Up to 10,000 goldminers have invaded Yanomami lands in northern Brazil, spreading malaria in the region and polluting many of the rivers with mercury.
Although most Yanomami are in contact with non-indigenous society, one uncontacted group is known to live in the area being invaded, and authorities are investigating signs of up to six other uncontacted communities living there.
The massive influx has been blamed by local indigenous leaders for the deaths of four children already. They say the miners are building settlements and airstrips, emboldened by President Bolsonaro’s support for land invaders, and constant attacks on indigenous people.
Some mining camps are just a few miles from uncontacted Yanomami.
The Yanomami association Hutukara estimates the number of miners at up to 10,000. They also report devastation to the fish and game they rely on for their livelihood.
The 35,000 Yanomami straddle both sides of the Brazil-Venezuela border. 20% of the Yanomami population in Brazil died from diseases brought in by goldminers during a previous gold rush in the late 1980s and early 90s.
After a long international campaign led by Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, Survival and the CCPY (Pro Yanomami Commission), Yanomami land in Brazil was finally demarcated as the ‘Yanomami Park’ in 1992. The Yanomami territories in Brazil and Venezuela together form the largest forested indigenous territory in the world.
Davi Kopenawa, known as “the Dalai Lama of the Rainforest” said: “Four of our rivers – the Uraricoera, Mucajaí, Apiaú and Alto Catrimani – are polluted. It’s getting worse, more miners are coming in. They’re not bringing anything [good], they’re just bringing trouble. Malaria has already increased here, and killed four of our children.”
Survival International Director Stephen Corry said today: “Bolsonaro’s racism has tragic consequences – and the gold rush underway in northern Brazil is just one example. It’s devastating the Yanomami people, who were attacked and massacred thirty years ago during the region’s last bout of gold fever. Bolsonaro’s happy to stand by and watch as the people die and the forest is destroyed – only a public outcry in Brazil and internationally can stop him.”
Communiqué from the Popular Indigenous Council of Guerrero-Emiliano Zapata (CIPOG-EZ) on the recent murder of its members, Bartolo Hilario Morales and Isaías Xanteco Ahuejote.
May 2019, Lower Mountains of the State of Guerrero.
To the Zapatista Army of National Liberation
To the National Indigenous Congress
To the Indigenous Governing Council
To the People of Guerrero
To the Peoples of Mexico and the World
To the National and International Sixth
To the Networks of Resistance and Rebellion
To the CIG Support Networks
Twenty days after the cowardly murder of our brothers, Lucio Bartolo Faustino and Modesto Verales Sebastián, impunity continues at the three levels of government. We the Nahua people of the mountains of the state of Guerrero are grieving and angry. We publicly denounce the hideous murder of our brothers, Bartolo Hilario Morales and Isaías Xanteco Ahuejote, who were both Indigenous Nahuas and local promoters of the Popular Indigenous Council of Guerrero – Emiliano Zapata (CIPOG-EZ). The people who carried out this atrocious assassination are professional paramilitaries. They were not satisfied to just to take their lives away; they denigrated them, showing no mercy in this extrajudicial assassination. They dismembered them and put our compañeros in bags. They thought through this vile act they would also demean their story and denigrate their lives. They are wrong.
Not only are they wrong, but the dignity of their lives stands in contrast to the cowardice acts of the murderers. The peoples of CIPOG-EZ and CNI of Guerrero, Mexico are keeping alive the memory of the men and women who have lost their lives in the struggle for the reconstitution of collective rights. We therefore ask the dignified people of Mexico and of the world to remember and spread the word about the history of our murdered brothers and their struggle to defend life; Bartolo Hilario Morales and Isaías Xanteco Ahuejote. Lucio Bartolo Faustino and Modesto Verales Sebastián.
