the Laos government is determined to press ahead, building eight hydro-electric projects on the Mekong River and another 50 dams on its tributaries.

101 East, with presenter Veronica Pedrosa, looks at whether the dams in Laos can lift a country out of poverty, or leave its people hungry.

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