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Quechua and Climate Change And: Profile of a Bengal Community and Indigenous Identity Crisis VOLUME 34 ISSUE 4 US $7.50/CAN $9

Global Response Campaign

Julian Quispes is leading his community in Peru to find ways to adapt to climate change. To that end, the people convinced the government to set up a national park to protect the Quechua culture and the potato varieties they depend on. See page 18 for the related story. Photo by Luis Pilares.

Cultural Survival

Indigenous Empowerment

Education and Outreach

Before the day is over, an Indigenous person will be killed or displaced. Before the month is over, an Indigenous homeland will be clear-cut, strip-mined, or flooded. Before the year is over, dozens of Indigenous languages will vanish forever. Governments and powerful economic interests perpetuate this human and cultural devastation. Cultural Survival works to reverse it. We partner with Indigenous Peoples to protect their lands, languages, and cultures and fight against their marginalization, discrimination, exploitation, and abuse.

Among Cultural Survival’s programs, we are working with a coalition of Native American organizations to save critically endangered Native American languages, and are reinforcing a network of community radio stations in Guatemala to help Mayans rebuild their cultures after 36 years of civil war. Our Global Response program helps Indigenous communities defend their threatened environments by mounting international letterwriting campaigns. We are also pursuing legal actions and more ambitious advocacy with Indigenous communities in Panama, Kenya, and Brazil.

Cultural Survival’s publications raise public understanding of and support for Indigenous Peoples and their concerns. In addition to this magazine and our digital newsletter, we maintain a website that includes the largest source of information on Indigenous Peoples anywhere and is visited by millions of people each year. We are also launching a website for Native American nations to share information on rescuing their endangered languages. Our fair-trade bazaars introduce more than 30,000 people a year to Indigenous artisans and provide money that directly supports Indigenous communities around the world.

Become a Part of Cultural Survival Cultural Survival’s work is only possible because of our members. Join us in making Indigenous Peoples’ rights matter. See the inside back cover for a membership form or join online at www.cs.org.

UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Cultural Survival’s work is predicated on the principles set out in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

WINTER 2010 VOLUME 34 ISSUE 4 IN MEMORIAM 3

ELLEN L. LUTZ (1955-2010)

DEPARTMENTS 4

Women the World Must Hear:

SUZAN SHOWN HARJO

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Indigenous Arts:

A PALETTE OF POSSIBILITIES

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Spirituality:

AIR AND WATER

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Food for Life:

AN INNER CITY GARDEN IN OAKLAND

40 Mayan women weep as they recount how they were raped by police and mine company employees in Guatemala. See related story on page 28.

GLOBAL RESPONSE CAMPAIGN 17

FEATURES 12 Camouflage

BY AMANDA WAPASS-GRIFFIN

A personal essay on the challenges of identity and appearance.

18 Farmers Without Borders

BY LAIRD TOWNSEND AND ANNIE MURPHY

Climate change is affecting Indigenous communities around the world, often in similar ways, and communities are looking for ways to deal with the issue. One of those efforts, an exchange between Ethiopian and Peruvian small farmers, could become a model for the future.

28 Mountain Home

BY DAVID DUCOIN

A photo essay on daily life in a Quechua village in Peru.

42 The Dwellers of the Valley

BY LYANSONG TAMSANG

A community profile from West Bengal, India.

48 Tata Noah

BY JUAN ESTEBAN YUPANQUI VILLALOBOS

A Peruvian family tale.

On the cover: Turitio Janco is a Quechua man who lives near Mount Ausangate, Peru. Quechuas across the Andes are facing tremendous challenges as a result of global warming, including melting of glaciers that provide their water and farmlands that have to move ever higher up the mountainsides. In this issue we take a special look at Quechua lives and the people’s efforts to adapt to climate change. See page 18 for the first related story. Photo by David Ducoin.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cultural Survival recognizes that Indigenous Peoples have long been exploited by photographers and publications. This publication does not pay photographers for images and makes no money from publishing them. We also make a tremendous effort to identify every Indigenous individual in the images that appear here. From time to time, however, such identification is not possible. We apologize to the subjects of those photos and to any reader offended by the omission.

What We’re Doing With Your Money

STOP A MINE THAT WOULD DESTROY A HUICHOL SACRED SITE IN MEXICO

BOARD OF DIRECTORS PRESIDENT AND CHAIRMAN Sarah Fuller VICE CHAIRMAN Richard Grounds (Euchee)

ADMINISTRATION Mark Camp, Acting Executive Director and Guatemala Radio Project Manager Mark Cherrington, Director of Communications and Editor Paula Palmer, Director of Global Response Program

STAFF TREASURER Jeff Wallace CLERK Jean Jackson Karmen Ramírez Boscán (Wayuu) Marcus Briggs-Cloud (Miccosukke) Westy Egmont Laura Graham James Howe Cecilia Lenk Pia Maybury-Lewis Les Malezer (Gabi Gabi) P. Ranganath Nayak Vincent Nmehielle (Ikwerre) Ramona Peters (Wampanoag) Stella Tamang (Tamang) Martha Claire Tompkins Roy Young

Nini Bloch, Acting Editor Kristen Dorsey (Chickasaw), Donor Relations Officer David Michael Favreau, Marketing Director Sofia Flynn, Financial Officer Cesar Gomez (Pocomam), Guatemala Radio Project Content and Training Coordinator Polly Laurelchild-Hertig, Director of Program Resources Jamie Malcolm-Brown, Graphic Design Agnes Portalewska, Program Officer Rosendo Pablo Ramirez (Mam), Guatemala Radio Project Assistant Coordinator Alberto Recinos, Guatemala Radio Project Legislative Coordinator Jennifer Weston (Hunkpapa Lakota/Standing Rock Sioux), Program Officer, Endangered Languages Ancelmo Xunic (Kaqchikel), Guatemala Radio Project Bookkeeper Phoebe Farris (Powhatan-Renape), Contributing Editor, Arts

SENIOR EDITORIAL ADVISORS FOUNDERS David and Pia Maybury-Lewis

Kris Allen Duane Champagne (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa) Louis Fox Lotte Hughes Kelly Matheson Bird Runningwater (Cheyenne/Mescalero Apache)

PROGRAM ADVISORS Cultural Survival 215 Prospect Street Cambridge, MA 02139 t 617.441.5400 f 617.441.5417 www.cs.org P.O. Box 7490 Boulder, CO 80306 t 303.444.0306 f 303.449.9794 7 Avenida Norte #51 Antigua Guatemala, Sacatepequez, Guatemala

jessie little doe (Wampanoag) Theodore Macdonald, Jr. Jacob Manatowa-Bailey (Sac/Fox)

INTERNS AND VOLUNTEERS Alison Cherrington, Kelsey Barber, Rachael Brown, Lucile Hoarau, Megan E. Kelly, Nora Lawrence, Brad Mergizian, Jenny Miguel-Hellman, Jason Moore, Pamela Perrimon, Kristen Rosen, Katie Quackenbush, Lindsay Randall, Emma Rosenberg, Linnea Sandin GENERAL INFORMATION Copyright 2010 by Cultural Survival, Inc. Cultural Survival Quarterly (ISSN 0740-3291) is published quarterly by Cultural Survival, Inc. at 215 Prospect St., Cambridge, MA 02139.

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2010 Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation: 1. Publication Title: Cultural Survival Quarterly 2. Publication Number: 0740-3291 3. Filing Date: December 30, 2008 4. Issue Frequency: Quarterly 5. Number of Issues Published Annually: Four 6. Annual Subscription Price: $45.00 7. Mailing Address of Publication: 215 Prospect St. Cambridge, MA 02139 8. Mailing Address of Publisher Headquarters: 215 Prospect St. Cambridge, MA 02139 9. Full Mailing Address and Complete Names of Publisher, Editor, and Managing EditorPublisher: Cultural Survival, Inc. 215 Prospect St. Cambridge, MA 02139, Editor/Managing Editor: Mark Cherrington, Cultural Survival, 215 Prospect St. Cambridge, MA 02139 10.

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Publication Title: Cultural Survival Quarterly 14. Issue Date for Circulation Data Below: Fall 2009-Issue 33, Volume 3 15. Extent and Nature of Circulation:a. Total Number of Copies: Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 6375; Actual No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 9,000 b. Paid and/or Requested Circulation-1.

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Percent Paid and/or Requested Circulation: 86; 85 16. This Statement of Ownership is printed in the Winter 2009 issue of this publication 17. I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete: Mark Camp, Director of Operations, Cultural Survival, Inc.

Cultural Survival Quarterly is printed on paper that is a combination of post-consumer recycled fiber and fiber from sustainably managed nonpublic forests certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, and the Program for the Endorsement of Forest Certification. The printer exclusively uses inks, chemicals, and solvents that are biodegradable and recyclable.

IN MEMORIAM

Ellen L. Lutz (1955-2010) e are deeply saddened to report the death of Ellen Lutz, who stepped down as executive director of Cultural Survival at the end of August because of the metastatic breast cancer that eventually took her life. She died on November 4 at the age of 55, surrounded by her husband, Ted Macdonald, and her children, David and Julia. Her end was peaceful and painless, and she met her death as she lived her life: with unbending dignity and unflinching courage.

