Centuries of struggle. (Indigenou Peoples--South America).

Indigenous people have been in a state of turmoil throughout South America since the beginning of Spanish and Portuguese colonization, weakening unpopular governments and raising global public awareness of their struggles. In 1999, there were more than 350 Indigenous groups with a population of more than 18 million in South America. Many of them continue to fight for their physical survival, for their territorial rights, and for respect of their cultural heritage.

When Portuguese explorers arrived in what is now Brazil in 1500, about five million Indigenous people, belonging to about 1,000 groups, lived there. Today, just 210 Native groups remain, with 350,000 people claiming direct Indian ancestry.

In 1993, British writer John Simpson, in World Monitor, described Brazil's Ashaninka Indians as "gentle, peaceable people who hunted in the forest and fished in the waters of the River Envira, (a tributary of a tributary of the Amazon) and asked nothing from the outside world except needles, mirrors, axes, and occasional medical help. Aside from such things, they lived their Stone Age existence with obvious contentment." The Ashaninka travelled to Brazil in the 1930s from Peru, where they had lived for thousands of years. At the time the article was written, the Ashaninka were threatened by a highway scheduled to cut through the nearby forest. The new road was to give access to the area to strip it of its valuable wood, a move the author said could lead the Ashaninka "into the downward spiral which has affected so many other Indian tribes: alcohol, disease, the irresistible pull of the shantytowns."

Here's what Jakutinga, a 66-year-old Pataxo Indian in Brazil, had to say in April 2000.

"My life and my forefathers' lives have been difficult. There have been many struggles during the past 500 years and they are not over. We've lived in many places. Each time people chased us away, we travelled elsewhere in smaller and smaller groups."

In 1993, a terrible thing had happened in another part of the Amazon rainforest. An unknown number of forest-dwelling Yanomami Indians went missing. It is presumed they were murdered by gold miners near the remote Indian village of Haximu in northern Brazil. According to one report, there were as many as 11,000 gold prospectors in the Indigenous area of just over 94,000 square kilometres in which 9,000 Indians lived in 200 villages. Haximu is close to the unmarked border between Venezuela and Brazil. In all, 73 Yanomami were killed by Brazilian illegal gold miners.

The Yanomami are the last major group of forest dwellers in the Americas. Brazil granted them land rights, but the miners never took much notice of that. Some 50,000 miners have rushed into the area since gold and diamonds were discovered there in 1988, some with huge dredging machines that frighten away forest animals the Indians hunt. Others also brought pneumonia, tuberculosis, and malaria, diseases to which the Indians have no resistance.

Elsewhere, in the Chaco region of Northern Argentina, the Wichi forest dwellers were threatened with loss of their lands, livelihoods, and the destruction of their ancient culture by agribusinesses. While they have legal rights under Argentina's laws, one report points out they have routinely been ignored. As a result, the Wichi are no longer able to support themselves in their traditional ways as hunter-gatherers. Their problems reached crisis proportions in 1996 when a Buenos Aires company bought 2,000 hectares of Wichi territory. The land had been illegally sold by the provincial government without permission from the Wichi themselves. The company devastated the landscape, cutting the surrounding forest of tropical hardwoods. This sort of activity led to the formation of the "Our Forest Project" in 1998 to fight deforestation that was sweeping the Itiyuro Basin.

Even where Indigenous people form the majority of the population, they are struggling. Bolivia is such a place. Natives there form 55% of the population of eight million, and people of mixed Native and European blood another 30%. Yet, the 36 Indigenous groups have similar problems to Natives around the world: they are desperately poor, and lack access to basic services such as clean water and electricity; they have declining control over their ancestral lands, and a tiny role in business, politics, and government.

Felipe Quispe, leader of Bolivia's Aymara people explains: "We Indigenous peoples are like foreigners in our own ancestral lands. The white colonial minority still has all the political and economic power."

This in a land where agriculture started about 3000 B.C. and the production of metal, especially copper, began 1,500 years later--the Bolivian highlands, permanently settled for at least 21,000 years, were part of the culture of Andean South America long before the arrival of the Spaniards.

