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The Great Pueblo Revolt - New General Megathread for the 10th of August 2023 (hexbear.net)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by thelastaxolotl@hexbear.net to c/indigenous@hexbear.net
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The Great Pueblo Revolt, or Pueblo Revolt (1680–1696), was a 16-year period in the history of the American southwest when the Pueblo people overthrew the Spanish conquistadors and began to rebuild their communities. The events of that period have been viewed over the years as a failed attempt to permanently expel Europeans from the pueblos, a temporary setback to Spanish colonization, a glorious moment of independence for the Pueblo people of the American southwest, or part of a larger movement to purge the Pueblo world of foreign influence and return to traditional ways of life. It was no doubt a bit of all four.

The Spanish first entered the northern Rio Grande region in 1539 and its control was cemented in place by the 1599 siege of Acoma pueblo by Don Vicente de Zaldivar and a few score of soldier colonists from the expedition of Don Juan de Oñate. At Acoma's Sky City, Oñate's forces killed 800 people and captured 500 women and children and 80 men. After a "trial," everyone over the age of 12 was enslaved; all men over 25 had a foot amputated. Roughly 80 years later, a combination of religious persecution and economic oppression led to a violent uprising in Santa Fe and other communities of what is today northern New Mexico. It was one of the few successful—if temporary—forceful stoppages of the Spanish colonial juggernaut in the New World.

Life Under the Spanish

As they had done in other parts of the Americas, the Spanish installed a combination of military and ecclesiastical leadership in New Mexico. The Spanish established missions of Franciscan friars in several pueblos to specifically break up the Indigenous religious and secular communities, stamp out religious practices and replace them with Christianity. Active efforts to convert the Pueblo people to Christianity involved destroying kivas and other structures, burning ceremonial paraphernalia in public plazas, and using accusations of witchcraft to imprison and execute traditional ceremonial leaders.

The government also established an encomienda system, allowing up to 35 leading Spanish colonists to collect tribute from the households of a particular pueblo. Hopi oral histories report that the reality of the Spanish rule included forced labor, the seduction of Hopi women, raiding of kivas and sacred ceremonies, harsh punishment for failing to attend mass, and several rounds of drought and famine.

Growing Unrest

While the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 was the event that (temporarily) removed the Spanish from the southwest, it was not the first attempt. The Pueblo people had offered resistance throughout the 80-year period following the conquest. Public conversions didn't (always) lead to people giving up their traditions but rather drove the ceremonies underground. The Jemez (1623), Zuni (1639) and Taos (1639) communities each separately (and unsuccessfully) revolted. There also were multi-village revolts that took place in the 1650s and 1660s, but in each case, the planned revolts were discovered and the leaders executed.

The Pueblos were independent societies before Spanish rule, and fiercely so. What led to the successful revolt was the ability to overcome that independence and coalesce. Some scholars think it was a millenarian movement, and have pointed to a population collapse in the 1670s resulting from a devastating epidemic that killed off an estimated 80% of the Indigenous population, and it became clear that the Spanish were unable to explain or prevent epidemic diseases or calamitous droughts. In some respects, the battle was one of whose god was on whose side: both Pueblo and Spanish sides identified the mythical character of certain events, and both sides believed the events involved supernatural intervention.

Nonetheless, the suppression of Indigenous practices became particularly intense between 1660 and 1680, and one of the main reasons for the successful revolt appears to have occurred in 1675 when then-governor Juan Francisco de Trevino arrested 47 "sorcerers," one of whom was Po'pay of San Juan Pueblo.

Leadership

Po'Pay (or Popé) was a Tewa religious leader, and he was to become a key leader and perhaps primary organizer of the rebellion. Po'Pay may have been key, but there were plenty of other leaders in the rebellion. Domingo Naranjo, a man of African and Indigeneous heritage, is often cited, and so are El Saca and El Chato of Taos, El Taque of San Juan, Francisco Tanjete of San Ildefonso, and Alonzo Catiti of Santo Domingo.

Under the rule of colonial New Mexico, the Spanish deployed ethnic categories ascribing "Pueblo" to lump linguistically and culturally diverse people into a single group, establishing dual and asymmetric social and economic relationships between the Spanish and Pueblo people. Po'pay and the other leaders appropriated this to mobilize the disparate and decimated villages against their colonizers.

August 10–19, 1680

After eight decades of living under foreign rule, Pueblo leaders fashioned a military alliance that transcended longstanding rivalries. For nine days, together they besieged the capital of Santa Fe and other pueblos. In this initial battle, over 400 Spanish military personnel and colonists and 21 Franciscan missionaries lost their lives: the number of Pueblo people who died is unknown. Governor Antonio de Otermin and his remaining colonists retreated in ignominy to El Paso del Norte (what is today Cuidad Juarez in Mexico).

Witnesses said that during the revolt and afterward, Po'Pay toured the pueblos, preaching a message of nativism and revivalism. He ordered the Pueblo people to break up and burn the images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and other saints, to burn the temples, smash the bells, and separate from the wives the Christian church had given them.

Revitalization and Reconstruction

Between 1680 and 1692, despite the efforts of the Spanish to recapture the region, the Pueblo people rebuilt their kivas, revived their ceremonies and reconsecrated their shrines. People left their mission pueblos at Cochiti, Santo Domingo and Jemez and built new villages, such as Patokwa (established in 1860 and made up of Jemez, Apache/Navajos and Santo Domingo pueblo people), Kotyiti (1681, Cochiti, San Felipe and San Marcos pueblos), Boletsakwa (1680–1683, Jemez and Santo Domingo), Cerro Colorado (1689, Zia, Santa Ana, Santo Domingo) There were many others.

The architecture and settlement planning at these new villages was a new compact, dual-plaza form, a departure from the scattered layouts of mission villages. Liebmann and Pruecel have argued that this new format is what the builders considered a "traditional" village, based on clan moieties. Some potters worked on reviving traditional motifs on their glaze-ware ceramics, such as the doubled-headed key motif, which originated fro, 1400–1450.

New social identities were created, blurring the traditional linguistic-ethnic boundaries that defined Pueblo villages during the first eight decades of colonization. Inter-Pueblo trade and other ties between Pueblo people were established, such as new trade relationships between Jemez and Tewa people which became stronger during the revolt era than they had been in the 300 years before 1680.

Reconquest Attempts by the Spanish to reconquer the Rio Grande region began as early as 1681 when the former governor Otermin attempted to take back Santa Fe. Others included Pedro Romeros de Posada in 1688 and Domingo Jironza Petris de Cruzate in 1689—Cruzate's reconquest was particularly bloody, his group destroyed Zia pueblo, killing hundreds of residents. But the uneasy coalition of independent pueblos wasn't perfect: without a common enemy, the confederation broke into two factions: the Keres, Jemez, Taos and Pecos against the Tewa, Tanos, and Picuris.

The Spanish capitalized on the discord to make several reconquest attempts, and in August of 1692, the new governor of New Mexico Diego de Vargas, initiated his own reconquest, and this time was able to reach Santa Fe and on August 14 proclaimed the "Bloodless Reconquest of New Mexico." A second abortive revolt occurred in 1696, but after it failed, the Spanish remained in power until 1821 when Mexico declared independence from Spain.

Ysleta del Sur Pueblo

The Tribal community known as "Tigua" established Ysleta del Sur in 1682. After leaving the homelands of Quarai Pueblo due to drought, the Tigua sought refuge at Isleta Pueblo and were later captured by the Spanish during the 1680 Pueblo Revolt and forced to walk south for over 400 miles. The Tigua settled and built the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo and, soon after, the acequia (canal) system that sustained a thriving agricultural-based community.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PUEBLO REVOLT

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How indigenous conservation protects Canada's environment (www.bbc.com)
submitted 1 year ago by thelastaxolotl@hexbear.net to c/indigenous@hexbear.net
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In Canada, centring conservation with the country's indigenous peoples is allowing its original stewards to reconnect to their land and culture – and proving remarkably effective.

Every year, when the frozen streams have melted and greenery emerges after months of winter stillness, Dolcy Meness knows it's time. Packing their truck, she and a colleague set off through the densely forested hills of Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg territory, an Algonquin First Nation in the province of Quebec.

After a few hours they reach their destination. Parking the truck, they make their way through forest until reaching a narrow stream. Kneeling on its mossy bank, Meness carefully places a small device in the water.

Over a period of one year, the device will collect data on the water's temperature, PH, salinity and conductivity.

But even before any data is gathered, Meness and her colleague are on the look out for indications that something is off. Seeing an unusually high amount of sand in streams – which leaks into the water from logging roads – is one sign they look out for, based on indigenous knowledge, says Meness.

"Brook trout use creeks, but they like rocks. Sand isn't a good breeding place for them, so they have to look for a different place. It creates a change that shouldn't be there," she says.

Using a "two-eyed seeing approach", Meness and fellow Nagadjitòdjig Akì guardians draw on the strengths of indigenous knowledge alongside Western science to monitor the impacts of extractive industries, like logging, on their territory.

Being in this job gives me in-depth knowledge about my own history, culture and teachings. [It's] a long journey of re-learning – Dolcy Meness By collecting data on water quality in streams and rivers, they help determine if companies are adhering to regulations.

"We can go to them and say: 'You're not doing your job properly, you're destroying creeks when you're logging, you're not following your own rules,'" says Meness.

Over the year, Meness and her colleagues will repeat their data gathering task many times. Working alongside non-governmental organisations, they're responsible for 50 sites throughout the Ottawa River watershed, which encompasses Kitigan Zibi traditional territory.

They are also part of a flourishing movement of 1,000 "Indigenous Guardians" across Canada who are stewarding their traditional lands and waters and redefining what conservation can – and many argue should – look like.

Amidst global ecological collapse, which some scientists call the "sixth mass extinction", there is increasingly widespread acknowledgement that indigenous people can demonstrate a more sustainable path forward – one that other societies could learn from. This is due to both their relationship with the environment, based on respect and reciprocity, and their substantial but often undervalued contributions to biodiversity conservation.

In Canada, where there are feelings among many that colonialism is a historical problem but one still rooted in the present, centring conservation with the country's original stewards is allowing indigenous people to reconnect to their land and culture. It is also reshaping relations between indigenous nations and non-indigenous Canada, presenting an opportunity for genuine reconciliation.