Ellen became director of the Cultural Survival in 2004 and transformed the organization over the next six years, strongly emphasizing human rights and advocacy, areas in which she had an international reputation. She led Cultural Survival into Native American language revitalization; she started a program to submit Indigenous rights reports to the UN Human Rights Council; she launched our first on-the-ground human rights investigation, in Kenya; she oversaw Cultural Survival’s merger with Global Response; she helped organize congressional hearings on Indigenous rights; and she moved the organization away from development work and project sponsorship, building and strengthening Cultural Survival’s own programs. And that’s the short list. As her disease progressed, she actually increased her efforts, and in addition to presiding over Cultural Survival’s most ambitious year yet, she coedited two pioneering books, Prosecuting Heads of State (Cambridge University Press) and Human Rights and Conflict Management in Context (Syracuse University Press).

Her concern for human rights began when, as a 15-year-old exchange student to Uruguay, she witnessed the onset of Uruguay’s state-sponsored “Dirty War,” and supported the international human rights movements that such actions spawned across Latin American during the 1970s. After graduating from Temple University in 1976, she went on to earn a master’s degree in anthropology from Bryn Mawr in 1978, then took a law degree in international law and human rights from Boalt Hall Law School at the University of California at Berkeley.

Ellen’s interest in Latin America continued as professional work with Amnesty International in Washington, D.C., and in San Francisco. From 1989

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to 1994 she headed the California office of Human Rights Watch, where she conducted research and published on little-known but extensive human rights abuses in Mexico, and where she was cocounsel in two groundbreaking human rights cases in US courts, against the infamous Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and Argentine General Suarez-Mason.

Moving with her family to Westborough Massachusetts in 1994, she helped to set up the Center for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. She was the first executive director for that center and also taught international law, human rights, and mediation at Tufts, Harvard, and the University of Massachusetts, and wrote widely. One of her students, now a professor at Occidental College, recalled how “warm and desirous she was of connecting to students in an often cold institutional world, a marvelous force of nature.”

As news of Ellen’s death circulated, heartfelt tributes to her poured into Cultural Survival’s offices from every corner of the world, reflecting both her wide circle of friends and the enormous impact of her human rights work. Cultural Survival board member Westy Egmont spoke for many—including the Cultural Survival staff—when he wrote, “Ellen has been one of my heroes. She taught so many of us that no tyrant should go unchallenged and no small group should be powerless. She lived large, fought with a superior intellect to wrest justice out of life’s most unjust developments, and never seemed to have her own self-interest interfere with those efforts. Ellen came to all such engagements with total humility, genuine concern, apparent knowledge, and a progressive set of values that all worked together beautifully. We have lost a champion, an esteemed leader, a hero of all we aspire to do in the name of justice. I have lost a dear friend.”

She will inspire all of us for many years to come.

The family is planning a memorial service for the spring, and Cultural Survival is planning to set up a fund to benefit Indigenous rights in Ellen’s name. If you would like more information about that fund or to make a contribution, contact Polly LaurelchildHertig at polly@cs.org.

Cultural Survival Quarterly

Winter 2010

3

WOMEN THE WORLD MUST HEAR

Suzan Harjo

By Jennifer Weston

The list of Suzan Harjo’s accomplishments would fill a small book, and each is more impressive than the last, with White House affiliations in several administrations among them. Photo courtesy of Suzan Harjo.

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uzan Shown Harjo has worked tirelessly for more than four decades to shape a national Native American policy agenda that addresses issues at the core of Indigenous identity: sacred sites protection and access, religious freedom, treaty rights, mascot abolition, and language revitalization.

Guided by the teachings of the ancient Cheyenne prophet Sweet Medicine, Harjo has also prayed and gathered traditional medicines at the sacred sites of her Mvskoke—or Creek Nation—ancestors in their traditional southeastern homelands. Her efforts have remade museum policy around the world and restored more than 1 million acres of Native American land. She helped found the National Museum of the American Indian and has worked for several White House administrations.

Harjo took some time out from her work for the

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museum where she is researching and curating a new treaties exhibit—a project she and Vine Deloria, Jr., began together years ago—to reflect on her life spent in service to Indian country.

Tell me about your early days in radio production on Seeing Red—how that series came about, and how it led into the work you did in the late 1960s on the national Native policy scene around religious freedom, sacred sites, repatriation, and eventually, the National Museum of the American Indian?

I was a fan/listener of WBAI-FM Radio Station, Pacifica Network and Foundation, and volunteered there in New York City to do programs there in the mid-1960s. I was hired as one of three producers in 1967 and created a Native affairs program I called Seeing Red. Its focus was contemporary Indian issues, cultures, histories, and peoples. Oftentimes, we would do a midnight-to-4:00 A.M. personality show, where we would talk, play music, and take telephone calls. Any Native person at that time with a pressing issue or struggle would either come to New York or join us by telephone for news coverage, because the WBAI listeners numbered in the millions in a sixstate area. Our programs were picked up by the Pacifica Network, which had other stations in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Houston, and which was affiliated with other listener-sponsored stations and networks in Canada and the United States.

My work with repatriation began with a visit to the Museum of the American Indian in New York City. My mother and I went there in July 1965 and saw 1) what she believed were clothes she helped make and helped bury her grandfather in and 2) a Cheyenne girl’s buckskin dress with a bullet hole where her belly had been. Mom charged me with getting them out of the Museum and reburied or buried, and with making sure that none of those ceremonial/sacred beings were left in any museums. I enlisted the help of the National Congress of American Indians and Cheyenne, Lakota, and Arapaho religious leaders at a meeting in June of 1967 at Bear Butte. That gathering was the formative meeting of a national coalition whose hard work led to museum reform and repatriation laws in 1989 and 1990, to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978, to the National Museum of the American Indian—which we envisioned there— and to other Native cultural rights laws and initia-

tives, including the efforts to protect Native sacred places, ancestral sites and languages.

You moved to Washington back in ’74—was that to direct the American Indian Press Association, and were you drawn there to have a deeper impact on national policies affecting Indian Country?

My husband and baby son had recently been involved in three life-threatening situations (a carbonmonoxide poisoning, a car wreck, and an armed robbery), and I was trying to figure out how to get them out of New York when my friend Richard LaCourse called from Washington, D.C. He said that he was burned out on Washington and was moving back to his home, Yakama Nation, and asked if I would replace him. I said yes and two weeks later started work as the news director for the American Indian Press Association. Unbeknownst to me, AIPA had no money, so I became the chief fundraiser as well as reporter for AIPA, which also was in political turmoil. As soon as I could disengage, I went into advocacy work at the National Congress of American Indians, as communications and legislative director. In 1976, I joined the Carter campaign, organized the candidate's meeting with Indian leaders in Albuquerque the week before the election, and worked in the Carter-Mondale transition. I was offered a few of the plum jobs, but I had promised the Native American Rights Fund I would be its legislative liaison after the transition, which I did until we got most of our legislative agenda accomplished.

Then, I joined the Carter administration in 1978 as special assistant for Indian legislation and liaison.

Tell me more about your work on the Religious Freedom Act from ’78—it’s a seminal point in modern Native history—a moment that enabled generations born during and after the 70s to grow up in this new era where Native ceremonial traditions could openly be practiced and flourish again. Were you one of the original authors? Who were your key allies in working to get this law through Congress and to the president’s desk?

There were hundreds of Native people who worked on it, and our meetings in various places in Indian country numbered anywhere from 25 to over 1,000. The Nixon and Ford Bureau of Indian Affairs and Justice Department would not support our efforts, because they said the Religious Freedom Act would be unconstitutional. In the early 1970s, our

coalition succeeded in gaining a regulatory exemption to eagle and migratory-bird protections for Native American people to possess, use, and own feathers, but we had no success with other areas of the drafts of AIRFA. Our strongest objections came from the extractive and logging industries to the protection of sacred places. Senators Barry Goldwater and Ted Kennedy were the original sponsors, which signaled to other members of Congress that the act was neither a conservative nor a liberal issue, and that anyone between those two senators could and should support the bill.

Our very best ally was President Carter. During his campaign meeting with tribal leaders, he pledged to sign the act into law, along with the Indian Child Welfare Act, Tribally Controlled Community Colleges Act, Eastern Indian land claims settlements, and other federal Indian legislation. I have to point out that he made a lot of promises to us and kept every one. I am very proud of having been a Carter political appointee and having been the primary author of his 1979 Report to Congress on American Indian Religious Freedom.

Even though we didn’t get everything we wanted, the act as a policy statement and as a process for creating follow-on legislation was and is invaluable. We achieved the first federal repatriation policy and returns of cultural patrimony during the first year's implementation of the act in 1979. And, we achieved follow-on repatriation laws in 1989 and 1990.

Based on your work with the Carter Administration in the 70s, Clinton’s in the 90s, and more recently on Obama’s policy committee and transition team, what gives you hope about the current administration?

Candidate Obama reminded me of candidate Carter, in his honest, intellectual, and heartfelt views of and approach to Native peoples and federal Indian laws and lawmaking. Like Carter, Obama has kept all his promises and more. I think his opponents are mean, nasty, and vocal, but I don't believe they have enough vote to deny him a second term (but that's what we said about Carter's opponents, too).

Jennifer Weston (Hunkpapa Lakota) is the program officer for Cultural Survival’s Endangered Native Languages Program.

Cultural Survival Quarterly

Winter 2010

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I NDIGENOUS A RTS

A Palette of Possibilities

By Phoebe Farris DC. In this painting, two nude figures, one with lighter skin than the other, walk in a simple neutralcolored landscape with a deep yellow sky. The time period and the figure’s race(s) are indeterminate. Are they an inter-racial couple, or people from the same tribe/ethnicity with varying skin tones? Is the nudity imposed or a symbol of their bodies in their natural state? Is this scene in America or a universal, primordial location? It is up to the viewer to determine the specifics of this open-ended narrative.

