February 25, 2008 by Jay Taber.

“At the heart of evolutionary anthropology lay the assumption that the human mind was guided by universal, not culturally specific, impulses…This assumption had two important methodological implications. First, it allowed ethnologists to reason by analogy, and to do so with the same certainty with which they reasoned deductively from observation.

Because they believed that all societies evolved through similar stages, developing similar or at least comparable technologies and social institutions along the way, they were perfectly comfortable studying ancient Native American cultures by proxy, deducing their histories from the present lives of people who occupied the same rung on the evolutionary ladder.

The conviction that ancient and contemporary aboriginal peoples might be considered virtually identical allowed the scientists to call their work an empirical science despite the absence of the actual subject matter they claimed to be analyzing.”

—from Zuni and the American Imagination by Eliza McFeely

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February 22, 2008 by Jay Taber.

International Indian Treaty Council has sent a report to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination documenting constitutional and institutional discrimination against indigenous peoples in the United States. Read the Consolidated Indigenous Shadow Report.

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February 19, 2008 by Jay Taber.

The Aboriginal Women’s Action Network has come out in opposition to the legalization of brothels in British Columbia to service sex tourism at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. More information about the industry itself can be found at Prostitution Research and Education.

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February 17, 2008 by Jay Taber.

Issues facing Ogoni people in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, a documentary by Al Jazeera:

Al Jazeera - People in Power: Democracy Delta-Style (Part 1)

Al Jazeera - People in Power: Democracy Delta-Style (Part 2)

Al Jazeera - People in Power: Democracy Delta-Style (Part 3)

Al Jazeera - People in Power: Democracy Delta-Style (Part 4)

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February 12, 2008 by Jay Taber.

Pepe Escobar of Real News reports on The Rise of Neo-fascism in Bolivia, and the implications for anti-indigenous violence in 2008.

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February 11, 2008 by Jay Taber.

Hardly a family in East Timor was untouched by the Indonesian invasion in 1975. In the occupation, a third of the nation may have died from bombing, starvation and systematic killing. This is besides the forced displacement of most of the population and widespread evidence of rape, torture and other human rights violations. It is the worst massacre, per head of population, in recent history, comparable to Cambodia under Pol Pot and to Rwanda.—Le Monde

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February 7, 2008 by Mirjam Hirch.

Shocking figures. There are over one billion people who are dangerously obese in the world. At the same time there are people who simply do not have anything to eat. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 850 million people worldwide are undernourished which is about every seventh person, mainly children. Every second four people are dying because of hunger.

In the civilized world food resources are most plentiful. However, more and more people are seen starving there too. Only a few of them exit this world because of a real lack of physical nourishment. Spiritual poverty is rife and causing extremely serious problems: It kills. Invisible bullets, machetes, arrows and sticks, like epidemics, attack people in the form of words and deeds. Injuring so much more deeply when the perpetrators are denying family who try to control their beloved kids with iron fists in silk gloves. Taking away the individual’s autonomy and self-determination and thus, in the end, their lives.

A former schoolfriend recently died from anorexia nervosa. She simply starved to death in her parental home surrounded by wealth and material security. Her mind having been imprisoned in its own concentration camp for many years, finally, was too debilitated to open the unlocked door into freedom….
She could not win her deathly fight to control the little she felt able to control of her life - her body. Leaving her surroundings to cope with the tragedy witnessed- needing to heal.

Technorati Tags: wealth, poverty, health

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February 6, 2008 by Jay Taber.

In his now classic paper on fundamental forms of social organization, Tribes Institutions Markets Networks, RAND’s David Ronfeldt lays the foundation for further discussion on the dynamics of conflict over such values extended in his and John Arquilla’s paper Networks and Netwars, which is also the title of an anthology edited by them that considers the implications of questions like how civil society networks can effectively curb or overcome the criminal, anti-democratic behavior of other social actors.

Perhaps of further interest to the discussion are questions of how the moral and ethical lessons learned within the structures of family, clan, tribe, and (ethnic) nation can be applied in negotiating such remedies as autonomy, sovereignty, and power-sharing within the modern state and multi-state institutions. Dr. Rudolph Ryser’s paper Toward the Coexistence of Nations and States is probably the most enlightening in that regard.

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February 5, 2008 by Jay Taber.

In the early 1990s, Daniel Junas, an expert on Reverend Moon’s political operations, proposed that Moon might have gotten his start with funding from Mitsubishi. Mitsubishi was named in the early 1980s, by the World Council of Indigenous Peoples, as one of the most threatening transnational corporations. Which, when you think about it, is not such a stretch given the history of corporate fascism in Japan. Just because Japan is no longer a military power, doesn’t mean its very aggressive major corporations — like some in the US and elsewhere — aren’t still in practice fascist. The fact that Moon has gone on to undermine democracy in the US through his media holdings like the Washington Times and United Press International, only underlines the stealth of corporate-backed, anti-democratic, economic warfare.

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February 4, 2008 by Jay Taber.

Yesterday, the Seattle Times ran an article about tribal healing projects undertaken to deal with the multi-generational community trauma resulting from the brutality of American Indian boarding schools in the US. Three years ago, the Canadian government appropriated $5 billion for a similar project to help First Nations survivors of the schools in Canada. Australia, which also stole children from its aboriginal population for the purpose of indoctrination in white supremacy, has yet to put any money where its mouth is.

Canadian aboriginals, of course, had to fight in court to get their government to discover its humanity. American original peoples have so far chosen not to pursue claims in the judicial system. For all three of these modern states, founded as English colonies, we find it hard to understand why there is any reluctance at all to voluntarily remedy the harms done to the internally displaced and abused native children. Perhaps the collective conscience of white society just can’t handle it.

I mean, it’s one thing to steal land. But children? That is hard to imagine.

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