The International Year of the World's Indigenous People:
"First Nations" Speak Out
by James Walls
[To launch the International Year, indigenous spokespersons
from around the world addressed the General Assembly on
issues ranging from human rights to caring for the
environment. They may hold secrets for a sustainable future.
But is anyone listening?]
United Nations, New York - On 9-10 December 1992, the United
Nations hosted hundreds of representatives of the world's
indigenous peoples. They constituted one of the most diverse
cultural assemblages ever seen in a setting famed for its
human variety. They journeyed here from all regions of the
world to participate in ceremonies inaugurating 1993 as the
International Year of the World's Indigenous People.
The Year is the outcome of a decade of United Nations work
with indigenous peoples that focused primarily on violations
of their human rights. Yet every aspect of the lives of the
indigenous - their detailed knowledge, their technical
skills, their reverence toward nature and the environment -
is altering the way we view the world and challenging
deeply-rooted assumptions about "progress" and
"development."
For many indigenous spokespersons, the UN celebration was a
pivotal event in a relationship with the world body that
extends back 40 years. "It is both a climax and a new
beginning," said Pauline Tangiora, visiting New York on
behalf of the Maori peoples of New Zealand. She is hopeful
that 1993 will "bring solutions to many issues the
indigenous face."
Interest by the United Nations in indigenous groups began in
1953, when the International Labour Organization (ILO)
launched a study on the persistent violations of their human
rights. In 1957, the ILO put forth its Convention 107
calling for protection of these rights.
In the intervening years, attention to indigenous peoples
has expanded to take in other issues. Great interest is
today evident in their close relationship with nature, as it
occurs in the immense variety of their natural environments.
The modern world is finding that indigenous peoples have
their own solutions to problems they face, and that these
often constitute important additions to humankind's stock of
knowledge and techniques. Most of the 7,000 natural
compounds used in modern medicine, for example, have been
employed by traditional healers for centuries.
Bud sadly many of these ancient cultures have been disrupted
- often in the name of development - and consideration is
turning to the services they now sorely lack - in health,
education, housing, access to clean water, energy supplies
and adequate waste disposal systems.
The challenges posed by indigenous peoples to the world
community could be heard as the International Year was
officially inaugurated and 20 indigenous spokespersons
addressed the General Assembly. They were also given voice
in quiet conversations in the corridors of the United
Nations Secretariat.
"We must have our own schools," said Rosa Ju, an Aymara from
the windswept highliands of Bolivia. "Our children must not
forget our ancient traditions."
"We must follow our own way," said Bimal Bhikkhu, a
Buddhist monk, speaking for the Chakma people of the
forested Chittagong Hills of Bangladesh. "We must do so even
though our dominant culture has other ways."
"We have to exercise political autonomy - in an expansion of
the concept of democracy," said Luis Macas, a Quechua
speaker from Ecuador, a descendant of the peoples who long
ago built the great Inca civilization.
"We must see an end to pressures for assimilation," said
Giichi Nomura, an Ainu from the island of Hokkaido in
northern Japan.
"We must have conditions that will enable us to recover the
integrity of our cultures, protect our ways of life, and
create environments in which our cultures will flourish,"
said Moringe Parkipuny, a Maasai from Tanzania.
These statements contained within them implications of
enormous tranformations to come. The Maori Pauline Tangiora
put it this way, "Yes, indeed, I guess you could say that we
indigenous peoples are on the verge of turning it all upside
down."
Who are the indigenous?
The Worldwatch Institute, an independent research institute
in Washington, DC, has pointed out that in addition to their
skills in maintaining their natural habitats, the indigenous
are also "the keepers of human variety." Indeed, their very
variety makes them difficult to define. In a December 1992
Worldwatch paper, "Guardians of the Land: Indigenous Peoples
and the Health of the Earth", Alan Thein Durning had this to
say about them:
"Measured by spoken languages - the single
best indicator of disctinct cultures because
each language implicitly encapsulates a
unique view of the universe - all the world's
peoples belong to 6,000 cultures; 4,000 to
5,000 of these are indigenous ones. Of the
5.5 billion humans on the planet, roughly 200
to 600 million are indigenous people. (These
ranges are wide because of varying definitions
of 'indigenous'; the higher figures include
ethnic nations that lack political autonomy,
such as Tibetans, Kurds and Zulus, while the
lower figures count only smaller, subnational
societies.)"
