| Your support of Cultural Survival this past year has made an enormous difference for Indigenous Peoples around the world.
 Because of your help, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
issued precautionary measures calling on Panama to halt dam construction
that would inundate Ngöbe communities living along the Changuinola River.
- Your support also enabled us to engage in a lobbying effort that led the
U.S. House and Senate Appropriations Committees to recommend quadrupling the amount of federal money to support Native American language programs across America.
- Our Guatemala Radio Project, which is growing towards a network of 260
stations throughout the country, introduced a telecommunications bill in
the Guatemalan legislature that will ensure the security of network
stations for years to come.
- Perhaps the most impressive advance this year has been our merger
with Global Response. This extraordinarily effective Colorado-based organization
has been advocating for Indigenous Peoples' land rights for almost 20
years. They have helped Indigenous communities block dozens of dams,
mines, and logging operations around the world, protecting the people and the unique environments in which they live. They will continue that vital work as a program of Cultural Survival, dramatically increasing our ability to help Indigenous Peoples.
This year's successes are a harbinger of even bigger things to come in
2010. We will be expanding Indigenous Community Radio across Latin
America, continuing to collaborate with Native communities across the
U.S. to gain support for their language programs; our publications and
newly reworked website will bring Indigenous issues to even more
people; and by taking on many more advocacy campaigns, we will spread
our efforts to many more Indigenous communities around the globe.
But to make all that happen, we need your continued support.
Won't you please give as generously as you can to our Annual Appeal? Thank you so very much and Happy Holidays from all of us here at Cultural Survival.
Photo: Ramiro Vargas, Schuar, in Cusco, Peru during
summer 2009 protests. Photo by Lilah Greenberg
|
What a passionate mission!
ReplyDeleteIt's sad to see the world still taking advantage of other people. It seems that Cultural Survival's projects are combating just this, but in a way that I, as a student of culture and an individual identifying with multiple ethnicities, can truly relate to. It's amazing to me that most of the current projects listed on the site are fighting against things that have happened before, elsewhere, to different people. Hydroelectric dams have had the same effect in groups other than Ngobe in Panama. They seem to just miraculously appear right down river from settlements of under-represented farming families, time after time. The Didipio project in particular has special resonance within me, as a Filipino. It reminds me of Superfund sites in the US and the remarkable correlation between their location and proximity to people of certain ethnicities and/or socio-economic status. Aside from many of the aggressor's campaigns in Cultural Survival's projects, plainly ruining people's lives, we as a human species are losing a good bit of diversity. More profoundly, we're losing culture. Generations of knowledge and tradition that is just as or more difficult to build than any building, company, or city. We need these people to represent the diversity characteristic of humans.
Thank you Cultural Survival and the indigenous communities and cultures around the world.
Poignant remarks Chris. It is true, we must acknowledge and assess environmental racism within policy and legislation.
ReplyDeleteThis is absolutely true! I am so struck by the manner in which the industrialized world seems to overlook the interests and even existence of indigenous groups. The very fact that these groups have lived and built their cultures around certain environments is often completely disregarded in favor of Western "progress". These are people whose lives are much more entwined with the features of the landscape. Those in favor of "development" tend to view mountains and rivers as obstacles to progress, as opposed to guiding forces. I am so glad to see that this organization is working to halt the construction of the dam Chris mentioned. This is a perfect example of industry attempting to harness and control a force that indigenous people rely on in its existing form.
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ReplyDeleteThis brought be back to my Political Anthropology class. The stories of all of the projects that were forced upon indigenous populations that really had no way to protect themselves when faced with 'the educated' claiming progress and improvement. Even though, I did my case study on Brazil's Landless Workers Movement the circumstances are startling easily comparable to the projects Cultural Survival has listed. The rural farmers in Brazil had everything threatened to be wiped away from their livelihoods to their very culture. Of course their’s wasn’t a special case because it has happened for centuries and across the world. Even in our very country. As Chris said we have lost so much as we enter an age where globalization and technology has brought us so much closer. I once said we are in a era of “is/zations” … medicalization, localization, culturalization, Americanization/ Westernization - not all of them bad, but all of them competing and not all of them -right- for a specific group, especially when there are outside interests at stake. People and organizations forget that what works for one may not work for another. Improvement doesn’t always require the destruction of culture and tradition. What we see as betterment, other see as a worsening situation. As mentioned, we are losing our diversity, and it due to the fact we try to replicate and mimic, instead of using what tools are already there and working within the cultures rather than against them.
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