23-4 Visions of the Future: The Prospect for Reconciliation

What Chance For Self-Determination? Farmers and foragers in the forests of northeastern Democratic of Congo

WHAT CHANCE FOR SELF-DETERMINATION? Farmers and foragers in the forests of northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo The peace brokered by retired President Nelson Mandela has held for over 10 years, and the Federation of Congo States has the fastest growing economy in Central Africa. The three states in the federation -- Haut-Congo, Katanga, and Bas-Congo -- with technical assistance from the…

Visions of the Future: The Prospect for Reconciliation

Reconciliation, like self-determination, is a buzz word in Indigenous circles. The co-existence of different cultures within a single, modern pluriethnic state, requires agreed upon understandings of the meanings of these terms - but this poses a problem for those Indigenous peoples who have adopted the rhetoric of self-determination as it applies in international law. In a western political…

To Contact or Not? The Jarwas Of The Andaman Islands

A cluster of 306 islands in the Bay of Bengal makes up India's territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Plane loads of tourists come to the airport at Port Blair to see the tropical rain forests and coral reefs in a place that is rapidly becoming the ecotourism hotspot of India. As the tourists disembark they pass pictures showing a historical prison that once housed many Indian freedom…

The Indigenous People of the Caribbean

Sponsored by the Florida Museum of Natural History and emerging from a conference organized by the Virgin Islands Humanities Council, this volume brings together the researchers from three subdisciplines under one cover: archaeology, ethnohistory, and ethnology. It includes the work of an extraordinary range of specialists and provides a well-rounded introduction to the history of indigenous…

Plan de Vida - an Indigenous initiative for cultural survival

Modernity, Ethnicity and Development from the `Outside' Indigenous peoples are consistently the objects of development politics. Development policies directed at Indigenous societies all too frequently stress the importance of the peoples giving up their culture in order to `develop' and not stand in the way of national modernization efforts. Implicit in such a notion of development is the idea…

Our Land, Our Life, Our Culture: The Indigenous Movement In Guyana

One of the strategies which Indigenous peoples have employed effectively to bind people together politically is a strategy which asks that people imagine a future, that they rise above present day situations which are generally depressing, dream a new dream and set a new vision. The confidence of knowing that we have survived and can only go forward provides some impetus to a process of…

Orang Asli Self-Determination and the Control of Resources

Orang Asli is the collective term for the 19 sub-groups of `first peoples' in Peninsular Malaysia. Numbering 105,000 in 1997, or a mere 0.5 per cent of the Malaysian population, the Orang Asli are largely forest or agriculture based, although several individuals have achieved levels of educational and economic success comparable to those of the dominant population. Nevertheless, it is no hidden…

Mohawk Warrior Leader, Ronald 'Lasagna' Cross

Ronald `Lasagna' Cross died on November 1, 1999, at age 41, from a fatal heart attack. Cross is best known for his role and involvement in the Oka Crisis of 1990 in Quebec, Canada. As a high profile member of the Mohawk Warrior Society, Cross was the center point of the 1990 standoff that occurred between the Mohawks from Kanehsatake and the Quebec provincial police. The confrontation was a…

Into the Life of the Nation: Use and Self-Determination among Traditional Pume Hunter-Gatherers in Venezuela

Into the Life of the Nation: Use and Self-Determination among Traditional Pumé Hunter-Gatherers in Venezuela Introduction People who live by hunting and gathering rely on a substantial land base for food, raw materials, and environmental information. The Pumé of Venezuela are intimately adapted to the savannas they inhabit. Their culture, from religion to social organization, is deeply rooted in…

Health, Disease and Survival: A Biomedical and genetic Analysis of the Orang Asli of Malaysia

Adela Baer's new title on the Orang Asli: Health, Disease and Survival: A Biomedical and Genetic Analysis of the Orang Asli of Malaysia, is a welcome addition to a field that is still plagued by glaring data gaps and misconceptions. The book aims to provide a summary of everything that is known, and what still needs to be known, about Orang Asli health, using a biomedical and sociocultural…

Can Local Communities Conserve Wildlife?

Somewhere in Zimbabwe's northern Zambezi Valley, a local farmer is wielding torches defending his only source of livelihood from a herd of hungry elephants. It is likely that these pachyderms will win the contest, unless the farmer resorts to the use of his rifle. Luckily, the farmer's neighbors join his efforts and together they effectively scare the herd back into the bush. Both elephants and…

The Ainu: Beyond the Politics of Cultural Coexistence

In 1899 the Japanese parliament enacted the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act, a law designed to achieve the assimilation of the Ainu population of northern Japan. The paradoxes of this piece of legislation are evident even from its title. The phrase "former Aborigines" was supposed to emphasize the fact that the Ainu were now citizens of a rapidly modernizing Japan, destined to merge…

Cosmos, Self, and History in Baniwa Religion: for those unborn.

In this book Robin Wright brings together more than two decades of his ethnographic and archival research on the relationships between Baniwa religion, history, and social action in the Brazilian Northwest Amazon. One primary aim of the book is to explain why many Baniwa people converted to Christianity this century after a brief exposure to the teachings of North American evangelical Sophie…

In The Hands Of The Government: The Last Maasai Journey

On January 27, 1979 in the early morning, my father Dopoi Olol-Dapash summoned me to his o'rrippie - a Maasai elder's retirement hut. The morning was bright, cool and a crisp gentle breeze blew into my face as I walked towards the secluded hut that my father had lived for the past thirteen years. My father, the oldest lliving known Maasai, wanted to talk to me about something that had been on his…

Australia At The Crossroads

In Australia, the English settlers neither enacted nor even contemplated a treaty with the indigenous Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders prior to the 1970s. Upon European incursion in 1788, the Indigenous population numbered about 300,000 divided into hundreds of linguistic groups, but by 1900, 75 percent of this population had succumbed to introduced diseases like small pox and tuberculosis…

Alaska Natives: Waves Of Change

With these words thundering above the roar of the river, a Tlingit elder of Southeast Alaska challenged his young followers to ponder on the significance of the waves of change surging across their homeland and revolutionizing their world. Should the listeners be able to answer his questions the elder reasoned they could find the solutions to the cultural survival of Alaska Native people. Alaska…

Reviving Caribs: Recognition, Patronage and Ceremonial Indigeneity in Trinidad and Tobago

THE RESURGENCE and reorganization of the Santa Rosa Carib Community (SRCC) in the city of Arima, Trinidad, raises certain contentious issues where reconciliation and self-determination are concerned, not least of which is the problem of how to define "Indigenous" in Trinidad. In various academic disciplines one finds writers who have long spoken in terms of a total dearth of indigeneity in the…