We hold the three levels of government categorically responsible: the federal government headed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the state government of Héctor Astudillo Flores and the municipal government of Jesús Parra García. Each level of government has held no one accountable, passing the ball to each other saying that the problems were inherited from past governments. This is the PRI attitude that has immersed our country into a bloodbath. There is no “transformation” that wants to change things and it seems that the only important changes occur in the upper spheres of government. The people in power don’t care about the lives of the people below.
The different narco-paramilitary groups have operated for more than twenty-five years in the region of Chilapa, in complicity with the Mexican State, and today is no exception. The state regime has tried over and over to divide our people and we have resisted the war of extermination for more than five hundred years. Our crime has been to defend our territory from the extraction of what they call “natural resources” which for us are sacred mountains or water springs and life. We struggle to maintain the principles that we inherited from our grandparents, which we call “uses and customs”.This world is very different than the one that the Mexican State has formed which goes against our form of community government.
Our towns are suffering systemic violence in which our women, children and men go missing or are murdered, and nothing seems to happen. Everything remains in complete impunity for this bad government, where one of the strategies of the state is to create terror in the heart of our people. Using torture, psychological warfare, death threats, and persecution against all members who promote community development.
We as Indigenous peoples ask ourselves over and over: Why is there so much dehumanization? Why is human life not worth more? Why are some lives worth less than others? And it seems that those on top see us at the bottom as commodities. We ask ourselves again and again, how would the powerful, the governments with more than 30 million votes, react if this violence were to happen to one of their relatives? Or if they were missing, were tortured and viciously murdered or are those acts only reserved for us?
As a national Indigenous movement we fight to reconstruct the social fabric of our people. We are fighting to re-establish peace in our communities, and seek to recognize and reconstruct our indigenous languages, culture and the thinking of our peoples that is interwoven with mother earth.
On May 23, 2019 around 1:30 pm, our brothers Bartolo Hilario Morales and Isaías Xanteco Ahuejote went missing near Chilapa de Álvarez, Guerrero. On the morning of May 24 we learned the terrible news; their lifeless bodies were found. Today we are making a public denunciation and asking for honest and dignified comrades from Mexico and the world; no matter how much they want to destroy us, today let us embrace the history of struggle, which is the history of struggle of the Indigenous peoples of Mexico and the world.
We demand justice for our murdered brothers: Bartolo Hilario Morales and Isaías Xanteco Ahuejote. Lucio Bartolo Faustino and Modesto Verales Sebastián. May the pain that overwhelms us today as relatives, friends and compañeros in struggle, not remain in impunity, nor be forgotten.
FRATERNALLY:
Justice for Bartolo Hilario Morales and Isaías Xanteco Ahuejote, CNI members!
Justice for Lucio Bartolo Faustino and Modesto Verales Sebastián, CIPOG-EZ member and former member of the CIG and CNI!
Justice for Gustavo Cruz Mendoza, Indigenous communicator assassinated from the CIPO-RFM!
Justice for Samir Flores Soberanes, Indigenous communicator assassinated!
Stop the counterinsurgency war against the EZLN!
Freedom for Fidencio Aldama of the Yaqui tribe!
Never again a Mexico without us!
Popular Indigenous Council of Guerrero-Emiliano Zapata (CIPOG-EZ)
Regions Costa Chica, Costa Montaña, Montaña Alta and Montaña Baja de Guerrero
Ever since the German Nazis committed horrendous mass murders of Jews, homosexuals, Roma, and Catholics, many commentators, analysts and scholars have made the mistake of associating “genocide” with “executions and gassing” of people en masse.
The originator of the term “genocide” attorney and author Raphael Lemkin’s analysis essentially explains this error when his analysis points to how the Holocaust is not a synonym for genocide, but the consequence of Nazi imperialism and Colonialism in Europe. While the massive murders by the Nazi government was a horrific case of human destruction the genocide had already begun before the killings. Read from Lemkin’s book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe(Washington, DC: Carnegie Council, 1944) on page 79 how he describes genocide:
Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group: the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population, which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.
