May 10, 2008 by Jay Taber.

Real News TV reports on the neo-fascist, “virulently anti-Indian,” landed elite strategy of violence against democracy and land reform in Bolivia.

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May 9, 2008 by Jay Taber.

US agencies contribute $125 million to support white oligarchy of Bolivia attempting to steal 97% of Bolivia’s natural gas reserves. Real News reports on the right-wing, landed class secession movement.

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May 9, 2008 by Jay Taber.

Nation-states have a vested interest in educating their citizens to develop loyalties and commitments to the central government. Of all of the methods used to accomplish this, formal education is the most critical. Leaders like to believe their citizens are in agreement with the cultural and political rules of the nation, and therefore most citizens will not resist education that interprets history and supports the culture of that nation. However, since indigenous peoples do not share the fundamental cultural philosophies of the history and culture of the nation-state, they are often unwilling participants in the nation-building processes of formal education.

The concept of freedom dominates Western intellectual thought and is inherent in modernization theory, as well as post-modern and post-colonial theories, that continue to focus on political marginalization of groups (like indigenous peoples) and give little attention to their own cultural interpretations, understandings or goals. The Western interpretations assume that freedom is also the goal of indigenous individuals and nations.

Freedom, however, is not a central core theme in the teachings of indigenous peoples. There are sometimes evolutionary themes, but those themes, such as among the creation teachings of the Navajo or Pueblos, focus on lessons of gaining increasing moral community and knowledge about how to sustain spiritual balance among tribal members, other peoples, and the powers or spirits of the cosmic order. Spiritual balance, the golden rule, moderation, working within ritual and life constraints, fulfilling ceremonial duties, maintaining individual and community moral commitments, and accepting individual and community responsibility for proper moral and ceremonial relations are core values for indigenous communities.

—Indian Country Today

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May 8, 2008 by Jay Taber.

PBS, the Smithsonian, and Japan’s National Museum of Ethnology offer some interesting views of the Ainu of Hokkaido.

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May 7, 2008 by Jay Taber.

Indigenous leaders confront World Bank’s carbon market fraud as corporate profiteering at their expense. Transnational corporations and institutions accused of colluding to steal remaining indigenous resources through market-driven climate change scams.

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May 5, 2008 by Jay Taber.

Scholars discuss Deloria’s legacy for indigenous people to reclaim responsibility in safeguarding sacred energy. Conference participants claim indigenous peoples’ ability to experience the holy in the land illustrates the incompatibility of cultures.

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May 2, 2008 by Jay Taber.

Institutionally, Israel — like the United States — is a crime against humanity: nation-states founded on genocide, built on theft. Restitution is now the only humane agenda.

But the psychology and psychiatry of the Israeli state in world consciousness is a paradoxical matter. Even Nobel laureates like Nadine Gordimer — noted for her contributions to undoing apartheid in South Africa — can get it wrong.

In this letter from Gaza university lecturer Dr. Haider Eid, the relationship between apartheid states and the role of writers like Gordimer is put in plain language. Conflicting loyalties and ethical dilemmas are part of life, but for moral models like Gordimer, an explanation is in order.

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April 24, 2008 by Jay Taber.

While indigenous leaders like Bolivia’s president Evo Morales call on the UN member states to disinvest in war in order to invest in reversing environmental catastrophe, American citizens are once again asked by corporate media to choose between warmongers to lead their country into further economic and social disaster. As Morales notes, it is time for a new way of living.

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April 23, 2008 by Rudolph Ryser.

Speaking at the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues at the United Nations (23 April 2008) Bolivian President Evo Morales called on indigenous peoples’ delegates to recognize the importance of ancient traditions and knowledge held by Fourth World nations as the essential ingredient for reversing the adverse effects of Climate Change.

Morales, according to Climatewire, said “Climate change offers proof that the world must undergo a fundamental realignment of its economic system.” The alternative to persistent consumption, according to President Morales is the balance between human need and natural reproduction provided by Fourth World cultures–the knowledge and practices rooted in intergenerational experience.

