articles july 23

Activist roots still thrive in Canada border crossing
Indian Defense League of America

NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. - Activist movements among modern North American Indians have roots that go back well beyond AIM and the siege at Wounded Knee, and they are still very much alive in the annual Native march across the U.S. - Canada border, held here recently for its 77th continuous year.

This year’s march marked the coming forward of the third generation in the sponsoring Indian Defense League of America, as one long-time leader lay seriously ill in the hospital. Although the passing of the torch was tinged with sorrow, it presaged renewed vitality for what could very well be the oldest continuous Native protest movement in northern America. It is a movement with a clear but still not widely known influence on the more famous upsurge of the early 1970s. full article

Native American tribes continue protest at Scottish Power AGM

Representatives from four native American tribes have been protesting outside Scottish Power's AGM meeting this morning.

They claim dams owned by the company in the US are causing a huge decline in salmon numbers which they depend on for their livelihood.

Leaf Hillman of the Karuk Tribe said: "We came here to send a message to Scottish Power and we're going to send that message. And that message is that we'll travel to the ends of the earth to accomplish our goal to bring the salmon home." full article

Pausing for a moment

By Pam. M. Smith, Staff Writer

A wispy breeze touched the circle of Native American Peace and Dignity runners as they paused in the partial shade of a mesquite tree Thursday morning just inside the west part of the Quechan Indian Nation.

They had been on the run all night from Manzanita, Calif.

Christine Emerson, an elder, blessed the runners through the “curuk," a Quechan sacred ceremony.

"This ceremony is performed for special events," she said. "I was entrusted with the right to do the blessing, as were my mother, Thelma Augerro, and maternal grandmother, Hippah Collins, before me."

The runners listened to a message from Quechan Phil Emerson, an elder for the journey. Emerson, who has made several of the runs, and started this one from Chickaloon, Alaska, will continue on to the Panama Canal. He carried a symbolic staff. full article

Experts say Inuit lawsuit could cost Ottawa, revolutionize aboriginal law

BOB WEBER

EDMONTON (CP) - He has fought battles in the boxing ring, on the football field, in city council chambers, in courtrooms and against cancer. But Kiviaq's latest fight may have the most far-reaching consequences.

The Edmonton Inuk, formerly known as David Ward, filed a lawsuit last week alleging Ottawa discriminates against his people. Legal experts suggest his efforts to win new federal benefits for Canada's 50,000 Inuit deserve serious consideration.

They also say the action could rewrite the relationship between non-status Indians, the Metis, the provinces and the federal government.

"If he were successful, it would be quite a revolution," says Peter Russell, a retired University of Toronto political science professor, who specializes in aboriginal law. full article

Climbers urged to avoid sacred Washoe site

LAKE TAHOE, Nev. - An advocacy group with a lawsuit challenging a U.S. Forest Service ban on recreational climbing at a sacred Washoe site has asked its members to refrain from scaling Cave Rock this summer.

The Access Fund, a Colorado-based group representing more than 1 million climbers nationwide, agreed to the voluntary closure, which was first suggested by the Forest Service, "out of respect to the religious practices of the Washoe." The group put out the memo this spring urging its members not to climb the popular volcanic formation on the lake’s southeast shore during July and August of this year.

Last fall, the Forest Service updated its Cave Rock management plan announcing its intention to permanently ban climbing at the site in an effort to protect Cave Rock’s cultural, historic and archeological resources, which make the site eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. full article

Black Hills art may be 5,000 years old
Ben Shouse
Argus Leader

CRAVEN CANYON - The markings on these sandstone cliffs are at once a revelation and an unsolvable riddle.

The rock art reveals the undeniable presence of ancient people, who chiseled a menagerie of animals, humans, tools and symbols here starting perhaps 5,000 years ago. And it hints at societies dating back to the last ice age.

"I can't help but be moved. I mean, we're talking 13,000 years ago that humans were here, and as indigenous people, we can't help but see them as our ancestors," said Arthur Amiotte, an Oglala Sioux artist who lives near Custer. full article

Bolivian Guaraní Indians Fight to Keep Oil Company Off Their Land
Gustavo Capdevila
Inter Press Service (IPS)
23 July 2004

GENEVA, Jul 22 (IPS) - The Guaraní community of Tentayapi, in southern Bolivia, one of the last bastions of the indigenous group's traditional way of life, is fighting to keep a foreign oil company out of its ancestral territory.

