PORTO ALEGRE, BRASIL

JANUARY 25-30, 2001

FROM THE FORUM FOR GLOBAL EXCHANGE &

BIOCULTURAL SECURITY DIRECTORATE,

CENTER FOR WORLD INDIGENOUS STUDIES

PREPARED BY A. RODNEY BOBIWASH, DIRECTOR

The Center for World Indigenous Studies is an international indigenous research and policy think tank that has as it's mandate the promotion of indigenous knowledge and the interests of the Fourth World. The Fourth World is defined as the world of Indigenous people - the original peoples of the Americas and across the globe who have been marginalized in their own lands, excluded from civil society, denied economic opportunity, and stigmatized by the Myth of Conquest and the Doctrine of Discovery - who have fallen off of even the lowest rungs of the false ladder of economic determinism - called progress. The Peoples of the Fourth World, from the highlands of the Andes, to the tundra of the Arctic, to the jungles of the Amazon, to the outback of Australia, to the taiga of Siberia, as well as those lost in the desert of the streets of the great cities of the world; New York, Sao Paolo, Jakarta, Nairobi and so on, are the victims of globalisation and their communities are the sites of resistance to neoliberalism.

Under the neoliberal agenda the colonization of Indigenous peoples of the Americas that began over 500 years ago is about to become complete. The reality of Indigenous life is not that we cannot become well-functioning citizens of our respective states and the world but rather that in insisting on our right to be Indian that we become subversive.

That, in keeping our language we challenge the hegemony of American linguistic imperalism;

That, in practicing our spirituality we assert our relationship to the earth in a way which challenges the right of mining and timber companies to rape and exploit her;

That, in guarding our traditional knowledge we deny the right of pharmaceutical companies to monopolize the benefit of the medicines given us for the healing of all humankind;

That, in safeguarding our bodies we refuse the demands of academics, sanctified by western universities, to patent our genes for profit;

That, in keeping our stories and songs for our Grandchildren and teaching our lifeways to them we deny the privilege of voyeurism practiced under the guise of eco and cultural tourism;

That, in building strong communities and traditional economies we deny the gods of false consumption and we deny the use of our labour in sweat shops and Maquiladors;

That, in practicing our traditional patterns of agriculture and harvesting of the land we guarantee our food security and deny Coca-Colonization which leads only to weak bodies and teeth to weak to bite back;

That in protecting the biodiversity of our traditional territories and lands we affirm the sacredness of all life and the interconnectedness of it and refuse to countenance the destruction of our brothers in the animal and plant world - which is also our world;

All of these things make our existence as Indigenous Peoples anathema to the machine of global capital. We apprehend that we are engaged in the final war for our survival and that what is happening under the guise of globalisation is not Re-Colonization, as some have said, but rather the final stages of the original colonization carried like smallpox on the ships of Christopher Columbus; on the robes of Jesuits; and on the blankets of traders and merchants. The Anishnabai people of the Great Lakes of North America have a sacred warrior society, open to all who are brave enough to love the people. It is called the Ogitchidaa, or the Big Heart Warrior Society, and members of it committed to staking their spears in the ground and tying themselves to them in the face of the enemy - there they would stand and fight until the death or victory. Much as our Grandfathers and Grandmothers stood in resistance to the enemies of the people, sacrificing themselves to the fire for the love of the people, so too we will now stake our spears in the ground, tie ourselves to them and we will not be moved until the struggle is ended.

As Indigenous People we recognize that the effects of globalisation are multiple and that many other communities are affected in similar ways as we have been. The mantle of oppression has likewise been thrown over the rights of workers, the unorganized, the landless and homeless, agricultural workers, the differently-abled, the communities of colour, students and the poor. All people - men, women, elders and children - black, white, yellow and red - have the right to determine their own destinies, individually and collectively, with access to basic human needs - nutritional food, healthcare, security of the person, water, and dignity. Under international trade agreements such as NAFTA and the proposed FTAA we have witnessed the deterioration and denial of these needs under the guise of free trade. At the World Trade Organization in 1999 the Director of the WTO, Mike Moore, loudly trumpeted to the media that "all poor nations want is a chance o compete!" The only competition is a race to the bottom. The race in the Americas to privatize health care, to open borders to commerce but not to workers, to sell the water upon which we all come from and depend on for life, is a competition in which all people will lose and transnational capital will prosper. We must make common cause between the sectors of struggle and adopt lateral strategies in which our strength will be our difference. We will reject the mediocrity of cultural homogenization and embrace the immense power of diversity forged in respect for the complementarities our different communities bring to the struggle.

The heart of the struggle must be community. Although the struggle is international in nature the site of conflict and resistance is local. The strength that we will draw upon and offer one another is held in the memories and the experiences of our Elders, in the hope and dreams of our children, and in the capabilities of our warriors and our women. The homogenization of culture, the hegemony of the Romance languages, the ubiquitousness of television, and the never-ending assault upon local cultures is an attempt to control the narrative of life. In seizing the narrative Microsoft, Nike, AOL-Warner, and all of their cohorts are appropriating the tools whereby we build our houses. This process designed to propagandize from cradle to grave is designed to rob us of the dignity of determining the world of our dreams -and it is in the world of our dreams - in the language of our ancestors - that we gain power. We categorically reject this and assert the primacy and need for protection of Indigenous and local cultures. Aggressions from the World Intellectual Property Office, the Trips Council of the WTO, the World Taxonomy Initiative among others must be met with the strongest resistance. The theft of our cultural property, our sacred knowledge, is the theft of our identity and autonomy. International and state bodies alike must move forward on the drafting of sui generis legislation that will guarantee the safeguarding of Indigenous Cultural Property.

All of the history of the Americas is built upon two historical realities which have not been acknowledged must less dealt with by any state in the Americas:

The first of these realities is the genocide of the original peoples of the Americas. It is conservatively estimated that at the time of first contact with Europeans that there were over 70 million Aboriginal people in the Americas. In Canada it is estimated there were around 17 million. In Canada today there are less than 2.5 million.

The second of these realities is the enslavement of the black man. Brought from their homelands in Africa to the Americas against their will to work the cane fields and plantations essential to the generation of mercantile wealth, Black people in America share with Indigenous people staggering rates of incarceration, illiteracy, infant mortality, ill health, and lack of opportunity. Dwelling in inner-city ghettoes they are further victimized by economic and environmental racism and a social system that holds out the hand of plenty while striking with the other.

At the ll Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism in Belem, Brasil in December 1999 Aboriginal people called for a radical re-examination of the way which the societies and states we live within are structured. This call began with a plea that the non-Native people there might go into the hearts of their cities and standing there in the wilderness of those urban deserts water the parched streets of humanity with their tears. That they would weep for the tens of millions of our ancestors buried beneath that pavement and concrete; that they weep for the earth despoiled by daily living; and, that they weep for their brothers and sisters going without bread; and, finally that they weep for themselves. And then, having those tears wash away the scales of wilful ignorance from their eyes that they could then join us in the redemption of the earth, in the salvation of humankind and in the reclamation of history.

It is the failure of American society to deal with these reality of it's collective history and the guilt it engenders that manifests itself in the inability of settler societies to cope with daily living. The ubiquity of television, non-stop entertainment, the prevalence of fast food and the endemic abuse of drugs and alcohol in the middle-class warrens and high tech house prisons of the rich in American society speak of a massive exercise in self-sedation. The need to exorcize onself from the inherent oppressions of consumer society and the lack of meaning guaranteed by excessive consumption result in both historical amnesia and in a deep sense of moral bankruptcy. This void is filled with frivolity the way a needle fills a vein. To distract it's citizens from the moral bankruptcy and desperation of it's own system the American government conducts an immoral and illegal War on Drugs in Colombia, in Thailand, and in many other areas of the world. In the process they recruit and they compromise the security and territorial sovereignty of surrounding states; they practise wide spread human abuse in the name of justice; and, they endanger the lives and communities of many Indigenous Peoples whose one wish is to be left alone. The War on Drugs must be carried out at the point of consumption and it must provide people with a meaningful alternative to the empty promises of a consumer society. The site of the War on Drugs must move to the United States and all combatants in this War must agree to allow Indigenous and local communities the right to security of the person, territorial integrity, and self-determination.

