| |||||||
Dear Aminul Bhai, This so called united Hindu-Buddho- Thank You, Md. Mostafa Kamal. --- On Thu, 9/4/08, Md. Aminul Islam <aminul_islam_ From: Md. Aminul Islam <aminul_islam_ |
| Release on bail should not affect corruption trials TARIQUE Rahman, senior joint secretary general of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and son of former prime minister Khaleda Zia, was released on bail Wednesday following days of intense speculation about the timing and manner of his eventual release. We are pleased that Tarique was released through what appears to have been a proper judicial process in that the High Court granted him bail in all the cases that have been lodged against him. Moreover, from the point of view that the release of Tarique on bail will enable him to seek necessary treatment for his ailments, we feel that the release was warranted. We have repeatedly argued over the course of the last year and a half that those arrested in normally bailable cases ought to be allowed to seek bail from the courts and that the courts should be allowed to give independent judgement on the bail applications. Denying detainees the right to apply for bail, which this military-controlled government has attempted to do through the promulgation of the Emergency Powers Rules, is not only unnecessary in our view but a direct affront to the separation of powers and the rule of law.
|
It appears the courts of Bangladesh are slave of government who are
actually slave of USA who arranged the bails of Tarek Zia, one of the
most corrupt persons in the world. USA government always want that bad
people rule other countries to take advantage of that, so the
happenings are just 'natural' things and nothing to be surprised in
Bangladesh!
--- On Thu, 9/4/08, fiz josef <fiz_josef@yahoo. From: fiz josef <fiz_josef@yahoo. |
There are more than 750,000 Indians among Brazil's population of 185 million and their lands account for 12percent of Brazil's territory. Last year 92 Indians were killed in land disputes.
Brazil's Indians should be given greater control over their communities, a United Nations rights investigator said on Monday as a court prepared to rule on the future of an Indian reservation in the country's North.
We love Brazil so much!
We love Cuba!
We love Che!
We love Fidel Castro!
We stand united Rock solid with our Black Brothers leading the Global resistance against the Zionist Hindu White Post Modern Manusmriti Apartheid Galaxy Order run by US Weapon Economy and corporate Imperialism!
We all know the Fraud about Indo US Nuke Deal. Indian Opposition, the Left as well as the Right is rallying to prepare themselves for yet another Nuke Opera in Parliament as the Secret Correspondence deciding the fate of Indian Nuclear sovereignty is exposed just during the second round meeting of NSG! We all know about the strategic re alliance in the Peace zone Indian Ocean led by US and UK! We all know everything about the War against terrorism and the War Zone right into our Heart!
We love so much the Football played by Argentina and Brazil!
I am fortunate to be born in a Bengali Refugee Indigenous family which easily identified itself with our Black brothers in Africa and Latin America!
I have been fortunate to live in different parts of North India and east India. I have contacts as well as relations in South, West and north east India as well! I have found the sentiment amongst our Indigenous communities all over the country quite Identical! We all love Brazil, Cuba, Fidel, Che, Argentina and Latin America! South Asia is divided vertically between fans of Pele and Maradona!
As a boy I played Football! I could not play Volley Ball, Badminton, Tennis or Table Tennis! In North India, Hockey was the game in vogue in sixties and seventies, but we opted for Football without hesitation. We were excited while Pele played in Kolkata! We had been excited whenever Argentina or Brazil succeeded in World Cup Football. We hardly know all the members of Indian Football team, but we always knew the names of Argentina or Brazil teams!
At home, we were divided between East Bengal and Mohan Bagan!But all of us supported Brazil!
In Olympics, India hardly impressed the World despite winning the Hockey golds and recently a few individual medals. But we all enjoyed Olympics and felt proud with the performamce of Karl Lewis, Flo Joe and thundering Bolt from Jamaica!
We always loved the West indies cricket team! Captain Loyed, Viv Richards, Marshal and Brian Lara were our heroes!
Our indigenous Indian brothers, 750,000 of them face the same crisis as we face in Nandigram, Haripur, Singur, Kaling Nagar, Navi Mumbai, Khammam, East Godavari, Koraput, Barnala, Noida and all over India! What we face in North Easts and entire Himalayan region! What we refugees and the nationalities, SC, ST, OBC and minorities face all the time!
Indian in Brazil are stripped off their Land, Life, Livelihood and Property!
On the face of Singur Stand Off, the Resistance of our Black Indigenous Indian brothers in Brazil may consolidate our Resistance against Globalisation and Global Ruling Hegemony!
In comparison, South East Asia is more intimate to us. China, Japan, Korea and entire south East Asia owe Buddhist legacy to India. Sumatra, Java, Bali and Cambodia root in Indian History and culture! But we never felt in the same way as we feel for latin America! I rather insist better relations in south Asia and with South East Asia. but the fact remains that we always remained isolated in Asia!
In South Africa, our Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi led Styagraha for the first time before reaching and leading India.Indian population is always present all over Africa! Genetically we happen to be the Black Untouchables most close to the tribes in Africa. Tribes in Andaman and Nicobar and the aboriginal people in Australia and Neuziland connects the Trans African Genetic Keith and Kin!
but we have not the Feel for Africa as we feel for Americas, particularly Latin America!
In WTO we team up with Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela!
We were colonised in the same way!
We are annihilated in the same way!
We are stripped off our Indigenous production in the same way!
Our natural resources are captured in the same way!
We are killed in the same way!
We are displaced in the same way!
We followed Che and Fidel!
We always stood united with Cuba!
Why should we not be united in Global resistance against the same enemy?
The future of Brazil's traditional Indian cultures was under challenge!
So is our Culture!
So is our Identity!
So are our languages!
So are our nationalities!
Brazil is bracing for an imminent ruling on the future of one of its largest indigenous reservations - a decision that campaigners claim could spell disaster for indigenous communities across the country.
