Lines from the past four days at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues

This is our last day at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. There have been so many presentations, ideas, people, experiences that it is hard to synthesize in a meaningful way. What I am doing in today's post is to highlight some of the phrases I heard that shifted my thinking or perspective. Unfortunately I didn't always catch who was speaking, but I tried!


Oren Lyons - Indigenous peoples are those who know how to thank the earth."

Oren Lyons -"There is a need to educate others about how to respect the earth."

Unattributed - Adults are those who are responsible as stewards for the children. This involves keeping the earth for the next generations.

Youth presenter - "We are a reality, not an issue."

How does racism counter an affirmation of (Indigenous) identity by youth?

Indigenous Women's Caucus - What are the contemporary manifestations of the doctrine of discovery?

African Caucus - One Indigenous language disappears every two weeks.

 Ecuadorian Indigenous representative - "In our community, everyone is a mother, a father, an uncle. In an urban centre Indigenous people are alienated from relations." A greeting is an important entry to communication. In cities, this opening is gone.

Ecuador Indigenous representative - "We don't always know we live in an Indigenous space."

Indigenous people are those who carry the burden.

Guatamala Indigenous representative - "Democracy is not legitimate without the participation of Indigenous women and youth."

Mexican Indigenous representataive - "I would like our country to liberate itself from racial discrimination so we can arrive at mutual respect."

"At my child's school, the children run away when I pick up my child. Parents tell their children that if they don't behave, I will take them away."

Tarcila Rivera - "Education is necessary to develop critical awareness....We need to appropriate technology as a tool to build rights and confirm culture."

Uncredited - "There is the language of the state and there is the language of the people."

Youth reprentative from Canada - "Our bodies are an environment." "Our body is our territory."

Danika Littlechild - "Women are the forgotten framework." "Women are the motivators for environmental agreements, but when drafted women become passive subjects instead of partcipants."

Pueblo representative - "The standard for safety for nuclear mining needs to be a pregnant woman, and not the 'fake man' used in 1945."

German representative to World Bank - "Is the 'do no harm' principle enough or should it be 'commit good'?"

My general comment is that there was an ongoing thread regarding 'free, prior and informed consent' versus 'consultation' versus 'significant Indigenous partnership or control'. Some used the 'free, prior and informed consent' framework while others called for a much strong self-determination framework. It is interesting to see where people are at in this ongoing dialogue.

Brenda Small, Confederation College, Canada/Mocreebec Council of the Crees

Tom Goldtooth

Third day - United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues

Today the key lesson I learned was the diversity of frameworks used by various Indigenous peoples around the world, as well as the similarity of some of these frameworks with the ones adopted by the Mocreebec Council of the Crees - the community I am most familiar with.

In particular, there were calls to recognize those Indigenous groups who self-define and do not rely on the labels and status bestowed upon them by colonial governments. This is precisely what Mocreebec has asserted for years. Mocreebec has asserted that only they have the rights to determine their own governance structure through clan councils, and that they can establish their own community sustainability without needing the approval or co-dependence of nation-state governments.

Another key item was the emphasis on controlling and managing resources, education and health for and by Indigenous community members.This theme was expanded upon by a panel that discussed the concept of environmental violence which is the negative and violent impacts on the environment and Indigenous peoples resulting from extractive industries. In this area, Mocreebec has been a leader in terms of working to develop resources in a method that lives out Cree values and supports environmental sustainability. For example, the Ecolodge and other businesses in the James Bay area were developed as a way of creating sustainability while manifesting Cree traditional values. I know it was not an easy thing to do given political and other pressure to link with external governance structures, but governance and self-determination need to be rooted first before reaching out is possible.

Ecuadorian and other Mesoamerican presenters spoke about reaching out to other nations in the areas of education and health while being solidly situated within a strong self-determining and self-identifying framework. From a position of health and strength, this is possible. However while going through the process of establishing a strong Indigenous governance structure - without the foundation of decision-making - sharing and reaching out is likely a significant challenge.