Many of the world's Indigenous People live in the area we know as the South - this is not just geographical designation but a concept which separates the lands of plenty in the North from the locus of poverty and oppression which feeds the never ending hunger of the North for resources, cheap labour, antiquities and quaint crafts, and foodstuffs. The equation in which those with the most, in terms of resources, benefit the least - while those with fewer resources but more capital benefit only themselves, is referred to by Eduardo Galeano as the Upside Down World. In this equation the most insubstantial thing in the world - money, becomes the hammer by which poverty is forged. The inherent dream. the promise of things to come, which is within the dollar bill is a fantasy of the North and a nightmare in the South. International development mechanisms - the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, must stop acting as the facilitator of economic inequity, environmental degradation, social hierarchy. and cultural exploitation and immediately embark upon a program focused on debt equalization, loan forgiveness, and radical world wide economic reconstruction. In the period of that these organizations have existed capital has become more concentrated in the hands of a few and the debt owed the poor by the rich has increased exponentially.

We recognize also that while the inequity between North and South continues to grow that there is increasingly a South within the North. Under the guise of NAFTA and the proposed FTAA there is a continued erosion of workers rights and the privileges of the poor. The rates of homelessness, crime, displaced peoples, and unemployment have all substantially increased in North America and Europe. Hand in hand with this the rates of incarceration, the incidences of police violence, the growth of open displays of racism and xenophobia, and the erosion of health care and social services, have also increased, resulting in a full scale assault on the poor - the War on Poverty is not a War on Poverty but rather a War on the Poor.

The North continues to rely upon the labour of the South. Workers are drawn from small traditional communities to work at slave wages and in unsafe working conditions in Free Trade Zones and Maquiladors located in Border Zones. Many of these are young women, many are children. Their working conditions are controlled by fear, intimidation, brutality and the establishment of false labour organizations - who under the cloak of unionism enforce the wishes of the employer. The costs to the workers personally and the cost to their communities is immeasurable. The movement of capital across borders while the movement of workers is restricted is a cynical strategy to guarantee substandard working conditions, the degradation of workplace environmental and labour standards, the stifling of effective and truly representative workers organizations, and the continued exploitation of the marginalized to make the rich richer.

Along with the exploitation of workers in Free Trade Zones and Maquiladors is the continuing need for cheap and menial labour in the industrialized countries of the North. While American capitalism is dependant upon a "flexible" pool of cheap labour this is a pretest to exploit labour without the costs of providing social benefits or job security or competitive wages. To ensure that workers have no incentive to stay in America once their usefulness is expended an elaborate structure of state and para-state structures is maintained. The most obvious example of this is the US-Mexican Border at Ciudad Juarez. This is the site of the new "Berlin Wall" but this is not about the separation of ideologies rather it is about the separation of the haves and have-nots, of those who benefit from exploitation and those who are exploited.. It serves as a potent reminder to those who work illegally, without benefits, and to all who employ that labour, in the United States of what is behind the wall - like in Camus' The Plague all the diseased inside the wall fear all who are outside. The border, maintained by a physical wall, armed border guards, and a perimeter of Border Patrols and right wing paramilitaries, organized by white supremacists, is emblematic of a great sickness that has descended upon America and it is only when the wall comes down that the healing power of the sun will come from the South. It is incomprehensible to Indigenous People who have always occupied these lands that recently arrived governments should dictate where and when we can travel within our traditional territories. The Original People of the place we call Turtle Island, the Americas, existed peacefully for millennia without the need of armed borders - it is time for the wall to come down and it is time for the healing to begin but it must begin with an equitable sharing of resources.

We have occupied our lands from time immemorial and it has generally been our practice to hold and to use these lands communally. In this way the needs of all could be satisfied and poverty was unknown to us. Under trade agreements such as NAFTA we have seen our traditional tenure on the land disrupted and our understandings of sharing subverted by the imposition of western notions of private property. Following on the shining example of our Brothers and Sisters in Chiapas, organized as Zapatatistas, who stood up to these predations and refused to accept them, we reject the imposition of private property regimes in the name of progress. We reject all concessions made by state governments in the name of neoliberalism which compromise our traditional tenure and organization on the land. In the Philippines the recognition of Indigenous lands is subverted to allow foreign mining interests access to the territories of the Subenon; In Colombia the Embera Katio People defend their homes against flooding from a dam financed by an international energy consortium; In India mining companies kill Maikanch people in the Kashpuri region and the Bhil and Naga People are jailed for defending their forests against transnational timber companies; in Chiapas ranchers and speculators invade Indigenous lands of the Tzotzil and others; in New Mexico coal companies desecrate the sacred lands of the Hopi and Navajo; while in Canada the United States eyes the stocks of fresh water never surrendered in any of our treaties. The protection of our lands and resources is integral to our survival as people and to the survival of the earth - the destruction of the planet is not the prerogative of those whose vision extends no further than the Gross National Product or the Annual Report to the Shareholders; The earth belongs to all who have been, who are now, and who will be - and we to it. . Furthermore we reject categorically the notion that civilization and settlement are contingent upon the other. Organizations such as the World Health Organization must stop funding projects designed to settle nomadic peoples into settlement areas. Indigenous peoples of South-east Asia, Aborigines in Australia, our brothers in the Bedouin world, the Roma People and all other peoples who have made the tent their home have the right to continue life in this way. We insist that states must cooperate with other states when their boundaries are crossed by Indigenous peoples living a traditional lifestyle and we must further to this re-examine all notions of nationality and state territoriality as arcane and unworkable if we are to achieve a world in which freedom is paramount..