But, Felipe Quispe thinks Indigenous people are gaining strength as Native groups literally take to the roads. In the fall of 2000, Natives across the country, with the support of labour unions, blocked about 70 main roads, virtually paralyzing the Bolivian economy for weeks and causing food shortages in major cities. The government had no choice but to meet most of their demands, including more land ownership and water rights, as well as higher pay for teachers.

In other places, such as Chile where the Mapuches and Pehuenches form only 8% of the population, there are frequent incidents in which Mapuches occupy farms, protest against clear-cutting and the construction of hydroelectric dams, take over municipalities in the southern part of the country, block highways, or clash with the police. These are the people who in the 1970s and `80s lost most of their traditional land under the brutal government of General Augusto Pinochet, and they're aiming to reclaim land they feel is rightfully theirs.

The Mapuche people have been defending their ancestral lands for more than 350 years. In the name of civilization and Christianity, first the Spanish and later the newly independent Chilean and Argentinian states conquered the Mapuche territories. The Mapuche finally lost control of their lands in 1885, resulting in many people being killed or forced from their homes to live impoverished lives in small rural communities and in the cities. Forestry plantations and the construction of roads and hydroelectric plants all have contributed to the Mapuche becoming marginalized.

Elsewhere in the subcontinent, Native Indians are becoming more and more active in demanding a better deal from the dominant society.

They've gradually been making progress.

Back in 1971, the Declaration of Barbados was signed by 11 Latin American anthropologists. It urged the countries of the Americas to recognize themselves as multiethnic states, asserted the right to self-determination for Indigenous peoples, and called for the defence of Indigenous culture and territory. This first Barbados meeting was attended exclusively by non-Indians; Barbados II, in 1977, included as many Indians as non-Indians.

In 1974, the United Nations recognized an Indigenous organization, the National Indian Brotherhood of Canada (now the Assembly of First Nations), as a nongovernmental organization (NGO). This gave it the status of an international Indigenous peoples' organization, when none had ever existed before. A year later, the World Council of Indigenous Peoples was created.

In the 1980s, the first transnational South American organization was created: COICA (Coordinating Body for the Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin). The organization brought together about 81 inter-ethnic groups from five Amazonian countries, covering a population of about 1.5 million people.

The progress continues:

* In the 1991 Declaration of Mexico, 19 Latin American countries along with Portugal and Spain acknowledged the importance of Indigenous peoples in national development and cultural diversity;

* During the 1992 conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Native delegates from several countries attracted world attention with cultural and political events;

* The United Nations proclaimed 1993 the International Year of the World's Indigenous Peoples;

* And, the draft Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (introduced in 1986) made it on to the agenda of the UN Commission on Human Rights in December 1998.

It all adds up to much greater visibility of the Indigenous peoples' rights movement. One happy result is that nine Latin American countries have included provisions in their constitutions guaranteeing the rights of Indigenous peoples. Some countries, such as Brazil, have removed assimilation clauses requiring the integration of Indians into non-Indian society, which had previously stripped them of their Native heritage.

SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES:

1. In 1993, a group of Indians from the Ecuadorean Amazon sued the Texaco oil company. The Indians claimed the company polluted rivers, lakes, and groundwater with oil and toxic waste during its 20-year operation in the rainforest. They demanded clean-up costs estimated at more than a billion dollars. The company maintained that its oil spills often were the result of natural disasters, not careless disposal, and that its emergency cleanup efforts met the (weak) environmental laws at the time. Research this case to find out how it was resolved.

2. Do a project on one of the great pre-Columbian civilizations: for example, choose from the Mayas and Aztecs in Mexico and Guatemala, or, in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, the Incas or the Quechua.

3. Watch the 1986 movie, The Mission, which depicts a South American tribe's brutal subjugation by 18th century colonial powers.

FACT FILE

Native people represent 15% of Chile's population, with 92% being Mapuche, 4.8% Aymara, and 2.2% Rapa Nui. The remaining 1% is composed of Atacamenos, Quechua, and Colla among others.