At the core of whatever definition is accepted - and the
United Nations accepts one that numbers the indigenous at
about 300 million - is the notion of peoples who have
resisted assimilation, who have struggled to maintain the
integrity of their cultures and ancient ways of life. A
recent advisory report to the UN Development Programme
(UNDP) by the Inter-American Indigenous Institute offered
this description:
"Scattered across the face of the planet
are numerous human groups who descend from
ancient societies...These ethnic groups
have succeeded in resisting persistent, and
often centuries-old, attempts at extermination
or assimilation by the sectors which have
assumed the representation or the control of
the new states.
Thus they preserve their cultural traditions,
lifestyles, world view, values and languages,
which differentiate them from other sectors...
They are defined as Indians, indigenous
peoples, aborigines, autochthonous peoples,
natives or 'first nations'."
The indigenous are found today in forests, mountains and
deserts, on arid plains and in the icy habitat of the Arctic
north. They are found, too, in the cities and universities
of the industrial world. Yet their societies tend to be
centered in the marginal and desolate terrains to which they
were driven by those who conquered them. The conditions they
live in often send a tragic message: that indigenous peoples
are powerless.
"But powerless no more," say Luis Macas, the Quechua speaker
from Ecuador. "Today, at last, we have come together. Today
we are organized. Indigenous peoples from all over the world
are for the first time working together for their common
goals."
The United Nations and indigenous peoples
"The task of bringing us together, making us a force in the
world, was carried out by the Working Group," Luis Macas
said. He was referring to the Working Group on Indigenous
Populations, set up as part of the UN Commission for Human
Rights in Geneva in 1982. Its mandate is to review the
policies of governments towards these groups and to prepare
a draft of a Universal Declaration of the Rights of
Indigenous People. The five-member team felt that any such
declaration would be vacuous without input from indigenous
peoples themselves. By 1985, the Working Group had persuaded
the General Assembly to establish a Voluntary Fund for
Indigenous Populations, which enabled indigenous
representatives from all parts of the world to travel to
Geneva to report, testify, review and debate the issues
involved.
The International Year is expected to close with a finalized
version of a declaration, which will be presented to the UN
General Assembly for adoption. The declaration is likely to
address a number of potentially controversial issues,
including the right of the indigenous to possess ancestral
lands or receive just compensation for them, the right to
establish autonomous governments and to receive
international arbitration of conflicts. But whatever the
declaration ultimately says may turn out to be less
important than the machinery that developed in the process.
Seven years of annual consultations have resulted in what
the Native American Onondaga Chief, Oren
Lyons-Haudenosaunee, called an "international assembly of
the indigenous," composed of individuals who are at home in
international fora and who speak eloquently for forgotten
cultures in all parts of the world.
Once they began their travels, these spokespersons for the
world's "first nations" could not be confined to an annual
appearance in Geneva. They became familiar figures on the
international stage. They were present at the Global
Conference of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders on Human
Survival, held in Moscow in January 1990. In a traditional
village setting on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro,
constructed with UNDP support, indigenous peoples held their
own meeting in connection with the UN Conference on
Environment and Development. And at the World Uranium
Hearing, held last year in Salzburg, Austria, indigenous
"witnesses" from all parts of the world presented testimony
on the environmental disasters resulting from the mining of
ancestral lands.
The keepers of nature
Just over three years ago, the role of indigenous in matters
of global ecology was brought before the international
community in a statement by the indigenous delegation at the
Moscow conference on human survival. The statement, read by
Jose Lucero, a Santa Clara Pueblo Indian from the
southwestern United States, said in part:
"Only indigenous peoples have demonstrated
efficiency in taking care of the Earth.
Indigenous cultures have provided the only
historical models of sustainable development
and must become primary decision makers in
the future of sustainable development. A
benevolent development must be defined as
a process which benefits all, indigenous peoples
included."
"A little thought would convince anyone of the truth of
these words," said Mr. Parkipuny, who was then a member of
the Tanzanian Parliament and who was present both in Mosocw
in 1990 and at the United Nations in December 1992.
"Civilizations invariably go under. In contrast, indigenous
cultures go on and on, some for thousands of years, or for
as long as they have been visible in the eye of history.
This is explained by the simple fact that indigenous
societies maintain a sustainable relation with the Earth,
and the great civilizations do not.
"That is why indigenous peoples are linked to the issue of
the environment," Mr. Parkipuny said. "The mainstream
industrial world can see us maintaining the most difficult
environments in permanent working condition. Whether in the
tropical forests, in the frozen north, or in the semi-arid
plains of East Africa where I live."
David Kopenawan, a Yanomami of the Amazon forest, was in
complete agreement. Mr. Kopenawan belongs to one of the
latest indigenous cultures to come into contact with the
modern world. "We have cared for the forest as long as we can
remember," he said. "Then suddenly people appeared from the
cities who had no idea of how to live in the forest. All
they can think to do is cut it down."