"Being in this job gives me in-depth knowledge about my own history, culture and teachings," says Meness. "[It's] a long journey of re-learning."

full article kkkanada

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Plantation Disaster Capitalism: Native Hawaiians Organize to Stop Land & Water Grabs After Maui Fire (www.democracynow.org)
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With the death toll from the Maui wildfires at 111 and as many as 1,000 still missing, we speak with Hawaiian law professor Kapuaʻala Sproat about the conditions that made the fires more destructive and what’s yet to come for residents looking to rebuild their lives. Decades of neocolonialism in Hawaii have redirected precious water resources toward golf courses, resorts and other corporate ventures, turning many areas into tinderboxes and leaving little water to fight back against the flames.

Now many Hawaiians say there is a power grab underway as real estate interests and other wealthy outsiders look to buy up land and water rights on the cheap as people are still reeling from the loss of their family members, livelihoods and communities. “Plantation disaster capitalism is, unfortunately, the perfect term for what’s going on,” says Sproat, who just published a piece in The Guardian with Naomi Klein.

She is professor of law at Ka Huli Ao Native Hawaiian Law Center and co-director of the Native Hawaiian Rights Clinic at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa School of Law. “The plantations, the large landed interests that have had control over not just the land, but really much of Hawaii’s and Maui Komohana’s resources for the last several centuries, are using this opportunity, are using this time of tremendous trauma for the people of Maui, to swoop in and to get past the law.”

Full Interview Transcript and Audio

amerikkka

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Ecuador’s oil referendum polarises Indigenous groups | Dialogo Chino (dialogochino.net)
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Óscar Machoa sits on the floor of his community’s large central hall, the maloca, cutting leaves and watching patiently as he heats them over a fire. Now aged 67, his hands show the signs of years of collecting plants, of craft and building work.

He is the healer of the Kichwa community of San Carlos, charged with passing on ancestral knowledge to his neighbours in the canton of La Joya de los Sachas, in Ecuador’s eastern province of Orellana – home to a portion of the Yasuní National Park, one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, which will this week be the focus of a national referendum over the future of oil reserves located beneath its soils.

As soon as he hears the word “oil”, Machoa’s patient attitude changes. “We don’t want anything to be extracted. I remember all the things they promised us and never fulfilled,” he says forcefully. The healer talks of a time nearly 60 years ago, recalling the beginnings of oil extraction in the area, led by Texaco (now owned by Chevron), and which saw more than 2 million hectares of the Ecuadorian Amazon affected over almost 30 years of exploitation.

“That’s when our nightmare began,” Machoa continues. “They told us they would use state-of-the-art technology, but spills became very common. Rivers were polluted, fish died, animals died, and nobody supported us. My grandparents, my parents, we grew up here. That’s why we are going to defend Yasuní for our children.”

This Sunday, 20 August, Ecuadorians will head to the polls for a general election to decide the country’s next president and parliament – clouded by the recent murder of candidate Fernando Villavicencio – as well as a parallel referendum to decide whether to continue or ban exploitation of the Ishpingo, Tambococha and Tiputini (ITT) oil fields, also known as Block 43, located within the Yasuní National Park.

The Kichwa healer says he is determined to vote “Yes” to block their exploitation, a position shared by many of Ecuador’s Amazonian population – though not universally. As the vote nears, the issue has polarised some Indigenous groups, both near and far from Yasuní itself, reflecting long-standing debates over the benefits and damage of oil extraction, and the extent of state support for the remote communities.

Full Article

wiphala

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Mobilization to demand an end to the war against the Zapatistas (www.jornada.com.mx)
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As part of the Declaration of the Third National Assembly for Water and Life, a "national mobilization against the war faced by the Zapatista peoples and all the indigenous communities of Mexico" will be called for October 12.

In this regard, Carlos González García, follow-up coordinator of the National Indigenous Congress-Indigenous Council Government (CNI-CIG) told La Jornada that on that day "activities are generally carried out to make clear the resistance of our peoples, and the opposition to the whole process of conquest and historical domination that has been imposed on the original peoples.

He specified that the CNI was founded on October 12, 1996 (it will be 27 years old) and that is why the proposal is to carry out "a day of struggle to demand a halt to the war against the Zapatista peoples and the original peoples of the country, and this includes the context of privatization and dispossession of water". In the CNI, "it is only going to be discussed at the beginning of September, but the idea is that it will be a national day".

In a press conference, members of the National Assembly for Water and Life (ANAVI) also demanded a "halt to state repression and drug trafficking crimes directed against the people of Santa María Ostula", as well as an end to the "systematic violence in Querétaro" against those who defend water, springs and territory, mostly ejidos".

Hortensia Telésforo, who was one of the coordinators of the sit-in held at the end of last year by residents of San Gregorio Atlapulco, Xochimilco to demand the removal of 1.6 kilometers of pipeline, said the National Water Commission (Conagua) is one of the entities that contributes to the current situation of unequal access to water in the country, because "it allows it", and in this sense the Third Assembly also agreed to hold a national demonstration against the Conagua on September 25.

"It has become very clear who is implementing this situation throughout the country. We call on all citizens to demonstrate that the Conagua is the main responsible for the institutionalization and instrumentation of the dispossession of water in our territories".

Also in the assembly, held on August 12 and 13, it was agreed that the Fourth National Assembly for Water and Life will be held in the communities that defend the territory in Tlaxcala between February and March of next year.

González García explained that "specifically this National Assembly in Defense of Water and Life, what it promotes is that beyond modifying legal frameworks, to carry out a self-managing exercise of water, because we do not see the will or interest on the part of the government or legislators to respect the right to water".

Since the government of Enrique Peña Nieto, organizations and collectives have pressured for "the enactment of a water law, in accordance with the constitutional reform that recognized the right to water as a human right; it is a pending issue that was not addressed by the previous government, that was not addressed by Congress during the previous six-year term, and that has not been addressed today either.

No progress has been made in this area, because "the interests behind water are enormous", close to "60 percent of water rights are in the hands of soft drink companies, breweries, and some mining companies; and another part goes to domestic consumption in urban areas", among others.

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Mapuche political prisoners on life-threatening hunger strike: Gendarmerie is responsible, government turns a deaf ear (hexbear.net)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by thelastaxolotl@hexbear.net to c/indigenous@hexbear.net
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At least two of the hunger strikers were transferred to the Angol Hospital, after more than 100 days on strike and several days on dry strike, due to the lack of response from the government and Gendarmerie. Solidarity with their demands and for the fulfillment of all their demands.

In August 2022 the Mapuche political prisoners in the Angol prison had reached an agreement with the Gendarmerie where formal aspects were agreed upon for the application of ILO Convention 169 to which the State of Chile is a signatory, in particular for the application inside the Angol prison for Mapuche prisoners, whether they were charged or convicted.

There, formulas were established to regulate visits, the entry of food and particularly for the guarantee of places where they can express their spirituality.

But on May 7, 2023 this agreement ceased to apply after a conflict occurred with prison guards, where community members were charged with false accusations of an alleged kidnapping of guards. This also implied the dispersal of the political prisoners to other prisons, which was later revoked by the Supreme Court, returning the prisoners to the Angol prison, but without respecting the agreement originally signed and agreed upon at the end of last year.

As a result, they began a hunger strike that has lasted more than 100 days, without any response from the government or the gendarmerie. The intransigence of the gendarmerie and deaf ears on the part of the authorities has led to the point that twelve of the political prisoners decided to begin a dry strike in the face of the government's inability to reach an agreement.

It is necessary to point out that many of the strikers were persecuted by the Operation Hurricane set-up when they were minors. On the other hand, the lack of attention from the Chilean State institutions is total, which is reflected in the fact that they have not even received a visit from the National Institute of Human Rights (INDH) during the more than 100 days of hunger strike.

It should be noted that the demand is absolutely minimal: that even when deprived of their liberty they can continue to exercise their cultural practices as Mapuche, for the correct application of ILO Convention 169, which is in force and which every State institution has the obligation to apply. In other words, they are requesting the retaking of an agreement that had already been previously reached in its application, nothing extraordinary or outside the law.

For their part, the business media and the traditional parties have promoted a campaign to demonize the demands of the strikers, who have even been accused of having alleged "privileges", which has been repeatedly denied by the strikers themselves and their spokespersons.

The political attitude of punishment by the Gendarmerie against the community members is striking, without respecting the established agreements, ignoring basic agreements that have been applied for more than 15 years in prisons where there are Mapuche prisoners. This institution is responsible for the situation, and the government on which it depends must respond.

At the time of writing this note, the state of health of the strikers is very serious, four of them are in critical condition, and at least two of them have been transferred to the Angol Hospital.

The treatment of this government with the community members on hunger strike contrasts clearly with the treatment it has had with the forestry businessmen, with the big farmers and with the right wing of the zone, applying a hard hand against the communities in resistance, prolonging for more than a year the State of Emergency in the zone, practically doing the dirty work that Piñera's own government was unable to carry out.

The Mapuche political prisoners on dry strike are:

  • Simon Huenchullan
  • Alejandro Liguen
  • Miguel Torres
  • Antoni Torres
  • Sergio Huentecol
  • Boris Llanca
  • Juan Penchulef
  • Pedro Palacios
  • Jorge Palacios
  • Alexis Huenchullan
  • Sebastian Marillan
  • Joaquin Millanao

We support the demands of the Mapuche political prisoners, we demand respect for the agreement reached and the application of Convention 169 and the fulfillment of all the demands of the strikers. We demand an end to the militarization of Wallmapu, the release of political prisoners and the return of ancestral lands.

original article

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Native Hawaiians fear Maui wildfire destruction will lead to their cultural erasure, 'This is, for us, genocide,' says community leader Keʻeaumoku Kapu (www.cbc.ca)
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Keʻeaumoku Kapu has been handing out water, clothes, and emergency supplies to families in need out of the Walgreens parking lot in Lahaina, Maui. He said it is a way to keep himself occupied while he grieves the losses of his community.

"I'm afraid we're not going to recover from this," said Kapu, speaking to CBC from his cellphone at the distribution centre Monday.

Kapu is a Kanaka Maoli (a Hawaiian word for their Indigenous people) community leader in Lahaina, and head of the Nā ʻAikāne o Maui Cultural Center — which was destroyed by the fire that ripped through Lahaina.

While members of the community are still grappling with their immediate needs and the death toll from the fire is still being counted, Kapu said he is "frantic" to make sure he is included in the conversations that are happening about what is next for Lahaina.

"I'm hoping that we can get over this hurdle, but at the same time the fear of being erased ..." said Kapu.