Recently I asked Davis to elaborate on this and two other paintings. Here is part of that conversation:

Darnella Davis, Grace and Hope. Watercolor on paper, 14 x 20 inches.

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arnella Davis is an artist, educator, policy analyst, and member of the Muscogee Creek nation, with tribal roots in Oklahoma and Michigan. Davis exhibits her figurative watercolors, drawings, and oil paintings nationally and abroad.

In 1992 and 1993, her work was seen throughout the United States in the College of Wooster Art Museum’s two-year traveling exhibition “We the Human Beings: Twenty-Seven Contemporary Native American Artists.”

Davis explains, “Imagery in my work arises in part form my mixed heritage and in part from—and in reaction to—my Eurocentric training. Across time, my genealogical research has unearthed words and pictures of my ancestors that reaffirm my place as the descendant of a long line of mixed-race peoples who struggled to keep their ways and their land. Although this personal information may provide some context for interpreting my paintings, the inspiration for this work springs from a source beyond personal history, where the color yellow signals a shift form the ordinary. In this visionary world, one can discern an America perceived not through the logic of the mind, but sensed by the spirit and the heart, a place accessible, perhaps, to our children’s children.”

The watercolor Grace and Hope was exhibited in the two-person show “Native Color” that we both participated in at the Parish Gallery in Washington,

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Darnella Davis: At first glance, the time, location, and people's race/ethnicity in Grace and Hope appear indeterminate, but a closer inspection reveals that this piece, as with others in the series, references the division of land seen during the Allotment Period. As the figures stroll along, their relationship is a generational one that conveys both history and possibility. Their potential interface with the land is colored by the allotment policies of the Dawes Act of 1887, which governed the division of tribal land to encourage individual rather than collective farming. Claims for the land and the size of any given allotment depended on racial purity or the strength of tribal affiliations.

For a time, racial identity was a fluid notion in the individual scramble for land. The painting's title suggests the possibility of retaining both dignity and optimism during a major cultural shift that for many had a corrupting influence on Indian Territory.

Phoebe Farris: In discussing Yellow Haired Brown Girl you mention that the "the color yellow signals a shift from the ordinary." In your portrait, does the girl's yellow/blond hair signify that blond/yellow hair is out of the ordinary for Native Americans, African Americans or people of color in general? Or is the yellow background signifying an out of the ordinary physical environment for the girl?

Color is highly emotive in my work and yellow skies appear with some frequency. I'm intrigued with the tensions surrounding unusual phenomena, especially events or actions that push us beyond the comfort of our day-to-day notions of boundary. In Yellow Haired Brown Girl, the light is warm and in-

tense, almost oppressive. Perhaps it serves as a warning. It signals a departure from the ordinary range of gray to blue that we associate with our atmosphere (as when skies appear green just before a tornado or under conditions such as sand storms). Likewise, many mixed-race people display a range of physical characteristics, some of which more closely fit our expectations than others. Australian aborigines can be quite dark skinned with pale blond hair. Such individuals are less often seen here in the Americas but do exist as examples of a complicated mix of often-recessive genes. These extraordinary individuals recall to us the long-term intermingling of racial groups. The opportunity is to examine the edges of our comfort with who and what we have been and are, acknowledging a broader range of variance than is generally recognized.

The figure in Above the Ground is jumping high in contrast to most of your subjects who are grounded. Can you explain your choice in depicting a more active pose?

This series of paintings queried the interactions of people to the land. Are we tied to the land? Can we own or possess it? Are we comfortable on it? As with chance, we might wonder, where will we land?

Perhaps a leap suggests our tension with being placed or tied down. To some degree, we alternate between being grounded and up in the air. Above the Ground captures a momentary release from gravity.

Most of your figures are painted nude.

Contemporary Native American artists only recently began using nudity in their art, although prior to European colonialism most of us wore minimal clothing. In many tribes women were bare breasted and men wore breechcloths. Why do you think Native American artists avoided the nude figure? Why do you feel more comfortable portraying nude figures?

Nudes are both primal and devoid of the time constraints imposed by contemporary dress. The issues that concern me may be grounded in the Allotment Period, but they have occupied groups and individuals throughout the ages. Unclothed people reside outside of time, or perhaps in a limbo of timelessness. In contrast, dress is often a form of celebration, signaling a confidence in, or an assertion of, the here and now.

What are your current research and art projects?

Are you still publishing and lecturing about Creek

Freedmen? Have you had any exhibits or publications since the recent analysis of your work in the 2009 "IndiVisible" exhibition/book?

Based on 20 years of study, I have recently completed a book-length manuscript. I believe my research answers the call posed by the indiVisible symposium, documenting the stories of mixed race peoples. It is currently under review by a number of scholars in preparation for submission to a publisher.

Darnella Davis, Yellow Haired Brown Girl. Watercolor on paper 15 x 18 inches.

In counteracting stereotypes and preconceived notions about racial and ethnic identities, Darnella Davis promotes understanding about the complexities of lives such as her famlies’, and in the process confirms that there is no monolithic Native American or African American experience.

As prominent scholar Jack Forbes (PowhatanRenape) notes, unraveling existing misconceptions is almost as important as new conceptions. Forbes writes, “The ancestry of modern-day Americans is often quite complex…Persons have been forced by racism into arbitrary categories which tend to render their ethnic heritage simple rather than complex.”

Phoebe Farris is the arts editor for Cultural Survival Quarterly and teaches at Purdue University.

She wrote about Darnella Davis in her book Red, Brown, and Black: Artists and the Aesthetics of Race, parts of which are reproduced here by permission of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

Cultural Survival Quarterly

Winter 2010

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S PIRITUALITY

Air and Water

By Rod McAfee ater is a very powerful medicine. We refer to it as the blood of the holy sacred mother, Mother Earth. This can make a flower beautiful, make a tree grow tall, make each and every person spiritual, holy, sacred. You are all of these things to begin with, when you are born. How did this come about? For nine months, each of us dwelled in darkness, in the fluid of the womb, a miniature human being, until it was time to leave the safety of the female, and the dam broke, and you saw light. Then you had to learn to breathe, and you had to learn to feed yourself. We refer to this water as the feminine power. It’s how we use it that’s important: in the sweat lodge, for example, when you pour it on the stones.

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We talk about the Great Mystery. My grandchildren, you’re the great mystery. What do you know about yourselves? Are you willing to accept that scar that proves to you that a woman carries you for nine months? When I had to do that, at first it was very uncomfortable. But finally I realized, that that’s why I’m here: because of the feminine.

Do we ever stop to think about the Mother? For years, I used to really hate my mother, because she wouldn’t let me participate in our traditions – the traditions of the Akimel O’odham people. What I didn’t realize was that she had a very tough life. Her mother died when she was very young, so her father took her out of school to take care of her brothers and sisters. She went into organized religion and became kind of fanatical about it. She forbade me to get involved in the traditional ways. My dad was higher educated, so he had two worlds. As a young lad he grew up in the desert in Arizona. He talked about the natural way, and then would turn right around and say, “That way is no good.” But how can that be, when that way, the natural way, took care of my people for thousands of years? We migrated out of Mexico, using this natural way. My dad talked to me about this! I was really confused, then, when I was young. My parents wanted me to go to school and to go to church. I had to do these things. This feminine power was never in my mind, or never pointed out.

You might not be using your medicine in a good way. I used to do that. I’d take air for granted, until the air was really bad and I would have to run outside and take big gulps of good air and then forget about it. There’s so much that comes from this simple and very powerful medicine, air. You need it for this thing they call a brain. And you have to use the water. It rains, goes into the tree roots, and the trees keep that water so we can use this medicine. Those are our relatives, the tree nation.

People call the natural way the “old way.” How can it be old when we still use it? You keep it alive.

You give it life just like in the sweat lodge, when we give the ceremony life. When you go in the sweat lodge, you go back into the womb of the Mother Earth. Using darkness and light. Using air and water.

In order to become stronger, learn to accept Mother Earth. She’s not going to leave you; she’s always

going to be around. All those times we walk out crying, we’re lonely; we don’t know what to do. We walk right on Mother Earth, not acknowledging her presence. We are literally sucking on her breast, this woman, until the day we die.

One of my teachers pointed out something to me that was very hard to accept. He said, “Your life’s not planned; it never will be. It’s what you do with it. You have everything there to make it the way you want it.”

Of course, you have to live in this day and age, in this push-button society. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just don’t get obsessed with it; always come back to yourself. Accept who you are. You’re part of creation. You live and breathe, just like the eagle. You use air and water, just like the deer. They’re our relatives: the tree people, the stone people.

My drum is the unity of two very powerful nations: the four-legged nation and the tree nation.

This unity creates a very powerful symbol. Today is good day. If it’s a little cloudy it’s still a good day because I choose how to use the day. If it rains, I still choose how to use that. Every one of you has that

ability to make a good life. You have everything! The core is air and water. The very core of everything is air and water.

I’m not the message. I’m just the messenger. And so I give this to you. You can be the messenger, in how you walk on Mother Earth, how you accept yourself. When good energy comes out of you, young kids like to be around you; animals like to be around you. Then you learn how to talk to the planet from the heart: that heart language, that spirit language. Mother Earth will listen.

Rod McAfee (Akimel O’odham) is a Pima Elder from Arizona. He has led ceremonies for Native prison inmates in Oregon and Washington and is a former drug and alcohol counselor for the Native American Rehabilitation Association. He is also the chair of the advisory board for the Earth and Spirit Council in Portland, Oregon, where he gave the talk from which this article is adapted. For more information, go to the website for Earth and Spirit Council at http://earthandspirit.org.

