During the war of independence, the Napoleonic generals who arrived in the Spanish towns said: “We have come to bring you freedom, but the first one who gets out of hand we will shoot.” Something similar happens today with the paradox of the Tesla company and other electric car companies, says Caroline Pearce, the director of Survival International, an NGO that defends indigenous and tribal rights.
“It is appalling,†says Caroline Pearce, “that electric car companies sell customers a promise of ethical consumption, while their supply chains destroy uncontacted tribes. It is not at all sustainable to cause the death of communities that live and want to continue doing so in a self-sufficient way. Nor is it respectful of the climate to destroy the forest of the Hongana Manyawasâ€.
The Hongana Manyawa, or Forest People, are one of the last nomadic hunter-gatherer peoples in Indonesia. They live in wild areas of the island of Halmahera, the largest in the Moluccas archipelago, in the Pacific. Its total population is estimated at about 3,000 people. Between 300 and 500 of them have given up on assimilation and live in the jungle, shunning any contact with the outside world.
That outside world has only brought trouble for those in their community who have not followed suit: the importation of disease, acculturation, and the destruction of their habitat. But there is no jungle in Indonesia or Halmahera deep enough to protect the last uncontacted Hongana Manyawa. Its lands are very rich in materials such as nickel or cobalt.
And these elements are very useful for electric car batteries. Several firms, including Tesla, the largest company in the sector in the world, support and finance the plans of the Indonesian Government to make this country one of the main producers of batteries for green mobility. The extractive activities will mean the destruction of “vast areas of forest in the interior of Halmaheraâ€, Survival maintains.
For this organization, it is contradictory that the people of the forest see their universe in danger, “destroyed by companies that seek to project an ecological image and claim to defend a sustainable lifestyle for people who live thousands of kilometers away.” Weda Bay Nickel and the French mining company Eramet have held since 2016 “a huge concession that invades the domains of the Hongana Manyawas.”
Satellite images, which can be seen very graphically here, show the deforestation that the Honga kingdom has suffered in the last six years. Millions of viewers were moved by the fiction of Avatar (2009). But you don’t have to go to the movies to find very real cases with surprising similarities to James Cameron’s film: peoples trying to defend their lands from the ambitions of others.
What a great story for Hollywood! A people threatened, an unequal struggle… Beings that do not renounce nature or the customs of their elders. That they will teach their children and their children’s children to plant a tree when they become parents: the umbilical cord will be buried next to the roots. Trees and humans will thus grow twinned. But it’s not a movie. It is the life the Hongana Manyawa want to live.