Located in the isolated Amazonian state of Roraima, the sprawling 1.7m-hectare (4.2m-acre) reserve was ordered by Brazil's president, Luiz Inácio da Silva, and is home to more than 18,000 aborigines from five different ethnic groups. Campaigners hailed the establishment of Raposa Serra do Sol as a historic move to protect the country's indigenous peoples from contact with the outside world.
Nearly all non-aborigines require legal permission to enter indigenous lands. But several rice farmers have continued to operate inside the reserve. They describe the demarcation of Raposa Serra do Sol as an obstacle to economic development and point to the fact that there are numerous aborigines among their employees.
Violence erupted earlier this year after government attempts to remove all non-indigenous people from the reserve. Bridges were burned and one group of aborigines was shot at, allegedly by gunmen hired by local farmers.
Paulo Cesar Quartiero, a rice farmer who was arrested earlier this year for resisting eviction, has blamed a foreign conspiracy for the creation of the reserve. "History will show who is selling Brazil and who is defending the nation," he said last week.
Many senior members of the military see the reserve - located along the borders with Venezuela and Guyana - as a threat to national security. Last year, the Brazilian military told the Guardian it believed drug traffickers may be taking advantage of the state's absence and using aborigines to smuggle cocaine into Brazil.
But campaigners say a supreme court ruling that reduced the size of the reserve or allowed non-aborigines to remain would encourage further invasions by miners, loggers and ranchers that could devastate the region's indigenous communities.
Fiona Watson, a campaigner from Survival International, a NGO, said a decision tomorrow in favour of the farmers could destroy the indigenous "way of life and set a catastrophic precedent for Indians all over the country".
During a visit to one village in the isolated reserve last year Pierlangela Nascimento da Cunha, a prominent indigenous campaigner, said the conflict over Raposa Serra do Sol was part of a wider offensive against indigenous rights. That offensive included a government bill that proposed opening up such reserves to mining companies in search of gold and diamonds.
"Brazil wants to be a big power. But this does not give it the right to steamroll over the rights of the Indians," said Cunha, who travelled to London in June to discuss the situation in Raposa Serra do Sol with British MPs and members of the Foreign Office.
"The development of our country cannot be achieved through the extinction of its indigenous people and by disrespecting their rights. The big economic interests see [aborigines] as an obstacle."
Adventurers have long scoured Brazil's vast Amazon rainforest for traces of hidden cities buried deep in the jungle. But new research shows the country's dense and inhospitable jungles were once home to an intricate network of towns and roads built by one of the world's earliest urban civilisations.
"These places were far more organised than your average medieval town," anthropologist Professor Mike Heckenberger, from the University of Florida, told the Guardian.
Co-written with a team of Brazilian anthropologists and one local indigenous leader, the paper published in the journal Science contains evidence that the Xingu region in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso was home to thousands of native Indians spread across dozens of towns and villages. The settlements - which are thought to date back at least 1,500 years and are described by the authors as "garden cities" - were constructed around a central plaza and flanked by walls.
Heckenberger said the Amazon settlements were not "full-blown cities" but rather "super or mega-villages" and towns, connected by a sophisticated grid of roads. He first came across traces of this Amazonian urbanism in 1993 while living with the Kuikuro tribe in the remote Xingu park, a vast rainforest reservation.
In 2002, he returned and, using GPS technology and the traditional knowledge of the indigenous communities, his team began mapping the settlements.
The study suggests some truth in the theories of explorers such as the British colonel, Percy Fawcett, who set out to find a lost city in Xingu in 1925 but was never seen again. Instead of "garden cities", he "was looking for stone cities, he was looking for Athens," said Heckenberger.
As to what happened to the inhabitants, Heckenberger believed Xingu's towns and villages had been "crushed" by colonialism and particularly disease.
Lawmakers in Brazil are debating whether to allow mining companies to partner with indigenous groups to exploit mineral deposits deep in the Amazon rainforest, reports Bloomberg.
While mining in the Brazilian Amazon has often been associated with pollution, overhunting, deforestation, road-building, the spread of disease and violence against indigenous groups, it has great wealth to some tribes, notably the Kayapo in the Xingu River basin. The Kayapo have used the proceeds from a mining tax levied on developers to fund opposition to other forest-destroying activities.
With prices for precious metals and minerals near all-time highs there is substantial pressure on indigenous groups to cash in on the potential riches beneath their feet, while avoiding past problems, many of which were associated with illegal wildcat miners known in Brazil as garimpeiros. Still some indigenous rights groups are opposed to measures that would open up their territories to more development.
"Indian lands have special characteristics,
Pereira believes the law would lead to further exploitation of indigenous territories and threaten traditional ways of life.
Gold mining in Suriname. Brazilian gold miners commonly cross borders to work in Suriname, Guyana, French Guiana, and Venezuela.
"About 4 percent of Indian lands have been deforested, up from zero in 2003, and this could grow considerably,
The mining industry disagrees, arguing that legalizing mining would reduce illegal incursions and bring operations under stricter environmental regulation. Miners say expanded production would help meet surging global demand for minerals.
"Opening up these lands would be great for the industry," Ailton Carlos Drummond de Oliveira, a board adviser to Mineracao Caraiba SA, A Brazilian mining firm which is developing a gold mine in Mato Grosso, was quoted as saying by Bloomberg. "Almost half of Mato Grosso and Para states, which are full of minerals, today are blocked off" as indigenous reserves.
Bloomberg reports that President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva supports industry on the measure, which still needs to win a series of approvals from Congress and Senate before it could become law.
The proposed law would give Indians 4 percent royalties and allow them to negotiate for a bigger share of profits. Indigenous groups could refuse to allow mining or they could organize small-scale projects on 100-hectare (247-acre) plots, according to the bill's sponsor, Federal Deputy Eduardo Valverde.
James Anaya, U.N. special rapporteur on indigenous rights, said the protection provided to indigenous people under Brazil's constitution was among the most advanced in the world but the government should do more to secure their right to self-determination.
"It has become evident to me that indigenous peoples frequently do not control the very decisions that affect their everyday lives and their lands even when their lands have been officially demarcated and registered," Anaya said at a news conference at the end of a week-long trip to Brazil.
