10-2 Land Rights: Strategies for Survival

Warfare in Polonoroeste

Indigenous People Fight to Save Their Lands On four different occasions, in just one and a half years, from July 1984 to December 1985, indigenous peoples of five different tribes in one region of the Brazilian Amazon Basin, have organized armed expeditions in order to protect their own lands which white squatters had invaded. This region, about the size of Connecticut, is one part of the area…

Tribal Leadership vs. Congress I in India

The Constitution of India, under Articles 244, 330, 332 and 335, provides for the administration of the scheduled tribes in scheduled areas. According to the 1981 census, the population of the scheduled tribes has risen to over 50 million. Scattered over a vast area, they form a significant minority in an ocean of caste peoples. Considering their economic backwardness, the government has…

The Hunter-Gatherer Myth in Southern Africa

Preserving Nature or Culture? It would be a biological crime if we allowed such a peculiar race to die out, because it is a race which looks more like a baboon than a baboon itself does...We have so far got about 20 who are just about genuine...It is our intention to leave them there (in the park) and to allow them to hunt with bows and arrows but without dogs. We look upon them as part of the…

The Andaman Tribes - Victims of Development

The current position and future of four distinct negrito tribes of the Andaman Islands, a Union Territory of India in the Bay of Bengal, is disturbingly demoralizing. The past and present trends in these islands provide a textbook case study of the dangers of too-sudden contact with indigenous and isolated peoples, and of the invariable tendencies of land imperialism which governments all over…

Seringueiros Defend the Rainforest in Amazonia

Seringueiros Meet with Leaders of UNI An unprecedented congress of 130 Amazonian seringueiros (rubber tappers) from Acre, Amazônas and Rondônia held last October 11-17 in Brasilia, may have initiated new ways to defend the cultures the rainforest harbors. The seringueiros elected a National Council of Seringueiros, and drafted a key proposal to establish "extractive reserves." Modeled on the…

Scrap-the-Dam Signature Campaign in Sarawak

In the Upper Rajang basin of Sarawak, a group of native representatives from 15 longhouse communities have sworn to defend their land from being destroyed, with their lives. At stake is not only their land, but their culture as well, if the government's proposed $10 billion Bakun Dam project is implemented. Led by Tua Kampung Uloi Lian and Tuai Rumah Nyaban Kulleh, both of Long Gang, the group,…

Refugees Flee Ethiopian Collectivization

Refugees from the highlands of Ethiopia's eastern Hararghe Province have been arriving in Somalia's Tug Wajale camp since December 1985. They have described in detail the forced relocation into central villages and the registration and subsequent nationalization of their animals, crops and equipment which precipitated their flight. Their reports indicate that Ethiopian authorities began their…

Federation of Indian Organizations of Napo-FOIN

One of Cultural Survival's priorities in the area of project support is to provide funding on a limited scale to Indians attempting to form ethnic organizations or federations for the purpose of directing and controlling their social and economic development. The Federation of Indian Organizations of the Napo, FOIN, is an ethnic federation representing the interests of approximately 25,000…

Brazil Restructures Its Indian Agency

On March 19, Brazilian Interior Minister Ronaldo Costa Couto took the country's indigenists and the staff of FUNAI by surprise; the previous night he had signed Decree no. 92.470, authorizing the decentralization of FUNAI and transferring its major functions-notably those of identifying and demarcating indigenous lands for reservations, and making decisions about exploitation of natural resources…

Anticipating Colonos and Cattle in Ecuador and Colombia

Awa-Coaiquer Land and Resources Management Project Who and where on earth are the Awa-Coaiquer Indians? Such questions would have remained largely unanswered, even in Ecuador and Colombia, but for an article in the Sunday color supplement of Quito, Ecuador's El Comercio printed in early 1982. Part of the explanation is geographic; the people live in dispersed settlements that span the Ecuador-…

Navajo Forced to Relocate

Interviews with those who refuse to leave Fueled by a confluence of events shaped by the passage of Public Law 93-531 in 1974, the tragedy the Navajo face is complicated and devastating. Some supporters of the law argue that it seeks to settle an alleged century-old dispute between the Navajo and Hopi tribes regarding land use within an 1882 Executive Order Reservation President Chester A. Arthur…

Native Customary Rights in Sarawak

Loggers Exploit Tribal Communities Development fever has struck the timber-rich state of Sarawak, East Malaysia, a haven for loggers. In order to feed and sustain the timber industry, indiscriminate logging has deforested hundreds of hectares of virgin rainforest annually, not only drastically changing the physical landscape of Sarawak but cheating natives of tribal land and culturally changing…

Muellamues - A Colombian Community Under Attack

Muellamués - A Colombian Community Under Attack The indigenous community of Muellamués, Colombia, located on the Colombia-Ecuador border, 25 km northwest of the Colombian city of Ipiales, has experienced an unprecedented wave of official repression this past year. Since November 17, 1984, when the Muellamueses occupied the hacienda Simancas, the community has suffered a series of violent attacks…

Military Rule Threatens Guatemala's Highland Maya Indians

Today, in probably the most systematic form since the Spanish conquest, the culture and traditions of Guatemala's highland Mayan Indians are under attack. The military regimes that have ruled Guatemala since its brief democratic "spring" ended in 1954 previously took little interest in the country's indigenous groups, which make up about 60 percent of the population. However, since 1978 - when…

Feeding the Hand That Bites

Since October 1984, the world-wide publicity blitz about the Ethiopian famine has resulted in the single largest outpouring of humanitarian assistance in human history. This assistance, however, has tragically reinforced the conditions that led to the famine rather than relieved them. Turning their heads the other way. Western agencies have neither assessed the causes of the famine nor evaluated…