In other words, when a distinct people is systematically occupied by an outside population with the intention of replacing that population with the invading people under the instrumentality of a government or other organized agent monopolizing violence, that process is genocide. All events after the occupation—the Colonization—are the result of the initial genocide.
Scholars claim that there have been no fewer than 181 “genocides” since what they describe as the “beginning of genocides” in 1945–that is, instances where human beings have been massively killed with the intention of destroying that human population.
The Center for World Indigenous Studies is conducting a study of “Genocides against Fourth World Peoples” to learn about the extent of genocide (in the Lemkin sense and in the latter-day scholars’ sense) committed against Fourth World peoples and what alternatives exist to establish justice and prevent occurrences of genocide.
By simply examining the continental figures for Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Middle East gathered by contemporary scholars tabulating the killings of groups by particular perpetrators we find that 156 Fourth Nations have been invaded with the resultant killing of an estimated 12.482 million people between 1945 and 2017.
Up to 58 UN member state governments and the militias they supported were responsible for all 156 invasions and ultimate killings of Fourth World peoples.
Our initial finding is that “governments” (Republics, Dictatorships, Empires, Kingdoms) commit the vast majority of genocides in both the Lemkin and the latter-day scholars’ sense.
According to our estimate, UN member states committed an average of 51% of all 181 incidents of genocide counted by contemporary scholars. That figure alone is astonishing, since invasions and killings of Fourth World nations account for about 86% of all “genocides” counted by contemporary scholars since 1945.
Clearly by these numbers alone, cultural genocide and massive killings constitute a major feature of genocide over the last 70 years and beyond. But, curiously, despite the International Convention on Genocide (1948) and the Rome Statute of 2002 that created the International Criminal Court, the cultural genocide of a people in whole or in part has not been prosecuted. And, of equal interest is the fact that not one of the governments responsible for invasions and then killing of Fourth World people has been sanctioned by the international community or any juridical forum.
Ongoing genocides are taking place now in China against the Uyghurs, Iraq against the Yezidi, Madaeans, Zoroastrians, and Assyrians; and against the Rohingya in Burma; and many other nations.
CASE STUDY: THE INDIGENOUS UYGHURS
Many Fourth World nations are suffering under invasion, occupation and killings similar to the Rohingya in southwestern Burmawhat and the Uyghurs. States cannot be permitted to continue the carnage.
Uyghuristan is the homeland of more than 12 million Uyghurs neighboring Mongolia, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Afghanistan. It has been an established nation of people for more than 2,500 years and the peoples’ written history extends to 1,480 BP. According to the TENGRITAGH AKADEMIYESI Uyghur Academy of Arts and Science Uyghurs were identified by Europeans as “Turkic” and referred to as “Taranchi.” The Russians referred to the Uyghurs as “Sart” or “Turk.” That their language is related to neighboring Turkic languages may have been the reason for these misapplied names. The Kuomintang government of China grouped all Uyghurs as part of the 11 million mostly Moslem Hui people who are located in northwestern China. Despite the practice of Islam, they are completely separate peoples.
Since the Peoples’ Republic of China under Mao Zedong and his successors annexed Uyghuristan the Uyghurs have pursued their independence and have frequently attempted to call the world’s attention to China’s cultural genocide against the Uyghurs.
Until China claimed Uyghuristan in 1949, the Uyghur population constituted more than 94% of the total population in the country. China has systematically relocated Han Chinese into Uyghuristan reducing the Uyghur proportion of the total population to a little more than 45%. Effectively the Chinese have committed cultural genocide by invading, occupying and attempted to replace the Uyghur population with its own population. The Uyghur resistance is strong and persistent to the point where the Chinese government as recently as 25 January 2018 began placing Uyghurs in “re-education camps” to force their fealty to the Chinese government. They have imprisoned tens of thousands and, under the veil of “terrorism” as their justification, killed many thousands more.