Fiction and fantasy gave way to harsh reality on Monday at the Venice film festival, with "BirdWatchers" exposing the plight of Brazil's Guarani Indians in the face of the biofuels boom.AFP reports from Venice!
"The economic potential of agriculture is one of the greatest threats to the Guaranis' land claims," said Marco Bechis, the Argentine-Italian director of the first political film screened at this year's festival.
"Land is always a problem between whites and the indigenous peoples," Bechis, 53, told a news conference. "The Guarani-Kaiowa survived one of the biggest genocides of history. The Conquest continues."
"We didn't invent very much at all," he added. "Our scriptwriters just put it into film form."
Eliane Juca De Silva, a Guarani schoolteacher in the cast of mainly non-actors, said: "What you see in the film is true. Our forest was full of trees that are no longer there."
Choking with tears, she added: "It is important for you to understand this is the plain truth of the Guarani. We want our customs to be respected just as yours are. I am proud of our people."
A UN special rapporteur on indigenous rights on Monday urged Brazil to do more to overturn 'critical' health and educational deficiencies and combat economic woes suffered by its native population.
'While culturally rich, indigenous peoples remain impoverished economically, without sufficient power or opportunities to develop on a sustainable basis and are continually suffocated by discrimination,' James Anaya, a US legal scholar descended from Apache indians, told reporters in Brasilia.
'The health and educational situation is critical for many indigenous peoples,' he said after wrapping up a nearly two-week stay visiting indigenous areas in Brazil.
He said that while Brazil had made recent legislative advances in addressing the problems faced by many of the 460,000 indigenous people in its population of 190 million, more changes were badly needed.
He questioned whether many social programs implemented, in fact, reached the South American nation's aboriginal population, and noted that a government scheme to boost infrastructure projects appeared to run roughshod over opposition from affected indigenous communities.
'It has become evident to me that indigenous peoples frequently do not control the decisions that affect their everyday lives and their lands,' he said.
Anaya, who earlier this year was made the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people, added: 'I've heard alarming accounts on violence against indigenous individuals, specially the most vocal leaders.'
He specifically called on the government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to launch a national public awareness campaign on indigenous issues.
Brazil's Supreme Court delayed a ruling on Wednesday over the future of an Indian reserve on the country's northern border, a case seen as one of the most important in years on indigenous rights.
A panel of 11 judges is to vote on whether to uphold apetition by two Roraima state senators who contest the creationof the 4.2-million-
The proceedings were stalled after one of the judges,Carlos Alberto Menezes Direito, asked for more time to lookinto the case.
The first and only judge to have voted so far, Carlos AyresBritto, rejected the complaint, saying the reserve's currentshape and size had to be maintained to ensure the Indians couldpreserve their way of life.
"Fragmented demarcation, like Swiss cheese, makes itimpossible to adhere to the constitution,
The governor of Roraima says the Raposa-Serra do Solreserve -- about the size of Kuwait -- is too big for the17,000 Indians inhabiting it. Mining, agricultural and timberofficials say Indians are an obstacle to economic development.
The army's chief Amazon commander as well as conservativecongres
The Makuxi, Wapixana, Ingariko, Taurepang and Patamonatribes and their supporters say the reservation is beingtargeted, sometimes violently, by big farming and othereconomic interests.
The dispute flared in April when police tried to evict ricefarmers from the reservation in Brazil's northernmost state,which borders Venezuela and Guyana.
The farmers resisted by blocking roads, blowing up bridgesand hiring gunmen. Ten Indians were wounded in a shootout inMay and a farm leader was arrested.
The head of the government Indian agency, Marcio Meira,told Reuters last month a Supreme Court decision annulling thereservation would be the biggest blow to Indian rights in morethan 20 years.
Indigenous peoples in Brazil
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Indigenous peoples in Brazil (Portuguese: povos indígenas) comprise a large number of distinct ethnic groups who inhabited the country prior to the arrival of Europeans around 1500. Unlike Christopher Columbus, who thought he had reached the East Indies, the Portuguese, most notably by Vasco da Gama, had already reached India via the Indian Ocean route when they reached Brazil. Nevertheless the word índios ("Indians"), was by then established to designate the peoples of the New World and stuck being used today in the Portuguese language to designate these peoples, while the people of India, Asia are called indianos in order to distinguish the two peoples.
At the time of European discovery, the indigenous peoples were traditionally mostly semi-nomadic tribes who subsisted on hunting, fishing, gathering, and migrant agriculture. Many of the estimated 2,000 nations and tribes which existed in 1500 died out as a consequence of the European settlement, and many were assimilated into the Brazilian population. The indigenous population has declined from a pre-Columbian high of an estimated at below 4 million to some 300,000 (1997), grouped into some 200 tribes. A somewhat dated linguistic survey [2] found 188 living indigenous languages with 155,000 total speakers. On 18 January 2007, FUNAI reported that it had confirmed the presence of 67 different uncontacted tribes in Brazil, up from 40 in 2005. With this addition Brazil has now overtaken the island of New Guinea as the country having the largest number of uncontacted peoples.
Brazilian indigenous people made substantial and pervasive contributions to the country's material and cultural development—such as the domestication of cassava, which is still a major staple food in rural areas of the country.
In the last IBGE census (2006), 519,000 Brazilians classified themselves as indigenous.
http://en.wikipedia
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
For other uses, see Native Americans.
"Red Indian" redirects here. For the ethnic group known to Europeans for using red ochre, see Beothuk.
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Americas, their descendants, and many ethnic groups who identify with those peoples. They are often also referred to as Native Americans, First Nations and by Christopher Columbus' historical mistake Indians, modernly disambiguated as the American Indian race, American Indians, Amerindians, Amerinds, or Red Indians.
