A world-renowned archaeologist has compared the destruction of two 46,000-year-old Aboriginal cultural sites in the Pilbara to the Islamic State’s destruction of Palmyra.
All posts by Pam Vernon
Bougainville: A Textbook in Colonization
Ophir*
Directed by Alexandre Berman and Olivier Pollet
Film Review
This documentary traces the history behind the 2019 referendum in which 98% of Bougainville island (which is mainly run by women) voted for independence from Papua New Guinea (PNG)
The referendum has its history in the “Bougainville Crisis,” a ten-year insurrection which the government of PNG lost, despite receiving major military support from Australia. The independence referendum was a condition of the 2000 peace treaty.
The insurrection, in turn, stemmed from the brutal exploitation of Ophir residents, many of whom were driven off their land. The oppressors? The the PNG government and a major copper and gold mining operation run by a Rio Tinto** subsidiary. The Paguna mine closed down when the insurrection started in 1989. However even after 30 years, Ohpir’s fragile tropical ecosystem is only just starting to recover.
The film offers numerous scenes from the independence campaign…
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“If I Lose My Land, I Am No One. I Have Nothing”: Indigenous Mro Face Eviction in Bangladesh
from Human Wrongs Watch By IWGIA – International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs*
The Mro People of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) in Bangladesh are under threat of being evicted from their ancestral lands with nowhere to go and everything to lose.
Photo: Mro man playing the plung flute.
Returning home to Chimbuk Hill amidst the COVID-19 pandemic to help the village’s needy, Abani*, a youth from the Indigenous Mro community received an alarming text message from his friend.
-Do you recognise these flags?
-No, what is that?
-They are going to take our land.
Foreign red flags and pillars were scattered around the lush hills of Chimbuk, and friends soon explained what was happening: A 5-star resort and amusement park was set to be built on their ancestral land. The land from which they eat, sleep, work, pray, where their family rests, and have done so for generations.
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Bandaiyan: Indigenous Names of Australian Cities
The meanings of the Ngarinyin word bandaiyan include ‘landmass, nature, people in relationship.’ According to the late Ngarinyin elder David Mowaljarlai, Bandaiyan refers to the to whole of Australia. We use this term and all the other Indigenous names on this map in recognition that this continent is home to hundreds of peoples with their own languages who formed deep-rooted relationships with the land long before colonizers came and declared it Australia.
Shown on the map are the traditional territories of about 500 Indigenous groups, based on research from the 1996 Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia, commonly called the “Horton map,” with a stylistic nod to Papunya Tula dot painting and the Western Desert Art Movement. The map’s South-up orientation shows a distinctly non-European perspective of the land down under.
As always, Decolonial Atlas maps can be reused under the
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Radioactive Waste and the “Nuclear War” against Australia’s Aboriginal people
Global Research, July 02, 2016
Ecologist 1 July 2016
Australia’s nuclear industry has a shameful history of ‘radioactive racism’ that dates from the British bomb tests in the 1950s, writes Jim Green. The same attitudes persist today with plans to dump over half a million tonnes of high and intermediate level nuclear waste on Aboriginal land, and open new uranium mines. But now Aboriginal peoples and traditional land owners are fighting back!
It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that the never-ending nuclear war against Australia’s Aboriginal people amounts to cultural genocide. Indeed it would be a statement of the obvious.
From 1998-2004, the Australian federal government tried – but failed – to impose a national nuclear waste dump on Aboriginal land in South Australia.
Then the government tried to impose a dump on Aboriginal land in the Northern Territory, but that also failed.
Muckaty Traditional Owner…
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NACCHO Aboriginal Health News: First Nations-led pandemic response a triumph
- First Nations-led pandemic response a triumph
- Wiradjuri man appointed as a Professor
- Face masks for our mob
- Racial violence in Australian health system
- Water fluoridation required
- Torres Strait communities taking back control of own healing
- New tool to help manage healthcare trial
Feature Story
Telethon Kids representatives, including Dr Fiona Stanley, have written to The Lancet, describing Australia’s First Nations-led response to COVID-19 as ‘nothing short of a triumph’. Since the beginning of the pandemic in Australia, there have been only 60 First Nations cases nationwide. This represents only 0.7% of all cases, a considerable under-representation, as First Nations people make up 3% of the total population. Only 13% of First Nations cases have needed hospital treatment, none have been in intensive care, and there have been no deaths.
These results have shown how effective (and extremely cost-effective) giving power and capacity to Indigenous leaders is. The response has…
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Amazon Heroes Who Don’t Give Up
Human Wrongs Watch
The Guardians of the Forest, a group of indigenous Guajajara in the Brazilian state of Maranhão, struggle to defend their land from invaders and to guarantee their survival in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
16 September 2020 (openDemocracy)* — If we ask Olimpio Santos Guajajara when the Guardians of the Forest were founded, his answer would be very simple: in 1500, the year the Portuguese landed in Brazil with an armada under the command of Pedro Álvares Cabral.
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Chile: Final Words of Machi Celestino Córdova as He Faces Impending Death
Posted on 17/08/2020 by anarchistsworldwide
13.08.2020: To the Mapuche nation, to the Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples of the world. To all of those who struggle for their spiritual beliefs, their territory, their freedom, their rights in dignifying their people. Always in search of the complete balance of the natural order of our Mother Earth, Ñuke Mapu, who has supernaturally privileged all of us as human beings—human beings who sadly still do not have the consciousness to value our Mother Earth as she deserves.
I deeply regret that I have to give you my last message, during my final remaining days. My sacrifice is definite. It will be an honor to give my life for the Mapuche people, for our spiritual belief which is sacred above all else. Thus, it should never be renounced.
And more than anything else, because my condition as Machi is my duty. It is mandated supernaturally…
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Indigenous Land in Australia 1788-2013
A snapshot of Indigenous held land in Australia 1788–2013 by Francis Markham and Jon Altman
In 1788 Indigenous nations possessed the entire continent of Australia. Then during a prolonged period of land grab from 1788 to the late 1960s Indigenous peoples were dispossessed. But then, from the late 1960s, there has been an extraordinary period of rapid legal repossession and restitution that is ongoing. This has not occurred as part of some coherent policy framework, but rather as a somewhat ad hoc land titling ‘revolution’ driven intermittently by political, social justice and judicial imperatives.
The question arises: If the logic of settler colonialism and market capitalism is dispossession, why have powerful state and corporate interests tolerated legal repossession? Professor Jon Altman from the Australian National University, Canberra offers his answers to this paradox and a fantastic set of maps in his 2014 paper, “The Political Ecology and Political Economy of the…
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Recently Extinct Languages
Extinct languages are ones which no longer have any speakers. The languages included in this map are one which have presumably gone extinct since the 1950s.
It is estimated that, if nothing is done, half of 6000 plus languages spoken today will disappear by the end of this century. With the disappearance of unwritten and undocumented languages, humanity would lose not only a cultural wealth but also important ancestral knowledge embedded, in particular, in indigenous languages.
While language extinction is a global phenomenon, the largest concentration of recently extinct languages in the world is on the West Coast of the United States – California (22 extinct languages), Oregon (9), and Washington (7).
Source: UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger
