View previous stories
	Community includes not just humans, but also plants, animals, and Nature itself by Georgia Nicolau LSE Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity   A bill that is threatening indigenous people’s land rights in Brazil and the recently found unmarked graves of indigenous children in Canada are two faces of the same centuries-old political project that prioritizes monoculture in all spheres of life.   This project has led us to where we are now: climate emergency and rising inequality. Are we able to forge ways out of it? Learning from and standing for ones that have long been fighting and defending our future is a good way to start.   If we look at countries from the perspective of the single-story policy, Brazil and Canada have a lot in common. In fact, Jair Bolsonaro, Brazilian current president, was even inspired by Canada’s neighbour, the United States, as one of his quotes during elections was that “The Brazilian cavalry was very incompetent. Competent was the American cavalry, which decimated its indigenous in the past and nowadays does not have this problem in their country.” And by this, he means indigenous rights. So yes, you could say he is keeping his promises by introducing this bill - no surprises.   ‘The only surprising element really is that Canadians are so surprised,’ said Niigaanwewidam Sinclair, associate professor at the University of Manitoba, in Canada. He is referring to the recent discovery of more than a thousand unmarked graves, most of them belonging to indigenous children, that have recently been discovered in Canada.   The graves are located in places where, for 100 years and until the 1990s, government-funded and church-run residential schools operated for indigenous children. The schools were part of a “cultural assimilation” project, also called cultural genocide by the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which completed its work in 2015.   This assimilation project, based on the annihilation of whole communities and their ways of existing, is also the driving force behind the Brazilian Bill 490 that just advanced in Brazilian Congress. The bill is a result of strong ruralists lobbies and goes against both the Brazilian Constitution and Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization (ILO) by affirming that Indigenous peoples only have the right to the lands they occupied at the time of the promulgation of the Brazilian Constitution, in October 1988, which significantly reduces their territories.   To reduce their territory is both to reduce their rights of existence that are connected spiritually, culturally, socially, and economically to their land and to jeopardize future generations that will have to deal with entire territories turned into endless pastures and soy plantations. This is without mentioning the impacts of the climate emergency.   The Bill is just a tiny part of a wider and rather transparent project from the Brazilian government that includes legalizing land-grabbing, the end of environmental licensing, and opening the fence to prior illegal mining and wood extracting. A project that reinforces a concentrated and agribusiness commodity-based economy.   Canada and Brazil are not alone in this. The attack on indigenous rights is in fact one facet of the alliance between the state and multinational mining, oil and energy, agribusiness and other agents of the neoliberal-extractive agenda.   “Here from this land, food is produced for the whole world and you cannot eat money”, said Wrays Perez, the first and former governor, or pamuk, of the self-declared autonomous territory of the Wampis Nation in Peru, to the British Parliament.   The Wampis nation has lived in a 1.4 million-hectare piece of land in the Amazon, at the border of Peru and Ecuador, since they can remember. And they have since worked to protect the forest and keep it alive -- which means defending the land from illegal mining and illegal wood extracting but also protecting it from the alliances between the Peruvian state and regional or multinational companies supported with Global North investment such as Blackrock and Citigroup.   In 2015, the Wampis self-declared an autonomous government and established governance protocols, including elections that recently elected a new pamuk. Built upon their ancient history in building spiritual, cultural, political and economic institutions, around 15,000 Wampis are teaching us that self-determining, commons-based organizations are a big part of the solution for protecting both our common resources and our social systems.   Their assemblies, voting and internal regulations, and their vision of a future that is collective while being both ancestral and innovative, is a prefiguration of a world where the forests are healthy and so are we.   Does that mean the end of the nation-states? On more than one occasion I have seen Wrays speaking of how they recognize themselves as one of the nations of Peru, although they have been in that territory long before the notion of a Peruvian state existed. To declare their autonomy, to empower self-determination does not necessarily mean the end of nations.   Instead, it can mean opening space for other political projects that substitute monoculture for pluriverse, that challenges the notions of development and progress as a straight line, that takes us away from being a hostage of the one size fits all thinking. That brings us into the Commons, going beyond the state and market as we know it.   In a document that recovers the history of the construction of their autonomy process, the Wampis tell us that their ultimate goal is to build the Tarimat Pujut (Buen vivir, vivir grato, vida plena). A notion shared by many indigenous and originary people, Tarimat Pujutm, similarly to Buen Vivir, is based on the belief that to have a “good life” is only possible as part of a community, but community in an expanded sense, not just humans but also plants, animals, and Nature itself.   This is so embedded in their culture that one shared tradition among different nations that I have known is that no one dies alone. Even when someone is dying there is a collective perspective in it. “Nadie se entierra solo”.   To recognize the rights and the ways of indigenous people and to stand with and fight for them is not just about solidarity or condescension. It is a matter of defending precious alternatives of existence.   A world where many worlds fit, as the Zapatistas would say. Pluriverse instead of the monoculture model promulgated by the alliance between state and private interests.   To defend indigenous people, their territories and their knowledge in all countries is to defend our future. Stand with your local indigenous people, hear their stories, learn from how they have, for centuries, lived in coexistence with other species. Push your local investors. And defund deforestation and the colonial-monoculture model.   http://afsee.atlanticfellows.org/blog/2021/georgia-nicolau-what-the-unmarked-graves-in-canada-and-bill-490-in-brazil-tell-us-about-our-future http://afsee.atlanticfellows.org/blog-home Visit the related web page
