25-3 From Our Readers

Oil Development In Ethiopia: A Threat to the Anuak of Gambela

Anuak (Anywaa) are a Nilotic people indigenous to the fertile Gambela state in southwest Ethiopia, and to the Akobo, Pochalla, and Jokau areas in Sudan. For years they have been the victims of abuses by successive Ethiopian governments. They now face renewed human rights abuses and a development project with the potential to further marginalize them. Anuak History The Ethiopian authorities…

Mexico's indigenous people protest Isthmus plan

Early this year in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the slice of land where the Yucatan Peninsula meets the rest of Mexico, several thousand people gathered to welcome the Zapatista "March for Dignity of the People who are the Color of the Earth." Indigenous Mixe community leader Zoila José Juan gave the welcoming speech and told the Zapatistas: "Our land is in grave danger, because the rich and their…

Mayan Folktales: Folklore from Lake Atitlan, Guatemala

James D. Sexton (Translator) University of New Mexico Press, 1999 ISBN: 0826321046 (Paperback) For many centuries, people have been using myth to explain everything from the world's most universal lessons to practices and standards that are particular to a single culture. As Bill Moyers writes in his book, The Power of Myth, "We tell stories to try to come to terms with the world, to harmonize…

Leaders Speak Out Against Plan Colombia

Leaders representing grassroots people's movements in Latin America visited Cultural Survival and other organizations and universities in Boston before convening in Amherst, Massachusetts, for the first North American Peoples Global Action meeting. Peoples Global Action (PGA) is an international network of grassroots organizations first convened in Prague, Czech Republic in conjunction with the…

Landmark ruling favors Sarawak's indigenous communities

In May, Malaysia's High Court passed a landmark ruling in favor of indigenous peoples. The ruling extended the customary land rights of the native people of Sarawak, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo. Customary land rights for Sarawak's natives will now include not just land immediate to their longhouse communities, but will extend to surrounding areas that include nearby forests, rivers…

Kurds Keeping A Vigil for Human Rights

September 15 marks the 205(th) day of a little-known vigil at Sheridan Circle in Washington, D.C. A group of us, mostly Kurds and some Americans, are keeping an around-the-clock protest watch to effect the freedom of four Kurdish parliamentarians imprisoned in Turkey on trumped-up charges linked to their declaration of a Kurdish ethnicity. Their liberty still remains beyond our reach. Who will…

Indigenous Resistance to New Colonialism

In an era of globalization, leaders of "recognized" nations often discuss the development of indigenous resources without inviting aboriginal leaders to the table. Bolivian indigenous activist Ivan Ignacio, one of many indigenous activists at the second People's Summit in Québec City in mid-April, spoke out against the agreement being discussed by 34 heads of state at the Summit of the Americas…

Global Colonialism, 1492-2001

An official in the National Security Investigation section of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police visited me at my office at the University of Lethbridge less than a month before the Americana Indigenismo forum during the People's Summit in Québec City. Sergeant Grant Cramer had traveled to Lethbridge in Southern Alberta to interrogate me on my organizing work for the upcoming conference. Why did…

From our readers...to our readers

For indigenous Dinka, the threat of annihilation at the hands of Sudan's Islamic north is ever present. Over the past 30 years, more than a million southern Sudanese tribespeople -- like the Dinka and Nuer -- have been slaughtered in this under-reported, so-called religious war. The story of Sudan's "lost boys" -- Dinka youth (mostly orphans) who fled their civil war-torn country and journeyed…

Uru life more than a tourist attraction

Tourism Web sites and brochures lure foreigners to South America's Lake Titicaca with pictures of Uru women wearing bowler hats and bright, layered clothing and of men standing in reed boats. The ads invite travelers to see the people of the floating islands. But outside the tourism sector, the Uru are land dwellers. The Uru Chipayas' origin is disputed, says Darius Morgan, writer and owner of…

Tribe disputes media reports on Mohegan Sun deal

Indian gaming has made headlines this summer as controversy stirs over a Connecticut casino's business dealings, but tribal officials say readers should not believe everything those stories say. On June 14, The Boston Globe published an article by Sean P. Murphy stating that Senator John McCain, acting as a member of the Indian Affairs Committee, called for an investigation into the $1 billion in…