According to the still-debated New World migration model, a migration of humans from Eurasia to the Americas took place via Beringia, a land bridge which formerly connected the two continents across what is now the Bering Strait. The minimum time depth by which this migration had taken place is confirmed at c. 12,000 years ago, with the upper bound (or earliest period) remaining a matter of some unresolved contention.[
Application of the term "Indian" originated with Christopher Columbus, who thought that he had arrived in the East Indies, while seeking India. This has served to imagine a kind of racial or cultural unity for the aboriginal peoples of the Americas. Once created, the unified "Indian" was codified in law, religion, and politics. The unitary idea of "Indians" was not originally shared by indigenous peoples, but many now embrace the identity.
While some indigenous peoples of the Americas were historically hunter-gatherers, many practiced aquaculture and agriculture. The impact of their agricultural endowment to the world is a testament to their time and work in reshaping, taming, and cultivating the flora indigenous to the Americas.[3] Some societies depended heavily on agriculture while others practiced a mix of farming, hunting, and gathering. In some regions the indigenous peoples created monumental architecture, large-scale organized cities, chiefdoms, states, and massive empires.
Many parts of the Americas are still populated by indigenous Americans, some countries with sizeable populations are Bolivia, Peru, Paraguay, Mexico, Brazil, Guatemala, Colombia, and Ecuador. At least a thousand different indigenous languages are spoken in the Americas and some like Quechua, Guaraní, Mayan languages, and Nahuatl count their speakers in millions. Most indigenous peoples have largely adopted a European lifestyle, but many also maintain aspects of indigenous cultural practices to varying degrees, including religion, social organization and subsistence practices. Some indigenous peoples still live in relative isolation from Europeanized society, and a few are still counted as uncontacted peoples.
http://en.wikipedia
Original peopling of the Americas
See also: Models of migration to the New World, Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact, Classification of indigenous peoples of the Americas, Solutrean hypothesis, Kennewick Man, and Pre-Siberian American Aborigines
Language families of North American indigenous peoplesScholars who follow the Bering Strait theory agree that most indigenous peoples of the Americas descended from people who probably migrated from Siberia across the Bering Strait, anywhere between 9,000 and 50,000 years ago. The time frame and exact routes are still matters of debate, and the model faces continuous challenges. A 2006 study (to be published in Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology[
One result of these waves of migration is that large groups of peoples with similar languages and perhaps physical characteristics as well, moved into various geographic areas of North, and then Central and South America. While these peoples have traditionally remained primarily loyal to their individual tribes, ethnologists have variously sought to group the myriad of tribes into larger entities which reflect common geographic origins, linguistic similarities, and lifestyles.[
Remnants of a human settlement in Monte Verde, Chile dated to 12,500 years B.P. (another layer at Monteverde has been tentatively dated to 33,000–35,000 years B.P.) suggests that southern Chile was settled by peoples who entered the Americas before the peoples associated with the Bering Strait migrations. It is suggested that a coastal route via canoes could have allowed rapid migration into the Americas.[citation needed]
The traditional view of a relatively recent migration has also been challenged by older findings of human remains in South America; some dating to perhaps even 30,000 years old or more. Some recent finds (notably the Luzia Woman in Lagoa Santa, Brazil) are claimed to be morphologically distinct from most Asians and are more similar to Africans, Melanesians and Australian Aborigines. These American Aborigines would have been later displaced or absorbed by the Siberian immigrants. The distinctive Fuegian natives of Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of the American continent, are speculated to be partial remnants of those Aboriginal populations. These early immigrants would have either crossed the ocean by boat or traveled north along the Asian coast and entered America through the Northwest, well before the Siberian waves. This theory is presently viewed by many scholars as conjecture, as many areas along the proposed routes now lie underwater, making research difficult. Some scholars believe the earliest forensic evidence for early populations appears to more closely resemble Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders, and not those of Northeast Asia. [6]
Scholars' estimates of the total population of the Americas before European contact vary enormously, from a low of 10 million to a high of 112 million.[7] Some authors see ideological underpinnings in this population debate. For example, Robert Royal writes that "estimates of pre-Columbian population figures have become heavily politicized with scholars who are particularly critical of Europe and/or Western civilization often favoring wildly higher figures."[8] Some scholars believe that most of the indigenous population resided in Mesoamerica and South America, with approximately 10 percent residing in North America, prior to European colonization.
The Solutrean hypothesis suggests an early European migration into the Americas[10]
American Indian creation legends tell of a variety of originations of their respective peoples. Some were "always there" or were created by gods or animals, some migrated from a specified compass point, and others came from "across the ocean".[14]
Vine Deloria, Jr., author and Nakota activist, cites some of the oral histories that claim an in situ origin in his book Red Earth, White Lies, rejecting the Bering Strait land bridge route. Deloria takes a Young Earth position, arguing that Native Americans actually originated in the Americas.[15]
http://en.wikipedia
The natives after the European colonization
[edit] First contacts
Depiction of cannibalism in the Brazilian tupinamba tribe, as described by Hans StadenWhen the Portuguese discoverers arrived for the first time in Brazil, in April 1500 they found, to their astonishment, a widely inhabited coastland, teeming with hundreds of thousands of indigenous people living in a "paradise" of natural riches. Pêro Vaz de Caminha, the official scribe of Pedro Álvares Cabral, the commander of the discovery fleet which landed in the present state of Bahia, wrote a letter to the King of Portugal describing in glowing terms the beauty of the land. In fact however, the Portuguese colonizers had many armed conflicts with the indigenous peoples and had many indigenous people as allies.
At the time of European discovery, the territory of current day Brazil had as many as 2,000 nations and tribes. The indigenous peoples were traditionally mostly semi-nomadic tribes who subsisted on hunting, fishing, gathering, and migrant agriculture. For hundreds of years, the indigenous people of Brazil lived a semi-nomadic life, managing the forests to meet their needs. When the Portuguese arrived in 1500, the Indians were living mainly on the coast and along the banks of major rivers. Initially, the Europeans saw the natives as noble savages, and miscegenation of the population began right away. Tribal warfare, cannibalism and the pursuit of Amazonian brazilwood for its treasured red dye convinced the Portuguese that they should "civilize" the Indians (originally, Colonists called Brazil Terra de Santa Cruz, until later it acquired its name (see List of meanings of countries' names) from brazilwood). But the Portuguese, like the Spanish in their South American territories, had unknowingly brought diseases with them against which many Indians were helpless due to lack of immunity. Measles, smallpox, tuberculosis and influenza killed tens of thousands. The diseases spread quickly along the indigenous trade routes, and whole tribes were likely annihilated without ever coming in direct contact with Europeans.
