35-2 Building an Indigenous City

CSQ 35.2 (Summer 2011): Building an Indigenous City

What We Are Doing With Your Money

AdvocacyAt the tenth session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, which took place May 16-27 in New York, Cultural Survival and FAIRA co-organized a side session titled: Creating Community Dialog around the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples through the Use of Community Controlled Media.And at this year's conference organized by International Funders for Indigenous…

The New Urban Jungle

For many Indigenous people in Peru, the best way to keep their land is to move to the city and keep a foothold in both worlds. It’s homesteading in reverse, giving Indigenous people new options and creating a new kind of city, one built on their terms. My people, we are fighters for the Amazon, warriors who have long struggled for our territory. Finally, yes, finally, we now have lands in the…

Not in Our Name

Editor’s Note: Pohnpei is one of the four Federated States of Micronesia, along with Yap, Chuuk, and Kosrae. The people of Pohnpei are mostly Micronesian, with their own language and unique traditions, and the government of Pohnpei has an unusual structure, in which familiar elected representatives in a legislature coexist with the state’s five traditional kingdoms and their respective kings and…

Safe Harbor: A portrait of an Indigenous environmentalist and his community

Ervin Hogdson leaned forward in the dóri (dugout canoe) his father handcrafted from a massive rainforest tree. Grown and made on community lands, the prow of the boat rose and fell pointing toward the island village of Rama Cay (pronounced “Key”), the figure-eight-shaped sanctuary in the center of the lagoon, which is the Rama capital island, officially Caribbean Nicaragua. Ervin’s people, the…

New Old Hunters: Inupiaq people organize to revive subsistence food culture

The Inupiaq people of Northwest Alaska have maintained a close connection with the creatures found on land, in freshwater rivers, and at sea for thousands of years. The seasonal relationship with berry picking, seal hunting, fishing, and other subsistence ways of life kept communities nourished. Mattresses, mittens, and clothing are made from these animals. Intertribal trading of foods and other…

The Path of Peace

Maria Alice Campos-Freire is one of the Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers, a group of women dedicated to promoting peace and understanding through Indigenous wisdom. Campos-Freire is from Brazil, where she is a madrinha (spiritual leader) of the Santo Daime community Céu do Mapia and the founder of Centro Medicina do Floresta (Forest Medicine Center). She spoke in November 2010 at the Earth…

VISUAL PROTEST! AN INDIGENOUS PERSPECTIVE

In April, the Patti and Rusty Rueff Galleries at Purdue University presented a solo retrospective highlighting my documentary photography of various social protest and cultural events as both an observer and participant. Beginning with the first Longest Walk, which took place in 1978, and culminating with images from 2010, the photographs affirm the many issues affecting Indigenous and other…

Bringing Back Language

Native languages are threatened to the point of extinction all over the world, and nowhere is this more apparent than on the Australian continent. Of the 500 to 600 dialects and 250 to 300 different language groups spoken within the past 100 years, only 20 have more then 1,000 speakers today, and local dialects are being lost at an even quicker rate. This, combined with the prevalence of “…

Letter from the Editor: The Tough Get Going

If you’ve been reading Cultural Survival Quarterly magazine for any length of time, you will have been exposed to what must seem like an endless stream of outrages committed against Indigenous Peoples. And it’s easy, reading about these situations, to feel sorry for the Indigenous communities affected, particularly if you are not Indigenous yourself. But pity is actually an inappropriate response…