"Because our island is now turned into a cheaper commodity because there's nothing more important to save here, you have people coming in willing to buy burned-out places."

Maui land grabs

Kapu said his family and other members of his community have been contacted by realtors asking to buy their burned-up property.

The office of the governor of Hawaii released a statement warning Maui residents about predatory buyers trying to capitalize on their fear and the financial uncertainty for those who have lost their homes.

In a press conference Wednesday, Governor Josh Green said he is working with the attorney general to put a moratorium on property sales in West Maui.

Social media posts from residents are pleading with people to not sell their properties to these realtors, fearing it will lead to Native Hawaiians being displaced from their homelands.

A non-profit organization called Hawai'i Alliance for Progressive Action has started an online petition to call on governments to use their powers to stop Maui land grabs, support displaced families and ensure decisions are made with Native Hawaiians at the table.

Kapu is urging people not to sell but is worried that people's fear and desperation may drive them to accept these offers.

"You're gonna make our children tomorrow orphans within their own land," said Kapu.

Lahaina holds deep cultural significance to the Hawaiian people and was once the capital of the Hawaiian kingdom. The city is where King Kamehameha III had his royal residence, and unified Hawaii under a single kingdom by defeating the other islands' chiefs.

Many Hawaiians still recognize it as the original capital today, long after the capital was moved to Honolulu in 1845.

The fire destroyed Lahaina's historic Front Street, where the cultural centre Kapu ran was located. Inside, the building held many cultural artifacts, like feather capes and helmets, implements, maps and documents.

They were all destroyed.

"Our place was a living place, it was a living museum. It was things that you could actually touch, books that you could actually read, maps that showed a lot of families where they originated from," said Kapu.

But the loss is bigger than that.

Kapu describes the centre as a gathering place for Indigenous people internationally, where culture was shared for the next generations and people could learn from each other.

Kapu is heartbroken over the loss, and holds himself responsible for the care of the objects inside, though he barely escaped trying to save it, only having time to grab his laptop as he ran out.

Ten minutes later the building was engulfed in flames.

"For Lahaina, I'm afraid what this place can turn into now," said Kapu, who worries the historic buildings that have been lost could be replaced by private development.

"This is, for us, genocide."

Full Article

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K’atl’odeeche First Nation forced from their homes for the second time this fire season (www.nationalobserver.com)
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For the second time this year, K’atl’odeeche First Nation in the Northwest Territories was part of the evacuation alert following an out-of-control wildfire fuelled by strong winds and dry conditions over the weekend.

Following an evacuation order in May, the K’atl’odeeche spent weeks away from their homes. K’atl’odeeche community members returned to find their band office burned to the ground and their community damaged.

Those emotions were present as community leadership alerted residents of another evacuation notice.

“I’m sorry to say this, but we are now again on an evacuation notice for K’atl’odeeche First Nation,” Chief April Martel said in a video posted to the community’s Facebook page, her voice cracking.

Only three weeks ago, Canada’s National Observer spoke with federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, who was in the community to give a press conference on the riverbed of the Hay River. In his conversations with community members, Singh was told the water level has never been so low in recent memory.

Greenhouse gases trap heat around the planet like a warm blanket. The more greenhouse gases we release into the atmosphere, the thicker that blanket gets, the hotter the planet grows and the more the climate changes. Burning fossil fuels is one of the main ways humans add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and drive climate change, which leads to hotter temperatures and creates conditions that help spark wildfires, like drought. Climate change also makes weather patterns more unpredictable, leading to an increase in extreme weather events.

full article

kkkanada

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Water wars: Mexico conference denounces plunder of resources from Indigenous communities (www.courthousenews.com)
submitted 1 year ago by thelastaxolotl@hexbear.net to c/indigenous@hexbear.net
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As Mexico faces its worst water crisis in decades, Indigenous communities have organized to fight back against what they call an exploitative system that has looted and contaminated their ancestral lands.

MEXICO CITY (CN) — On Aug. 1, 20-year-old Lorenzo Froylán de la Cruz was forcibly disappeared in his hometown of Santa María Ostula, in the southern Mexican state of Michoacán, where he served on the town’s communal guard. His remains were found 10 days later.

His death was yet another in what water activists denounced as a “war of extermination” against Mexico’s Indigenous peoples and the resources on their ancestral lands at a press conference in Mexico City on Tuesday.

The conference was held to announce the conclusions and plans of action developed at the third biannual National Assembly for Water and Life, which took place on Aug. 12 and 13 in San Gregorio Atlapulco, in the historic Mexico City borough of Xochimilco.

This war “is taking place on our territories, especially ... against the Zapatista communities,” said activist Eduardo García, referring to the insurgents in the southern state of Chiapas who have opposed Mexico’s government since the mid-1990s.

He added that the war is being “developed and systematized” by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador “in order to guarantee and safeguard the interests of big capital and the narco-state.”

Such disapproval of López Obrador's security policy was expressed by several attendees at the assembly over the weekend. The president has been criticized for his advancement and expansion of a growing wave of militarization in Mexico during the 21st century.

In May, Zapatista communities alerted that “Chiapas is on the verge of civil war” in a statement signed by over 1,300 sympathizers and celebrity leaders, such as Mexican actor Diego Luna and American intellectual Noam Chomsky. The group held that López Obrador is either actively or passively complicit in the conflict.

Over 830 people attended the weekend’s assembly, representing more than 200 grassroots Indigenous and environmental organizations and 21 Mexican states. They contend that Mexico’s worsening water crisis is the result of a rapacious capitalist system backed by lopsided policy and intensifying violence.

“Organized crime and paramilitary groups systematically collaborate with the armed forces, the National Guard and state and municipal police, to the point where we can no longer understand them as distinct phenomena, but rather as codependent pieces,” said García, “[the] muscles and ligaments of the weaponized arm of the capitalist narco-state.”

EZLN

Full Article

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Young Indigenous people lead the global climate action movement - The Yucatan Times (www.theyucatantimes.com)
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“Living the Climate Emergency”: Native Hawaiian Kaniela Ing on Fires & Colonialism (www.democracynow.org)
submitted 1 year ago by thelastaxolotl@hexbear.net to c/indigenous@hexbear.net
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We speak with Kaniela Ing, national director of the Green New Deal Network and seventh-generation Kanaka Maoli, Native Hawaiian, about the impact of this week’s devastating wildfires and their relationship to climate change. The catastrophic fires have destroyed nearly all buildings in the historic section of Lahaina, which once served as the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom. What is now being described as the worst natural disaster in Hawaii’s history was created by conditions such as dry vegetation, hurricane-level winds and developers redirecting water and building over wetlands, which are directly related to the climate crisis. “Anyone in power who denies climate change, to me, are the arsonists here,” says Ing. “We’re living the climate emergency.”

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TranscriptAMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

We continue to look at the catastrophic wildfires in Maui. We turn to Kaniela Ing, who is the national director of the Green New Deal Network. Ing is a seventh-generation Native Hawaiian from Maui. I spoke to him on Thursday night, asking him to talk about what’s happened to Maui and the historical significance of Lahaina Town.

KANIELA ING: Sure. First off, thank you for having me and centering this issue. I will preface by saying that I’ve been really busy, but when I’m not doing these interviews, I just tend to, like, break down. These are really somber times. I was born and raised in Maui. I’m Kānaka Maoli, Native Hawaiian, come from seven generations. And our island is on fire. Our most historic town was set ablaze by wildfires. Hundreds of people have been evacuated and hospitalized. The death toll is climbing, and people are searching for loved ones right now.

So, Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, Joe Manchin, oil companies and anyone in power who denies climate change, to me, are the arsonists here. And we’re living the climate emergency.

So, it is sad times right now. It’s heartening to see the community come together and, you know, deliver goods to the families in need. Fundraising has been incredible for the direct relief. But what I am wondering, personally, is, once the recovery efforts start to unfold and the cameras are gone, who’s going to be left more powerful or less powerful? Are people still going to be paying attention when the recovery work is going to last for years? And is that going to make community members stronger, or is it going to make the people who have mismanaged the land and water and created the conditions for these fires to happen even more powerful? And that’s what we’re focused on at Green New Deal Network right now.

AMY GOODMAN: Kaniela, can you talk about specifically the friends, the family, what has happened to those that have been devastated by the fires, particularly in Lahaina? Can you tell us some of those escape stories, some of what has taken place with the fires so suddenly wiping out this historic city? And then talk about the historic nature of Lahaina as the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom and what that means.

KANIELA ING: We’re a tropical island here on Maui. We’re not supposed to have wildfires. This came as a shock to everyone. There’s not enough firefighters here. We can’t ship them over from the next state. We’re an island. So, everyone right now is feeling a bit overwhelmed. As it occurred, we saw community members jumping into the ocean with nowhere else to go, just floating and watching their homes being reduced into ashes. The death toll went from six to 36 all of a sudden, and there are still firefighters, Red Cross members out there searching for our loved ones. It was — it was apocalyptic. The scene was something that, you know, you would only see in a movie. But the reality is, like, this is becoming quite the norm now, and it will become more so in the future.

Lahaina Town is actually — it’s often characterized as a tourist town, but the people who live there — which should be the focus — tend to be some of the most rooted Native Hawaiians that I’ve ever met. They’re the types of — their families, from generations ago, created aquaculture, which, like, the West is only kind of learning about now. You know, I used to work with them to, like, figure out better ways that NOAA could manage, like, fisheries. They’re really the keepers of the ancestral knowledge. And, you know, some of their — yeah, like, most of the folks that evacuated are, like, Kānaka Maoli or other immigrant folks. And my heart goes out to those families.

AMY GOODMAN: When you say it’s a tourist town, that’s because it’s historic. So, talk about what that means. Give us a history lesson about Hawaii and about Maui, and how it relates to the mainland United States, even how it became a part of the United States.

KANIELA ING: Sure. So, Lahaina Town was a thriving center of Hawaii. It was like the heart of Hawaii before not just statehood, but before Hawaii was even a territory of the United States. So, if you start from one end of Front Street and walk to the other, it’s like a Disneyland ride through the colonial timeline of capitalism in Hawaii, starting from royalty, going to whaling, sandalwood, sugar and pineapple, tourism to luxury.