Tribal Agro-Forestry Technology Project

Due to the shrinking rainforest and diminished plant and animal wildlife in Mindanao, the Higaonon indigenous people are impoverished, struggling even to provide basic food to their community. Illegal logging and lowland encroachment continue each day throughout the forest, further devastating the ecological balance of these ancestral lands. In 1999, the Higaonon elders and community envisioned a…

The Thinking People: The U'wa Battle Oxy

Colombia is home to approximately 80 indigenous tribes with more than 700,000 members. (Kotler, 1999) The U'wa now number 5,000 people, and live on their ancestral ground in Colombia, near the Venezuelan boarder. According to John Vidal, "They have lived in the foothills and cloudforests of the Andes in northeast Colombia since, they believe, the world began, and had only limited contact with the…

The Politics Of Negotiating Rights: The Innu Nation Experience

"Survival" is a word the Innu know well. "Not so long ago -- within the last 50 years, in fact -- our parents and grandparents lived on the land. Survival was, for them, part of daily life as a hunting people. They depended on the movements of the caribou, the abundance of small game, and the predicatability of the weather. A small thing -- a simple mistake, a run of bad weather, or a shift in…

The Lakota Fund: Local Institutions & Access To Credit

Access to credit has consistently been identified as one of the key elements necessary to increase economic capital and stimulate economic development, on or off Indian reservations. World Bank economists claim that the problem of gaining access to credit is an important determinant in low-income areas' participation in the economic growth of a country. (Binswanger & Deininger, 1997;…

Plan B: What Is Going To Happen To My People?

Be it for profit, energy, development, or because of a desire to help Indian peoples, outsiders continue dreaming up projects to develop Indian lands. Here in Arizona. thousands of Phoenix commuters zoom down the new 101 Freeway. On one side, they see the Salt River Indian Reservation's agricultural land, casinos, and modest Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) houses. On the other, they see expensive…

The Environmental Crisis in the Philippines

The current relationship in the Philippines between indigenous peoples and the state can be characterized as a legal and institutional stalemate. In Philippine law, indigenous peoples' ancestral domains are recognized under native title as never having been public land. At the same time, Philippine land law is founded on the Regalian Doctrine and its premise that all natural resources in the…

The business of fair trade

Activism is a business. Fair trade organizations are learning that their movement for fair and sustainable labor practices requires good business sense -- not just good intentions. Simply put, fair trade advocates want workers to be paid adequate wages and have good working conditions rather than be subjected to market pressures. The success of the fair trade industry, particularly in the coffee…

Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge

Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley, Editors Tarcher/Putnam, 2001 ISBN 1 58542 091 3 (Hardcover) Had this press release preceded the publication date, it would have been an ideal conclusion to the fascinating book under review. In 60 short, riveting exerpts, the editors chronicle -- through 500 years of colonization -- the changing attitudes of outsiders toward the world's shamans. They also…

Relationships & Community Wellbeing

Djupurula's community looked like so many indigenous villages, dilapidated and silent. It's the silent part I always find most troubling. So often, communal enterprise breaks down, replaced by individual interests that don't really benefit the individual or the tribe. Djupurula, a young Aboriginal man, and I met in the Outback, some 30 miles outside Alice Springs. When he discovered that I was an…

Reconstructing Sovereignty in Alaska

Contrary to the general assumption that sovereignty must rest in a single, monolithic entity, the indigenous population of Alaska is in the process of reconstructing sovereignty within the context of multiple, interrelated institutions, in which nearly 100,000 Native peoples, their cultures, and their general welfare are common denominators. At base, sovereignty may be defined as a people's right…

Project: Life; Programs for Cultural Survival Around the World

Genocide, revolution, and 25 years of war have devastated the fabric of Cambodian society. Millions perished in the killing fields; millions more live with the memory of trauma. Amidst this pain, many Cambodians have turned to their traditional religion, Buddhism, as a source of solace and dignity. Approximately 3000 Buddhist monasteries (wats) were desecrated or razed during the Khmer Rouge…

