Protecting their land and lives with their stories

Hi everyone, 

This past Friday was International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples – a date chosen by the UN to highlight not only the specific threats to Indigenous groups the world over, but also to celebrate their knowledge and expertise. One example is environmental protection. Indigenous people are some of the best protectors of our forests and rivers, working with the landscape, not against it, to survive. 

With that in mind, I thought I’d use this opportunity to talk about an investigation my newsroom did back in 2022 into a community whose land was being commandeered by farmers. 

The story takes place in Brazil, in a dense rainforest where the Mỹky people have lived and farmed for centuries. For decades, they’ve been fighting for acknowledgement of the full extent of their territory, as established by technical studies. Some of their territory has been recognised, but local farmers, backed by politicians, challenged that protection, trying to strip away the Mỹky people’s rights to their land. 

Amid the legal uncertainty, non-Indigenous farmers moved on to the land and the federal government did not evict them. At the time of the story, the Brazilian government was led by the populist president Jair Bolsonaro, who championed big business over Indigenous rights.

Xinuxi Mỹky, a village elder, said: “This pasture, where the whites live, was also our village, but now they are raising cattle. The land belonged to us.”

For a story like this, every step of the supply chain needs to be meticulously evidenced. In this case, that meant proving the cattle actually grazed on the land. The destruction was obvious – on one side of a fence was pristine forest; on the other, vast fields where the crops grew only a few inches high. But spotting the cows was key. 

Sure, TBIJ could have flown out a reporter to stake out the field night and day. But the people who cared most were already there, and had the skills to tell their own story. They just needed the tools. So we worked with a group of Mỹky filmmakers, the Ijã Mytyli Cine Collective, led by Typju Mỹky. We bought them a drone, both to gather footage for our reporting, but also to help them monitor their territory against further invasion. 

It was an important moment for the TBIJ team, partnering with an Indigenous community for the first time to tell their story and what mattered most to them.

Typju told me: “The drone has been fundamental for us in supervising and monitoring the territory of the Mỹky people. It’s helped us a lot to monitor, especially during this dry season. We’re mainly monitoring fires.”

Across the Amazon rainforest and Cerrado savannah, fires are often started by illegal land grabbers who burn the forest to clear the land for farming or logging. After Bolsonaro took office, fires surged on land under embargo, a kind of environmental protection meant to stop further deforestation. 

Often, it’s not enough to simply point out where farmers have encroached Indigenous land – they know, and they don’t care. But their international buyers have set higher standards. My colleagues tracked where the cattle being farmed on Mỹky land ended up. 

They discovered that the cattle went to an abattoir linked to a global supply chain that ended up with Nestlé – which uses beef in baby food, pet food and seasoning. Other major companies in this supply chain included McDonald’s and Burger King.

The abattoir at the centre of it all was owned by Marfrig, Brazil’s second-biggest beef company. Marfrig claims it doesn’t purchase livestock from farms that illegally encroach on Indigenous land or destroy sections of rainforest.

Typju told me it’s fundamental “to build this bridge between investigative and journalistic work, to tell a little about the reality of our peoples”. 

He said: “The investigation strengthens us more and more, it encourages us to fight. I want to keep fighting for the ancestral territory, for the Mỹky people.” 

Pssst. A quick nudge if you’re a new subscriber or missed it last week - TBIJ is running its annual survey this month and it’d be great to get your feedback on what we’re doing. Whether you read everything we publish, or just this newsletter, it’s really helpful to know what you want us to do more of, and what you enjoy from us. And, if you like The Spark, feel free to let my higher ups know!

“My work primarily focuses on telling the stories from the inside out and going to the ground where different things are happening. I have a forensic focus on the transition towards a decarbonised economy and electrification because the lion’s share of minerals that are required for those outputs are extracted from Indigenous people’s land.

Australia is quite an apathetic country. Over time, I have become really tired of how journalists tell Indigenous people’s stories. Both you and I could look up at the sky and you might see the stars, but I might be able to see the constellations. Two different people can effectively look in the same direction and see two very different things. I have a desire to bring integrity to the stories that are being told, to make sure that those whose voices and vantage points are traditionally on the outside are privileged and upheld.

Where I live in Darwin, in the Northern Territory of Australia, there’s an island called Groote Eylandt. It’s sparsely populated, and also home to the world’s largest manganese mine. I started looking into the happenings on the island and, working with Rachel Hoffman, we uncovered a broad range of corruption and misuse of public office. The guts of the story is that there’s a non-Indigenous person that has effectively taken control of the body that’s meant to represent the local Indigenous peoples, and he’s used that position and that public office to allegedly enrich himself and those close to him.

The science is pretty conclusive: overexposure to manganese leads to manganese poisoning. And what’s really strange about Groote Eylandt is that you’ve got these people living on the doorstep of one of the world's largest mines, and the manganese dust is in the upper quartiles on the planet. Yet the narrative is that there’s no adverse health impacts. 

But people on the island are exhibiting symptoms. There’s a lot more reporting to be done. 

~ After Ben published the investigation, Mark Hewitt, the non-Indigenous community leader, was referred to the national corruption watchdog. He said the work he did was in line with statutory requirements; you can read his full response in the article here ~

I think what’s been really interesting is the reaction from the community. There’s been quite an outpouring of people who have endeavoured to reach out. The local radio station is basically reading the story out on air most days. 

We received a lot of correspondence from members of that community that are now doing what they can to either move him on from his role or assist with relevant investigations. They want to make sure that they can get to the bottom of the tragic story.

There's a lot more digging still to be done, quite literally, and hopefully we can keep investigating.”

You can listen to Ben speak about his investigation here. He’s also done a fascinating investigation into healthcare in the Doomadgee community and I’d highly recommend watching his work here. 

If you have any other stories told with and by Indigenous people, I’d love to hear about them – I really think these stories are some of the best and most impactful (or spark-y!) journalism around. 

Reporting with communities like this takes care and time. If that’s something you’d like to support, TBIJ has a membership scheme called Insiders, where you can get the inside scoop on everything we report on, and financially support the work we do. It makes it easier to say yes to out of the box ideas like, “Hey, shall we buy these guys a drone?”

Thanks, Sparkies, and until next time,