[edit] Slavery and the Bandeiras
The mutual feeling of wonderment and good relationship was to end in the succeeding years. The Portuguese colonists, all males, started to have children with female natives, creating a new generation of mixed-race people who spoke Indian languages (in the city of São Paulo in the first years after her foundation, a Tupi language called Nheengatu). The children of these Portuguese men and Indian women formed the majority of the population. Groups of fierce conquistadores' sons organized expeditions called "bandeiras" (flags) into the backlands to claim the land to the Portuguese crown and to look for gold and precious stones.[3]
Brazilian natives during a ritual, Debret.Intending to profit from sugar trade, the Portuguese decided to plant sugar cane in Brazil, and use indigenous slaves as the workforce, as the Spanish colonies were successfully doing. But the indigenous people were hard to capture and, soon infected by diseases brought by the Europeans against which they had no natural immunity, began dying in great numbers. This, coupled with the prospects of increased profits from the African slave trade (at the time almost monopolized by Portugal and supplying the labour needs of both Spanish and Portuguese settlers in the New World), encouraged Portuguese settlers and traders to start importing slaves from Africa. Although in 1570 King Sebastian I ordered that the Brazilian Indians should not be used for slavery and ordered the release of those held in captivity it was only in 1755 that the slavery of Indians was finally abolished.
[edit] The Jesuits: Protectors of the Indians
Main article: Jesuit Reductions
The Jesuit priests, who had come with the first Governor General to provide for religious assistance to the colonists, but mainly to convert the "pagan" peoples to Catholicism, took the side of the natives and extracted a Papal bull stating that they were human and should be protected.
Jesuit priests such as fathers José de Anchieta and Manuel da Nóbrega studied and recorded their language and founded mixed settlements, such as São Paulo dos Campos de Piratininga, where colonists and natives lived side by side, speaking the same Língua Geral (common language) and freely interbred. They began also to establish more remote villages peopled only by "civilized" natives, called Missions, or reductions (see the article on the Guarani people for more details).
By the middle of the 16th century, Catholic Jesuit priests, at the behest of Portugal's monarchy, had established missions throughout the country's colonies. They became protectors of the Indians and worked to both Europeanize them and convert them to Catholicism. The Jesuits provided a period of relative stability for the Indians.
In the mid-1770s, when the power of the Catholic Church began to wane in Europe, the Indians' fragile co-existence with the colonists was again threatened. Because of a complex diplomatic web between Portugal, Spain and the Vatican, the Jesuits were expelled from Brazil and the missions confiscated and sold.
By 1800, the population of Brazil had reached approximately 3.25 million, of which only 250,000 were indigenous. And for the next four decades, the Indians were largely left alone.
[edit] Wars
A Warrior depicted by Jean-Baptiste Debret in the early 19th CenturyA number of wars between several tribes, such as the Tamoio Confederation, and the Portuguese ensued, sometimes with the natives siding with enemies of Portugal, such as the French, in the famous episode of France Antarctique in Rio de Janeiro, sometimes allying themselves to Portugal in their fight against other tribes. At approximately the same period, a German soldier, Hans Staden, was captured by the Tupinamba and released after a while. He described it in a famous book.
There are various documented accounts of smallpox being knowingly used as a biological weapon by Brazilian villagers that wanted to get rid of nearby tribes (not always aggressive ones). The most "classical", according to Anthropologist, Mércio Pereira Gomes, happened in Caxias, in south Maranhão, where local farmers, wanting more land to extend their cattle farms, gave clothing owned by ill villagers (that normally would be burned to prevent further infection) to the Timbirans. The clothing infected the entire tribe, and they had neither immunity nor cure. Similar things happened in other villages throughout South America.[4]
[edit] The rubber trade
The 1840s brought trade and wealth to the Amazon. The process for vulcanizing rubber was developed, and worldwide demand for the product skyrocketed. The best rubber trees in the world grew in the Amazon, and thousands of rubber tappers began to work the plantations. When the Indians proved to be a difficult labor force, peasants from surrounding areas were brought into the region. In a dynamic that continues to this day, the indigenous population was at constant odds with the peasants, who the Indians felt had invaded their lands in search of treasure.
[edit] The legacy of Cândido Rondon
Marshal Cândido Rondon.In the 20th century, the Brazilian Government adopted a more humanitarian attitude and offered official protection to the indigenous people, including the establishment of the first indigenous reserves. Fortune brightened for the Indians around the turn of the century when Cândido Rondon, a man of both Portuguese and Bororo ancestry, and an explorer and progressive officer in the Brazilian army, began working to gain the Indians' trust and establish peace. Rondon, who had been assigned to help bring telegraph communications into the Amazon, was a curious and natural explorer. In 1910, he helped found the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (Indian Protection Service) (SPI) (today the FUNAI, or Fundação Nacional do Índio), the first federal agency charged with protecting Indians and preserving their culture. In 1914, Rondon accompanied Theodore Roosevelt on Roosevelt's famous expedition to map the Amazon and discover new species. During these travels, Rondon was appalled to see how settlers and developers treated the indigenes, and he became their lifelong friend and protector. In 1952, as a final legacy, he established the Xingu National Park, in the state of Mato Grosso, the first Indian reservation in Brazil. Rondon, who passed away in 1956, is a national hero in Brazil. The Brazilian state of Rondonia is named after him. The remaining unacculturated tribes have been contacted by FUNAI, and accommodated within Brazilian society in varying degrees. However, the exploration of rubber and other Amazonic natural resources led to a new cycle of invasion, expulsion, massacres and death, which continues to this day.
