Category: Indigenous peoples

Australia’s thought-provoking Apology

Okay, I am merely nine months late in commenting on the breakthrough apology that Australian PM Kevin Rudd offered to the indigenous peoples of Australia and the Torres Strait Islands in the parliament in Canberra back on February 13. You can see video of Rudd delivering it here, and read the text here.
As a US citizen (and also, for my sins, a British citizen), reflecting on Rudd’s heroic– though of course not yet nearly “sufficient” act– makes me ask how long it will be until my government here in Washington issues some equivalent public apologies for past, very grave misdeeds.

    * For the many acts carried out against numerous Native American peoples– exactly analogous to deeds the Anglo-heritage Australians committed against the indigenous peoples of their lands;
    * For the barbaric acts carried out against African peoples ripped from their own countries, brought to our shores, and kept in a situation of enslavement that– unlike slavery systems known elsewhere in the world– was maintained intact throughout the generations;
    * For the unjustified wars of aggression our government has launched, both on this continent and far afield, right down to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Well, I said, “past” misdeeds. Some of our country’s misdeeds– including the occupation of Iraq and its maintaining of a completely unfair agricultural subsidy program that has ripped the livelihoods away from hundreds of millions of poor-country farmers — continue to this day.
In the case of continuing misdeeds, it is a good question whether we should focus more on stopping the misdeed or seeking a public apology– or even, as is preferable, some form of concrete reparation– for it.
My own strong preference is to focus first of all on stopping the misdeed. Apologies and other forms of “reckoning” can wait till later. But if we wait to end the commission of the misdeed then further considerable harm will have been done in the meantime…

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Evo makes his move

I want to express my good wishes to Evo Morales and the people of Bolivia as they try to take back some control over their country’s mineral wealth.
It looked to me that he moved intelligently and with good timing– crucially by trying to ensure that the foreign firms operating in Bolivia’s gas fields are not able to destroy vital production and financial records that will help Bolivia to sit down and negotiate the best possible deal with the firms in the weeks ahead.
I see that over at the CSM today, former foreign correspondent Richard O’Mara has quoted Abel Posse, described as “an Argentine novelist and diplomat knowledgeable about the Andean countries” as having written about the Andean indigenous peoples that,””They live bad, die early, pass through cycles of famine. They have been considered incapable of governing and incapable of being governed.”
That sounds either fatalistic or derogatory (or both?). But O’Mara continues:

    But they have held firm to their traditions and values. They know what they believe. They know what they do not believe.
    The people Morales represents, probably a large fraction of the more than 50 percent of the electorate who voted for him, “don’t believe in globalization, don’t believe in capitalism, don’t believe in Marxism. (Che Guevara died in Bolivia because he failed to grasp that.),” wrote Posse. Nor do they believe in the institutions imposed upon them by whites and mestizos: the judicial system, taxation, everything that has to do with the “imaginary republic” created to further the interests of only 10 percent of the population.
    So what do they believe in? Well, for one thing a softer approach to development and a deeper respect for the environment. Bolivia, owing to slash-and-burn agriculture and the worldwide demands for exotic hardwoods, suffers extensive deforestation, soil erosion, and industrial pollution.
    Morales speaks of a cultural federalism, some new institution to bind together the divergent peoples who inhabit Bolivia’s lowlands in the Amazon basin, virtually at sea level, and those of the sierra, who live in remote hamlets, some clinging to the high Andes at nearly 20,000 feet. These are very practical problems and concerns, hardly driven by ideologies of the standard sort.
    Morales speaks frequently of multiculturalism and “convergent economies,” whatever that means. But his policies are not all vague. Quite specifically, he wants to direct the wealth that flows from existing resources (Bolivia has the second largest reserve of natural gas in the continent) to the people who never got it before.
    … Much will be heard in the coming months no doubt about Indian superstitions, mockery of their worship of Pachamama, their goddess who calls upon human beings to care for the earth. The rise of Evo Morales certainly won’t restore the indigenous people of the Andes to their historical high estate. But a little improvement might be in the offing.

By the way, I’d really like to find an English-language website that provides good, unbiased news and commentary regarding what’s happening in Bolivia. (Or I suppose I could understand a Spanish site easily enough.) Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks!

Counter-insurgencies and large-scale incarceration

Today I finished writing a long article I’ve been working on for a while, about the role of large-scale incarcerations in colonial counter-insurgency campaigns… Well, that was was sort of what it ended up being about. It started out as something slightly different, but in this case (unlike most others) my writing process was a fairly intuitive one, so I just sort of followed the narrative where it led me, and learned a lot in the process.
Yes, I’m sure you’re all really eager to find out about my writing process. (Irony alert.)
Well, along the way, I wrote quite a lot about the anti-Mau Mau campaign in Kenya. I borrowed acouple of Bill’s books about French counter-insurgency strategies in Algeria. I talked a bit with a friend about Dutch counter-insurgency strategies in Indonesia. (Did you know that when the Japanese invaded Indonesia during World War 2, the Dutch administrators of an entire detention camp called Boven Digul escaped to Australia– and took their Indonesian prisoners with them? What an interesting episode.)
Anyway, the main thing I wanted to put up here is this link to a really fascinating article titled Patterns of frontier genocide 1803