Unfortunately, not every community can come to the UN and see how many commonalities and allies they have around the world, but everyone should. I hope that Mocreebec and others come to share where they are at, and their vision and learning with others here in this powerful Indigenous forum. There is lots to share, and it is always a wonderful thing to see that one is not alone. There are allies and there is a broader movement out there. We are all swimming in the same stream....

Second day of the 12th session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues

The highlight of the day came at the end when there was a cultural event for all the delegates to the conference. It was a BLAST!!! What a wonderful thing to dance with compadres and comadres from all over the world. I have always had a dream to do that, and I did in front of the UN General Assembly chambers. I doubt that the UN has seen that much fun in a long time.

The low point was the fact that my camera died, so I only have one picture to share with you.



 

The party starts! Dancing and music in front of the General Assembly chambers.

In the general session today, there were many excellent presentations and interventions. I was particularly interested to hear of the innovations and policy/program developments in Ecuador where they have an Indigenous intercultural university called The House of Wisdom. Unfortunately the university faces serious challenges. Yesterday the Ecuadorian presenter had spoken about the challenges of racism in the inter-cultural health sector and some of the initiatives they have established to address intercultural health and Indigenous health issues. They are trying to ensure the recognition of ancestral medicine and also health pluralism. Another interesting presenter from Russia spoke about an Arctic university that they have to support education for nomadic and Northern peoples. There was a presentation by the Youth Caucus which highlighted the solidarity of youth delegates who came to stand around their chosen speaker. All in all, there was much to learn and much to agree with.

Tomorrow is another day....

United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues - The 12th Session

Here we are on Monday on the first day of the 12th Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. We wandered around disoriented in this large, slightly deteriorating time capsule complex from the 1950's. Yes, I am speaking about the UN complex. It is impressive to see Indigenous people from all over the world coming to gather and speak and listen. The biggest impression I have from this first day is that it is amazing that there has been such a significant struggle for Indigenous people to have a presence here. Oren Lyons spoke of the early days when a small group protested across the street from the UN campus, facing a phalanx of police. Now people gather to speak in the Ecosoc Council Chambers. These are steps.

I think that this is an important place to assert voices. But I am sad at the energy it takes to assert and to resist Indigenous presence on the stages of the world. I look for ways for a direct communication between communities without having to knock on doors...

An Empowerment Model for Access to Justice: The IDLO Report

In the first week of February 2013, the International Development Law Organization released a fascinating report entitled "Accessing Justice: Models, Strategies and Best Practices on Women's Empowerment". This report is the culmination of field research that was designed to determine which strategies are most useful for improving women's ability to access justice in their respective countries.

In many countries there is a state legal system that is based on either a civil code or jurisprudence in the form of a common law system. These systems are often ones that have been adopted from a former colonial administration or have developed contemporaneously with the nation state. However prior to the development of the nation state or the imposition of colonial law, disputes were resolved through a system of customary law that functioned at a more local level. In many countries customary law is recognized alongside a state legal system, though not always. Customary law is often very community-based and community-conscious in the sense that peace in the community may prevail over the assertion of individual human rights. The system is also often more familiar to those who engage with it and does not require significant resources in order to obtain a result.

The important and interesting thing about the IDLO examination of access to justice is that it does not only focus on the state justice system. It acknowledges the fact that women in developing countries often engage with the customary legal system because of its familiarity and its relative efficiency. IDLO does not disparage the customary system; rather it acknowledges its strengths and weaknesses while looking for windows of access that can be strengthened. IDLO also looks for ways the ensure the protection of universal human rights at the local level.

This approach is nuanced and avoids adopting an outsiders' gaze or judgement. It looks at what exists, what is working and what needs improvement, and it looks for ways to strengthen those practices which work well for women. It also does not base its analysis upon an artificial polarity between the state legal system and the customary system such that the customary system is seen as antithetical to human rights. The ability to see the strength in customary law practices allows for acknowledgement and support of indigenous legal systems which are part of a larger self-determination effort.

As someone very interested in windows of empowerment and tools for overcoming alienation, this report on access to justice for women is of vital interest. Please check it out!

The thing about apologies...

