BY SHAY CULLEN
INDIGENOUS peoples are under threat as never before and need the international community to stand with them as they demand justice, their ancestral land rights and an end to the exploitation and abuse they suffer in many countries.
They suffer discrimination, stigmatization and racism. How disingenuous that is since all people in the world today descended from some indigenous tribal people through the ages. In fact, DNA tests show that everyone in the world is descended from one common ancestor in Africa.
Real science does not lie. The human species emerged in the Makgadikgadi-Okavango wetland. It was not just any home, but the ancestral “homeland” for all modern humans today.
Today, there are more than 476 million indigenous peoples that live in 90 nations around the world. According to the United Nations, they make up 6.2 percent of the world population. They have their own unique languages, culture, customs and traditions and have ancestral rights to their lands having possessed these from time immemorial. They are people that are capable of self-governance and have survived for many thousands of years before nations emerged in history.
In the last 500 years, colonialism spread across the world and foreign nations invaded the lands of indigenous people, killed millions and stole and occupied their lands. The indigenous people were infected with western diseases against which they had no defense and millions more died. Others were massacred and driven to the edge of extinction.
This month, it is 500 years anniversary since the Aztec civilization in South America was wiped out by the Spanish conquistadors. In the Philippines, 500 years ago the Spanish invasion began a war of extermination against the Moro people in Mindanao which eventually failed but they conquered the rest of the Islands. The aggression and land-grabbing and the attempted extermination of groups of indigenous people is still going on.
The murder and attacks against indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest are on-going as miners, loggers and agro-farming planters have once again continued to invade ancestral and in search of gold and plantations. They burn and devastate the environment and drive away the indigenous people.
The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 declared a cultural genocide was inflicted against the Canadian indigenous people. As many as 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly abducted from their natural families and locked up in residential schools.
Hundreds of children died from hunger, neglect malnutrition, disease, physical and sexual abuse. The schools, to their eternal shame, were run by religious groups of several denominations but the Catholic Church had the most schools. The children’s human dignity was taken, their language forbidden, their family ties erased.
“These measures were part of a coherent policy to eliminate aboriginal people as distinct peoples and to assimilate them into the Canadian mainstream against their will,” the Commission’s final report declares.
“The Canadian government pursued this policy of cultural genocide because it wished to divest itself of its legal and financial obligations to Aboriginal people and gain control over their land and resources.”
The greatest moral scandal was government agents co-opting churches into running these schools when it fact what the churches did was against the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth himself. (To be continued)/PN