And to me, the fire is a tragic symbol of this trajectory’s terminal point, like where it all ends up if you continue down this mode of extraction as a way to live. But it’s also like the — it also contains the most deep and durable relics of our history of resistance: the museums, the architecture, the infrastructure, the banyan tree — the oldest and largest in the United States, which has burned, 150 years old this year. Like, it includes all that, but also just the fact of how slow it was to develop is a testament to the people-powered, usually Native-led resistance that each industry faced along the way.

AMY GOODMAN: You refer to the raging wildfires as a result of colonial greed. Explain.

KANIELA ING: Yeah. So there’s two facets to this. First is climate change. The National Weather Service says the cause of this fire was a downed power line, and the spread because of hurricane-force winds. And the spread was caused by dry vegetation and low humidity. Those are all functions of climate change. This isn’t disputable. This isn’t political. It, unfortunately, has become politicized, but it’s a matter of fact. Climate pollution, corporate polluters that set a blanket of pollution in the air that is overheating our planet contributed — caused the conditions that led to this fire.

In addition, there is mismanagement of land. The original “Big Five” oligarchy in Hawaii, missionary families that took over our economy and government, they continue on today as some of our largest political donors and landowners and corporations. They’ve been grabbing land and diverting water away from this area for a very long time now, for generations. And Lahaina was actually a wetland. You could take a — like, Waiola Church, you could have boats circulating the church back in the day. But, you know, because they needed water for their corporate ventures, like golf courses and hotels and monocropping, that has ended. So the natural form of Lahaina would have never caught on fire. These disasters are anything but natural.

So, yes, colonial greed and the fact that they caused the pollution that warmed our planet and set hurricanes like this to become the norm, and the gross mismanagement of our land and water, which the Green New Deal actually is about returning both — you know, both mitigating climate change, building resilience, but also returning the stewardship of land and water to the people.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the dry land right now? I mean, you have Hurricane Dora hundreds of miles away. The wind was intense, but the drought that existed, that relationship to climate change?

KANIELA ING: Yeah, that’s right. So, growing up on this island, we saw maybe one or two fires, and they were very contained, when things got to this drought factor. It’s never been anything close to this. This shocked even — even like the climate scientists that I’ve worked with over the years were shocked by this fire.

And a lot of it has to do with these dry conditions. Growing up, my dad would drive us to church, and he would point out to the sugarcane, and he’d say, “When you’re my age, all this sugarcane will be gone.” And I was like, you know, “OK, sure.” It’s such a central part of Maui. But he was right. The sugar is gone. And the reason why is because one of these Big Five oligarchical corporations that I spoke of knew that the sugar wasn’t profitable, but they continued monocropping most of the island in order to get some tax breaks for agriculture.

Now, I grew up in a community where it would rain cane ash on us, and it was like fun. I didn’t realize we were all getting asthma. It’s an environmental justice community. But, you know, there were people that fought against the cane burning. And the corporation ended up blaming the activists for the sugar shutting down, pitting the union workers against the community. The result now is just like a fallow, really dry land across the whole central valley of our island. And really, if community members and union members were to unite and had been organized years ago, we could have had a much different future. And that’s still something that I think we should continue working to build, is that labor and environmental unity.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the April survey of homeless people, unhoused people? I think it was something like 704 unhoused people in Maui County, among them 244 suffering from mental health disabilities. The unhoused crisis among Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, and what do you know about Native Hawaiians who were unhoused and how the wildfires have affected them?

KANIELA ING: Yeah. I think there’s a certain perception of Native Hawaiians who are unsheltered that’s not — that does not fit with reality. Some of the unsheltered Hawaiian communities that continue today were occupations of land that was getting seized. And they were like, “Look, we don’t want to cooperate with this, with this new extractive economy that y’all created, so we’re going to live by ourselves in our own community on this beach. We’re going to govern ourselves.” And they’re quite organized, and they’re living in a way that’s subsistent and in harmony with nature. Now, it’s not to be glamorized. A lot of these folks face some really dire conditions not being a part of this capitalist system. But a lot of them are doing it based on really strong and sensible beliefs.

Now, when a climate crisis hits, when a disaster hits, it’s going to impact these people first and worst, no doubt. And we need to make sure that both relief and recovery efforts, in the longer term, are prioritizing the low-income and Indigenous people that are some — some are still unaccounted for. Some don’t even have IDs. And, you know, they need to be front of mind with everything we do, from, you know, day zero, when the disaster breaks, to years out, when we’re recovering.

AMY GOODMAN: The wildfires occurred on the same day that President Biden said in an interview that he had “practically” declared a climate emergency, but he has not actually formally done that. What would that mean?

KANIELA ING: Yeah. I’ve just been frantically trying to make sure that my loved ones are OK. But I also work on climate. This is my job. And as soon as I start thinking about that statement from President Biden, I just get so incensed. This is a climate emergency. There’s no practical — “practically” he declared it. You either believe it or not. And I think as bad as Republicans have been by denying climate, Democrats are just as culpable by not doing enough. Scientists say that we need to be investing at least $1 trillion a year in the clean energy transition. We need to end and phase out, deny all new fossil fuel permits, and really empower the communities that build back ourselves democratically. That’s the solution for it.

And President Biden announced his second term, but he hasn’t told us how he’s going to finish the job. He needs to lay out that vision, what we’ve been demanding from a Green New Deal, if he wants communities that got him elected to come out, that base of climate voters, that happen to be predominantly Black, Indigenous and low-income people. But we need something forward-looking to come out, because right now, like, I’m not even thinking about voting, right? Like, nobody in Lahaina is thinking about whether or not they support Biden. Like, give us something. You know, at least let us be seen.

So, you know, I think that’s that sense of urgency. Even me, who is in this climate work full time and see these events unfold elsewhere, until it hits you at home and it’s people you know, grocery stores you shop at, schools your kids go to, your church actually being burned down, you’re not going to understand the urgency. Like, it is shocking. And we’re not talking 10 years from now. We’re having — these things are happening right now. It could happen to your home tomorrow. That’s the urgency we’re dealing with, and we need to act accordingly. So, no “practically” speaking. Like, we need to move now and do everything we can.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you tell us more about the importance of Indigenous wisdom and practices in addressing the climate catastrophe?

KANIELA ING: Sure, yeah. So, going into Lahaina, the people that actually lived there for generations are the keepers of some of the most profound Indigenous knowledge that I have ever met. They understood subsistence fishery, how native plants were buffers against, like, you know, disasters, how to create regenerative agricultural practices. And it’s that view of the world where, you know, our success isn’t determined by how much we hoard, but rather how much we produce for others and share, and where, like, our economy is not based on how well the rich are doing, but how many people, how many of us, can actually thrive. Like, it’s that — it’s not just Indigenous knowledge, but it’s that value system that really needs to be reestablished.

So, you know, I think over the years, especially in my line of work, there’s been more resources for Indigenous folks to lead frontline fights against bad projects. But the intervention that really needs to happen is Indigenous leaders also need to be resourced to build the good. They need to be the purveyors of and architects of the new green and, like, community-rooted world that’s still possible, even in these dire times.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, would you like to leave us with some images that you have been living through over these last few days, like the banyan tree, where you show us — when you put out on social media the before and after the wildfires, but other images or stories of people’s bravery in trying to preserve what you have known for so long?

KANIELA ING: Yeah, I mean, as we’re speaking, there’s people that still haven’t found their loved ones. A lot of the friends I grew up with — like, I come from a lower-income neighborhood — they’re firefighters. I ran into one on the way here, and I’m just like, “Hey, y’all are doing a great job.” And he was just sweating and, like, started crying and, you know, barely — looked like he hasn’t slept in days.

Hotels are letting residents in, without cost, to sleep. Multiple businesses are just letting people drop off goods, and they’re shipping it three to four times a day. They’re leaving their doors open 24 hours. So, there is that sense of, you know, this is an island; we’re all in this together. And that sense of mutual aid and solidarity is really carrying us through, and it’s been quite remarkable to witness. But, you know, don’t want to leave you with some toxic positivity either. Like, these are hard times, and unless we take urgent action now, it’ll only get worse.

AMY GOODMAN: And what, do you feel, is the most important thing that President Biden, the federal government, people should be pushing for right now?

KANIELA ING: Well, right now we need direct aid. But there needs to be a longer focus on recovery, that these — that we can’t rebuild the community in a few weeks. It’s going to take years. And we need to do it intentionally, not just making sure — not just bringing us back to the status quo, because the status quo is what led us here, but making sure that we have more democratic and community-controlled institutions that come out of this.

Unfortunately, the groups that are best poised to deploy direct aid, because of their institutional connections, are also the most likely to enable disaster capitalists from exploiting the situation. So, we need to create — we need to understand that, you know, as we’re, like, trying — as people want to help, that they’re resourcing groups that have an eye towards community organizations, to the organizers that will actually be there once the cameras leave, and will be rebuilding from the ground up over the course of the long run.

AMY GOODMAN: And one more time, can you tell us why the banyan tree is so important?

KANIELA ING: Yeah. I mean, the banyan tree is so iconic. There’s like 16 trunks. It’s the largest in the United States. It just turned 150 years old in April. And the images of it being completely toasted is heartbreaking. Now, I have hope, because trees have deep roots, especially of that age, that it will continue on. And, you know, that’s the vision in my mind, right? Like, as we rebuild as a community, as we realize the vision of a Green New Deal nationally and globally, the banyan tree also regrows its leaves and is a positive symbol for what’s to come.

AMY GOODMAN: Kaniela Ing, the national director of the Green New Deal Network, seventh-generation Native Hawaiian, speaking to us from Maui. And I especially thank my little pup Zazu for staying quiet during that interview, which makes me think about all of the fauna and the flora destroyed, as well, on Maui and, of course, most importantly, the people.

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Mesoamerican Long Count calendar - New General Megathread for the 11th of August 2023 (hexbear.net)
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The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is a non-repeating base-20 and base-18 calendar used by several pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, most notably the Maya. For this reason, it is often known as the Maya Long Count calendar. Using a modified vigesimal tally, the Long Count calendar identifies a day by counting the number of days passed since a mythical creation date that corresponds to August 11, 3114 BCE in the proleptic Gregorian calendar. The Long Count calendar was widely used on monuments.

Background

The two most widely used calendars in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica were the 260-day Tzolkʼin and the 365-day Haabʼ. The equivalent Aztec calendars are known in Nahuatl as the Tonalpohualli and Xiuhpohualli.