Yes, 156 Fourth World nations have suffered cultural genocide since 1945 and not one government responsible for invasions and killings of millions of people have been called to account.
Rudolph Ryser is the Chair of the Center for World Indigenous Studies.
“I brought you all some water,” I said to the ragtag crew of six holding our “All Nations Unite With Wet’suwet’en” banner across the lane of semi-truck traffic heaving out of the Port of Vancouver. We had been standing, rotating positions, for five hours now.
A hundred feet away, 200 people formed a square around the intersection of Hastings Street and Clark Drive, blocking semis, buses, and drivers headed to the glass towers of downtown. At the center of the intersection, Elders from local nations sang and drummed. With a pivot of their feet, they honored the four directions: north, south, east, and west.
I walked back to the intersection and stood with the man from yesterday’s march. He had been making his way through the crowd, offering people sage for smudging, a common cleansing ceremony. He held out his hands.
“I have to go soon. I didn’t smudge you yet. I want to give you this.” His hands held the abalone shell, the burning medicine, and feathers. Then, he looked me steadily in the eye and said, “I see you. We see you.”
Tears blurred my vision. I brought the smudge bowl to the table under the tent and cleared away bags of chips and plastic containers of muffins. I smudged. The medicine drifted through the air, and Dennis, the man from Moricetown on the Wet’suwet’en nation, walked away, toward the east. I held the feathers until, exhausted and triumphant, we marched out of the intersection as the winter dusk fell in the late afternoon.
That day, January 9, 2019, urban Native organizers led a six-hour blockade of the Port of Vancouver. We were responding to attacks by the RCMP, Canada’s paramilitary police force, on Wet’suwet’en people who have reoccupied their territory since 2010. The RCMP have been authorized by the British Columbia Supreme Court to forcibly clear a path for the construction stage of Coastal GasLink’s fracked gas pipeline. We targeted the Port because it is one of the most valuable economic sites in Vancouver, with goods worth hundreds of thousands of dollars passing through each hour. We targeted the Port to show the colonial state that Indigenous people will not sit quietly by while our cousins and comrades are under attack.
Since December 10, 2018, we have organized five other solidarity actions in Vancouver. We have occupied Coastal GasLink’s corporate offices; organized three simultaneous sit-ins of New Democrat Party (NDP) politicians’ offices (the “progressive” Party in BC under whose direction the RCMP is acting); led a march through downtown that blocked two bridges; mobilized 1,500 people into the streets of Vancouver to hear inspiring speeches; and, most recently, blockaded a rail line that leads into and out of the Port.
These actions have been strong, righteous acts of solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en nation in northern British Columbia. As urban Native organizers, we stand by our cousins and comrades at Wet’suwet’en.
This moment of organizing is fierce, but within our own communities, we talk quietly about the absence of sustained urban Native organizing, outside of the “flashpoints” of solidarity actions that we often lead in the city for Indigenous land defenders on the remote frontlines. In settler-colonial Canada, these flashpoints inevitably come every few years, but our organizing does not sustain itself beyond our reactions to violations of Indigenous sovereignty on the land.
Many of us wonder: where is our movement?
Red Power Roots
There is an incredible history of urban Native organizing in Canada and the United States. One of the most famous was the Indigenous sovereigntist Red Power movement, which was most active and visible between the 1960s and the 1980s. Many groups organized during Red Power, but perhaps the most popularly known organization is the American Indian Movement.
Red Power was sparked when Indigenous fishing rights, secured through treaties, were threatened. In response, Indigenous activists in Washington State staged “fish-ins,” risking arrest to fish in their own waters. Then in 1969, the 19-month reoccupation of Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay gained massive mainstream media attention and pushed issues of Native sovereignty and rights into the public discourse. Red Power was a pan-Indian movement that focused on unity between diverse Indigenous nations in the face of the colonial states of the US and Canada.
