Indigenous Rights

Through dialogue and shareholder proposals, Trillium Asset Management Corporation (”Trillium”) is helping to voice the concerns of indigenous peoples to corporate decision-makers.
Indigenous peoples worldwide are imperiled by numerous threats to their physical and cultural survival — deforestation, the despoilment of land and water through resource extraction, war, foreign diseases, poaching, and racism.

Corporate activities — particularly resource extraction — are often the medium through which these disasters visit. Many of the ancestral lands of native peoples are rich in natural resources coveted by the timber, oil and gas, mining, tourist and other industries. These areas are also home to diverse and fragile ecosystems whose survival is key to a sustainable human future. It is no exaggeration to say that the continuing assaults on the world’s indigenous peoples and the lands they safeguard could have disastrous impacts on the industrialized world.

What We’re Doing About This Issue

How We Screen on Indigenous Issues

When we consider investing in a company, Trillium examines its behavior and policies toward indigenous communities. We will avoid investing in companies that have demonstrated a pattern of disrespectful or exploitative behavior. If problems emerge at a company in which we are already invested, we will engage with management in dialogue to determine if the company is committed to changing its behavior and redressing past wrongs. We generally view divestment on social grounds as a last resort, to be used only if dialogue and shareholder proposals fail to have a positive impact upon corporate behavior.

Corporate Dialogues and Shareholder Proposals

Trillium is engaging in dialogue with several companies on issues affecting indigenous peoples, and in some cases, we have sponsored shareholder proposals:

• We have been monitoring the Home Depot’s timber sourcing policies for several years since our 1999 shareholder proposal on the topic was followed by company’s subsequent pledge to phase old growth products from its stores. Home Depot has joined the Forest Stewardship Council, which incorporates indigenous rights into their certification process, and the company has committed to increase the percentage of certified wood into their product mix.

• Working with U.S. PIRG, we filed resolutions for the 2001 annual meetings of BP, Chevron, and ExxonMobil addressing drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Proposed drilling in the protected 19 million acres of the Refuge would threaten a vast and unique array of arctic tundra and wildlife, and threaten the Gwich’in and Inupiat communities who have relied for thousands of years on the sanctity of the Refuge and its wildlife.

Although BP successfully used procedural and legal hurdles to block the resolution, the Chevron proposal drew over 11% of the vote, the highest vote at an American company in opposition to an oil company’s expansion into the Arctic Refuge. The same resolution at ExxonMobil will be voted upon in late May 2001. For more information about our Refuge proposals, visit our Refuge page.We were co-sponsors of a proposal at Enron Corporation calling for a report analyzing the biodiversity and indigenous peoples impacts of Enron’s operations worldwide, with an eye towards developing or refining policies addressing these issues. The proposal attracted 4.9% of the vote at the May 2001 annual stockholder meeting. We continue to be in dialogue with the company.

We are in dialogue with several large national retailers on two separate issues: policies related to site development on sacred or ancestral lands, and the marketing of products bearing racist or offensive depictions of Native Americans (such as the Cleveland Indians’ “Chief Wahoo” logo.) In a recent issue of our newsletter Investing For A Better World, we wrote about the struggle of the descendants of Crazy Horse to convince Liz Claiborne to change the name of its “Crazy Horse” clothing line. (Click here to read the article.)