Settler societies, indigenes, culture, language

Jonathan, Shirin, and I have been having a really interesting interesting discussion down here about issues of culture and power in settler societies.
In the course of the discussion there Jonathan has been starting to develop a really interesting typology of different kinds of settler societies. Since he’s a guy who knows an amazing amount about many really intriguing parts of the world, including but not limited to the Pacific Islands, Africa, and the Middle East, what he has to say is really worth reading.
We also address the ever-thorny question of when cultural appropriation– mainly, in this context, by the settlers, of the cultural products/practices of the indigenes– is legitimate and when it should be (at the very least) questioned. In the discussion there, we make a distinction between cultural appropriation (generally ok) and cultural expropriation (generally not ok).
Finally, I’ve been looking at the report that New Zealand’s Waitangi Tribunal issued in 1986 on the issue of whether Maori language (te reo Maori) counts as a “treasure” (taonga) of the Maoris under the terms of the 1840 Waitangi Treaty and is thus deserving of the government’s protection.

    [That web document there presents both the English-language and the equally authoritative Maori-language versions of the Treaty. In “Article the second”, the “kuini o Ingarani”, that is, the Queen of England, undertakes to protect the unqualified exercise of the Maori chiefs’ chieftainship over all their “ratou taonga katoa”– their most precious treasures….
    Note also in the Maori-language second para of “Article the First”, that the language actually had no word for or concept of the European-origined concept of “sovereignty”. Therefore they used a Maori transliteration/adaption of the concept of “governorship”– Kawana-tanga.]


Well anyway, in 1913, 90% of Maori schoolchildren could still speak their ancestral language. (Marcia Stenson, 2004, p.97) But since the view (and possibly the desire) of most of the Pakeha (i.e. mainly-Anglo settler) majority in the country was that the Maoris were “a dying race”, whose last remnants would presumably soon be assimilated into English-speaking society, government policies forbade Maoris from using their mother-tongue in schools and provided no access for them to use it in their dealings with the government.
By 1975, fewer than 5% of Maori schoolkids could speak their ancestral tongue.
Enter the Waitangi Tribunal— a body established that very same year as

    a permanent commission of inquiry charged with making recommendations on claims brought by Māori relating to actions or omissions of the Crown, which breach the promises made in the Treaty of Waitangi. The Tribunal comprises up to 16 members… Approximately half the members are Māori and half are Pākehā.

So here are some excerpts from what the Tribunal reported, in April 1986, about the language issue:

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Fences and indigenous peoples

JWN reader Scott H., who is part Lenni Lenape, sent along a reference to this AP story out of Oregon yesterday, which tells of yet another attempt to fence in a group of indigenous people…. In this case, the native-American students at a boarding school in Salem, Oregon:

    Barbed wire turned out to be the wrong way to mark the 125th anniversary of the Chemawa Indian School, which serves tribes across the nation.
    Construction crews began setting up an 8-foot-high fence, topped with barbed wire, around the 200-acre campus in Salem as the boarding school was preparing to celebrate its anniversary this weekend. The barbed wire was being removed Friday following protests.
    The construction … [resulted] in a student demonstration and letters from parents to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which ordered the $63,000 project.
    “Chemawa means `happy home,’ ” student Jeremy Cummings told the Statesman Journal newspaper in Salem. “It doesn’t make a happy home with a fence around it.”

Indeed not. Neither there, nor in the fenced-in cities in occupied Palestine.
By the way, I explored that Lenni Lenape website a little bit, and found this page about the people’s history which should be of special interest to US Quakers.
One of the first big groups of Quakers on this continent was the group brought over in the late 17th century by William Penn, who has a “land grant” from whichever British King it was and came over here to launch what was called the “Holy Experiment” in Quaker governance.
Quakers have prided themselves on having tried to treat the native peoles of north America fairly– in particular, by “buying” their land from Indians for a “fair” price, etc etc. (In later centuries, Quakers also participated along with other churches in undertaking the cultural genocide of many Indians by putting their children and youths into boarding-schools where they were forbidden from speaking their people’s languages. But I suppose they thought they were “doing them a favor”? Anyway, that phase came a lot later… )
So the Lenni Lenape were some of the first native peoples that Penn’s colonists encountered. I guess he and the Quakers who came with him tried to treat them decently. But much or most of the land they had in “Penn”-sylvania and New Jersey was actually held in Penn’s personal name, and after he died his descendants weren’t nearly so attentive to trying to treat the Indians fairly.
According to the Lenape story told on that page I linked to, after William Penn’s death his descendants,

    falsely represented an old, incomplete, unsigned draft of a deed as a legal contract. They told the Lenape that their ancestors some fifty years before had signed this document which stated that the land to be deeded to the Penns was as much as could be covered in a day-and-a-half’s walk.
    Believing that their forefathers had made such an agreement the Lenape leaders agreed to let the Penns have this area walked off. They thought the whites would take a leisurely walk down an Indian path along the Delaware River. Instead, the Penns hired three of the fastest runners, and had a straight path cleared. Only one of the “walkers” was able to complete the “walk,” but he went fifty-five miles.

And so the colonists claimed from the Lenape an extra 1,200 square miles of land inside “Penn”-sylvania… The Lenape were put off that land and sent off on what became a 130-year “trail of tears” that pushed them ever further west and south till they ended up in Oklahoma…
In June 1762, the New Jersey Quaker John Woolman determined to travel from his home-farm westwards to visit some of the native Americans in the center of what is today Pennsylvania. In his journal he wrote,

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