There are many ways that the stories of Red Power are told. Many who lived through the era speak about the movement’s internalization of colonized gender roles, and how this affected the leadership of women and two-spirit people. And most storytellers agree that the politics within Red Power shifted from a pan-Indian sense of unity to revitalizing cultural and spiritual practices specific to individual nations. On the ground, this often meant leaving the city as a site of organizing and going back to reservation or rural Indigenous communities.
There are lots of explanations for this shift, but from my perspective, this change was a complicated result of internal shifts in consciousness within the Red Power movement and external forces, including the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) targeting of the American Indian Movement; discourses of multiculturalism, most obviously instated through Canada’s 1988 Multiculturalism Act; the colonial states’ responses to broader Civil Rights-era movements by shifting money into education, which threatened social movements by offering routes to entry into the middle class; and, in the US, affirmative action policies.
With this shift away from pan-Indian identity and unity, Indigenous peoples in Canada and the US often began to return to their communities on traditional territories or reserves (in Canada) and reservations (in the US). Indigenous people also began, in earnest, relearning and revitalizing their languages, cultural and spiritual practices, and traditional or hereditary governmental structures, which, for centuries, the colonial governments had attacked and criminalized. Indigenous reoccupations of traditional territories, like at Wet’suwet’en in northern British Columbia, are the fruits of the tail end of the Red Power movement.
Yet, some urban Native organizers feel the loss of the pan-Indian politic: urban Indigenous people without a home territory to return to cannot connect to land-based activism. At issue is what sovereignty means to Indigenous people in Canada and the US, and whether we can expand our notion of sovereignty in ways that build connections and alliances between diverse experiences and expressions of Indigeneity in the early 21st century.
At issue is how urban Natives can assert our sovereignty as people who have been deeply dispossessed of our traditional territories, on the one hand, and find the city to be a rightful place of land relationships, on the other.
Who urban Natives are
Photo by Sharon Kravitz
In Canada, more than half of all Indigenous people live in urban centers, and more than 70 percent of American Indians and Alaskan Natives live in cities in the US. Many Red Power activists in the US had been removed from reservations into major cities through the 1956 Relocation Act. Today, we find ourselves in the city for many reasons: surviving foster care or gendered violence, adoption, the search for jobs, legacies of residential schools and intergenerational trauma, fractured kinship networks. There are almost infinite reasons. In cities, we form strong urban Native communities. We make long-lasting and loving connections with diverse Indigenous people from many nations across so-called Canada. We make the city our home.
The realities of life for urban Natives often collide with settler expectations for Indigenous people; while many of us may be rooted in our cultures, many of us are not. While some of us may visit the reserve often, some of us don’t even know which reserve is ours. The gaps in our historical memories are not our individual faults; they are the effects of colonialism, which has attempted for hundreds of years to wreck our kinship systems, our non-capitalist economies, and our cultural knowledges.
Indigenous movements today emphasize returning to the land, leading many Indigenous sovereigntists to reoccupy territories, participate in ceremony, and relearn languages and cultural practices. Reoccupying land is perhaps the foremost expression of Indigenous sovereignty because Canada and the US are actively engaged in a never-ending war for land. Refusing to be confined to reserves or reservations, and refusing to be dispossessed of our territories, asserts our sovereignty in ways that defy settler laws and settler entitlement. These trajectories are enormously inspiring, and hold great potential for Indigenous nationhood.
But this era of Indigenous sovereignty expressed most radically through reoccupation of territories makes it complicated for urban Native people to participate. Many of us live in poverty and face questions of survival in our daily lives. Many of us have fled our communities due to violence; others have severed relationships with our communities due to the varied effects of colonialism. Many of us cannot “go home.”
Urban Natives in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en
In between these two tendencies, I have quietly fought to carve out space for urban Natives to make connections with our cousins and comrades at Wet’suwet’en, and elsewhere. In Vancouver, I have been organizing with an ad hoc coalitional group that includes both settlers and Indigenous people. We come from different organizations and different politics and backgrounds. Our greatest shared point of unity is the political principle of Indigenous sovereignty, and a belief, different as it may be given our social and historical positions, in our responsibility to respond to this moment of colonial attack on Indigenous sovereignty in the streets.