Cultural Survival Quarterly

Rod McAfee at home (left) and at one of his many speaking engagements.

Photo and drawing by Dianne Russell (www.dianerussell.net).

Winter 2010

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F OOD FOR L IFE

Kola Le Miye Ca Wau Welo “My friend, this is me, I am coming”

By Gilberto Daniel Rodriguez (Mexica/Nahuatl) onight, the drum beat propels stories written in colors. Sage-smudged murals speak. In the halls, young women walk past carrying harvested dark Arbol chili varieties and Yerba Buena, while garden beds outside host a conversation entirely in Dakota dialect. On the brick façade of this East Oakland building is a sign that reads, “Intertribal Friendship House.”

Within these walls, dubbed the “Urban Rez” of California, you will find the second home of one of the largest urban Native American populations in the United States. Established in 1955 as one of the first

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urban American Indian centers in the nation, it has served the community to address issues facing the challenges of relocation. It has continually provided a space for ceremony, struggle, and organization.

Once again, the community that was at the epicenter of such landmarks of consciousness-raising as the occupation of Alcatraz Island, the Long Walk for Survival, and the American Indian Movement for Freedom Charter School continues to lead in the tradition of social changes for the benefit of Indian people. This time, Bay Area Native folk are at the cornerstone of a growing inner-city food justice movement that opposes, like many other indigenous communities, the predatory nature of genetically modified or unhealthy processed foods and lack of access to alternatives.

It is contradictory that in the San Francisco Bay Area—a food-lover’s paradise where the “Gourmet Ghetto” food district flourishes, the Slow Food legacy is alive and well, and the bounty of local farmers’ markets are world-renowned—you simultaneously find Indigenous people who are isolated and often denied their Native food ways. Even within a culturally tolerant and ethnically diverse region such as the Bay Area, the Native community most often remains invisible. Also, despite the presence of many state-of-the-art health institutions and providers, health disparities within the community remain chronic and severe.

In response to all of these contradictions, Native people here are reclaiming traditional food ways and practices as a steadfast priority. With an ally in Seva Foundation, the Friendship House is engaging people as diverse as Indigenous community leaders and the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Public Health Educators. Everyone is lending their hands in sowing seeds and ensuring the future of a sovereign, thriving food system that will be the sustenance of healthy Native people.

This latest justice movement starts with something as simple as a 700-square-foot garden.

Janice Wright, a California Pomo elder, has been involved with the first raising of the beds and has consistently accompanied mothers to the Native Parenting and Gardening class. Sitting in front of a tall bushel of tomato vines, her eyes quietly motion to her hands with a smile. Leaning in, I see a ripe tomatillo in her open palm, and looking back at me she says, “This here brings us new life.” She later proudly remarks,

“Out here we don’t use any insecticides or any of that on our plants…they’re all organic.”

Friendship House Executive Director Carol Wahpepah, Ojibwe, has noticed that the center’s new cooking and gardening programs have opened up dialogue among participants on the nutritional aspect of different foods available in the region. It also simply sparks an interest in vegetables generally. Carol recalls, with a smile, “I would see young people at first throwing out their salads. By the second week they were going up for seconds and thirds and even showing it off to me. I think that’s from working in the garden.” More than 700 community members participated in the Friendship House food activities in the first year, many of them youth.

It has also sparked a bigger push: “The IFH Board has now adopted ‘No-Salt’ and ‘No-Sugar’ policies,” Carol explained. One mother described noticing changes in the frequent community meals, saying, “The mint was good when put in the water.

We had mint tea, mint water, instead of sugar. It was really good. “ Today there are garden greens such as sea collards and kale supplementing meals made at home as well as in the dishes prepared for community events. There is a diverse array of 47 vegetables growing on the small grounds. Families—men, women, and children are continually tilling their gardens where a cluster of red-pink rhubarb stalks is only a couple feet away from International Boulevard, leading away from mint and pines to a stretch of the San Antonio district in Oakland.

Christina Gonzalez (Pomo) is one such mother, and she related to me the importance of strengthening familial ties through the Native Gardening class she frequents: “We all get together, Native women and children, to learn. Last weekend we practiced keeping our children together so they can grow up and be the next generation. Because I grew up here, I want my children to be part of this community, too.”

There has been increasing Native participation in classes teaching canning and cooking traditional meals with locally grown food, and there is a special focus on women in the Parenting Circle: “The cooking class was for the girls so that they don’t go living on canned food.”

Medicinal plants like Hoopa tobacco sit in the herbal section of garden along with varied California sage, cedar, and various mint and lemon balm species that are used in ceremony, providing respite from detrimental outside forces. A two-week day camp saw young people learning to plant seeds in hand-painted take-home pots, harvesting vegeta-

bles, and learning about the Hopi blue and purplespeckled corn in the garden. There are now radishes, onions, kale, and leeks growing during our Bay Area winter and keeping people directly involved with our urban earth.

By providing the Native community a space for garden and health resources, Friendship House is now offering more opportunities to recover longheld preventative health methods in the urban environment and combat common diseases prevalent among Native Americans today. Together, we welcomed back the return of healthy foods—to us, it feels like an old friend that is coming back home.

Gilberto Daniel Rodriguez is a program associate with the Native American Community Health Program of Seva Foundation. See www.seva.org/ifh for more information. This article is first of a threepart series from Seva’s program, spotlighting Indigenous communities in Alaska, South Dakota, and California as they recover ancestral food systems that promote self-reliance and prevent chronic disease such as diabetes.

Author’s note: this story is dedicated to Valerie Brown (1971-2010) who often came to the garden to plant alongside her children. Memories of her kindness and laughter are still present in her absence.

Cultural Survival Quarterly

Left: The Friendship House rhubarb is as robust as the institution itself.

Below: Maggie John (Dine) is the coordinator of the Intertribal Friendship House garden. Along busy International Boulevard, you will find her in her straw hat most days watering and sharing techniques, traditional uses, and ideal times for planting. Photos courtesy of Seva Foundation.

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CAMOUFLAGE

By Amanda Wapass-Griffin

Sarah Sense (Chitimacha/Choctaw), Cowgirl Evolution. Digital image, 30 x 19 inches. Berlin Gallery, Heard Museum Shop, Phoenix, Arizona (www.berlingallery.org).

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y thoughts are like a thousand startled bats looking for a way out of a cave. Their wings are frantically flapping as they move in a thousand different directions all at once. I saw this on one of those nature shows on TV, the shows you only watch when there is nothing else on.

The woman sitting across from me is staring. I have been quiet for too long; the silence is awkward for her.

She has pushed up her glasses twice and is gripping her pen so tightly her knuckles are white. Her awkwardness is making me uncomfortable. She clears her throat and looks down at the single piece of paper on her clipboard. It’s blank and I can’t help but wonder what she sees.

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Last week I stood staring at my reflection in the mirror for over half an hour, just like she is staring at the paper on her clipboard, studying intently what I saw: the hue of my skin, the shape of my eyes, and the outline of my jaw, wishing the way I looked aligned with the way I felt about myself. All this because of that stupid pamphlet I came across stuffed in a magazine as a bookmark. “Identity Counselling for Aboriginal People” was what it was advertising.

“So how do you feel right now? How would you describe your emotional state?” She fires both questions at me in a single breath. She tries to make eye contact but I can’t focus on her, I am trying to catch one of those bats in my head just to give her something so she will stop staring at me.

She is asking me, in not so many words, what I am doing sitting across from her. Can she see that I am second guessing my decision to call the number on the back of that pamphlet?

Yesterday I saw an old man sitting on an overturned wooden crate, his back against the grubby

brick wall of a store front. He was playing an old guitar, the case opened in front of him with a few coins scattered haphazardly in the folds of the threadbare faux velvet lining. He was playing a simple, haunting melody, carefully plucking the strings; his head bent low, his shoulders stooped. I walked by him at first but then I stopped a few feet past him as his melody pulled at my heart, turning me around. I rummaged in my pocket for a coin to throw in amongst the paltry few he had already accumulated. He rewarded me with a wide smile, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he was smiling on the inside, too.

“I feel sad,” I blurt out, my thoughts still on that old man in dirty clothes playing a beautiful song. I am not really lying because I am sad, but I think that is just part of it. She looks at me, eyes wide, and even though she keeps her facial features neutral I can see a smile in her eyes, as if she really accomplished something by getting me to speak.

She would not be smiling if she could see the unexpected emotional eruption her two questions are Cultural Survival Quarterly

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Marla Allison (Laguna) SelfPortrait, 2003. Pastel on paper, 10 x 8 inches.

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causing me. I don’t exactly know why I am here today. I slip my hand into the pocket of my sweater, gently running my fingertips along the worn edges of the photograph I brought with me today. It is a picture of me when I was a little girl, with two blonde braids and such soulful brown eyes. It makes me sad because now I know who that little girl will become.

She will be like that old man, smiling on the outside.

I remember this kid in elementary school. Every time we would have show-and-tell, he would wear these grubby camouflage pants and talk about his and his dad’s hunting exploits. One time he even brought a hide from a bear his dad had killed, but I just couldn’t get past his pants. I guess hunters have to wear camouflage so they will blend in with their surroundings because they don’t want to be seen.

Maybe that’s what I do: wear camouflage when I don’t want to be seen. Long ago my people were skilled hunters, and camouflage was essential to their survival. We hunted, silently stalking our prey on the bald prairie, blending into the landscape that we were part of.

