Many people know that the resource scramble is escalating, with the age-old quest for fuel joined by new determination to secure claims to seeds and minerals. This intensified multinational assault is largely waged against resource-rich indigenous lands. In the Philippines over the last two decades alone, foreign companies have gobbled up over a quarter of the land, mostly on indigenous people’s territory. But increased exploitation has been met with increased opposition: Indigenous peoples are fighting back. In Wisconsin, an Ojibwe tribe waged a twenty-eight-year battle against some of the world’s largest mining corporations to preserve their sacred rice beds from mining pollution-and won. In Nigeria, indigenous women successfully shut down oil production as part of their fight to preserve their subsistence farming and fishing economy. The triumphs of such struggles have inspired similar movements in communities around the world. Dirty Gold demonstrates how these movements’ political demands have energized peasant and other non- indigenous communities.

Indigenous peoples are working together to assert their sovereignty, using the language of human rights and the political might of transnational solidarity networks to challenge resource colonialism and environmental racism. A professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Al Gedicks is a longtime environmental/native solidarity activist who has served as the director of the Center for Alternative Mining Development Policy.