Beyond their enormous knowledge of their natural
environments, "indigenous peoples have consciously increased
the biological diversity they inherited from nature," writes
Worldwatch author Alan Durning. They have done so, he says,
"not by creating new speciies, but by fostering genetic
diversity within species - an achievement for which the
world's ascendant cultures are deeply indebted to them."
As an illustration, Mr. Durning describes the practices of
the Liberian Kpelle people, who "foster diversity for the
security it produces; they carefully march crop strains with
the slope, soil conditions and sunlight conditions on each
patch of their land. Women of the forest-dwelling Kpelle sow
more than 100 varieties of rice, making their fields a
jigsaw puzzle of genetic diversity."
Such practices are so commonplace among indigenous
cultivators that "native peoples are and have been the
stewards of 99 per cent of the world's genetic resources",
the International Society for Ethnobiology stated in 1988.
Other advanced technologies are used by indigenous peoples
all over the world, and are equally impressive. The United
Nations Conference on Desertification carried out a case
study in the Thar Desert of India. It found that the
cultivators of the jujube trees used everything the trees
produced - fruit, buds, blossoms, bark, leaves and woods.
They also cultivated species of plants and animals that
lived in symbiosis with the trees.
Tuareg pastoralists, who have lived in the arid Sahel for
more than a thousand years, developed a somplex set of
strategies for dealing with drought. When the rains ceased,
as they do regularly in the Sahel, the Tuareg drove their
animals southward into subhumid regions where, according to
ancient agreements, they exchanged the fertilizer produced
by their livestock for the right to graze on the
post-harvest stubble. The destruction of this system -
caused in part by the imposition of national boundaries
irrespective of tribal lines - has contributed to the
desertification of the Sahel.
The modern world has begun to comprehend the sophisticated
skills and techniques often involved in indigenous
technologies. They have also awakened to the understanding
that indigenous environments, tropical forests especially,
are treasure troves for botanicals. Coupled with this is the
realization that the industrial world does not know what
most of these botanicals are, and that it could end up
destroying them before it ever finds out.
This neglect was pointed out years ago by Nicole Maxwell,
American author of the book, Witch Doctor's Apprentice, who
spent much of her life living with native societies in the
jungles of Ecuador and Peru. "I was amazed at the number of
curative plants that the Jivaro knew how to use," she said.
"But I could never get an pharmaceutical houses interested
in them. They couldn't see any profit in them because you
cannot patent a natural substance. I remember one young
Jivaro man who had suffered a 10-inch machete-slash that
reached to the bone of his arm. He wrapped the wound
tightly, binding it with the leaf of a certain large-leafed
shrub. The wound healed without leaving even a trace of a
scar."
Much can be gleaned from indigenous peoples in the arts they
have developed over almost endless time. But according to
Arvol Looking Horse, of the Lakota Sioux living in the
north-central United States, "the modern fixation on
practical results is exactly what is wrong." He adds, "If
that is the point of view, just getting results, the
industrial world will miss what indigenous peoples are
trying to tell them." For Looking Horse the heart of
sustainable development lay not in technologies but in
attitudes, in a certain philosophy of life that was echoed
in a statement read by the indigenous delegations at the
conference in Moscow:
"The great powers of the universe are now
turning against us when rain, the gift of
life that waters the Earth, is now
contaminating and killing the gardens and
trees of life.
Our eldest brother, the sun, whom we
celebrate and cherish as he brings the
dawn of each new day, now begins to throw
rays of cancerous light, and new diseases
stalk the earth."
Indigenous speakers from many lands were saying similar
things when they addressed the General Assembly last
December. Repeatedly, they referred to the spirit of nature
that infused all natural environments. They spoke of the
sky, rivers, sun and moon as if they were living things.
As global ecological problems become more menacing, the
importance of such attitudes is increasingly being
recognized. Institutions such as UNDP are re-examining the
criteria which have defined development for nearly half a
century. In many instances, UNDP is looking to indigenous
peoples - in Bolivia, in the Amazon Basin, and in the Choco
jungle of Colombia - to seek ways of preserving natural
habitats and to make development sustainable. Many of these
projects - which will be reported on in CHOICES as they
progress - are based on indigenous peoples' own assessment
of their needs. They aim to go beyond "popular
participation," by keeping activities under the direction of
the indigenous themselves. It opens a new chapter in the
great panorama of development. It may be the most
interesting chapter to date.
*****
James Walls is a freelance writer living in New York City. He
is the author of "Land, Man and Sand: Desertification and
its Solution" (Macmillan Publishers, 1980)