The combination of a Haabʼ and a Tzolkʼin date identifies a day in a combination which does not occur again for 18,980 days (52 Haabʼ cycles of 365 days equals 73 Tzolkʼin cycles of 260 days, approximately 52 years), a period known as the Calendar Round. To identify days over periods longer than this, Mesoamericans used the Long Count calendar.

The Long Count calendar is divided into five distinct units:

  • one day - kin
  • 20 days - uinal
  • 360 days - tun
  • 7,200 days - katun
  • 144,000 days - baktun

Mesoamerican numerals

Long Count dates are written with Mesoamerican numerals, as shown on this table. A dot represents 1 while a bar equals 5. The shell glyph was used to represent the zero concept. The Long Count calendar required the use of zero as a place-holder and presents one of the earliest uses of the zero concept in history.

The Mesoamerican Calendar - Ancient Americas 84

The Mayan Calendar countdown

Megathreads and spaces to hang out:

reminders:

  • 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
  • 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
  • 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
  • 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can reserve a spot here nerd
  • 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog

Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

Theory:

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I have returned from my trip to Pine Ridge and not only was it a huge success there are big things to come! (cdn.discordapp.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Nakoichi@hexbear.net to c/indigenous@hexbear.net
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Our next immediate goal is to purchase 100 acres of land on the reservation for the warehouse/distribution center, a food forest/communal farm, more construction projects for basic infrastructure, and the necessary legal fees and a lawyer to procure a buffalo pasture so that we can stop relying on white ranchers commodifying the necessities for ceremonial practices.

Will post updates when we get the next round of fundraising going, but considering it only took us two weeks to raise our first 10k I'm confident we will be able to do this and I will be returning next year.

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Conflict casts shadow over Indigenous Peoples’ Day in Mexico (www.laprensalatina.com)
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Tuxtla Gutierrez, Mexico, Aug 9 (EFE).- Wednesday’s observance of the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples found members of first nations here in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas unhappy about President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s “indifference” in the face of escalating violence.

Activists told EFE that scores of indigenous people have been killed and many more displaced by gangs seeking territory along the Mexico-Guatemala border to facilitate the trafficking of migrants and drugs.

“We want to contribute, we want our rights to be fully recognized, for them to listen to us and not by way of intermediaries,” Margarita Gutierrez Romero, the leader of an organization of indigenous women, said in an interview.

More than 23 million of Mexico’s 126 million inhabitants identify as indigenous and nearly 7 million of them speak an indigenous language, according to figures from the Inegi statistics agency.

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Full Article

Lopez Obrador signed a decree Wednesday protecting the sacred places and ancestral territories of indigenous peoples in the states of Nayarit, Jalisco, Durango, San Luis Potosi, and Zacatecas.

“As a matter of principle, my government has made the decision to recognize and protect the cultures and spiritual values of our peoples, which are the heart of deep Mexico and the most intimate truth of our homeland,” the president said during his daily morning news conference.

Gutierrez Romero acknowledged that progress has been made since Lopez Obrador took office in December 2018, while citing security, justice, health, and women’s inclusion as areas where much remains to be done.

She also pointed to a large gap between policy and reality, contending that indigenous people still lack genuine representation in public institutions.

“They continue smashing us, they continue usurping,” the activist said. “They think we are children and that is part of the old and outdated policy, so where is ‘putting the poor first’ (Lopez Obrador’s slogan)? Where is putting the indigenous peoples first?”

Indigenous and grassroots organizations in Chiapas began sounding the alarm in May about gangland violence targeting first nations communities, especially those supporting the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN).

Though the EZLN announced itself to the world on Jan. 1, 1994, with an armed uprising, the Zapatistas soon abandoned rebellion in favor of “political struggle by civil and peaceful means.”

“Instead of investing their efforts in war, they have built hospitals, schools, and autonomous governments that have benefited Zapatistas and non-Zapatistas alike,” said a statement issued in May by a coalition of groups and signed by notables such as Oscar-winning filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron and scholar Noam Chomsky.

Miguel Angel Villanueva, a peasant leader on the Mexico-Guatemala border, told EFE that tensions have been rising this year and complained about Lopez Obrador’s comments during a visit to Chiapas on June 23, when the president described the situation in the state as one of “peace and tranquility.”

“The problems continue, the crime, the educational problems and other kinds, organization continue speaking out and organizing, but there is no response, there are no results,” Villanueva said.

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North America is a Crime Scene (hexbear.net)
submitted 1 year ago by take_five_seconds@hexbear.net to c/indigenous@hexbear.net
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Jodi Byrd writes: "The story of the new world is horror, the story of America a crime." It is necessary, she argues, to start with the origin of the United States as a settler-state and its explicit intention to occupy the continent. These origins contain the historical seeds of genocide. Any true history of the United States must focus on what has happened to (and with) Indigenous peoples--and what still happens. It's not just past colonialist actions but also "the continued colonization of American Indian nations, peoples, and lands" that allows the United States "to cast its imperialist gaze globally" with "what is essentially a settler colony's national construction of itself as an ever more perfect multicultural, multiracial democracy," while "the status of American Indians as sovereign nations colonized by the United States continues to haunt and inflect its raison d'etre." Here Byrd quotes Lakota Scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, who spells out the connection between the "Indian wars" and the Iraq War:

"The current mission of the United States to become the center of political enlightenment to be taught to the rest of the world began with the Indian wars and has become the dangerous provocation of this nation's historical intent. The historical connection between the Little Big Horn event and the "uprising" in Baghdad must become part of the political dialogue of America if the fiction of decolonization is to happen and the hoped for deconstruction of the colonial story is to come about.

A "race to innocence" is what occurs when individuals assume that they are innocent of complicity in structures of domination and oppression. This concept captures the understandable assumption made by new immigrants or children of recent immigrants to any country. They cannot be responsible, they assume, for what occurred in their adopted country's past. Neither are those who are already citizens guilty, even if they are descendants of slave owners, Indian killers, or Andrew Jackson himself. Yet, in a settler society that has not come to terms with its past, whatever historical trauma was entailed in settling the land affects the assumptions and behavior of living generations at any given time, including immigrants and the children of recent immigrants.

In the United States the legacy of settler colonialism can be seen in the endless wars of aggression and occupations; the trillions spent on war machinery, military bases, and personnel instead of social services and quality public education; the gross profits of corporations, each of which has greater resources and funds than more than half the countries in the world yet pay minimal taxes and provide few jobs for US citizens; the repression of generation after generation of activists who seek to change the system; the incarceration of the poor, particularly descendants of enslaved Africans; the individualism, carefully inculcated, that on the one hand produces self-blame for personal failure and on the other exalts ruthless dog-eat-dog competition for possible success, even though it rarely results; and high rates of suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, sexual violence against women and children, homelessness, dropping out of school, and gun violence.

These are symptoms, and there are many more, of a deeply troubled society, and they are not new. The large and influential civil rights, student, labor, and women's movements of the 1950s through the 1970s exposed the structural inequalities in the economy and the historical effects of more than two centuries of slavery and brutal genocidal wars waged against Indigenous peoples. For a time, US society verged on a process of truth seeking regarding past atrocities, making demands to end aggressive wars and to end poverty, witnessed by the huge peace movement of the 1970s and the War on Poverty, affirmative action, school busing, prison reform women's equity and reproductive rights, promotions of the arts and humanities, public media, the Indian Self-Determination Act, and many other initiatives.

A more sophisticated version of the race to innocence that helps perpetuate settler colonialism began to develop in social movement theory in the 1990s, popularized in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth, the third volume in a trilogy, is one of a number of books in an academic fad of the early twenty-first century seeking to revive the Medieval European concept of the commons as an aspiration for contemporary social movements. Most writings about the commons barely mention the fate of Indigenous peoples in relation to the call for all land to be shared. Two Canadian scholar-activists, Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright, for example, do not mince words in rejecting Native land claims and sovereignty, characterizing them as xenophobic elitism. They see Indigenous claims as "regressive neo-racism in light of the global diasporas arising from oppression around the world."

Cree scholar Lorraine LeCamp calls this kind of erasure of Indigenous peoples in North America "terranullism," harking back to the characterization, the under the Doctrine of Discovery, of purportedly vacant lands as terra nullis. This is a kind of no-faul history. From the theory of a liberated future of no borders and nations, of a vague commons for all, the theorists obliterate the present and presence of Indigenous nations struggling for their liberation from states of colonialism. Thereby, Indigenous rhetoric and programs for decolonization, nationhood, and sovereignty are, according to this project, rendered invalid and futile. From the Indigenous perspective, as Jodi Byrd writes, "any notion of the commons that speaks for and as indigenous as it advocates transforming indigenous governance or incorporating indigenous peoples into a multitude that might then reside on those lands forcibly taken from indigenous peoples does nothing to disrupt the genocidal and colonialist intent of the initial and now repeated historical process."

  • Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
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The Herculean task of digitizing Mexico’s vast Indigenous history (hexbear.net)
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Article

The challenge of the 21st century is how to convert over a century of audio, video, text and more into digital formats before it is too late.

In the thick of this for Mexico’s National Institute of Indigenous People (INPI) is head archivist Octavio Murillo Álvarez de la Cadena and his staff, who say that their work is particularly important because “Indigenous peoples have been historically marginalized,” not to mention that many Indigenous cultures are threatened with disappearing or complete assimilation.

In total, INPI has a collection of over 520,000 non-digital items, which not only includes multimedia but also an important collection of handcrafts.

That collection today exists in analog mediums:

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Full ArticleThe earliest multimedia comes from the 19th century, almost all recorded by foreigners who took advantage of then-new technologies to record Mexico and its Indigenous people.

Mexico would not consider doing the same in any systematic way until after the Mexican Revolution, when the government sought to create a new identity for the country that acknowledged both its European and Indigenous heritage.

This mexicanidad, or Mexicanness, has been an important concept since but not without problems: under the term indígenismo, federal authorities worked to reconcile conflicting ideals of preserving traditional communities with integrating them into the wider Mexican society.

But indígenismo also inspired a wide array of documentation efforts using new and old technologies. Originally, these efforts were scattered among different bureaucracies, and not always with the interests of the Indigenous peoples paramount. This began to change with the founding of the National Indigenista Institute in 1948, and its Ethnographic Audiovisual Archive (AEA). By the end of the century, it would evolve into INPI and its various archives.

INPI has embraced digitization for many of the same reasons that other institutions all over the world have — less handling of delicate materials, faster and easier consultation and greater accessibility by the public and international scholars.