Our work responds to two challenges: one is to create a place in Indigenous sovereignty movements to ensure that land defense politics also see the city as land; the second is to find a place for Indigenous struggles within class-based urban grassroots movements, which tend to elide the very real forces of colonialism that also structure the city.
In addition to my involvement with Wet’suwet’en solidarity organizing, I have been a member for the past seven years in an anti-capitalist and anti-colonial organization, Alliance Against Displacement. Our community organizing work has tended to focus on low-income struggles, homeless tent cities, and renter’s struggles. More recently we have started a campaign led by trans women called Bread, Roses and Hormones and a campaign against the police in the suburb of Surrey, called Anti-Police Surrey.
From the first years of being involved with Alliance Against Displacement, the urban Indigenous people within the group have wanted to start an urban Indigenous campaign. We have yearned to do this, ached over it, spent many hours dedicated to theorizing what an urban Indigenous campaign would look like in the second decade of the 21st century. We met with homeless Indigenous people in tent cities. We held talking circles for self-identified Indigenous people in Vancouver. It was hard to find the spark that could sustain a movement, and that is ultimately what we hoped to build through a campaign.
In the past two months of organizing Wet’suwet’en solidarity actions and support in Vancouver, I have felt a shift. We urban Native people are in the streets blocking ports, rail lines, speaking freely about our right to our land, our sovereignty, our nationhood. We are drumming and singing unapologetically, leading marches of thousands of people, some of us dressed in our traditional regalia happily standing beside some of us dressed in jeans and Wu-Tang sweatshirts. We are meeting each other spontaneously in the streets, building connections, and sharing politics. We are connecting with political elders, like Ray Bobb, who was involved with the Native Alliance for Red Power in the 1960s and 70s in Vancouver. We are meeting youth, like the young Stó:lô woman Sii-am, who spoke in the whipping wind and pouring rain just after we shut down a major transportation route in downtown Vancouver one evening.
While the violence against Wet’suwet’en people, and Wet’suwet’en land, is yet another mournful example of colonialism in Canada, I also see great potential in this moment. Urban Native people are being catalyzed through the Wet’suwet’en assertion of sovereignty. We are rekindling our voices, hearing new voices, developing a more explicit politics of sovereignty that takes us into the streets.
All photos by Murray Bush / flux photo
All photos by Murray Bush / flux photo
The future of urban Indigenous organizing
Photo by Murray Bush / flux photo
The Wet’suwet’en confrontation with colonial power has mobilized many of us Indigenous people, Wet’suwet’en and others, rural or urban. Urban Native people are rising right now, leading solidarity actions in cities across Canada, increasingly taking our rightful place in Indigenous sovereignty struggles.
We are targeting sites of economic trade and exchange, like ports and railways, because we know that colonialism and capitalism are entwined forces that must be fought simultaneously. We are taking to the streets alongside anti-capitalist organizers who are deeply committed to anti-colonial struggle, and recognize the necessity of dual movements against capitalism and colonialism in so-called Canada.
We are defying the “ally” politics that have plagued Indigenous land defense solidarity work for at least 15 years now, politics that center white activists and their relationships with Indigenous land defenders while simultaneously viewing urban Natives as “less Indian” than our rural cousins and comrades.
We are building from the strengths of the Red Power era of organizing in the 1970s and 80s, and moving past its weaknesses.
We are inheriting the consciousness-raising staged through Idle No More, an Indigenous movement that spread from Canada to the US in 2013, and are pushing this movement further, making on-the-ground connections between culture, land, and sovereignty.
We are creating a new politics that honors the particularities of individual nations’ land relationships, cultures, and knowledges while also embracing urban Natives as people with political agency as well.