After Rondon's pioneering work, the SPI was turned over to bureaucrats and military officers. They did not share his deep commitment to the Indians. The lure of reservation riches enticed cattle ranchers and settlers to continue their assault on native lands – and the SPI eased the way. Between 1900 and 1967, an estimated 98 indigenous tribes were wiped out.
But reports of mistreatment of Indians finally reached Brazil's urban centers, and in 1967, the military government launched an investigation. It soon came to light that the SPI was failing to protect native lands and that agency officials, in collaboration with land speculators, were systematically slaughtering the Indians by intentionally circulating disease-laced clothes. Criminal prosecutions followed, and the SPI was disbanded.
Also in 1967, in a seismic political shift, the Brazilian military took control of the government and abolished all political parties. For the next two decades, Brazil was ruled by a series of generals. The country's mantra was "Brazil, the Country of the Future," which the military government used as justification for a giant push into the Amazon to exploit its resources, thereby bringing Brazil to its rightful place among the leading economies of the world. Construction began on a transcontinental highway across the Amazon basin, aimed to encourage migration to the Amazon and to open up the region to more trade. With funding from World Bank, thousands of miles of forest were cleared with no regard for reservation lands. After the highway projects came giant hydroelectric projects, then swaths of forest were cleared for cattle ranches. As a result, reservation lands suffered massive deforestation and flooding. The public works projects attracted very few migrants, but those few – and largely poor - settlers brought new diseases that further devastated the native population.
[edit] The Brazilian gold rush
The next phase of destruction came in the 1980s with the discovery of large deposits of gold on reservation lands, particularly Yanomami land. The Yanomami, one of the largest and oldest known tribes in the Americas, had lived virtually unchanged since the Stone Age. Then the promise of gold brought tens of thousands of speculators onto their land. The mercury used to extract the deposits polluted the rivers and killed the fish. The miners also introduced tuberculosis, malaria and flu. In 1977, the Yanomami population was estimated at 20,000; by the end of the 20th century, it was down to 9,000.
http://en.wikipedia
History and status by country
[edit] Argentina
See also: Demographics of Argentina
See also: Argentine Amerindians
See also: List of indigenous languages in Argentina
Argentina's indigenous population is about 403.000 (0.9 percent of total population).
[edit] Belize
Mestizos (European with indigenous peoples) number about 45 percent of the population; unmixed Maya make up another 6.5 percent. The Garifuna, who came to Belize in the 1800s, originating from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, with a mixed African, Carib, and Arawak ancestry make up another 5% of the population.
[edit] Bolivia
In Bolivia about 2.5 million people speak Quechua, 2.1 million speak Aymara, while Guaraní is only spoken by a few hundred thousand people. The languages are recognized; nevertheless, there are no official documents written in those languages. However, the constitutional reform in 1997 for the first time recognized Bolivia as a multilingual, pluri-ethnic society and introduced education reform. In 2005, for the first time in the country's history, an indigenous Aymara, Evo Morales, was elected as president.
[edit] Brazil
Brazilian Indigenous chiefs of the Kayapo tribe: Raony, Kaye, Kadjor, Panara.
Korubo man from the Brazilian Amazon.
See also: Indigenous peoples in Brazil
See also: List of Indigenous peoples in Brazil
The Amerindians make up 0.4% of Brazil's population, or about 700,000 people.[52] Indigenous peoples are found in the entire territory of Brazil, although the majority of them live in Indian reservations in the North and Centre-Western part of the country. On 18 January 2007, FUNAI reported that it had confirmed the presence of 67 different uncontacted tribes in Brazil, up from 40 in 2005. With this addition Brazil has now overtaken the island of New Guinea as the country having the largest number of uncontacted tribes.[53]
[edit] Canada
Bill Reid's sculpture The Raven and The First Men, showing part of a Haida creation myth. The Raven represents the Trickster figure common to many mythologies. The work is in the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver.Main article: Aboriginal peoples in Canada
The most commonly preferred term for the indigenous peoples of what is now Canada is Aboriginal peoples. Of these Aboriginal peoples who are not Inuit or Métis, "First Nations" is the most commonly preferred term of self-identification
[edit] Chile
Main article: Indigenous peoples in Chile
Less than 5 percent of Chileans belong to indigenous peoples, such as the Mapuche in the country's central valley and lake district, and the Mapuche successfully fought off defeat in the first 300–350 years of Spanish rule during the War of Arauco. Relation with the new Chilean Republic were good until the Chilean state decided to occupy their lands. During the Occupation of Araucanía the Mapuche surrendered to the country's army in the 1880s. The former land was opened to settlement for mestizo and white Chileans. Conflict over Mapuche land rights continued until present days.
Sculpture of a Chibchan-Sutagao Native American standing at the entrance of Fusagasugá, Colombia
[edit] Colombia
Main article: Indigenous peoples in Colombia
A small minority today within Colombia's overwhelmingly Mestizo and Afro-Colombian population, Colombia's indigenous peoples nonetheless encompass at least 85 distinct cultures and more than 1,378,884 people[54]. A variety of collective rights for indigenous peoples are recognized in the 1991 Constitution.
One of these is the Muisca culture, a subset of the larger Chibcha ethnic group, famous for their use of gold, which led to the legend of El Dorado. At the time of the Spanish conquest, the Chibchas were the largest native civilization between the Incas and the Aztecs.
[edit] Costa Rica
Costa Rica was the site of many indigenous cultures, but only eight remain today: Bribri, Brunka, Cabecar, Chorotega, Guaymi, Huetar, Maleku and Terraba, also called Teribe or Naso.