INPI is also experiencing many of the same successes and challenges institutions in other countries have: digitization, despite its simplistic concept (to create electronic copies) presents a number of technical challenges.

The fragility and degradation of many analog objects necessitate investment in highly-specialized equipment and training for staff for the initial transfer, The creation of new systems and procedures and maintenance of digital files.

Next is the sheer volume of files. Limits on time and money means that decisions have to be made as to what gets digitized and how quickly. Most considerations are familiar: age and condition of originals, their importance to INPI’s mission and who created them. INPI is fortunate to have in-house experts for each of its archives as well as access to outside help.

But INPI has considerations that other institutions may not. One carryover is a history of censorship in the Mexican government, as well as making and using archives for political purposes. Unlike the U.S., cultural materials created by the Mexican government are not automatically in the public domain, precisely to keep some control over how material is used. Digitization is unlikely to change this.

Politics is an extremely important part of how the archive is managed, including when it comes to digitization, says Murillo. Because of a problematic history between Mexico City and Indigenous and Afro Mexican communities, it is important to involve feedback from them, especially since one of INPI’s criteria for prioritization is how well a file or object “represents a marginalized group.”

Consultation is facilitated by INPI’s system of 23 radio stations all over the country. Run by local Indigenous communities, station staff also serve as intermediaries between Mexico City offices and peoples that INPI serves.

Legal issues can include copyright, but INPI avoids many problems because it holds the authorship rights over most of this collection. Interestingly, Mexican law creates new rights for digital copies as derivative works. This means, for example, for a film shot in 1950, it is necessary to get permission from the author of the original as well as INPI as the converter to use the digitized file.

More important is the notion of collective rights over cultural expressions. This is a fluid area in Mexican law right now, in part driven by controversies related to the use of images and more from marginalized peoples by both Mexicans and foreigners.

The last “political” issue is navigating the constantly changing bureaucratic and political tides that any cultural agency needs to do in order to get needed resources. Murillo and his staff’s successes in this regard means that Mexico leads Latin America in digitizing its Indigenous heritage, having been able to get the basics needed for the work.

This allows them to focus more on developing procedures and working out technical issues. Murillo still sees struggles ahead: many politicians see monies for cultural projects as a kind of “charity” rather than an investment, he says.

But time is not on the side of preservation programs like these, and there is still a very good chance that records will be lost before they can be digitized.

When I asked Murillo if INPI would consider offers from outside organizations to support his efforts, his answer was an unhesitant “absolutely.”

___

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‘I shout from the rooftops I exist’: Brazilians identifying as Indigenous up by 90% in 12 years (www.theguardian.com)
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A growing number of Brazilians are reclaiming their Indigenous identity, after years of fighting for rights

When a census taker came knocking on Vahnessa de Oliveira Ferreira’s door in Rio de Janeiro in 2010 and asked her how she identified racially, she replied “mixed”. Twelve years later, when asked the same question for Brazil’s 2022 census, she had changed her answer to “Indigenous”.

“Indigenous people learned to justify themselves [as mixed-race] because for a long time, being Indigenous was synonymous with being lazy, a good-for-nothing, a savage,” said Ferreira, a tour guide and social educator who now proudly identifies as a trans Indigenous woman.

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Full Article

The 37-year-old is part of a growing number of Brazilians reclaiming their Indigenous identity, as reflected in new census data published on Monday. According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), the number of people identifying as Indigenous has increased by nearly 90% in just 12 years, from 896,917 to 1.69 million.

An estimated 5 million native people lived on the land that would later be christened Brazil when Portuguese invaders arrived in 1500. Decimated first by disease, war and enslavement, and more recently by state oppression and a policy of miscegenation that effectively erased Indigenous experiences, the native population had officially fallen to a few hundred thousand by the end of the 20th century.

“There was a tendency for Indigenous peoples to deny their identities, to protect themselves from racism, historical violence, ethnocidal policies,” said Rosani Kamury Kaingang, an Indigenous researcher at the Federal University of Pará, where she is known by her legal Portuguese name, Rosani de Fatima Fernandes.

Increasingly meticulous work by the IBGE, both within and outside Indigenous territories, has helped produce ever more accurate data on Brazil’s native population in the census. But this growth in official statistics also reflects the success of an organised Indigenous movement that has fought tirelessly to gain rights, visibility and a political voice in the last four decades.

“This created a much more favourable scenario for Indigenous people in terms of legal rights and public policy,” said João Pacheco de Oliveira, professor of anthropology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).

Even the violent anti-Indigenous stance of the previous Jair Bolsonaro government could not roll back a process of growing appreciation for Indigenous cultures and causes.

“The Indigenous issue gained visibility through a positive lens, and this had an effect on some people who started to look at themselves in the mirror, see themselves as Indigenous and begin this process of reclaiming their identity,” said Tarisson Nawa, a doctoral student in social anthropology at the UFRJ and active member of the Indigenous movement. This is strengthened by an understanding of identity as defined by socio-cultural characteristics rather than physical traits, he added.

Miguel da Silva Guimarães started seeing himself as Indigenous after his grandfather revealed the family’s origins on his deathbed. “Only our elders knew we were Indigenous. It was a way of protecting us,” said the 58-year-old, whose family left the Amazon forest for the city of Belém when he was a child, fleeing the threat of land invaders.

Guimarães now goes by Kwarahy Tembé Tenetehar – a name bestowed on him by Indigenous relatives he met while searching for his personal history – and has made it his mission to help other people reclaim their Indigenous identity. To that end he founded the Wyka Kwara Association, an organisation that has welcomed around 1,000 urban Indigenous people as they seek to reconnect with their culture and communities.

Many are from ethnic groups considered extinct by the state, a label described as “absurd” by Pacheco de Oliveira. “People can recover their traditions, identity, languages,” he said.

After tracing back her Indigenous ancestry that had been erased through a process of urban migration, Ferreira identifies as Goitacá, a group from the northern coast of Rio de Janeiro state officially declared extinct centuries ago. She is one of a handful of resurgent Goitacás.

“Now I shout from the rooftops that I exist,” she said. “We are a part of Brazilian society.”

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Webinar: Indigenous Peoples’ leadership for integrated holistic approaches to health and well-being (www.who.int)
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Every year on 9 August, the United Nations observes the International Day for the World’s Indigenous Peoples. The theme for the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples 2023 will be ‘Indigenous Youth as Agents of Change for Self-determination’ with the sub-themes: Climate Action and the Green Transition; Mobilizing for Justice and Intergenerational Connections.

With an estimated 476 million Indigenous Peoples in the world, they represent 6.2% of the world’s population. While noteworthy percentages of Indigenous Peoples live in urban areas, overall approximately 73% live in rural areas globally. Indigenous Peoples speak more than 4,000 of the world’s 6,700 languages. They conserve 80 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity. To uphold the rights of Indigenous Peoples, ensure their equitable access to health services, promote intercultural care and traditional medicine practices, and enhance health equity and action on health determinants impacting Indigenous Peoples, it is important to promote their health leadership in the world.

In 2023, the World Health Assembly, countries adopted Resolution 76.16 calling for a Global Plan of Action on Indigenous Peoples’ Health.WHO is committed to develop the Global Action Plan with the engagement of Indigenous Peoples to ensure their free, prior, and informed consent throughout the development process.

The objectives of this webinar are as follows:

  • To highlight the leadership by and for Indigenous Peoples in the health sector, as well as for activities across sectors on key determinants of health such as nutrition and environmental health, around the world.
  • To raise awareness of the planetary and One Health needs of Indigenous Peoples and advocate for their rights in relation to health and health environments, across generations.
  • To share knowledge on approaches (policies, strategies, programmes and interventions) for the holistic health and wellbeing of Indigenous Peoples, including in the context of climate action and the green transition, and facilitate learning across countries.
  • The event is co-organized by WHO and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).
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Haudenosaunee Confederacy - New General Megathread for the 7th of August 2023 (hexbear.net)
submitted 1 year ago by thelastaxolotl@hexbear.net to c/indigenous@hexbear.net
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Called the Iroquois Confederacy by the French, and the League of Five Nations by the English, the confederacy is properly called the Haudenosaunee Confederacy meaning People of the long house. The confederacy was founded by the prophet known as the Peacemaker with the help of Aionwatha, more commonly known as Hiawatha. The exact date of the joining of the nations is unknown and said to be time immemorial making it one of the first and longest lasting participatory democracies in the world.

The confederacy, made up of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas was intended as a way to unite the nations and create a peaceful means of decision making. Through the confederacy, each of the nations of the Haudenosaunee are united by a common goal to live in harmony. Each nation maintains it own council with Chiefs chosen by the Clan Mother and deals with its own internal affairs but allows the Grand Council to deal with issues affecting the nations within the confederacy.

The Haudenosaunee symbol of the long house, provided by the Peacemaker, is recognized in traditional geographic locations. Upon confederation each nation took on a role within the metaphorical longhouse with the Onondaga being the Keepers of the Fire. The Mohawk, Seneca and Onondaga acted as the Elder Brothers of the confederacy while the Cayuga and Oneida were the Younger Brothers within Grand Council. The main meeting place was and still exists today on Onondaga territory.

the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s constitution is believed to be the oldest, participatory democracy on Earth. What makes it stand out as unique to other systems around the world is its blending of law and values. For the Haudenosaunee, law, society and nature are equal partners and each plays an important role.

Haudenosaunee’s Legendary Founding

Megathreads and spaces to hang out:

reminders:

  • 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
  • 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
  • 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
  • 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can reserve a spot here nerd
  • 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog

Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

Theory:

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The Tarascan/Purépecha Empire: The Forgotten Empire of Mexico (www.youtube.com)
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During the 14th century, an empire was founded in Western Mexico that is nearly forgotten today. The Iréchikwa Tzintzuntzani was one of the greatest empires in the Pre-Columbian Americas. Discover what made this empire so unique in Mesoamerica.

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Book reveals the lesser-known story of Mexico’s Indigenous slaves (hexbear.net)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by thelastaxolotl@hexbear.net to c/indigenous@hexbear.net
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Article

Slavery is as old as civilization and has taken a wide variety of forms across history, but if you speak of slavery today, most people will envision the Atlantic slave trade, which snatched Africans from their homeland and transported them far away to be sold as property.

This is why Andrés Reséndez, Mexican historian and professor at UC Davis, wrote “The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America,” published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2016.