The woman leans towards me in her high-backed chair. I take a good long look at her. I am not surprised by what I see: dark pantsuit with a white blouse buttoned up to her throat, conservative black pumps, and dark rimmed glasses. I swear these people must have a dress code, because they all look the same. Her hair is dark brown and pulled back into a pony tail. I can’t tell if she is pretty or how old she is.

Is she wearing camouflage too?

Sometimes I wonder if all of my people are wearing one form of camouflage or another. I think about my younger brothers and sisters. It seems the young people are growing up so defiant and belligerent these days. Around my neighborhood I see them strutting down the street with their baggy pants, straight-rimmed ball caps with their shaggy black hair sticking out on three sides, and their hoodies hanging on their skinny frames. I watch them shake hands with their bros when they meet

up and share a smoke as they laugh about something that they should probably cry about instead.

I look around the small windowless room I am in, mostly to distract myself from the onslaught of unwanted thoughts in my head. Filling most of the room is a black loveseat and a beige high-backed chair with a cheap looking particle board coffee table separating them. There is one picture on the stark wall across from me. It is a print of a country landscape. It looks cheap, but I find myself staring at it; well, staring past it anyway.

What does this woman sitting across from me see when she looks at me? I can deceive others so easily because I have the best camouflage: I look white. A few years ago I walked into an off-sale store with my friend. Inside, this Native guy, maybe 45, was buying an 18 pack with his buddy. He was wearing acidwashed jeans, an acid-washed jean jacket, cowboy boots and a beat-up Native Pride cap. He looked me up and down when I walked in and smiled at me, showing off his toothless smile.

“Are you German?” he asked me with an appreciative smile. Before I could respond to the lame pick-up line, my friend was in the guy’s face, fists balled at her sides, yelling at him like he was deaf.

Cultural Survival Quarterly

Sarah Sense (Chitimacha/Choctaw), Cowgirls and Indians No. 4.

Digital image, 54 x 37.5 inches. Berlin Gallery, Heard Museum Shop, Phoenix, Arizona (www.berlingallery.org).

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“She’s just as much Indian as you are, jerk!” I grabbed her arm and pulled her away. But as I turned to the beer coolers at the back of the store I saw my distorted reflection in the glass, and I wondered if she was right.

I wish there was some music playing. The woman in front of me is deep in thought. The silence is stifling. It is full of people’s secrets, confessions, and heartaches. Nobody comes to this office because they don’t know how to deal with their happiness.

I could use a smoke. I can’t help but smile, because I can hear my best friend lecturing me on quitting. Ever since she kicked the habit she thinks I should, too. Man, I miss those lazy summer days when we used to drive down to the river in her beatup old Mercury that we dubbed The Rez Bomb. We would roll down the windows, smoke, and listen to music. We used to talk and dream about better things as the sun set. For a while I wouldn’t feel like I was alone. What was that one song we would play over and over? Something about “scars being souvenirs you never lose.”

“What makes you sad?” she says, interrupting my thoughts. Is this really the question she is asking me?

I feel disdain creeping in, and I am certain there must be a script for the first visit. I look at the clock, ticking like a time bomb, but only 20 minutes have passed. Maybe it would help if I lay down like they do in the movies.

“Life,” I mutter, and I can tell she recognizes the hint of sarcasm in my voice. I see something flash in her eyes and her back stiffens. I feel my own temperature rising, the match getting closer to the fuse on the powder keg inside of me. I fight my reaction because anger has been camouflage for my pain too often.

Life does make me sad, in a lot of different ways.

I was at my kokum’s wake on the reserve a few years ago. On the second morning, I was sitting by the fire watching my two eight-year-old cousins chucking a basketball at each other. I called them over. I had to call a few times before they reluctantly came. I asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up.

They stared at me blankly and shrugged.

“What do you like to do in school?” They shrugged nonchalantly. “What about sports?” I pressed them further. I really wanted to know.

“Nah, we ain’t good enough,” is how they finally responded. I watched them take off, their answer leaving a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach.

What is happening to my people that our kids think they are not good enough by the age of eight? I close the door on this memory.

This woman thinks she knows me. Suddenly the room is stifling hot. I feel a sheen of perspiration on my forehead. I shift my body on the sticky vinyl couch I am melting into. I blink quickly, but my eyelids feel like sandpaper. My throat is parched. I am teetering on the precipice of control. Images are flashing through my mind like a strobe light. I do not want this stranger asking me any more questions. I want to make her understand.

“Do you know how you can help me?” I am surprised by how strong my voice sounds. She looks at me warily, but I am not saying this for her benefit. I am saying it for mine. “When I walked in here today, you were so sure you knew what I needed. That’s history in a nutshell. Residential schools, the Indian Act, and treaties came about because somebody thought they knew what somebody else needed.” I am getting more animated. She looks confused. “I came here thinking I needed you to help me. But I was wrong.” I stop there. My heart is racing.

I think about my ancestors, those that walked this earth before me, and I wonder what they would tell me if I asked them why? Why do I have to walk through life wearing camouflage and carrying the sorrows of the past on my shoulders?

They would not answer me right away, giving time for my question to sink in until it became a part of them. Like putting on a new pair of moccasins and wearing them for awhile until the leather softened and took the unique shape of your foot. When they spoke their voices would be quiet so I would have to bend in close to hear them, the earthy scent that clung to their clothing soothing me. They would start by telling me about their own experiences, because my people teach what they know, and what they know is what they have lived. They would tell me that the past is not something to fear or be ashamed of. It just is.

These thoughts calm my racing heart and bring me back to the roots I tried to sever many times.

Somehow, even though I hid them from the sunshine and refused to water them, they remained alive. I breathe in deeply and look at the woman across from me.

“I don’t need your help,” I tell her softly, as I step out of the layers of camouflage I have wrapped myself in over the years. “I just need you to see me.”

Amanda Wapass-Griffin is a 29-year-old woman of the Thunderchild First Nation in Saskatchewan.

This essay was one of the 2010 winners of the Historica-Dominion Institute’s Canadian Aboriginal Writing and Arts Challenge.

Cultural Survival Quarterly

Marla Allison (Laguna), In Love with Home, 2004.

Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 inches.

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FARMERS WITHOUT

George Littlechild, Never Again, 1993. Mixed media, 44 x 30 in. Collection of Canadian Art Bank. The image shows the artist’s mother, Rachel, at the age of 9 in 1938 at the Ermineskin Indian Residential School in Hobbema, Alberta. Courtesy of George Littlechild (www.georgelittlechild.com).

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BORDERS

By Laird Townsend and Annie Murphy

Climate change is now a fact of life, and one all humans must increasingly confront on a daily basis. Yet climate change is particularly hard for traditional small farmers who live in the most affected zones and lack hightech tools to insulate themselves against the changing climate. But today, small food producers are calling on ancestral knowledge to find ways to adapt, as well as some transnational networking to share that information.

One of those efforts, an exchange between Ethiopian and Peruvian small farmers, could become a model for the future. song wound through a small agricultural village. “Hemes, hemes,” one woman called, “He cares for us.” “Hashou Hemes,” “Yes, he does,” the chorus answered. Beyond a bamboo fence and down a steep path, six women in cotton shifts gathered to sing and work. Their clothing was dotted with white stains from a large, banana-like plant, and as they sang, they chopped, scraped, wrung, and splashed, giving the work its own rhythm. The plant they were preparing is called outsa in the Indigenous Gamo language, enset in Amharic, and “false banana” in English.

These women live in the village of Doko in the Gamo Highlands of southern Ethiopia. Doko lays at an elevation of 10,000 feet, on a bluff above the Rift Valley. The highlands are home to more than 50 communities that speak an Omotic language also

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Shangre Shano Shale (left) learns from Julian Quispe how the Quechua Photo by Luis Pilares.

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Right: The village of Paru Paru is one of six Quechua communities that have banded together to create the Potato Park, which protects the land, the culture, and the farming traditions and crops of the region.

Photo by Luis Pilares.

Below: Enset, also called the false banana, is a staple crop in Ethiopia.

Although it is in the banana family, the fruits are not edible. But the roots are, and a single root may produce 80 pounds of food, making it one of the most productive food plants in the world. Photo

by Nicolas Villaume.

known as Gamo. And these interconnected communities, as well as nearly 13.5 million rural inhabitants in Ethiopia, depend on the enset plant for their survival.

“Enset is incomparable with any other crop,” said Halimbe Soazo, the eldest woman of the group and head of this household. “It’s used for everything: fences, curtains, seat cushions, bags, string, rope, animal feed. We can’t think of our lives outside of enset.”

Enset is a staple. It’s prepared in many forms and in many contexts—from a nutritious gelatin mothers eat after childbirth to the ground, boiled root served to funeral mourners. And the plant is naturally drought resistant, with one fully mature plant able to support five people for two to three months.

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No academic record exists to document such matters, though the villagers in the Gamo Highlands say this area has never experienced famine, and they believe enset is why.

But this ancient survival strategy is no longer a sure bet. During the past 10 years, community members and local agronomists have reported a drastic fall in enset production; crops have declined, and plants are growing weaker, thinner, and more susceptible to disease. The cause is a familiar refrain worldwide: climate change. And like traditional communities around the world, the Gamo are being forced to adapt—a fate that will eventually hit even the most developed spots on the globe.