One of the community's leaders, Saúl Carayury, told the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations, meeting this week in Geneva, that Maxus Energy, a subsidiary of the Spanish-Argentine firm Repsol-YPF based in Spain, intends to explore and drill for hydrocarbons on communally-owned indigenous land in Tentayapi. full article

Forests thrive under control of indigenous people
By Vanessa Houlder in London
Published: July 23 2004 5:00 | Last Updated: July 23 2004 5:00

Developing countries are increasingly relinquishing control of tropical forests to their inhabitants in a trend that is helping to preserve endangered forests, a new report says.

The study was published just before delegates from 59 countries meet in Geneva on Monday to renegotiate the International Tropical Timber Agreement, a United Nations treaty first agreed in 1984 in response to concern about the destruction of tropical forests.

Forest Trends, a Washington-based non-profit group which published the report, criticised the new draft agreement for not mentioning local communities' efforts to protect tropical forests. It called on negotiators to give indigenous people a larger role in policy-making as well as strengthened rights to produce and sell forest products full article

Neocons the Real Present Danger

by Paul Craig Roberts
President Bush's neoconservatives have announced that they are relaunching the Committee on the Present Danger. The new CPD will be totally different from the original.

I was a member of the Committee on the Present Danger. It was a bipartisan private organization consisting largely of former presidential appointees who distrusted naiveté about Soviet intentions. One concern was that the U.S. government, feeling pressured to reduce nuclear arms, would be outmaneuvered by the Soviets, who didn't have similar pressures, with a strategic advantage for the Soviets being the result.

The members were patriots committed to liberty, not warmongers. Some of the neoconservative members talked about "rolling back"Soviet gains, but the majority of the members rejected this as a romantic impulse not worthy of discussion. The committee's main concern was that U.S. capabilities not be rolled back more than, or in advance of, Soviet ones. full article

Outsourcing War Crimes
by Ted Rall

It was late fall 2001, and the U.S. conquest of Afghanistan was nearly complete. A passel of foreign war correspondents milled about the lobby of the Hotel Tajikistan, waiting for the Tajik foreign ministry to issue permission papers we needed to pass the checkpoints between Dushanbe and the Afghan border, so we could go on to cover the siege of Kunduz. I popped into the Soviet-vintage hotel's business center to check my email. That's when I met Jonathan Keith "Jack" Idema, the former Special Forces soldier charged on July 5 along with two other Americans for kidnapping and torturing Afghans as part of an unauthorized, vigilante anti-Taliban operation run out of a private home in Kabul.

"U.S. citizen Jonathan K. Idema has allegedly represented himself as an American government and/or military official," the U.S. military said in a statement. "The public should be aware that Idema does not represent the American government and we do not employ him."

That's their current story, anyway.

Agents of the National Security Directorate, Afghanistan's new intelligence agency, say they found eight starved Afghan detainees--three of them hanging by their feet--in Idema's rented house in central Kabul, along with a few AK-47 rifles and blood-soaked clothes. None of Idema's prisoners were working against the Karzai regime, so the NSD plans to release them. Idema, say officials, was probably hoping to torture his victims into telling him the location of Osama bin Laden so he could collect a $25 million bounty. full article

The hysterical skies
She survived a flight with 14 harmless Syrian musicians -- then spread 3,000 bigoted and paranoid words across the Internet. As a pilot and an American, I'm appalled.
By Patrick Smith

July 21, 2004 | In this space was supposed to be installment No. 6 of my multiweek dissertation on airports and terminals. The topic is being usurped by one of those nagging, Web-borne issues of the moment, in this case a reactionary scare story making the cyber-rounds during the past week.

The piece in question, "Terror in the Skies, Again?" is the work of Annie Jacobsen, a writer for WomensWallStreet.com. Jacobsen shares the account of the emotional meltdown she and her fellow passengers experienced when, aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Detroit to Los Angeles, a group of Middle Eastern passengers proceeded to act "suspiciously." I'll invite you to experience "Terror" yourself, but be warned it's quite long. It needs to be, I suppose, since ultimately it's a story about nothing, puffed and aggrandized to appear important.

The editors get the drama cooking with some foreboding music: "You are about to read an account of what happened," counsels a 70-word preamble. "The WWS Editorial Team debated long and hard about how to handle this information and ultimately we decided it was something that should be shared ... Here is Annie's story" [insert lower-octave piano chord here].

What follows are six pages of the worst grade-school prose, spring-loaded with mindless hysterics and bigoted provocation. full article