	Truth and Justification: On the Cruelties Against Indigenous People by Gaen hia uh American Indian Law Alliance, agencies   “Kill the Indian, save the man,” proclaimed Richard Henry Pratt, a veteran officer of the Indian Wars and follower of Gen. George Custer. Pratt was describing the true mission of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, which opened on a former Army base in 1879.   By 1900, there were 150 such schools across the United States, all dedicated to eradicating the culture, language, and customs of Indigenous children.   Europeans sailed across the Atlantic to “discover” the so-called New World, and they kidnapped our siblings, parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and great-grandparents.   In these schools, our names were changed, our heads were shaved, and our clothes and other belongings were taken from us.   Our families endured enormous physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, and sexual abuse. And it’s not ancient history; we live with survivors of those schools.   This summer’s discovery of thousands of unmarked graves of Indigenous children at the sites of Canadian “Indian residential schools” forced a far-too-late reckoning with Canada’s appalling history with its First Nations.   The Canadian government’s 2015 Truth and Reconciliation process identified approximately 4,100 Indigenous children dead at the residential schools. That number continues to grow. Thus far, 2,100 more children have been found at Indian residential schools throughout Canada.   It should be noted that the United States had twice as many of the boarding schools. In fact, the last one in the United States closed in 1996.   To justify the campaign of “deculturation,” which amounted to a form of genocide, the European colonialists relied on the Catholic Church, which authored the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, a series of 15th-century papal bulls that gave European “explorers” the right to claim dominion over lands they “discovered” unoccupied by Christians as terra nullis, or empty lands.   The Doctrine of Christian Discovery created a theological and legal artifice that allowed Catholic colonizers—and later Protestant allies—to rationalize the violent enslavement, exploitation, and extractions they enacted in the name of church and crown.   Five centuries on, the Doctrine of Christian Discovery is still being used—underpinning all Indian land law in this nation and across much of the globe.   In 2005, the doctrine was cited in a Supreme Court decision by Ruth Bader Ginsburg that denied the Oneida Nation—part of the Six Nation Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, which includes the Onondaga Nation of which I am a citizen—the right to repatriate lands within their original treaty footprint.   The cruelty, violence, and brutality were the point of these “educational institutions.” The trauma and harm experienced within these residential schools continues to reverberate within our communities as people grow up without their Indigenous language, cultures, or ways of knowing.   The echoes are heard every time a woman or girl goes missing or is murdered. We feel the impact of the boarding schools in the lateral violence of sexual assault and domestic abuses experienced by far too many Indigenous children. We feel the impact of boarding schools in the hurt and grief, the loss of what could have been—the missing and murdered generations.   Sometimes it is all just so overwhelming that some Indigenous peoples have turned to substance abuse because not feeling is better than this feeling.   But we are still here, practicing our precolonial governments, celebrating our cultures, embracing our languages, and raising our children with the traditions of their ancestors.   Canada likes to draw attention to its Truth and Reconciliation Commission and report, but one can’t reconcile over 500 years of genocide while it is still continuing.   Instead of returning our land, Canada continues to build transcontinental pipelines and the “man camps”—where the men imported to work on the pipelines live—both of which are linked to the scourge of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (#MMIW) on the Indigenous lands.   And yet, the United States has not even made the grudging Canadian attempt to come to grips with its genocidal attempt to erase Indigenous peoples from our homelands.   Like Canada, the United States is reluctant to address centuries of treaty violations, genocide, land theft, ecocide, and more.   Where is President Joseph R. Biden Jr.? We call all US presidents, including Biden, Hanadaga•as, or “destroyer of villages,” ever since George Washington sent troops to destroy our villages and burn our fields because we tried to stay neutral during the American Revolution.   In 2015, Pope Francis expressed “personal anguish” at what he called the “crimes” of the church in colonizing the so-called New World, but he has yet to take steps to formally renounce the Doctrine of Christian Discovery that gave the veneer of legality to that genocidal violence.   I see the effects of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery all around me. Onondaga Lake, the Haudenosaunee’s most sacred site, is poisoned and polluted. Those responsible for stealing and poisoning the lake refuse to return even just a small part of the land to us for our ceremonies and so that we can care for it.   And yet, all across Mother Earth, stories reverberate of Indigenous nations and peoples’ resistance and refusal in the face of the settler colonial state.   We know that each day is a gift from the Creator and every day we start by giving thanks to the Creator, to our Earth, and to all of creation.   We give gratitude to the children of Turtle Island who were sent to “Indian residential schools.” We give gratitude to those who died in those schools, including those who died running away from these institutes of death and destruction. We give gratitude to those who survived these “schools” and came home.   One of the most important teachings of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy is the seven-generation principle. Everything we do is to make the world a better place for the seven generations to come. We say, “NYA•WENHA SKA•NONH”: Thank you for being well.   In Haudenosaunee culture, we also understand the value of ceremony and doing things according to the protocols given to us by our ancestors.   One of our ceremonies is the Edge of the Woods ceremony. We meet visitors at the edge of the woods, use deer skin to wipe away the dust of travel, so that they may see the generations to come clearly. We start at the head and work to the toe, brushing away all of the trials and travails of travel. We take an eagle feather and wipe the dust from their ears, so they may hear the elders clearly. We give them water from Onondaga Lake to drink, so they may speak clearly. After this, we welcome the visitors.   To those who wish to do the work of healing and holding settler colonial nations to account: Meet me at the edge of the woods.   * Gaen hia uh (Betty Lyons) is the Executive Director of the American Indian Law Alliance: http://aila.ngo/   http://ictnews.org/ http://talkpoverty.org/tag/indigenous-people/index.html Visit the related web page
	View more stories