[edit] Ecuador
Main article: Indigenous peoples in Ecuador
Ecuador was the site of many indigenous cultures, and civilizations of different proportions. An early sedentary culture, known as the Valdivia culture, developed in the coastal region, while the Caras and the Quitus unified to form an elaborate civilization that ended at the birth of the Capital Quito. The Cañaris near Cuenca were the most advanced, and most feared by the Inca, due to their fierce resistance to the Incan expansion. Their architecture remains were later destroyed by Spaniards and the Incas.
Otavaleña girl from EcuadorApproximatel
Coastal groups, including the Awá, Chachi, and the Tsáchila, make up .24% percent of the indigenous population, while the remaining 3.35 percent live in the Oriente and consist of the Oriente Kichwa (the Canelo and the Quijos), the Shuar, the Huaorani, the Siona-Secoya, the Cofán, and the Achuar.
In 1986, indigenous people formed the first "truly" national political organization.
[edit] Guatemala
Many of the indigenous peoples of Guatemala are of Maya heritage. Other groups are Xinca people and Garífuna.
Pure Maya account for some 40 percent of the population; although around 40 percent of the population speaks an indigenous language, those tongues (of which there are more than 20) enjoy no official status.
[edit] El Salvador
Much of El Salvador was home to the Pipil, Lenca, and a number of Maya. The Pipil lived in western El Salvador and spoke Nahuatl like their Aztec and Maya counterparts, and had many settlements there. The Pipil had no treasure but held land that had rich and fertile soil, good for farming, this both disappointed and brought attention to the Spaniards who were shocked not to find gold or jewels in El Salvador like they did in other lands like Guatemala or Mexico, but later learned of the fertile land El Salvador had to offer and attempted to conquer it. At first the Pipil had repelled Spanish Attacks but after many other attacks they had stopped fighting and many were sadly used for labor by Spaniards. Today many Pipil and Indigenous populations live in small towns of El Salvador like Izalco and Nahuizalco.
[edit] Mexico
Main article: Indigenous peoples of Mexico
Benito Juárez, an indigenous Zapotec and President of Mexico from 1858 to 1872. He was the first Mexican president with indigenous roots.The territory of modern-day Mexico was home to numerous indigenous civilizations prior to the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores: The Olmecs, who flourished from between 1200 BCE to about 400 BCE in the coastal regions of the Gulf of Mexico; the Zapotecs and the Mixtecs, who held sway in the mountains of Oaxaca and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec; the Maya in the Yucatán (and into neighbouring areas of contemporary Central America); the Purepecha or Tarascan in present day Michoacán and surrounding areas, and the Aztecs, who, from their central capital at Tenochtitlan, dominated much of the centre and south of the country (and the non-Aztec inhabitants of those areas) when Hernán Cortés first landed at Veracruz.
In contrast to what was the general rule in the rest of North America, the history of the colony of New Spain was one of racial intermingling (mestizaje). Mestizos quickly came to account for a majority of the colony's population; however, significant pockets of pure-blood indígenas (as the native peoples are now known) have survived to the present day.
With mestizos numbering some 60 percent of the modern population, estimates for the numbers of unmixed indigenous peoples vary from 13% percent (pure Amerindian, as reported by the National Commission for the Development of the Indigenous Peoples)[55] to 30 percent (predominantly Ameridian)[56] of the population.
In the states of Chiapas and Oaxaca and in the interior of the Yucatán peninsula the majority of the population is indigenous. Large indigenous minorities, including Nahuas, Purépechas, and Mixtecs are also present in the central regions of Mexico. In Northern Mexico indigenous people are a small minority.
The General Law of Linguistic Rights of the Indigenous Peoples grants all indigenous languages spoken in Mexico, regardless of the number of speakers, the same validity as Spanish in all territories in which they are spoken, and indigenous peoples are entitled to request some public services and documents in their native languages.[57] Along with Spanish, the law has granted them –more than 60 languages– the status of "national languages". The law includes all Amerindian languages regardless of origin; that is, it includes the Amerindian languages of ethnic groups non-native to the territory. As such the National Commission for the Development of the Indigenous Peoples recognizes the language of the Kickapoo, who immigrated from the United States,[58] and recognizes the languages of the Guatemalan Amerindian refugees.[59] The Mexican government has promoted and established bilingual primary and secondary education in some indigenous rural communities. Nonetheless, of the 13% of pure indigenous peoples in Mexico, only about 67% of them (or 7.1% of the country's population) speak an Amerindian language and about a tenth (1.2% of the country's population) do not speak Spanish.[60]
The indigenous peoples in Mexico have the right of free determination under the second article of the constitution. According to this article the indigenous peoples are granted:[61]
the right to decide the internal forms of social, economic, political and cultural organization;
the right to apply their own normative systems of regulation as long as human rights and gender equality are respected;
Sea of Poppies
by Amitav Ghosh
471pp, John Murray, £18.99
This terrific novel, the first volume in a projected trilogy, unfolds in north India and the Bay of Bengal in 1838 on the eve of the British attack on the Chinese ports known as the first opium war. In Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh assembles from different corners of the world sailors, marines and passengers for the Ibis, a slaving schooner now converted to the transport of coolies and opium. In bringing his troupe of characters to Calcutta and into the open water, Ghosh provides the reader with all manner of stories, and equips himself with the personnel to man and navigate an old-fashioned literary three-decker.
He begins in the villages of eastern Bihar with Deeti, soon to be widowed; her addicted husband, who works at the British opium factory at Ghazipur; and Kalua, a low-caste carter of colossal strength and resource. Moving downstream, we meet a bankrupt landowner, Raja Neel Rattan; an American sailor, Zachary; Paulette, a young Frenchwoman, and her Bengali foster-brother Jodu; Benjamin Burnham, an unscrupulous British merchant, and his Bengali agent, Baboo Nob Kissin; and every style of nautch girl, sepoy and lascar.
On their way to the "black sea", these characters are exposed to a suttee or widow-burning, a shipboard mutiny, a court case, jails, kidnappings, rapes, floggings, a dinner party and every refinement of sex. The story proceeds at pace without too much by way of coincidence, dreams or - the bane of this sort of book - the supernatural. This volume ends with the Ibis, storm-tossed, off Sumatra. I cannot tell whether we are headed for Mauritius or China, but am happy to sail.
