Copyright 1994 InterPress Service, all rights reserved.
Worldwide distribution via the APC networks.
*** 12-Oct-94 ***
By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Oct 12 (IPS) - Indigenous groups across the Americas,
from Chile to Canada, are sharing alternative trade and
development skills to fight such problems as poverty and social
exclusion.
''We are not same-same, but as indigenous people we share
common problems,'' said Blandina Makkik, a consultant from the
Inuit community of Canada who attended this week's meeting at the
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) for groups from the
Americas.
''We have different governments. The Canadian government is
more encouraging than Southern governments, but we still have to
struggle,'' she said.
Makkik works with Unaaq, an Inuit company with an Arctic shrimp
export business that is helping indigenous groups in Belize,
Eritrea, Nicaragua, and Russia to promote similar enterprises.
Some two dozen people came to the meeting with the help of the
Ottawa-based Apikan Indigenous Network and the U.N. Development
Programme (UNDP) to develop new projects for their communities.
And they told their success stories.
Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin of the Fair Trade Federation has
worked with groups around the Americas to sell indigenous goods,
including organic coffee and traditional clothing. He says there
are ready markets for the products.
''It's that simple. We meet today, and tomorrow you can start
selling your goods in the speciality Third World stores in this
country,'' said Haslett-Marroquin who is from Guatemala, but now
lives in Minneapolis.
Wayne Dunn of Apikan has just returned from Central America,
where he assessed indigenous community needs and capabilities.
Referring to these trade opportunities, he said: ''It's like
someone lit a light bulb for me. It seemed like such a natural way
to proceed.''
The groups propose to share, not only business development
techniques, but also indigenous technology and organising skills.
According to Enrique Neuhauser, senior policy adviser for
UNDP's Latin America and the Caribbean bureau, the Quebec Inuit
group, 'Orientation', visited Chile last month to share with local
groups techniques for charting indigenous problems.
And the Canadians are assisting groups like the Mapuche-
Pehuenches people, whose traditions could be threatened by the
Pangue dam on the upper Bio-Bio river, which is now being built
with financing from the International Finance Corporation (IFC),
the World Bank's private sector arm.
''The Inuit have developed traditional geographic information
systems that use house-to-house surveys to establish the damage
that the dam would cause. They have a methodology and the sotfware
to express this,'' said Neuhauser.
Another project is reaching across borders to help indigenous
youths on three continents. Eight young people from Canada, Chile,
and Russia are currently living in Canada with the Inuit Circum-
Polar Conference in Ottawa to share community organising skills.
They are to return with the skills to their own communities in
April.
But some like Ed Hall of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs says
that it is not enough to share trade and organising skills. It is
also necessary to educate governments and agencies on how to work
with indigenous peoples.
Hall cited the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers which runs water
management projects that could touch on dams and marine recreation
areas.
''The agencies have to be introduced to tribal governance and
they need to learn how different tribes use resources
differently,'' he said, noting that this is increasingly important
as indigenous communities win back the right to manage their own
resources.
''For example, the Army Corps will have to decide how to return
waterfront areas at the Garrison dam in North Dakota to the
Standing Rock Sioux and the Fort Berthold reservations,'' he said.
Neuhauser says input from this week's meeting will go to a
January summit in Brazil, where groups from throughout the
Americas are to chart new projects for the UNDP to develop.
Fernando Zumbado, the UNDP's regional director for Latin
America and the Caribbean, stressed that ''understanding and
feeling solidarity with the struggles and successes of indigenous
peoples in the Americas is key to fashioning a revised,
successful, and fair Latin American and Caribbean process of
development.''
''A phrase from an aboriginal woman in Australia recently
caught my attention,'' he said: ''If you came only to help me,
then you can go home. But if you consider my struggle part of your
own survival, then perhaps we can work together.''
(END/IPS/PC/YJC/94)
Origin: Washington/INDIGENOUS PEOPLES/
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