We are synthesizing the varied and diverse Indigenous sovereignty efforts into a movement that has the numbers, strategic alliances, and political vision needed to fight Canadian colonialism.
We are acting in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en frontline, and we are also saying: the colonial frontlines are everywhere.
On September 30, communities across Canada will be commemorating ‘Orange Shirt Day’, an annual event that is helping Canadians remember the thousands of Indigenous children who died in Residential Schools, and to reflect on the intergenerational trauma that was caused by the Residential school system. Similar school systems were also run in the US, New Zealand and Australia with terrible consequences for Indigenous children and communities.
Stswecem’c Xgat’tem First Nation elder Phyllis Jack Webstad founded Orange Shirt Day in 2013, after she shared her childhood experience at the St. Joseph’s Mission residential school in William’s lake, British Columbia.
Residential school staff stripped her of her favourite orange shirt the day she was taken from her family. As Residential school survivor Vivian Timmins said today, “The orange day shirt is a commonality for all Native Residential School Survivors because we had our personal items taken away which was a tactic to erase our personal identity. Maybe it was a piece of clothing, but it represented our memory that connected us to families. Today is a time to honour the children and youth that didn’t make it home. It’s a time to remember Canada’s dark history, to educate and ensure such history is never repeated.”
Alarmingly, that history is being repeated in many parts of the world. According to Survival International, there are nearly one million tribal and Indigenous children across Asia, Africa, and South America who are currently attending institutions that bear a striking resemblance to Canada’s residential schools.
Indigenous artist RG Miller’s haunting autobiographical painting recalls the horrific abuse he experienced at residential school. Photo Courtesy RG Miller
A horrifying legacy lives on
The horrifying legacy of residential schools is being repeated, on a massive scale, because the attitudes and intentions underlying Canada’s residential school system live on.
Tribal and Indigenous children around the world are being coerced from their families and sent to schools that strip them of their identity and often impose upon them alien names, religions, and languages.
Extractive industries and fundamentalist religious organizations are frequently pulling the strings behind these institutions.
One residential mega-school in India—which boasts it is “home” to 27,000 Indigenous children—states publicly that it aims to turn “primitive” tribal children from “liabilities into assets, tax consumers into tax payers.”
Its partners include the very mining companies that are trying to wrest control of the lands these children truly call home.
Parents have described the school as a “chicken farm” where children feel like “prisoners.”
An expert on Adivasi education told us, “Their whole minds have been brainwashed by a kind of education that says, ‘Mining is good’, ‘Consumerism is good’, ‘Your culture is bad.’ Tribal residential schools are institutions which are erasing the autobiography of each child to replace it with what fits the ‘mainstream’. Isn’t it a crime in the name of schooling?”
Without urgent change, many distinct peoples could be wiped out in just a few generations, because the the youth in these schools are taught to see their families and traditions as ‘primitive’, ‘backward’ and inferior to ‘mainstream’ society so that they turn their backs on their languages, religions and lands.
Survivors of Canada’s residential schools are beginning to speak out against these culture-destroying institutions.
“What’s happening right now at these residential schools in India and beyond is very similar to what happened with the residential schools in Canada”, says Roberta Hill
Roberta Hill is a survivor of the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Canada, where she was abused by the pastor and school staff in the 1950s and 60s. She sees the strong parallels between her experience and that of Indigenous children in these modern culture destroying schools: “What’s happening right now at these residential schools in India and beyond is very similar to what happened with the residential schools in Canada – this separation of Indigenous children from their family, language, and culture is a very destructive force. My experience at residential school was traumatizing. I was taken from my family at the age of six and put in the school where I experienced a lot of abuse and isolation. If this is happening again now, then there needs to be international attention. It needs to stop or else they are going to go through the same thing that we went through. It will cause irreparable damage – not only to the Indigenous children attending, but to the future generations of that community.”