About 10 million Mexicans, or one in ten, call themselves "Indians," which once was considered a derogatory term.

Virginia Choinquitel died in June 1999 in Argentina. She was the last remaining Ona Indian, ending a 9,000-year history of a tribe that was hounded by settlers and bounty hunters.

According to the National Organization of Colombian Indigenous People, more than 400 Indians have been assassinated in left-right violence during the past decade.

Websites

Earth Love Fund, Artists
for the Environment
http://www.unisong.com/
elf/index.html

NativeWeb--http://www.
nativeweb.org/

Zapatistas in Cyberspace
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/
faculty/Cleaver/zapsincyber.
html
Traditionally, the Lacandones lived in complete
harmony with their environment, rotating crop
fields that reverted back to rainforest. Their jungle
(Selva Lacandona) contains about 175 of Mexico's
plant species. The Lacandones still use dug-out
canoes, but the future for their children is uncertain.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In La Paz, Bolivia' largest city, non-Natives live at the bottom of the
canyon in relative comport, while most of the Natives live in brick
buildings clinging to the upper sides of the canyon, without
electricity, running water, or sewage systems. Even though Native
people form the majority of the population, they live separate lives,
excluded from the privileges the non-Natives enjoy. Many cities of the
developing world, especially their rapidly expanding peripheries, or
"peri-urban" areas where the poor generally live, need affordable
water and sanitation services. In Latin America, cities and their
peri-urban areas are growing rapidly. In 1990, they already accounted
for more than 70% of the continent's population. For example, El Alto,
on the periphery of La Paz, Bolivia had a population estimated at over
610,000 in 1992, with 73% of the people living below the poverty line.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

RELATED ARTICLE: Not a primative people.

The Mayan people of Central America were the only pre-Columbian Americans to have developed a sophisticated writing system, and they covered their buildings with it. The buildings are buried in the jungles of Mexico and Central America. The Mayan system used symbols or glyphs in various ways. Some are similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs, representing syllables, which could be put together to create words. Others are pictograms, where pictures are used to represent names and places. It took decades to decode the language but, by the 1980s, about 80% of the hieroglyphic characters were translated. When that happened, it became apparent that the "glyphs" were about 200 years older than had previously been thought, going back to about 100 AD in cities that dated as far back as the 5th or 6th century BC. More than 800 separate Mayan glyphs have been identified and a single glyph can have multiple meanings, depending on the context and location within the whole picture being presented. The Mayan writing was so sophisticated that scholars think probably only members of the higher classes were able to read the symbols. The Maya carved these symbols into stone, but the most common place for writing is thought to be the highly perishable books they made from bark paper, coated with lime to make a fresh, white surface. Because of their perishable nature and zealous Spanish book burning, few of the books remain today.

Despite their religious use of human sacrifices, the Mayan people created an extremely refined civilization. They had amazing developments in mathematical calculations and astronomy. Instead of ten digits, as in our system, they used a base number of 20, with a system of bars and dots for counting. A dot stood for one and a bar stood for five. The Mayans took their star gazing seriously: Maya kings timed their accession rituals in tune with the stars and the Milky Way.

They also developed a complex 260-day calendar, which gave each day a name, much like our days of the week, and it was used for centuries. The calendar makes a dire prophesy that places us all in history in a mere decade: it predicts the end of our "Age of the Jaguar," the fifth and final "Sun", on 22 December 2012 AD. This, according to Sun-spot theories (i.e. that the Sun's variable magnetic field has consequences for life on Earth), will happen when there's a sudden reversal in the earth's magnetic field.

RELATED ARTICLE: From isolation to extinction.