Having colonized most of our traditional territories the imperial machine rolls on to claim what is left of us in the small enclaves we have protected ourselves in - in the forests, the jungles, the mountains and the deserts. With the discovery of recombinant DNA technology the final frontier has been opened to the colonizer. Today from the jungle lands of the Yanomami, to the highlands of the Hmong, to the Arctic lands of the Chuchkee, to the Andean strongholds of the Quechua, teams of scientists and medical researchers collect the genetic information of Original Peoples. This is often done without our prior informed consent and always with no determination of the use it is put to. These scientists in the employ of transnational pharmaceutical companies are backed by an international apparatus controlled by lawyers and technocrats. The World Intellectual Property Organization, the WTO - Trips Council, the consultations carried out under international instruments such as the Convention on Biodiversity and Agenda 21, with the full complicity of the United Nations, attempt to quantify the genetic properties of our DNA, they tell us for the "benefit of mankind." It is apparent that we do not benefit from a process in which we do not provide consent and that "benefit sharing" is a euphemism in the lexicon of thieves who offer back a minute portion of those things they have stolen once they have broken into our houses. We call upon all peoples to join us in enforcing an international moratorium on bio-prospecting and genetic piracy. Until there are sufficient protections for our full and informed participation in all aspects of this endeavour there can be no concession on this point.

The year 2002 has been declared the International Year of EcoTourism by the United Nations Environment Program. This industry has grown as an international phenomena and is currently a trillion dollar a year industry and is the fifth largest employer in the world. The fastest growing sector of this industry are the two areas of adventure tourism and eco-tourism. Tourists from the Americas, Europe and the Far East come in search of meaning. They are no longer content to sit in a resort and soak up the sunshine but insist on combining this was an educational or cultural experience. Most often this market is directed to Indigenous lands and communities. The preservation of cultural and biological diversity in these places make them attractive destinations to tour operators. When this is combined with access to cheap labour and corrupt state officials willing to overlook environmental and social disruption in exchange for financial consideration - it becomes irresistible. The result of this most often is that Indigenous societies and cultures are disrupted and displaced by tourism; local people become a cheap labour pool to clean up after people who should know how to clean up after themselves; local culture is exploited and turned into crafts and dances for the entertainment of tourists; and the local ecology, upon which Indigenous People depend for life, is depleted. In Mexico, In Costa Rica, in Belize, in Thailand and many other places national bodies establish biosphere zones whose primary purpose is to act as a portal for tourism. Local people who are not employed as cleaners and grounds keepers in the resorts turn to the "black economy" for survival and the drug trade, prostitution, and trade in endangered species, all thrive in the resort destinations of the world. The International Year of EcoTourism must be more than an exercise in emotional gluttony which promotes the entrenched matrix of tourism-indigenous people-exploitation and must be an honest exploration of new critiques and a re-examination of the principles of development in this area.

Finally we cannot forget our many brothers and sisters in the Fifth World . The Fifth World is the world of the displaced person - the world of the refugee. Whether displaced by war, by natural disaster, or by economic deprivation, this is the largest growing demographic segment in the world today. Many of these are Indigenous, many are not - either way we must stand shoulder to shoulder with them demanding humane treatment, sanctuary when needed, the observance of human rights, and dignity of life.

While there is much to say -many words yet to be spoken, many thoughts to be thought and many dreams to be dreamt we encourage the delegates at the World Social Forum not to forget the plight of the Original Peoples of the world, nor to ignore our wisdom and experience. We also ask you to heed the advice of our Elders and in your deliberations to make them as if you were thinking of seven generations to come with an open heart to the Creator.

Chi Meegwetch,
Rodney Bobiwash
January 19, 2001