In the case of the Gamo Highlands, rising temperatures and disrupted rain cycles are already disrupting growth and causing seedlings to stunt, wilt, and or simply drown. Farmers are scrambling to address the unprecedented rain patterns, experimenting with new planting times and other variables, but disruption of enset crops still has serious repercussions here. Which is why, next door to the women’s work party, a contingent of Doko’s elders has gathered to discuss the village’s enset problems.

“When I was a youth, enset was very dense in everybody’s yard,” said Shagre Shano Shale, an elderly head of the compound. He was dressed in the region’s white gabi robe, as were most of the men.

Shagre was animated about the enset of his childhood: “It was big, fat! Nowadays I can’t even see a fraction of the rich enset from those times.”

Eager to find a solution, Shagre Shano had recently returned from a journey of thousands of miles, which took him from the Doko compound to Peru’s Sacred Valley.

Twenty-seven-year-old Julian Quispe has lived in the Quechua community of Paru Paru his entire life.

He has a house made of adobe and wood, the walls packed tight, snug, and smooth—and painted in shades of ochre, rose, and pale blue, mixed from plant dyes. Each day, Quispe and his wife, Serufina, rise around five-thirty, breakfast on a porridge of ground fava beans and milk, and head to their fields, where they grow the favas, the corn, and the region’s staple: potatoes. The latter, which will be the base for lunch and dinner, are known here as the daily bread of the Andes, and Julian and Serufina are two of many villagers working to preserve native potato varieties in this area.

“The entire system is changing,” said Julian Quispe. It was a damp spring morning, and he sat on a low stool by the indoor hearth, peeling potatoes and keeping an eye on a pan of corn. His six-yearold daughter, Yoli Irma, knelt next to him playing jacks with a handful of eucalyptus pods. “We’re planting a full month later than before, and the potatoes are moving to higher altitudes,” he said.

“The amount of rain isn’t the same, nor is the amount of sun. Everything about the growing cycle is different. For the sake of our daily lives, we had to find a way to respond to it.” These are the same problems that increasingly confront villages like Shagre’s in Ethiopia and around the globe. But Paru Paru is one of six local communities that have developed a strategy that aims to adapt to climate change, while protecting not just the potato, but the entire area, its people, and their way of life. The communities have declared all their land—in a sense, their lives—a park: the Potato Park. The land has been officially registered and granted park status by the Peruvian

government, which means it’s protected from mining, logging, and other private business interests.

In addition to daily work and family duties, Julian and Serufina lodge visitors and tourists in their home and participate in the park’s efforts to preserve native potatoes. In late September, which is spring in the southern hemisphere and the start of the planting season, Shagre and four Ethiopian academics arrived at the Potato Park to discuss how to deal with climate change. The Ethiopian delegation was hoping to use the park model to develop a similar space for enset in the Gamo Highlands, in Shagre’s village of Doko.

On a clear, windy morning they assembled in park headquarters, a bright adobe and glass structure in the village of Sacaca. And after spending the

Cultural Survival Quarterly

Below: Quechua women in Paru Paru enjoy traditional food as they take a break from working. Photo by Luis Pilares.

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Above: Shangre Shano Shale traveled to Peru to learn how Quechua people are adapting their farming to climate change. He came back with powerful ideas and options.

Right, Belachew Beyene and fellow villagers from Doko work on their fields of enset.

Traditionally, these fields have produced more than enough crops, but climate change is producing dwindling yields.

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morning discussing climate change experiences in each community, the group sat around a large table for morning snack. The Ethiopians were dressed in zippered jackets and hats with wide brims, and the Quechua Potato Park residents in ponchos and knit hats embellished with embroidery and beadwork.

The snack was the core of what these farmers had discussed all morning. And it was a feast: sliced boiled potatoes in a thick sauce of farm cheese and garlic; new potatoes baked and covered in the

Andean herb huacataya; brown bread made with local wheat; bananas and mandarins traded from a lower, warmer part of the valley, and more potatoes. The spread was prepared by a group of local women who run a small restaurant in the park. Shagre sat quietly, a light brown fedora on his head and his wiry grey beard trimmed short and neat.

He regarded the food and the farmers around him for several minutes, and began to speak with the help of his friend and interpreter, Feleke Woldeyes Gamo, a botanist who specializes in enset.

“The most impressive thing for me so far is the way they respect traditions and culture here, in every way,” Shagre said. “In my culture, in the past we had the same relationship, but it’s diminished recently.”

Shagre said a community-run restaurant could be incorporated into the Enset Park they envision in Gamo Highlands. And Feleke added that resource-generating tourism projects are an important incentive for locals to invest in adaptation to climate change. “Creating a park and finding ways to adapt to climate change is just one aspect of this project,” he said. “We must find a variety of ways to make this project appealing and profitable to the people in Shagre’s area, and this [restaurant] is ideal, because enset enters into all kinds of food. Even just wrapping bread in the enset leaves during cooking

adds a wonderful herbal flavor.” Both Feleke and Shagre took second helpings of the young potatoes with huacataya. “I must say, this is a truly impressive snack,” Feleke said. He smiled at his potatoes.

According to the women who run the Potato Park restaurant, Papamanka or “potato pot” in Quechua, local tradition hasn’t always been appreciated. “We’d fallen into the habit of selling all our native products and eating mostly rice and pasta in our own homes,” said Rufina Cruz, who helped prepare the meal. “Now we’re proud to eat this food again, and we’re recovering old ways of preparing it.” Cruz is one of the original members of Papamanka, which started in 2004 with a competition to see who could cook the best mirinday, a local dish of guinea pig, tortilla, meat, cheese, snails, fava beans, peas, and the slender, slightly sweet cousin of the potato, papalisa. It’s a dish for parties and special occasions like the spring planting, a hearty concoction fit for the groups of people who help sow each other’s fields. Like Indigenous communities throughout the Andes and the world, these Quechua communities value reciprocity, or ayni.

Still, the Potato Park is more than just pure ayni.

Here, Indigenous tradition has been combined with the Western world of NGOs and small business. Since the park’s beginnings in 1998, the Cusco-based nonprofit Andes Association has worked with the communities on the construction and realization of the park, which grew out of an inventory of native potato varieties in Chawaytire, one of the other six park communities. That original registry, funded by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, eventually became part of collaboration with Peru’s world-renowned International Center for the Potato, or CIP for its Spanish acronym.

“In our conversations with people about the potato registry, we realized that it could be much bigger,” says Cesar Argumedo, director of the Andes Association. “We say that the entire area could be a reserve, that we could use the concept of a protected area to protect more than just land, but agriculture, Indigenous culture, and an entire way of life. We realized this isn’t just about potatoes, but the entire world that exists around the potato.” The park’s founders had decided that the potato could become a symbol of nourishment, resilience, and cultural sovereignty. “The struggle to preserve the potato,” said Argumedo, “is connected to the struggle of communities all over the globe to protect their agricultural biodiversity and continue feeding themselves, in spite of climate change.”

The project has come at a critical time. Due to

rising temperatures in the region, cold-loving potatoes are growing at elevations up to 600 feet higher than normal, in some cases so high that growing zones approach mountain summits, threatening to eventually disappear altogether. Intense hail, frost, and drought are more common. And rain even falls in unprecedented patterns, sometimes flooding away topsoil and leaving unusually moist conditions. That moisture favors the notorious Phytophthora infestans blight, which has been increasing in both incidence and intensity.

Steeped in traditional knowledge, the villagers knew that the greater the diversity of varieties, the more likely that one or more would survive the new climate. As Argumedo says, Potato Park isn’t about teaching people how to adapt to climate change.

“These communities already have the knowledge to do so, and have been adapting for centuries,” he points out. “This is about supporting them in that process.” It’s just the sort of process Shagre and the cadre of Ethiopian academics hope to emulate—not just to respond to climate change, but to preserve their land and culture. “The Potato Park concept is Cultural Survival Quarterly

Quechua potatoes require cold temperatures, and as the climate has warmed, farmers have been forced to move higher and higher up the mountainsides in search of suitable soil. Photo by Luis Pilares.

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Quechua people have used terraces like these for thousands of years to carve fields from the steep mountainsides. Photo by Luis Pilares.

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to use one crop—in this case, the potato—as a flagship,” said Tesema Tanto, a quiet, intensely polite Ethiopian plant geneticist who was part of the delegation. “In preserving the flagship, you preserve the rest of the environment as well.”

Francesca Bayona was one of the local authorities who received the group at the park’s potato warehouse, a humble adobe building in Paru Paru.

Bayona is one of the papa arariwas, or “guardians of the potato,” a community member respected for her potato knowledge. As Bayona opened the doors of the warehouse, she explained that it now holds more than 410 varieties of native potato—from peruana, known for its ruddy skin and substantial, golden flesh, to the knobby qachun waqachi, which prospective daughter-in-laws must successfully peel before marrying into a family.

Shagre and Feleke wandered through the warehouse, along with Dr. Zerihun Woldu, an Ethiopian professor of plant ecology who led many of the discussions. Inside, the air was cool and smelled of wood smoke, the thin, high-altitude light only slightly illuminating the shadowy interior. The space was lined with rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves full of paper bags of potatoes in stacks. Other potatoes sat in loose piles, some labeled with handwritten tags. It

was a decidedly informal arrangement, compared to what the stock at CIP in Lima must look like, yet it’s also the careful product of more than 20 years of work. “This is involved, but simple; it’s extremely feasible,” said Woldu as he surveyed the space. “It’s exciting to see this warehouse in the community itself, being managed in such a way that local people are not only participating, but actually administering the space.”