 The Canadian Government, among other governments around the world, has issued a number of apologies for historic wrongs. It has apologized to Japanese-Canadians for interning them during World War II and confiscating their property. It has apologized to the Chinese-Canadian community for the exorbitant tax that was imposed on early settlers from China in order to deter them from staying in Canada. An apology was provided to Indo-Canadians for the Komagata Maru incident wherein a boatload of Sikhs were detained and then turned away from Canada because of a desire to maintain a 'white' society in Canada. There was an apology for the Inuit High Arctic relocation. And of course, there was the apology for the Indian Residential School system.

This past weekend there was a world broadcast premiere of a documentary called "A Sorry State". There is much academic literature on the issue of state apologies. However I found the personal perspective of the filmmaker on the issue much more cogent and visceral than many of the papers on the topic.

Mitch Miyagawa has a very interesting perspective because his family members were on the receiving end of three formal state apologies. His father had been interned by the Canadian government during WWII and had lost their property. His parents divorced and each remarried. His father married a woman who had attended an Indian Residential School and who had thus received an apology in that regard. His mother married a man whose parents had paid head taxes in order to come to Canada. So the topic of apologies is a personal theme.

Coming from the perspective of a child of apology recipients, and also as a father who is teaching his children about apologies, Miyagawa takes the viewer through a simple yet profound journey about the meaning of state apologies. He is skeptical about them - feeling at first that state apologies are politically expedient and shallow if unaccompanied by action. But he goes further to explore the various meanings given to them by recipients. His father denied a negative impact resulting from the internment and the need for an apology. In any event, he feels that there is no need to dwell on the past. However, because the apology has sparked interest and discussion with his filmmaker son, we find that at the end of the movie and at the end of his life, Mr. Miyagawa does acknowledge that his family did suffer. So the apology was a vehicle for raising consciousness both for him and his son.

For his step-mother, a health support worker who is immersed in the world of recovery from residential school trauma, the apology was important. However Miyagawa also interviewed residential school survivors who were very cynical about it because their residential school experiences were denied by government because of a lack of records.

For his step-father, the apology was an important step to help him feel less alienated in Canadian society. As he noted, he was not proud to be Chinese-Canadian when he was young. It was hard to be Asian in a sometimes hostile society. Acknowledgment that past treatment was wrong, was important for him to feel a sense of belonging.

I think one of the most interesting concepts came from a Japanese-Canadian activist who noted that the important thing is that a government acknowledge that democracy is diminished the moment when the human rights of citizens are denied by government action. His main concern was that there be some sanction or check in place so that governments realize that their actions will have political, institutional and other consequences.

The key thing that I was reminded of when watching this documentary is that apologies are very personal and very emotional. They are a very basic part of human interaction. They are meant to happen between individuals who have had some conflict. It is these characteristics that are necessary to give them meaning. The meanings associated with them are as varied as the types of relationships that exist between each person apologizing and each recipient.

State apologies, however, are abstract and often distant in time. Also, the type of responsibility behind the apology is sometimes hard to grasp because it is vicarious. It is rarely the direct perpetrator who is apologizing to the person harmed. So the emotional transaction between the perpetrator and the transgressed person is sometimes hard to find.

I am not saying that the raison d'etre for state apologies is wrong. I think that the fact that a government is willing to examine its past and address the harms suffered by its citizens through its policies and legislation is critical. But I do not think that an apology is actually terribly meaningful as a vehicle for social change where the transgressor is the government. 

I realize that many will contradict me on this point because they feel that an apology is the deepest form of acknowledgment that a government can give. It indicates that a government is not qualifying how wrong the action was and it understands the personal significance of past actions to its citizens. I have in fact witnessed profound emotional reactions by those who have received apologies for historic wrongs.

But I think that to personalize a government is a mistake because it gives the recipient a false sense that there is some level of emotional responsibility for the recipient's well-being that will result in a change of action. In fact there is no sense of emotional responsibility in a government. It is an institution with a task to govern the people. In a democracy, it is tasked with governing through representation by the people. When a group of people is transgressed, the institution is weakened. Government is moved by different levers than emotional responsibility. Consequently, apologies - which are more appropriately interpersonal emotional interactions between a wrongdoer and a victim - are not the right vehicles to capture the complexity of the transaction and the type of responsibility between a state and its citizens.