The book’s very title suggests that Reséndez addresses a system perhaps as bad as the one perpetrated upon Africans, and it also suggests that not many people know about that system.

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Full ArticleI must confess I was jolted by what the author has to say about Christopher Columbus and his plans for the lands he discovered. I was obliged to quickly remove Columbus from that pedestal he had occupied in my mind since childhood.

Apart from being a skillful and imaginative navigator, Admiral Christopher Columbus, reports Reséndez, was also a shrewd and experienced businessman. When he secured a sponsorship for his voyage from Ferdinand II and Isabella I in April of 1492, he insisted that clauses be added to the contract that gave him one-tenth of “all the merchandise, whether pearls, precious stones, gold, silver, spices and any other marketable goods of any kind, name, or manner that can be bought or bartered.”

Upon encountering problems in extracting tribute from the Indians of Hispaniola, where he had established a base, Columbus noted the “tameness” and “ingenuity” of the local people. In the very first letter he wrote upon his return to Spain, addressed to Royal Comptroller Luis de Santangel, he promised to deliver “as many slaves as their Majesties order to make, from among those who are idolaters.”

Once they had established a foothold in Mexico, conquistadors were rewarded for their participation in the conquest not just with booty but with parcels of land known as encomienda. The Indigenous people already living on that land were assigned to the new owner — now an encomendero — as his workers.

Though the nominal arrangement was that the encomendero would see to the Christian education and safety of his workers in exchange for labor and tribute, the reality was that they were enslaved.

In addition to their agricultural labor, Indigenous slaves were an essential and integral part of the mining industry, which was soon flourishing all over Mexico: a mine was always with the slaves forced to work it.

The leader in mining was Hernán Cortés himself. Notarial records show Cortés spending more than 20,000 pesos in a single day to buy three mines and hundreds of slaves.

“Ultimately,” says Reséndez, “not only was Cortés the richest man in Mexico, he was also the largest owner of Indian slaves. And wherever Cortés led, others followed.”

Most mines required digging, usually downward through solid rock. Since explosives were not introduced until the early 18th century, miners had to dig with simple picks and crowbars and wedges, working from sunrise to sunset. On top of this they faced the dangers of tunnel collapses and, in the long run, death from silicosis, which filled their lungs with scar tissue.

And then there was the job of carrying the ore to the surface, up notched pine logs called “chicken ladders,” in leather bags weighing around 150 kilos.

Perhaps the most horrible job of all in mining work was the “patio process.” Silver ore was crushed to powder, spread over a patio and sprinkled with mercury. Water was added to form sludge. Then a slave, still wearing shackles, had to walk over this toxic mud in order to mix it thoroughly.

“This job,” says Reséndez, “invariably resulted in serious health problems, as the poisonous metal would enter the body through the pores and seep into the cartilage in the joints.”

Fortunately, in the Spanish court there was a group of activists trying to mitigate the worst excesses of the conquistadors. Prominent among them was Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican friar who witnessed Spanish atrocities in the Caribbean firsthand.

One of the friar’s favorite tactics to win people over to his cause, says Reséndez, was to scandalize court members by reading aloud from a manuscript that would later become his book “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies,” which described the manner in which the Spaniards “dismember, slay, perturb, afflict, torment and destroy the Indians by all manner of cruelty: new and [diverse] and most singular manners such as never before seen or read of.”

University students today around the world still learn about the gory details of the Spanish colonization of the Caribbean from this book.

Eventually, new legislation known as the New Laws aimed at establishing a different relationship between Spain and its Native American vassals. The new code stated that Indigenous people were free vassals of the crown.

“So from now on,” it declared, “no Indian can be made into a slave under any circumstance.”

Spaniards in the New World who had long relied upon Indigenous slave labor were in shock. Naturally, they tried to use every trick in the book to continue as before, but now they had to worry about getting caught by the crown.

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Could Indigenous communities in Brazil hold key to climate justice? (www.aljazeera.com)
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Across the Amazon, Indigenous residents are developing sustainable economies centred on local production.

Boa Vista, Brazil – Under the scorching late-morning Amazon sun, dozens of people begin to approach from all corners of the woods, farming gear slung over their shoulders.

As tradition dictates, residents of the Willimon community in the Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous territory of Brazil’s Roraima state are coming together to help fellow farmers plough their land.

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Full ArticleDespite the blue skies and high temperatures, it is winter, which means rainy season in the Amazon – so it is time for planting. Today, the men and women of this community are helping Telma Macuxi clear her land.

“I work as an Indigenous health agent [for] the Willimon community, but it is these crops that will provide for my household,” Macuxi told Al Jazeera. “I have a big family, and the salary I receive for my work is mostly used for the things we don’t produce: salt, sugar, clothes.”

Spanning nearly 1.75 million hectares (4.3 million acres), Raposa Serra do Sol is among the largest Indigenous territories in Brazil. After decades of land conflict, its boundaries were formally demarcated in 2005.

Throughout the day, neighbours and friends help Macuxi and her husband prepare the field. The couple offers community members warm meals and caxiri, a traditional drink made of fermented cassava.

The food produced here will not only feed Macuxi’s family, but also support the entire community: “We contribute to events and celebrations, and we also share the crops with other families who may not have as much,” she said.

Collective plans

This stance is not exclusive to communities in Raposa Serra do Sol.

The Indigenous economy across the Brazilian Amazon is defined by concepts of justice and sharing, acknowledging the various social roles played by community members, and the interconnectedness of local territories and biodiversity.

As the least-deforested areas of the Amazon, Indigenous lands are crucial for keeping global warming below the critical 1.5C threshold.

According to a recent academic study, Indigenous territories and protected areas accounted for only five percent of net forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon between 2000 and 2021. This is largely due to Indigenous peoples’ inherent devotion to preserving the environment for future generations.

In Roraima, this drive translates into long-term collective plans, wherein each community identifies sacred zones and production areas.

“Our goal is to manage our territories and their natural resources in accordance with our traditional knowledge,” Sineia do Vale, national coordinator for Brazil’s Indigenous Committee on Climate Change, told Al Jazeera.

More recently, she said, climate justice has become central to this process: “We don’t believe climate justice can be addressed detached from the management of our territories, as it pervades social and cultural issues, including income-generation alternatives that respect our ways of life.”

While such a vision might seem far-fetched in a capitalist world, a recent study (PDF) by the World Resources Institute Brasil suggests otherwise, indicating that an economy derived from the Indigenous experience is not only feasible, but lucrative.

Researchers found that adopting bioeconomic models based on the replication and expansion of arrangements that already exist in Indigenous territories could increase the Brazilian Amazon economy’s gross domestic product (GDP) by 40 billion reals ($8.4bn), create 312,000 jobs and increase the forest’s carbon stock by 19 percent.

This model would also make the region more resilient to economic crises.

“Under financial capitalism, vulnerable groups often suffer from the effects of abstract economic variables, which often escape their comprehension,” Wesley Matheus, a consultant for the World Bank, told Al Jazeera.

“Thus, economic systems that are to a certain extent dissociated from these variables and are instead integrated to the social-environmental dynamics of a given context tend to be more resilient to possible shocks in the financial market.”

Ecological protection

In communities such as Brazil’s Tabalascada, which houses around 1,000 people over 5,260 hectares (13,000 acres), this is already a reality. Its economy is circular and sustainable.

“Nowadays, nearly everything produced in our territory is commercialised and consumed within the community,” Chief Cesar Wapichana told Al Jazeera.

Since 2010, the community has been home to the Association of Indigenous Producers of Tabalascada. Members’ activities include agriculture, flour manufacturing and animal husbandry.

Last year, residents of the community created a WhatsApp group to promote the sale and trade of goods produced locally.

“A while back, we had to drive to the city to sell our products or pay someone to deliver them,” Wapichana said. “It was more complicated and expensive. Today, everything that is advertised in the WhatsApp group is sold almost immediately.”

The money flowing within the community has helped small businesses, such as snack bars and bodegas, while also stimulating producers who are at the core of the economic system. And because their trade depends heavily on local ecosystems, the circular economy of Tabalascada has also furthered ecological protection.

“We really do have a robust economy inside our territory,” Wapichana said. “That has brought growth for the entire community – always with preservation at the forefront of our minds.”

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Panama: Indigenous Community Needs Further Support to Relocate, Government Delays the Move Despite Sea Level Rise (www.hrw.org)
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  • Sea level rise and lack of space threaten the rights of people living on the tiny island of Gardi Sugdub and other coastal Indigenous communities in Panama.

  • The community of Gardi Sugdub has planned for their relocation to a safer mainland site for over a decade, but long-promised support from the government has been delayed.

  • Panama should provide immediate support so the Gardi Sugdub community can complete their relocation with dignity and should build on lessons learned to develop a national policy to safeguard human rights in future climate-related relocations.

(Panama City) – Sea level rise and lack of living space threaten the rights of Guna Indigenous people living on Panama’s small island of Gardi Sugdub, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The community began planning to relocate to the mainland in 2010, but no one has yet been able to move.

The 52-page report, “‘The Sea is Eating the Land Below Our Homes’: Indigenous Community Facing Lack of Space and Rising Seas Plans Relocation,” documents both why the Gardi Sugdub community decided to relocate and how government delays and incomplete support for relocation have stalled the move and left the community in limbo. Human Rights Watch found that while some aspects of Panamanian government and Inter-American Development Bank support for the community have been exemplary, urgent action is needed to ensure that community members’ rights are respected in the relocation.

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Full Article here“Panama should follow through on its promises and provide immediate support so the Gardi Sugdub community can relocate with dignity,” said Erica Bower, climate displacement researcher at Human Rights Watch and author of the report. “It’s not too late for the government to take this opportunity and create a blueprint that coastal communities elsewhere in Panama and globally can turn to as they confront the climate change crisis.”

The report is based on over 40 interviews with Gardi Sugdub community members and others involved in the relocation process.

Gardi Sugdub is a tiny, flat, and crowded island of nearly 1,300 people just off Panama’s northern coastline. A part of the Guna Yala autonomous region, the island has been home to Guna Indigenous people for over a century. Originally Gardi Sugdub offered refuge from mainland mosquito-borne illnesses and colonial restrictions, but today, the island faces new challenges. There is no room to expand, and floods are already making life harder for the island’s residents, affecting their rights to adequate housing, health, education, and culture. Some rise in future sea levels is inevitable, according to the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, threatening long term island habitability and prompting this community to choose relocation to the mainland as a measure of last resort.