The group moved to a nearby greenhouse, recently constructed for potato seedlings. Working in collaboration with CIP scientists, park residents have begun to selectively breed indigenous potatoes for resistance to climate change, isolating plants with the ability to continue adapting to the higher elevations and to withstand unprecedented drought, heavy frost, and the too-abundant rain that nurtures blight. The residents are using these samples to create more resilient varieties.

Below the greenhouse, the Sacred Valley stretched to the horizon. The Ethiopian delegation often remarked that the rolling hills and patchwork of green fields looked startlingly like the mountains of their own Gamo Highlands. And, as they spent time talking and interacting with the Quechua park residents, they increasingly believed that the Potato

Park model could succeed back home. “An important thing is that this is being done with the participation of farmers themselves; it is not something upside down, but starts from the grassroots level,” said Feleke about the Potato Park. “This is a good approach we can make use of.”

The following morning, park farmers and representatives from the Andes Association brought the Ethiopian delegation to the town of Lares, to see a key part of the system of agriculture in the Andes: a trueque market. In trueque, products from different altitudes are exchanged using a system of barter, and Lares is one of the oldest trading posts.

The market started early, while the mountains were just inky silhouettes against the sunrise.

Vendors met to drink cups of hot chocolate from a lower part of the valley and roasted corn from the higher altitudes, and then the market quickly got underway: potatoes and favas swapped for papayas, oranges, and avocados; mustard- and burgundy-colored ears of corn traded for plastic sacks of untoasted coffee and raw cacao. Many of the participants have limited access to hard currency, and this exchange is their main economy.

The visitors circulated around the market with a

sack of potatoes; Shagre was especially intent on collecting some Andean corn, so unlike the varieties he’s accustomed to in Ethiopia. Before the market, Shagre and the rest of the delegation had been having breakfast in a small restaurant. They were set to return to Ethiopia in a few days time, and were beginning to contemplate just how they would begin to build an enset park. While many spoke of funding and planning, Shagre was concerned about how to introduce the idea itself. “My main worry in constructing a park for the enset is youth. The elders are always concerned about our traditions, but the youngsters, they want to forget it, they want to flee away,” said Shagre. “But we have to find a way to involve them, or we won’t be able to preserve the enset.”

The next day, 29-year-old Ricardo Paccu Chipa pointed out that the Potato Park changed a similar trend in the Sacred Valley. “We youth have been a challenge here too,” said Paccu between meetings, playing with the ribbons of his ch’ullo hat while he thought. Below a vibrantly colored poncho, he wore plain trousers and running shoes. “I started working with the park project when I was 23,” he said. “Back then, tradition didn’t mean much to me; if anything,

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I was a bit ashamed of it. Now, I’m directly involved in recovering and appreciating our customs and values. I travel abroad in traditional dress, and I feel truly proud of where I’m from. Surely this is something that will translate into the experience of the Ethiopian communities,” said Paccu. “And I hope we can continue to support them and exchange experiences as they continue with their park.”

Shagre echoed Paccu, clearly intent on bringing all the information gleaned by the delegation back to his community. “When I go back, I will first confer with the elders; through them [the news] can go through society, and hopefully that will make the youth feel concerned about their tradition and culture,” says Shagre. His thirty-two grandchildren are among dozens of youth in Doko.

On his first day back at home, Shagre kept his word. Sitting in the courtyard in Doko, he described his trip to an eager audience. The other leaders in attendance—including Meresho Megaro, a village hudouga, or senior community leader, and Endala Tilbe, an ade, or spiritual leader—flanked Shagre as he spoke. They deferred to Shagre, who was visibly tired, still recovering from the long trip, and they were excited by his initial reports. “We have no more than two varieties of enset [in our fields] in Doko,” said Ade Endala Tilbe, noting that about a dozen regional varieties have fallen out of use. “But Shagre saw about 300 varieties of potatoes in Peru. If we make an inventory and see who has what type, we [could] re-establish the inventory of enset types that existed on the land.”

For now, the idea of emulating Potato Park is a dream. But down a nearby dirt road, at the regional government’s agronomy center in Chencha, scientists have now preserved nine traditional types of enset from the area. And nine hours away in the capital Addis Ababa, the scientists who traveled with Shagre are busy working on the logistical and financial parts of the enset park proposal. Like any other ambitious plan, this one must deal with a host of external variables; but its success will depend on community members like the people assembled here in Doko.

Next door to the discussion, the women continued their work party. On the ground sat a pan of grey sediment derived from enset; it’s the makings of itema, whose many uses include the gelatin served to new mothers. A top layer of water had been removed to make laundry detergent. Leftover fibrous material would be mixed with the root to make ountcha, the base for bread, fried dumplings, and many other dishes. The coarse stems would be used in building materials and other products. Later, some of the women would fill a biodegradable

enset-chord backpack with manure and straw fertilizer, which they carried to the fields. Their male counterparts, singing their own work songs, then ploughed this mixture into the earth to plant hatso, enset seedlings.

“Climate change has gotten worse in my community,” said Shagre. “But if we work harder, it wont be that difficult to regain [enset varieties] and preserve their seeds, their type,” he said. “I am ready to practice what I saw in Peru.”

Laird Townsend, who was based in Ethiopia for this story, is a Massachusetts-based freelance journalist specializing in indigenous issues and climate change. A former editor at Orion magazine, he now directs the media nonprofit Project Word, a project of the Tides Center.

Annie Murphy, who traveled to Peru for this story, is a freelance journalist based in South America. She regularly contributes to National Public Radio, and her writing has been published in The Nation and The Virginia Quarterly Review.

Left: The wide variety of potatoes grown by Quechuas provide a diversity of flavors, uses, and growing conditions—all the product of deliberate genetic manipulation by Quechua farmers over thousands of years. That broad stock of characteristics may provide the necessary resilience for the people to adapt to changing climates while keeping their traditions.

Above: Julian Quispes and Shangre Shano Shale listen to a discussion about potato preservation and the mechanics of creating a park. Photos

by Luis Pilares.

Support for this piece was provided by The Christensen Fund, a San Francisco-based foundation focusing on biocultural resilience and indigenous issues. The foundation was also one of the sponsors the intercultural gathering described in this story.

For a related photo essay on enset preservation, see www.conversationsearth.org.

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MOUNTAIN HOME

By David Ducoin

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The village of Huilloc is home to about 200 traditional Quechua families living in stone-andthatch houses at 12,000 feet in the Peruvian Andes north of Ollantaytambo, near Machu Picchu.

Typical of many traditional Quechua communities, daily life in Huilloc revolves around farming and weaving. The main crops are potatoes—some 140 varieties—and beans, which the people of Huilloc trade for corn with communities at lower elevations. The crops are grown on terraced fields cut into the steep mountainsides, where the farmers, like others in the Andes, are finding that warming climate is

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Above: Andean farmers have developed more than 5,000 varieties of potato over centuries, giving them options that may help them adapt to climate change.

Right: Each Quechua village has its own distinctive style of clothing. Here, Sémon Husca is wearing the hat and poncho style of Huilloc village.

Previous: The potato fields for many Quechua villages are high above the village iteslf.

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forcing them ever higher up the mountains to find cold enough weather to support their potatoes. The village’s life revolves largely around the growing season, which is also the rainy season, running from September to May. All the work in the fields—plowing, planting, turning fallow soil, harvesting the crops, is done by hand, using very basic tools.

During the dry season, the men often work as guides and porters on the Inca Trail.

The weaving of Huilloc women, from the wool of their llamas and alpacas, is very highly regarded and traded at the weekly market for pots and pans, farming tools, and other items they cannot produce themselves. The community is home to the Textiles Revitalization School, where elder weavers teach younger women the art of using a backstrap loom and making traditional textiles. The school is a project of the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco,

which itself was a special project of Cultural Survival (it’s now a freestanding nonprofit organization). The Cusco center works with nine communities in the region, helping them preserve and revive traditional Quechua weaving and textiles.

Each year, the weavers of Huilloc and all the other communities in the valley gather together to dye the year’s supply of wool—a labor- and time-intensive task that is more economical (and enjoyable) when it’s done en masse.

In the photos that follow, French photographer David Ducoin documents weaving and farming in Huilloc.

David Ducoin’s photographs of the Mapuche people appeared in the spring 2010 issue of Cultural Survival. For more of his work, see his website, www.tribuducoin.com.

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Left: The backstrap loom that these women are using has remained essentially unchanged for thousands of years.

It is anchored by two sticks on the far end, and tension is maintained by strap around the weaver’s back. Guinea pigs are mainstays of the Quechua diet and have the run of the house.

Right: Paublina feeds corn to her chickens in of her house in Huilloc.

Below: An assortment of foods available at the weekly Huilloc market includes coca leaves, beans, several potato varieties, and Andean corn.

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Above: The patterns on Huilloc weaving are all traditional, and each form and pattern has a meaning. The wool is dyed with plant colors, a process that is done communally by all the villages in the valley.

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Above, right: Some of Huilloc’s alpacas.

Alpaca wool is especially soft, with very high insulation values, making it perfect for high-altitude clothing.

Below, right: This stone and thatch house is typical of many Quechua villages, sturdy enough to withstand mountain storms. Some houses in Huilloc are adobe with tile roofs, the other style common in Quechua villages.

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Above: Lucia Meloq spins alpaca wool into yarn using a puchka, or drop spindle. Quechua learn spinning as children, and someone with Lucia’s experience can produce a wide variety of yarns with consummate skill.