Project Retonos De Mais

The village of Cantel is located in the western highlands of Guatemala, in the department of Quezaltenango, 150 miles west of Guatemala City. Its population consists primarily of Mayan Indians who speak the Quiche/Kiche dialect, mostly small subsistence farmers who twice a year must supplement their meager incomes by traveling to work on large plantations in the southern coastal lowlands. There,…

Cultural Solutions To Human Needs

The ecological sciences are discovering that the natural and cultural realms are not only more complicated than we think, but more complicated than we can think. Yet development specialists, pressured by their employers to make progress, have not paid attention to this lesson. They continue to devise plans and projects that reflect value systems incompatible with the values of local cultures in…

CS Spring 2001 Student Conference

Communicating in your native language is undeniably empowering. As we have seen with far too many groups, when you lose the opportunity to speak your native language, you also lose a meaningful connection to your people. It is not only words that disappear, but the knowledge of survival, unique perspectives, culture, and diversity in life (see our Summer, 2001 issue). In the face of globalization…

Bhasha Research & Publication Center

Of India's vast population, 90 million belong to the indigenous communities known as adivasis or tribals. Most of the tribal communities live in central India; some live in the northeastern parts of India. Both areas are rich in timber and minerals. Tribals have developed sophisticated knowledge systems related to the folklore, ecology, agriculture, healthcare, art forms, and craft styles of…

Being Human: Ethics, Environment, and Our Place in the World

Anna L. Peterson University of California Press, 2001 ISBN 0 520 22655 0 (Paperback) The underlying theme of Being Human: Ethics, Environment, and Our Place in the World is that a population explosion and the mismanagement of finite resources are soon to impact us all in dramatic fashion, and that nothing short of a new religion -- one beyond the "living earth" Gaia hypothesis -- offers hope of…

At Home In The World

Michael Jackson Duke University Press, 2000 ISBN 0-8223-2538-1 (Paperback) At one time, the books anthropologists wrote were about the peoples -- exotic or familiar -- they studied. Recently, a new genre of anthropological monographs has appeared. These books are not so much descriptions of peoples as autobiographical accounts of anthropologists in the process of studying them. Maybe this…

Algiers joins Berbers in protest

Since he became president in 1999, it seems that Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria has regarded the unrest among the Berber minority as nothing more than smoke; vapor; inconsequential stirrings. But in the last three months, the heat of discontent, smoldering for over a decade under the coals of corrupt governance, unemployment, housing shortages, and general unrest, has grown too dangerous to be…

A Difficult Time: Migrant work and the WoDaaBe in NigerA Difficult Time: Migrant work and the WoDaaBe in Niger

"Tell your people that WoDaaBe are going through a very difficult time," says an elderly WoDaaBe man. His eyes are old but his hand holds mine firmly, a sign of strength. I have heard similar words many times before; words that reflect WoDaaBe nomads' concern for their present situation. Repeated droughts in the Sahel area of Niger have led to losses of livestock and reduced the possibility of…

"...you cannot creep the chasm; you must leap it..."

In 1897 Alfred Deakin urged decisiveness in the slow grind toward federation. Indigenous affairs have also become a slow grind. As in Deakin's day, people pass off "tinkering around the edges" as reform. Proposals creep along, yet are promoted as if representing a leap forward. Aboriginal spokesperson Noel Pearson has read the political climate and offered several elements of a plan. Pearson's…

The Fight To Preserve Shor Culture

In the mountainous regions of southern Siberia, an ancient people is losing ground. The Shor, an indigenous group with Turkic roots in the south Kemerovo Region of Siberia, are trying to hold on to their culture in spite of a declining population and a number of social, economic, and health challenges that threaten to push them to extinction. Like many indigenous populations around the world,…

Oil & Human Rights in Sudan

Until recently, accusations by human rights groups that the oil companies operating in Sudan have helped fuel Sudan's civil war went unheard. But as the national media and the U.S. government turned their attention toward the Sudanese genocide, foreign oil companies in Sudan have faced increasing international pressure to relocate their operations. The search for oil in Sudan is not new.…