Economies centered on capital accumulation are the cause, not the cure for global warming, food shortages, massive refugee movements, fuel shortages and the perpetual impoverishment of most of the world’s people. The goal of capital economies, market economies, is accumulation and concentration of wealth and power into the hands of a very few; impoverishing the many and raping the natural world. Capital economies install the vast human population as consumers while limiting the number of producers in massive corporate conglomerations. The basic assumption and necessity of capital economies is that nature’s wealth is a commodity essentially free for the taking and that human labor is a commodity that must be kept at a minimum. The constant emphasis on capital growth assumes endless natural wealth and human labor. This is a fundamental error in thinking. Nature has limits and human labor cannot long sustain abuse.

Modern subsistence economics, based on the concept of life renewal and natural balance is now essential as a corrective for more than four hundred years of intensified capital growth and consumption. Economies centered on subsistence where human need is balanced against the capacity of the natural world to reproduce can reverse global warming and stabilize global climate. Subsistence affirms life as the central concern of human economic activity while ensuring that more of human societies become producers and consumers of their own produce. The goal of modern subsistence economics is the replenishment of life and respectful use of the natural world. Subsistence economics is deeply embedded in the cultures of Fourth World peoples throughout the world. (For a thorough and insightful discussion of the subsistence perspective read Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen in their excellent book “The Subsistence Perspective,” Zed Books: London. Professor Mies emphasizes that her book along with Claudia von Werlhof and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen discusses the “subsistence perspective” and not an economic model. Mies argues that the subsistence perspectives emphasizes the economy and society, culture, history and all other aspects of life. While I agree with this analysis, I suggest that economics is indeed about all aspects of life just as it is true that culture is about all aspects of life.)

Many Fourth World nations, like the states governments of India, China, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and others have turned their backs on their own culture, their own knowledge, to become acquisitive societies. These nations have joined in the headlong rush to consume the natural world in excessive ways. They have become contributors to global warming, food shortages, and all the rest. These indigenous peoples believe they have long been denied the “fruits of progress,” and have waited too long to become consumers like metropolitan populations. These nations are making the same mistake as the consumer, commodified populations. These Fourth World economies are showing the same signs of widening gaps between rich and poor, sharply reduced natural wealth, and wild swings between enrichment and impoverishment.

US President Bill Clinton proclaimed in the early 1990s “It’s the economy stupid” to call attention to a political point of emphasis in that electoral campaign. The phrase is now the point to understand why climate change, fuel shortages, food riots, desertification and deforestation are a product of the capital economy Mr. Clinton then lauded. Capital economics assumes perpetual growth and consequently perpetual consumption. It is argued that the capital based economy and environmental balance can go hand in hand by generating “green jobs” and “green technology.” The problem with this thinking is that it essentially no different from the constant growth and consumption emphasis of straight capital economics. Technology is supposed to save the environment and prosper the population. There is no evidence that such an approach has any legs.

On the other hand, there is powerful evidence supporting the notion that subsistence economics is the appropriate alternative that can reverse the sins of the last 400 years. Now it is up to Fourth World nations that still have confidence in their own cultures to persuade modern states like the United States, Germany, China and India that they must adopt the tried and true practices of modern subsistence economics. By so doing, President Morales’ urgent call for an alternative to the greed of capital economics that solves the problem of climate change, food shortage, fuel shortages and more will indeed be realized and Fourth World nations will resume their place in the global dialog for human life.

A fundamental shift must take place in the way human beings transact the distribution of goods and services. We must reclaim localism, and restore human productivity as well as human access to land. These are essential elements of the subsistence perspective and of these the most immediate change that must take place in the relationship between people and the land. Restore land to those who have become landless owing to state and corporate confiscations of land. People must have access to the land to produce food and life. Changing the economy in this fundamental way can restore the balance needed to reverse the calamities now confronting the world’s peoples.

(c) 2008 Center for World Indigenous Studies

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April 22, 2008 by Jay Taber.

60 years into the UN human rights regime, the Human Rights Council has issued a report on the “governance gaps” in addressing corporate liability for international crimes. In the Report of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the issues of human rights and transnational corporations, the HRC rapporteur — while noting widespread corporate complicity in human rights abuses — asserts the bedrock role of states in redressing them.

Not to belittle the responsibility and power of states to accomplish this duty under the UN charter, but the bedrock role lies with indigenous nations and their civil society allies. Reining in corporate as well as state actors requires we recognize and act on this reality.

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