Five hundred years after Christopher Columbus arrived at the shores of the New World on 12 October 1492, the ancient Mayan people in Mexico's rainforest (the Lacandones) were on the verge of extinction. Colonization and exploitation forced the Lacandones into the country's rainforest in the Chiapas region, where they lived in isolation for centuries. By 1992, only 30% of their lowland tropical forest, the Selva Lacandona, remained, and much of that was damaged. Tens of thousands of immigrant slash-and-burn farmers cleared the land, along with lumber companies, commercial cattle-ranchers, and the state-owned oil company. With the destruction of their land went the Lacandones' traditional values and religion, which, by the 1990s, were known only to a few elders among the 300 or so remaining Lacandones, about 6% of the estimated population before Columbus set sail. About half are thought to have died from diseases that arrived with the Spaniards; in the first half of the 20th century they were devastated by yellow fever carried ashore by more recent immigrants.

On New Year's Day in 1994, the people of the Chiapas state in southern Mexico rose in rebellion. This was the day the North American Free Trade Agreement among Mexico, Canada, and the United States went into effect. The bloodshed came after a long history of exploitation of Native Indians in the region by wealthy landowners (mostly descendants of the earlier Spanish conquerors). The Zapatista rebels--the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN))--under the leader Subcomandante Marcos, quickly captured the attention, and often the sympathy, of the rest of the world. The rebellion supporting Indigenous rights left 200 army and rebel soldiers dead and hundreds more in subsequent clashes, but the Zapatistas continue to enjoy international support.

Vicente Fox (National Action Party-PAN) was sworn in as Mexico's president in December 2000, breaking seven decades of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Mr. Fox said he wanted to end the Indians' second-class status. In March 2001, the EZLN marched 3,000 kilometres from their headquarters in the jungles of Chiapas to Mexico City to rally support for Native rights. The Zapatista message is that it's time for Mexico to redress centuries of injustice and cultural encroachment suffered by its Indigenous groups. They arrived amidst the cheers of more than 150,000 supporters waiting for them at Zocalo Square in the heart of Mexico City. (While the Mexican Congress approved constitutional changes granting special rights to Indian peoples in April 2001, the reform was watered down, which put an end to negotiations between the government and the rebels.)

Farther north in Mexico, in December 2000, the government of the state of San Luis Potosi designated 140,000 hectares (1,400 [km.sup.2]) as a nature reserve, with money from the World Wide Fund for Nature. The move was designed to protect the area's 48 species of cacti, and to preserve a sacred pilgrimage route to a spot where the Huichol Indians say the Sun was born. According to The Economist, it was the first time an Indigenous holy site of no archaeological interest won protection in Mexico.

RELATED ARTICLE: Generations of injustice.

The aim of Chile's Indigenous Truth Commission, which was formed in January 2001, is to review past treatment of the country's Indigenous population. It is similar to the 1991 Truth and Reconciliation (Rettig) Commission, which collected information on human rights abuses committed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-89).

Chile's Indigenous population has historically been dismissed by many people as "detrimental to the progress of the country," which has created deep-rooted prejudices among many non-Native inhabitants.

By involving Indigenous leaders as well as academics, religious leaders, and historians, the Indigenous Truth Commission explains that its hope is to draw up an account of Native people's history that will be free of prejudice and embraced by all sectors of society.

For decades, Chile's Mapuche people have watched development projects--such as the Ralko dam on the Biobio River and the construction of highways--devastate their land, destroying their way of life as well as the ecosystem.

The Mapuche people continue to appeal to the international community to recognize their land rights. The Chilean government is one of the few governments in the world that does not recognize the existence of its own Indigenous peoples and does not ratify Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization.

RELATED ARTICLE: Hidden treasures.

It's estimated that about 50 Indigenous groups still live, hidden, in Brazil's vast interior. They have never had contact with outsiders. The Brazilian government's National Foundation for Indians (FUNAI) thinks it might be better if it stays that way: the Foundation wants to keep the groups isolated to protect their natural resources from prospectors and to guard against outside diseases. As FUNAI sees it, integration attempts often make the Indians dependent on well-meaning charities for such things as food and medicine.

"After that first contact, Indians start to lose their health, language, and family structure," says one FUNAI worker. "We now believe that an attitude of extreme paternalism is wrong."