American Indian PGA golfer will ‘talk to the land’

Notah Begay III, the only American Indian golfer on the PGA tour, is tapping his roots as he builds an $8.5 million course on a reservation in Kansas: He said the tribal land must be asked “what it wants you to do.”

The 18-hole Firekeeper Golf Course – Begay’s first signature course – will cover 240 acres near the Prairie Band Potawatomi Casino and Resort on a reservation near Mayetta. Named for the Prairie Band, known as the “keepers of the sacred fire,” Begay said the course should be ready to open next summer.

Begay, a member of the Navajo Nation, said the needs of the land come first.

“You say a prayer, talk to the land and ask it what it wants you to do,” he said Monday in announcing the project. “We incorporate into it the natural design of the land. We didn’t want to add things that weren’t naturally there or needed.”

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An Ashaninka indigenous woman cooked in the main road linking the central jungle to Lima.

Ashaninkas and Machiguengas, indigenous peoples of Peru, protested against the government’s plans to open large parts of the Amazon for drilling, logging and dam building.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/03/yosemite-conservation-indigenous-people

Conservationists have often seen native people as a problem to be solved by eviction. Now both sides are learning mutual respect.

Article discussing the history of when national parks were declared and what happened to the Native inhabitants who lived on those lands.

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Q’orianka Kilcher is half Peruvian Indian on her father’s side, of Quechua/Huachipaeri descent.  Kilcher talks about the Peruvian Indian protests and how she’s helping them.

from the LA Times:

Late last week, Q’orianka and her mother flew to Peru, which in recent days has been the scene of violent clashes between police and Amazon indigenous groups, who are protesting the turning over of tribal lands to oil drilling, logging and mining. The clashes have left more than 30 people dead and brought severe criticism of President Alan García, who is pushing to open the Amazon for commercial development, over his government’s handling of the affair. Under domestic and international pressure, last week Peru’s Congress suspended the pro-development decrees that sparked the protests, but the situation is far from resolved.

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Peru’s indigenous people win one round over developers

The Shawi indigenous people in northeastern Peru have many reasons for bitterness, Pizango, who is apu, or chief, of the group, said last week at a roadblock set up a few miles west of Yurimaguas to protest government policies.

“It’s been a long trajectory of abuse,” Pizango said. “We got tired of it.”

He and others had blocked the main road leading to Peru’s interior with tree stumps and rocks and set up makeshift tents with plastic sheeting along the highway shoulders. The surrounding terrain of Loreto province was a rolling green moonscape that long ago had been clear-cut by loggers.

Then, in a development celebrated as a victory for indigenous groups, Peru’s Congress last week voted to revoke two laws enacted last year to further open the Amazon to mining, oil and timber development. The measures had enraged indigenous groups and led to a bloody confrontation June 5 in Bagua that officials said left 10 civilians and 23 police officers dead, with one officer missing and presumed dead.

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Actually, the liberal leftists are the worst things that’s ever happened to America, let alone [to] the Indian people. They are, supremely, extremely racist against Indian people. The liberal left is our worst enemy. It’s been the Democrats in Congress that have consistently for almost two centuries, that have put the most debilitating laws into effect that strip us, bit by bit, of our freedoms.

Russel Means in an interview discussing Property Rights and Natives.

This is an intriguing interview with Russell Means by Scott Horton of AntiWar Radio that follows the same theme as yesterday by asking the question, Who really owns Indian land?

Delta Foxtrot: Rebuliding America, one Neighborhood at a Time - Russell Means with Scott Horton

Russell Means in discussion with Scott Horton on topics from Corporate Farming, Establishing Neighborhood Power and the Mass Thievery known as Property Tax.  Among other topics in this thirty minute interview, they speak to the imperial laboratory of Indian Reservations and how tactics perfected there have been exported to other countries, and now brought back to America itself.

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‘You Are On Indian Land’ is a short 1969 Canadian documentary that focuses on Tribal Sovereignty, which has long been a source of contention between Natives and Federal Governments, by following a short lived protest by Canadian Mohawks.  This 36 minute film ultimately asks, Who really owns Indian land?

The film shows the confrontation between police and a 1969 demonstration by Mohawks of the St. Regis Reserve on the bridge between Canada and the United States near Cornwall, Ontario. By blocking traffic on the bridge, which is on the Reserve, the Indians drew public attention to their grievance that they were prohibited by Canadian authorities from duty-free passage of personal purchases across the border, a right they claim was established by the Jay Treaty of 1794.

via (National Film Board of Canada)

‘You Are On Indian Land’ is credited with being the first Canadian documentary to chronicle Native issues.

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via www.villageearth.org

Protests have ended today after more than a week of armed blockades on roads and energy installations. More than 60 ethnic groups have come together in solidarity leaving behind their political divisions and organizational alliances to form a unified front against the state and the allied oil companies. The President of ODDPIAP (Organization for the Defense and Development of the Indigenous Peoples of the Peruvian Amazon) has said this is a fight for everything.

“We are tired of being silent against the abuses of the government such as recent legislation passed which makes it easier for foreign companies to buy up indigenous lands in the Amazon. And over 70% of Amazon lands are now in the hands of oil companies. Over 1500 police have been deployed to Camisea, Bagua, and Marañon. Government helicopters have been circling locations taken over by indigenous protesters. The government had declared a state of emergency and had given permission for police to shoot protesters on the spot, but we indigenous peoples think this cause is worth dying for and are not scared anymore.”

Roads and rivers have been blockaded, oil pipelines were closed, oil operations have been occupied, and major industry was blocked from river travel between, in and around Iquitos and Pucallpa, the two major urban centers of the Peruvian Amazon.

What the indigenous front is asking for is direct dialogue with Alan Garcia, President of Peru, and his administration and the repeal of a number of destructive laws. The President claims that bringing industry and foreign investment into the furthermost reaches of the Amazon will bring people out of poverty. This is a clash between two different development paradigms. Many indigenous peoples have already determined their own development path and it does not include the wide-scale exploitation of resources and the industrial take over of their lands.

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Wider Drug War Threatens Colombian Indians - NYTimes.com

NUNCIDO, Colombia — Up and down the rivers of western Colombia, a new breed of criminal armies is pressing deeper into this isolated jungle, fighting with guerrillas for control of the cocaine trade and forcing thousands of Indians to flee.

It is the kind of nightmarish ordeal that is an all-too-common feature of Colombia’s long war: peasants being terrorized by gunmen seeking dominance in the backlands.

But as Colombia’s war for control of the drug trade intensifies in frontiers like this one, with new combatants vying for smuggling routes and coca-growing areas where Indians eke out a meager existence, it is adding to the already grave toll on the nation’s indigenous groups. At least 27 of the groups are at risk of being eliminated because of the country’s four-decade conflict, according to the United Nations, and human rights organizations worry that the new violence is pushing even deeper into the Indians’ ancient lands.

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Several hundred tribespeople today staged a protest against FTSE-100 company Vedanta, as it bids massively to expand its controversial aluminium refinery in Lanjigarh, Orissa.

The refinery occupies land belonging to the Majhi Kondh tribe, and lies at the foot of the Niyamgiri hills, home of the isolated Dongria Kondhs. Both tribes took part in the protests.

The refinery has already been condemned by government officials for regularly breaching safety standards, and emitting ‘alarming’ pollution. Over a hundred families lost their homes to their refinery. Many more lost their farm land and with it their food-security and self sufficiency.

via (Survival International | Tribes stage mass protests against British mining company Vedanta)

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