It is perhaps for this reason that no matter the level of apparent abasement by a government and the emotional impact on the recipients, government apologies strike people as being problematic. Somehow they don't make sense entirely, and they don't quite capture what is needed to address historic wrongs.

Something as simple as saying "I'm sorry" should not trigger such a lot of complicated writing....

Interesting note - Who tracks what?

Just a quick note - Within seconds of posting my comment on gun purchases and fear in the US, my post was picked up by what I suspect are monitoring sites for gun or anti-gun lobbyists in the US.. Never seen that happen quite as quickly before. Pretty powerful debate. Pretty emotional issue....

Peace through Fear? Is it really the Home of the Brave, Land of the Free?

FACT: After the shooting of innocent people in a theatre in Colorado, gun sales went up. (CBC)

FACT: After the shooting of young school children in Newtown, Pennsylvania, USA, gun sales went up.(Washington Post)

Every time there is a person who uses a weapon that is capable of great destruction, such as rapid fire guns to kill many people at once in a peaceful setting, people are awoken. However, when they are newly awake, they scream, "How could this happen?!" "It's an act of a mad person!" "How could this awful thing happen here where things are so peaceful?" "This has never happened quite like THIS before!"

 This seems to happen every time. Mass killings have occurred enough - 61 times in the United States since 1999 - for us to know better than to think that somehow each time it is unique.

The latest media frenzy over the killings in the school in Newtown Pennsylvania has been a focal point for debate and outrage because this time the 'unique' factor was the extreme youth and innocence of the victims in a school setting. But does the fact that they were young children matter? What about the Breivik killings in Norway? They were also young people. Were they less 'innocent' because they were at a political meeting? Was their slightly older age (probably 6-12 years older) a meaningful difference?

Was it the fact that the killing happened in a school? Yet there have been school killings before, so is the setting really critical? Should a person who goes to a movie theater be more on guard against being shot (and be considered 'less innocent') than a child at a school?

I do recognize that the latent visceral fear that parents feel when they leave their small children with a caregiver in a school setting - perhaps for the first time - is the key factor here. It is the latent anxiety for one's children, which most people feel in the most peaceful societies, which has been awoken. It is a powerful motivator and hopefully one that stimulates useful debate and action.

However we cannot think that these killings are unique simply because they shock us at a deeper level. They have a common element - the use of weapons capable of killing many people quickly. These killings have become more normal, and the accessibility of tools used by the killers is what makes them possible. It is the fact that a weapon can kill so many people so easily, that allows for devastating physical manifestations of emotional and spiritual violence.

We need to be able to recognize people who are emotionally and spiritually violent (Dawson College shooting) in order to deal with the source of disruption. That is of course often left out of the debate because it is a politically difficult discussion to have, and perhaps not very interesting to people.

However the issue I want to deal with in this post is the role of fear, and whether it contributes to peace and freedom.

The United States is called the "Land of the Free and Home of the Brave". Yet all we hear is fear-motivated action that limits the actual individual freedom of people to live without an expectation of violence in their lives. People are afraid - they buy more guns. People are afraid - they create gated communities. People are afraid - they shoot at innocent people they don't trust. Society gets more violent and people then get more afraid.

Is this freedom?

Does this make sense?

Does a gun create any sense of spiritual or physical or emotional freedom in a society?

No.

A gun lobbyist would say that it is up to the person to create that sense of peace in themselves, and a gun is a neutral element.

But that is disingenuous and ignores the fact that many people buy guns because they fear for their own personal security and they fear other people with guns. And it ignores the fact that a gun is a significant magnifier of violence. As such, it is a magnifier of fear and social dysfunction.. It is a tool of great destruction.

Does buying a gun buy peace? No. It creates false security. It creates peace of mind based on a fantasy. It contributes to a broad societal siege mentality and volatility.

There is only peace of mind until the next mass killing.