President Laurentino Cortizo promised, after earlier dates for the relocation came and went, that the new site will be ready on September 25, 2023, according to community members. The Housing Ministry recently delayed the date yet again, to February 2024. The new date is the latest in a series of unfulfilled promises that include a partly constructed, now abandoned hospital and glacial progress on building a school. The authorities have not provided a full explanation for the delays to all community members, who have requested greater transparency on timelines and budgetary changes and increasingly fear the new timeline will not be met.

A community leader involved in the process said, “The government is not complying with what it agreed to for this project. Look at that delay. That is not fair.” He is not alone. An elder said: “I might not even see this relocation happen in my lifetime. All other leaders who started the project have died in this process.”

Human Rights Watch found that, without prompt government action, conditions at the new site may threaten people’s rights to an adequate standard of living, housing, water, health, education, and culture. Plans for water, sewage, and trash management at the relocation site and at the nearby model school are inadequate. The new site experiences erosion during floods and lacks shade to protect people from hot temperatures. As of April, the proposed site for a small health center had not yet been prepared for construction.

At the same time, not everyone wants to relocate. Some Gardi Sugdub community members wish to remain on the island, and they need continued access to basic services, including health care, education, and electricity. Others intend to regularly commute back and forth between the island and mainland for livelihood and cultural reasons and require improved access to transportation to make that possible.

Gardi Sugdub is not alone: 38 communities in Panama may require relocation because of a combination of overcrowding and sea level rise. Over 400 communities globally have completed or are undertaking relocation because of natural hazards, including those that are expected to increase in frequency and intensity because of climate change. Gardi Sugdub’s experiences offer important lessons about the process of community-led relocation for subsequent efforts, Human Rights Watch said.

Planned relocation is an adaptation measure of last resort with serious risks, making it essential that planning respects human rights principles such as meaningful participation, informed consent, and nondiscrimination. Most critically, communities like Gardi Sugdub need to be leading the way at all stages of the relocation process.

Some governments, such as the Pacific Island nations of Fiji and the Solomon Islands, have developed policies for planned relocation, although no country in the Americas has yet done so. Panama should learn from its experience in Gardi Sugdub and design the first national policy to safeguard peoples’ rights during planned relocation in the Americas.

The international community should also build on lessons learned from the Inter-American Development Bank’s model of community-engaged support for Gardi Sugdub. The bank provided important support for the project from 2018 to 2023, although that support ends this month. As planned relocations are complex and require long term support, future support from development banks and other international organizations requires extended timelines and ongoing monitoring and evaluation.

The relocation of Gardi Sugdub is planned at a time when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading authority on climate science, finds that “as climate risk intensifies, the need for planned relocations will increase.” This reality makes it essential to learn from past experiences of community-led relocation like Gardi Sugdub.

“Governments the world over should plan in an anticipatory, inclusive, and rights-respecting way today to avert foreseeable rights violations in the future,” Bower said.

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The Navajo Suffered From Nuclear Testing. 'Oppenheimer' Doesn't Tell Our Story (time.com)
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Christopher Nolan’s highly-anticipated Oppenheimer comes to the big screen five days after the 44th anniversary of the Church Rock uranium mill spill, when 94 million gallons of radioactive waste poured into the Puerco River, spanning northwestern New Mexico and northern Arizona, and across the Navajo Nation. Children played in the contaminated water, while livestock drank from radioactive aquifers. What came next—cancers, miscarriages, and mysterious illnesses—is a direct consequence of America’s race for nuclear hegemony. It’s an accomplishment built on top of the bodies of Navajo men, women, and children—the lived experience of nuclear weapons development in the United States. But, as usual, Hollywood chose to gloss over them.

The Navajo people cannot afford to be, yet again, erased from history. Hollywood has a lot of work to do, and they can start by standing with the Navajo people and urging Congress to provide just compensation for victims of radiation exposure.

amerikkka

Full article here

As part of this effort, we must all recognize the continued suffering and sacrifice that built the atomic era. From the 1940s to the 1990s, the U.S. used the Navajo Nation to supply them with uranium for the manufacture of nuclear weapons and energy. While ownership of the mines was transferred from the federal government to private companies in 1971, the U.S. failed to enforce proper safety standards, leaving the sites unregulated until 1990 when the last mine closed. More than 500 now abandoned mines cover our land as a result. Miners and their families were kept in the dark about the heinous dangers of radiation exposure, so they went about their daily activities like any other community. Workers drank the mine’s cool spring water, while their wives washed their yellowed work clothes. Families built homes with local rocks and sediment and let their children play for hours on uranium byproducts, including mine debris piles. Despite the U.S. government’s awareness of the risks inherent in uranium mining, most Navajos did not know what radiation was—let alone the danger presented by every second of exposure.

Growing up in a community that has an abandoned uranium mine in Red Mesa, Arizona, I witnessed firsthand the heartbreaking and enduring consequences of uranium mining on my people. Despite the passage of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) in 1990, justice remains elusive for Navajo families who have suffered from the devastating and long-lasting health and environmental effects of the uranium mining industry on Navajo land.

While RECA has provided life-saving healthcare coverage for some uranium miners, the legislation’s limited scope has left many Navajo people suffering from radiation exposure without any compensation. The list of diseases covered by the law is, to start, woefully incomplete. Renal cancer, nephritis, and kidney tubal tissue injury are just some of the conditions that were initially excluded because of a lack of available scientific data connecting them to radiation exposure. RECA also excludes Navajo miners employed after 1971 from eligibility for compensation. Yet, the work they did, and the dangers they faced, remained exactly the same.

This is not a problem of the past. As of August 1, 2022, more than 53,804 claims have been filed under RECA. Of those, more than 12% identified as Navajos. Navajo miners and their families suffer a wide variety of cancers and radiation-related illnesses, with new victims regularly diagnosed. Women living near the mines have experienced stillbirths and miscarriages at abhorrent rates and their children carry the physical legacy of the Cold War through developmental delays, chromosomal aberrations, and other birth defects.

The Navajo people have suffered and sacrificed so much, while directly contributing to our country’s post-war pursuit of nuclear superiority. And while our Navajo Code Talkers are esteemed for heroically saving countless lives in the South Pacific during World War II, our uranium miners have largely been overlooked. The only thank-you for their years of patriotic service has been death, disease, and decades of advocacy to recognize their sacrifice.

Time is slipping away for Navajo uranium miners and their descendants, their hopes dangling in the balance. With each passing day, their weary bodies bear the weight of diseases inflicted by their labor; the clock ticks, mercilessly. As they wait for existing claims to be processed and for expanded eligibility through the RECA amendments, their precious time on this earth dwindles, a poignant reminder of the urgent need for justice and compassion.

The legacy of uranium mining on the Navajo is a perpetual blemish on our nation’s history with its Native people, and the disregard of our stories from media and movies like Oppenheimer can’t mean a continued erasure in U.S. policy. Acknowledging the harm done means living up to the intended purpose of RECA: to compensate all those impacted by the harms of the nuclear age. It is only then that my people can begin to heal and our beautiful and sacred land can be restored. We need the world to hear us and provide the justice that has long been denied to our people.

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Caracoles Zapatistas - New General Megathread for the 29th of July 2023 (hexbear.net)
submitted 1 year ago by thelastaxolotl@hexbear.net to c/indigenous@hexbear.net
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The Caracoles is a way to organize self-government in the five Zapatista controlled zones in the state of Chiapas, they were born on August 8, 2003 in substitution of the Aguascalientes. This change marks a new marks a new stage in the political development of the EZLN that can be analyzed from different angles.

The "caracol" has been a constant representation for the indigenous peoples of the Mexican southeast since time immemorial. The ancient Maya used it not only as a symbol to represent the zero 0, they used it to make music, to call the population to concentrate or to perform religious ceremonies. Today it still used in the area to call community assemblies.

The pu'y or Caracol represents the collective heart where knowledge comes from, symbolizes the way in which the heart (i.e., the community) expresses itself to the world. to the world. The Zapatistas call this dialectic way of relating to the external "life". called "life", which would be the form in which the internal heart manages to communicate with the other, understanding the with the other, understanding communication in its double channel, speaking and listening. Thus, the snail represents the call to dialogue.

Ja ma' 'ay ya'tel kujtiki, an idea that Lenkersdorf (German Language) translates in his Tojolabal-Spanish dictionary as "the authorities elected by us are commanded by us", and expresses one of the basic premises in the indigenous political tradition that the Zapatistas have taken up to organize themselves within the Caracoles.

In the indigenous cosmovision, the capacity of the rulers to listen and to decide or think from the "we thinking from the "we" is inseparable from the heart. Thus, to be a good ruler is to to have the capacity to develop an empathetic relationship with the problems of the community in order to community in order to make decisions from the inside out, from the heart of the we. us, what the Zapatistas call "to command by obeying".

Ancestrally, this organizational form of "commanding by obeying" has had as its objective to achieve an equitable to achieve an equitable distribution of power and to promote the active participation of the people. In this way, it seeks to avoid the concentration of command power in the hands of one group. Thus, decisions are not delegated to the authorities, but are directly dependent on the people's decision, participation being not only a political right but also an obligation linked to a sense of responsibility to the community.

In this sense, the main task of the indigenous authorities would be to listen to the demands of the population and act according to them, i.e., to exercise command in a process of "walking the in a process of "walking the walk by asking", leaving behind the Western political vision of representative democracy that unilaterally exercises power.

How are Caracoles Organized?

The self-government exercised within the rebel zones is organized by the communities at the local level, by groups of communities at the regional level and by a group of regions at the zone level, so that each Caracol is in charge of one of the five zones in which the recovered territories are grouped.

The thirty Zapatista Autonomous Rebel Municipalities (known by the Zapatistas by the acronym MAREZ) are declared "existing" with the rupture of the military siege on December 19, 1994. With this begins the process of building Zapatista autonomy driven by the grassroots communities. Currently, the Autonomous Municipalities exercise their right to self-determination independently.

Now, the function of the Good Government Boards, constituted on August 9, 2003, is to counteract the imbalance in the development of the autonomous municipalities and communities, mediate in conflicts that may arise, deal with complaints of all kinds, oversee the implementation of community projects in the MAREZ and promote support for community projects, monitor compliance with the laws, and link the EZLN and the CCRI with the civilian Zapatista support bases.

Each of the constituent parts of the territory or rebel government receives a name assigned by its inhabitants through an assembly consensus.

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