Yet Sea of Poppies is a historical novel, which means that the story is only half the story. Ever since Walter Scott published Waverley in 1814, readers have turned to historical fiction not just for escape from a straitened and conventional present, but also for instruction. Scott gave his readers not merely the bizarre character-types and wide open spaces of a fantastic pre-industrial Scotland, but antiquities, dialect, history, geography and lashings of political economy. Ghosh finds the educational programme of the Scottian novel very much to his purpose.
Thus he dramatises (or rather roman-ticises, in the sense of makes a novel out of) two great economic themes of the 19th century: the cultivation of opium as a cash crop in Bengal and Bihar for the Chinese market, and the transport of Indian indentured workers to cut sugar canes for the British on such islands as Mauritius, Fiji and Trinidad.
At a more everyday level, Ghosh creates an encyclopedia of early 19th-century Indian food, servants, furniture, religious worship, nautical commands, male and female costume and underlinen, trades, marriage and funeral rites, botany and horticulture, opium cultivation, alcoholic drinks, grades of clerk and non-commissioned military officers, criminal justice, sexual practices, traditional medicines and sails and rigging.
His technique, which was also Scott's, is to supply the maximum information that the story can support. For example, he has read the description of the great Sudder opium factory at Ghazipur published in 1865 (a little late, but it will do) by the factory superintendent, JWS MacArthur. Given that there are probably not 20 copies of MacArthur's Account of an Opium Factory on earth, Ghosh is amply justified in using it. His device is brilliant. He has Deeti rush in terror through every single shed of the factory in search of her dying husband. Yet whereas MacArthur wanted to show how the factory operated in each season, Ghosh makes all its activities simultaneous. Poppy flowers, sap and trash are processed before Deeti's terrified village eyes. Ghosh has not forgotten the agricultural calendar; it's just that he will no more waste a fact than MacArthur wasted poppy.
Indian writers in English of an earlier generation, such as the late RK Narayan or VS Naipaul, aspired to a pure metropolitan or "Oxford" English. Ghosh, like Salman Rushdie, introduces words from the Indian languages, and from the various creoles, pidgins and slangs that have arisen in India and the Asian seaports since the 18th century. He has combed the colonial-era dictionaries and lexicons for nautical speech, barrack-room slang and all sorts of thieves' and whores' argot. The most important of these sources is Sir Henry Yule's Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases (1886), which is also a particular favourite of Rushdie's. Some readers may be perplexed by such sentences as: "Jodu had been set to . . . stowing pipas of drinking water, tirkaoing hamars, hauling zanjirs through the hansil-holes.
Yet for all its research, Sea of Poppies is full of the open air. It never, as the 18th century used to say, "smells of the lamp". Nor does it matter that Ghosh, like Rushdie, sometimes reads like Kipling and Jim Corbett and those British memoirists of the Camp-and-Cantonment school.
This is the alchemy of Indian independence. What was reprehensible in, say, EM Forster becomes meritorious in Ghosh. Ghosh's Baboo is not far from the ugly colonial stereotype, but is also a character of wit and great service to the plot. With the Europeans, the chemistry is reversed. They are Indian stereotypes - all filthy manners and disgusting personal habits - but also characters of force and imagination. Raja Neel gets them in one: "It would be all but impossible, surely, to deal with them, if not for their drink?"
Historical novelists, even Scott, are often bad at love. As one might expect, Ghosh passes over for his chief romantic interest both English and natives. He lights instead on an octoroon from Baltimore and a Frenchwoman brought up in the Calcutta Botanic Garden by a Bengali wet-nurse. Their speech, respectively the "tall" American English of the 19th-century frontier and franglais, bores him silly and he does it badly. Confined by the manners of Jane Austen, these young people simply cannot get going. Ghosh loses patience - and in comes a cutlass-heaving lascar or a farting Sahib.
· James Buchan's latest novel, The Gate of Air, will be published by the Maclehose Press in August.
·To order Sea of Poppies for £17.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.
|
|
| Aboriginal America - by Jacob Abbott - 136 pages The Making of the American Landscape - by Michael P Conzen - 452 pages The Soul of the Indian - by Charles Alexander Eastman - 68 pages |
| Big business honours indigenous success The Australian, Australia - The trip will be hosted by Stephen Cornell, from the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, who told The Weekend Australian the finalists ...  LON:BLT - ASX:BHP |
| Natives play role in US election Regina Leader-Post, Canada - In Canada's North, we have a number of seats where the aboriginal vote can decide the outcome. As a result, all the major parties have been able to include ... |
| First Nations and the MILF Manila Standard Today, Philippines - In Canada, for instance, the native Indians struggled for years to be considered as First Nations or the original people of North America. ... |
| In search of Simon Fraser Globe and Mail, Canada - Aboriginal leaders are now playing catch-up in their treaty negotiations. So perhaps it's not surprising that the first two pages of the government's book ... |
| Look on bright side The Australian, Australia - Recognition of the importance of good governance is at last gaining momentum, drawing inspiration from the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic ... |
| Balkanizing Canada theTrumpet.com, OK - Instead the focus is on groups that, allegedly, have been subjected to oppression by American and Western civilization—homosexuals, American Indians, ... |
| Maori seats possible model to give Aborigines a voice New Zealand Herald, New Zealand - The United States' National Congress of American Indians, Canada's Assembly of First Nations and Sweden's Sami Parliament are other examples that are also ... |
| Aboriginal entrepreneurs honoured on special night Journal Pioneer, Canada - ... internationally acclaimed Métis architect Doug Cardinal; Joe Garcia, president of American Indians; Mark Solomon, Kaiwhakahaere (chairman) of Te Runanga ... |
| Posted By ERNIE SANDY Orillia Packet & Times, Canada - In North America, it was the English and French who laid claim to Aboriginal land through a series of very questionable documents called treaties. ... |