RG Miller, a prominent Indigenous artist from Canada states: “My horrific experience at Native residential school destroyed my connection with community, family, and my culture. The abuses I suffered there completely broke any sense of trust or intimacy with anyone or anything including God, spouses, and children for the rest of my life.”
Over the past two decades, thousands of residential school survivors have shared their stories of abuse; but there are thousands of other children who will never be able to tell their own stories because they passed away while they were in a residential school. Other children, like Chanie Wenjack, died while trying to escape. The young Ojibwe boy ran away from his residential school in Ontario, trying desperately to reach home, 600 km away. He died of hunger and exposure at the age of 12 in 1966.
Half a century later—and 12,000km away—Norieen Yaakob, her brother Haikal and five of their friends, fled their residential school in Malaysia. The children, who belong to the Temiar—one of the Orang Asli tribes of central Malaysia—ran away to avoid a beating from their teacher. 47 days later, Norieen and one other little girl were found, starving but alive. The other five children died, including Haikal and seven-year-old Juvina.
Juvina’s father, David, told us, “The police said, “Why are you bothering us with this problem?” We felt hopeless. It was only on the sixth day that the authorities began their search and rescue mission for the children. But they told us parents to stay behind. They said if we went in it would just be to secretly give food to the missing children that we were supposedly hiding. They accused us of faking the whole incident to gain attention and force the government to help us more. That was what they thought of us… [Finally] they found a child’s skull and we could not identify immediately whose child it was. We had to wait for the post-mortem. I could not recognize my own child.” The families are currently taking the authorities to court in a case that the world should be watching.
Norieen Yaakob of the Temiar tribe of Malaysia barely survived running away from her residential school. She was found 47 days after fleeing her school; five other children died.
The terrible truth is that Indigenous children are dying in these schools. In tribal residential schools in Maharashtra state in India, over one thousand deaths have been recorded since 2000, including many suicides. With echoes of the traumas experienced in Canada, many parents never learn that their children are ill until it is too late, and they often never know the cause of death.
There are also a frightening number of cases of physical and sexual abuse, very few of which reach the justice system. Government schools across Asia and Africa are often staffed by teachers who have no connection to, or respect for, the communities they serve. Teacher absences are common, and abuse goes unseen and unreported. The potential for devastating damage is extremely high.
Survival International will soon launch a campaign to expose and oppose these culture destroying schools and to demand greater Indigenous control of education, before it is too late for these children, their communities, and their futures.
There is certainly a need for it. These schools endanger lives and strip away identities, but they also deny children the right to choose a tribal future.
The ability of Indigenous Peoples to live well and sustainably on their lands depends on their intricate knowledge, which takes generations to develop and a lifetime to master. To survive and thrive in the Kalahari Desert or to herd reindeer across the Arctic tundra cannot be learnt in residential schools, or on occasional school vacations.
What’s more, in this current age of severe environmental degradation, climate change and mass extinctions, Indigenous Peoples play a crucial role in preserving the world’s ecosystems. They are the best guardians of their lands and they should be respected and listened to if we have any hope of survival for future generations.
Rather than erasing their knowledge, skills, languages, and wisdom through culture-destroying residential schools, we must allow them to be the authors of their own destinies as stewards and protectors of their own lands.
Tribal children in Indonesia learning on their land, in their language. Photo: Sokola Rimba
Dr. Jo Woodman is running Survival International’s upcoming Indigenous Education campaign. She has spent two decades researching and campaigning on Indigenous rights issues, focused on the impacts of forced ‘development’, conservation and schooling on tribal communities.
Alicia Kroemer holds a PhD in political science from the university of Vienna on collective memory and residential schools in Canada, with publications, films, and lectures on the topic. She serves on the board of Indigenous rights NGO Incomindios in Zurich, where she is a human rights educator and UN representative. She also works as a research consultant for Minority Rights Group and Survival International in London, UK. She is interested in allyship, advocating and promoting human rights, with a special focus on Indigenous rights globally.
