34-1 Samburu Under Attack

The Healing Spirit

The Healing Spirit For the Kalahari Bushmen, if you’re sick, it’s time for the community to sing, clap, and dance to bring on the spirit to the medicine man so he can heal you. Although the ancestors are gender-neutral about who is powerful enough to hold the spirit, there are more men who take on the role, and many who feel the spirit is too hot to handle. Here a (San?) bushman medicine man…

Tough Love: The Mapuaucaria and the Araucaria tree

Like the rugged landscape that it covers, the Araucaria araucana tree is a fixture in the traditions and culture of the Mapuche people of the Andean foothills in central Chile and southwest Argentina (see page __ for more on the Mapuche). Known by the local people as pewen and by English speakers as the “monkey-puzzle” tree, the Araucaria araucana is native to Chile and…

Mapping Cosmology

Seeing José Benítez Sánchez’s artworks in person is a dramatic experience. His art is intensely colorful and packed with forms and motion. Every square inch is filled, and figures and shapes crowd each other, all formed of yarn pressed onto a beeswax-covered panel. Your eye hardly knows where to land as it tracks the motion and flow of the various elements, and yet for all the artwork’s…

What We Are Doing With Your Money: Papua New Guinea Campaign

Cultural Survival is helping Papua New Guinea organizations raise funds so that Indigenous landowners of Madang province can fight in court against the proposed Ramu Nickel Mine, which would dump millions of tons of toxic waste into coastal waters, threatening marine life and the human communities that depend on it. When the National Court issued an injunction prohibiting the Chinese owners of…

Supporting Aboriginal Athletes

Janice Forsyth, who in 2002 won a prestigious Tom Longboat Award—Canada’s top prize for Aboriginal athletes, recalls having few athletic role models when she grew up as a member of the Fisher River Cree First Nation of Manitoba. As a child, Forsyth knew Indigenous athlete Alwyn Morris had won two medals for Canada in canoeing at the 1984 Olympic Games, but she says she “knew little of his story,…

Conservation Refugees

The only thing that has displaced more people around the world than war is wildlife conservation. For Indigenous Peoples, the consequences are the same.At the Third Congress of the World Conservation Union (also known as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature [IUCN]) in Bangkok, Martin Saning’o, a Maasai representative and the only black man in the room, listened intently to a…

When the Police are the Perpetrators

"I heard bullets, so I rushed out of my house,” said the woman, cradling her bandaged arm. “I was only about five meters outside when a bullet hit me in the arm, just below the elbow. My children were screaming. I saw the police kicking and beating them. Everyone was running and crying.”The woman speaking was sitting in a circle of women in the Samburu village of Loruko, in northern Kenya.…