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Right: Victoria’s chapped cheeks are the result of the cold, high environment she lives in. Huilloc is about 12,000 feet above sea level in the ecological zone called the suni (Quechuas live higher than any other people, up to 17,000 feet). Children in Quechua villages are generally treated like adults, and expected to take responsibility early. They tend to be well adjusted, too, with few of the adolescent issues faced by children in industrialized cultures.

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Left: People dance at the Huilloc elementary school’s annual festival.

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WHAT WE’RE DOING WITH YOUR MONEY 40

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GLOBAL RESPONSE Our campaign to stop a Chinese nickel mine from dumping toxic waste into the ocean off Madang, Papua New Guinea, has been something of a roller coaster ride. We launched our letterwriting campaign, which many of you participated in, but it soon became clear that the situation required more support. The Indigenous communities have brought suit against the mine, asking for an injunction, but their case is being handled by a single lawyer with very limited resources, so we helped her find funding so she can bring international marine scientists to court. Then, on September 21, the first day of the trial, the Rai Coast plaintiffs didn’t show up, and it was soon discovered that the mining company had “persuaded” them to abandon the case. Paid thugs hired by the mining company directly threatened the lives of the three men and their families. The company also sent threatening letters to local government authorities, warning of dire consequences if the communities blocked the ocean-dumping plan. Despite death threats, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Tiffany Nonggorr, quickly found another plaintiff to carry on the case. Thirty-seven more people are seeking to join the suit.

The new plaintiff, Louis Medaing, a leader of the Tong and Ongeg clans, has reported threats against him and his clans since the day he filed his case, and on October 12 he sued the mining company for contempt of court. “My family and clan members have been put under intense pressure by the mine owners…to discontinue the court case,” he said. Company representatives told him that if he proceeds with the trial, all Tong and Ongeg clan members employed by the mining company will be fired. For now, the trial and the contempt hearings are temporarily delayed while lawyers on both sides adjust to the change in the plaintiffs.

In Panama, our campaign to persuade the government to rescind recently passed laws is also showing progress.The three laws put severe limitations on public protest, excuse police from human rights violations, release industries from filing environmental impact statements, and override traditional Indigenous methods of choosing their leaders.The letters that you wrote made a difference: the president of Panama agreed in October to revoke Law #30, the most egregious of the three laws. We’re now increasing our pressure on him to revoke the other two.

In Kenya, our campaign to stop police violence against Samburu villages has continued to bear fruit. In response to our documentation of that abuse, a Kenyan organization has initiated trainings for police who are sent to Samburu East district. Michael Tiampati, national coordinator of the Pastoralists Development Network of Kenya, reports that many of the police officers “ are ignorant because of stereotypes…They are transferred to this area and they want to convert pastoralists to suit their imagined ‘civilised’ society. So we told them of the need to respect the people's social-cultural-economic and religious way of life because their job is to ensure security of persons and property but not to convert communities.”

Tiampati reports that his trainings for Administrative and Kenya Police forces have been “very successful.” They were opened by the Samburu East District Commissioner, and they focused on Kenya’s new constitution which contains strong safeguards against abuse of power, as well as regional and international human rights standards on policing and the rights of citizens. Tiampati says the officers were receptive, and they “acknowledged that their actions have not met the required human rights standards.” They indicated, however, that their orders came “from above,” which underscores the need for continued pressure to be applied to the highest government officials.

Tiampati said the trainees accepted that they have not shown respect to the Samburu communities and that the police proposed joint (community & police) training in the villages to create harmony and develop good working relations. The Pastoralists Development Network of Kenya is now seeking resources to implement these trainings.

People in Papua New Guinea march to protest the recent law that shields corporations from responsibility for any kind of environmental or social damage their operations cause. Photo courtesy of Ramu Bismarck Group.

ENDANGERED LANGUAGES PROGRAM In June 2011, Cultural Survival will again coordinate the National Native Language Revitalization Summit at the Smithsonian Institute. In conjunction with the summit, Cultural Survival will partner with Advocates for California Indigenous Language Survival to operate a two-week training program called the National Breath of Life Institute. These trainings sessions will help 40 Native language advocates learn how to find and use the material stored in the National Archives and the Library of Congress on their languages.

Last year Cultural Survival helped language partner the Sauk Language Department apply for and receive a substantial grant from the federal Administration for Native Americans. And the Sauk program has been putting the money to good use. They exceeded all benchmarks for both language learning hours (240 per quarter) and second-language learners’ proficiency improvements.

Cultural Survival program officer Jennifer Weston participated in a federal Head Start consultation session, to help the government direct more Head Start money to Native language programs.

She also submitted a formal resolution titled Declaring Native American Languages in a State of Emergency to the National Congress of American Indians in collaboration with the National Alliance to Save Native Languages. The goal is to get the National Congress of American Indians to pressure President Obama to sign an executive order offering more support for language programs.

Cultural Survival also helped craft the executive order.

GUATEMALA RADIO PROJECT Since mid-August, the Guatemala Radio Project staff and radio station volunteers have been participating in a series of street protests aimed at moving the community radio bill to a vote in Congress. The bill, which would fully legalize the community radio stations, was introduced and moved out of committee over the summer, but the Congress has failed to bring it to a vote, largely because of the influence of some major commercial radio stations. These stations fear competition from the community stations, a concern that is in fact baseless.The most recent of the protests, on Columbus Day, produced some very heartening results: the president promised to hold a series of roundtable discussions with government officials, community radio representatives, Cultural Survival staff, and representatives of the commercial radio stations association. The goal of the talks is to resolve the commercial stations’ concerns and move the community radio bill to a vote as soon as possible.

The Dwellers of the Valley A community profile from West Bengal

By Lyansong Tamsang come from a peasant family, and my forefathers were farmers. I was born and grew up in a hilly jungle hamlet hemmed in by bamboo, ferns, and tall deb daru (conifer) trees that change colors throughout the day. Our Lepcha village, called Lower Bom (“Bom” means “flower bud” in the Lepcha language), lies about 10 miles from the hill towns of Darjeeling and Kalimpong in India’s West Bengal state. In the far distance, the landscape blurs into the mist over Mount Kanchenjunga—the great peak that forms a backdrop for our tribal villages.

Our vast valley breaks into wavy grasslands that spread along the banks of two rushing streams, the Rangeet and the Teesta, which meet at Pasok, in the foothills of Kalimpong.

When I was a child, my father would wake me up early in the morning to prepare me for a long

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Above: Khecopalri Lake is one of the most sacred sites for Lepcha people. Here the lake is surrounded by prayer flags. Photo by Black Vanilla.

Right: A typical Lepcha house overlooks a valley.

Photo by Pushpak Banerjee.

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walk up the high Himalayan valley to a distant crop field, where he worked to make our living. Getting out of the bed in the wee hours was not that bad, because my father was an inveterate storyteller. I knew that dozens of folktales were waiting to be told as we passed the poor Lepcha tribal homes of Lower Bom village.

My father would stop at Pasok for a while to rest.

Then, looking up at the streams, he would start a song, “Rangnyoo-Rangeet,” which narrates the story of the wild hill-bird Toot Pho and the mountain snake Paril Bu, who were best friends. Everyday, they’d see each other and talk about the unhappy isolation of the two streams. The two friends wanted the streams to fall in love and merge together into one eternal river. The streams listened to their wishes and ended up joining together, although they kept

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Below: Lepcha people have their own writing system, which, according to Lepcha belief, was created by the scholar Thikúng Men Salóng in the 18th century. Many Lepcha stories and historic accounts are stored in their books. Photo by Hceebee.

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the blue and grey of their waters separate, like a beautiful lady’s two strands of hair. We, too, have mingled with a great stream of people, yet we retain our identity as an Indigenous tribal community.

Recently, Western lifestyle and a large-scale influx of people from southern Nepal and Bhutan have been changing our people and our culture. Day by day, the place has become more and more crowded, and an assimilation of our people is taking place. We see political boundaries being created. Although we are basically peace-loving people, and our ancient tribal rituals coexist with different religious faiths like Buddhism and Christianity, we’ve started asserting our community aspirations, because our traditional tribal nature is getting marginalized economically and culturally. This is our situation.

Bom is a farmers’ village. Our family still owns a small strip of ancestral cropland. The main crops that we grow are rice, maize, a wide variety of vegetables, and apples. I live with my wife and two sons. My wife looks after the land. We follow our traditional agriculture and we use organic fertilizers. We would never use chemical fertilizers to grow high-yielding crops.

Almost 99 percent of the people that live in 120 villages here in the Kalimpong area at an altitude of 5,000 to 7,000 feet are subsistence farmers who plow their family plots to grow some crops for day-to-day consumption. The farmers don’t sell their crops in the market; they depend on small land holdings and can’t produce enough crops for the open market.

The average yield from these plots is inadequate to sustain a family throughout the year, so economically these families are very poor indeed. What is more, the recent dry monsoon years make things even worse. Then the farmers eat practically anything, like wild roots or creepers.

Lepcha children must speak Nepalese or English in government schools, so the Lepchas are not a well-educated people. As a result, our tribesmen are virtually excluded from all kinds of developmental work. They live like a poor linguistic minority without basic amenities and entitlements. We do not have electricity, drinking water sources, and a regular source of livelihood. Because there is practically no electric power in these remote villages, we use kerosene lanterns at night, but the kerosene is not al-

ways cheap or freely available. Above all else, we find it hard today to preserve our culture, customs, and language. As a result, our people of this hilly region have hardly any options. They must depend on the people who live in the plains for all kinds of day-today needs, including food and water.

Despite the fact that the Lepcha people of northeast India were recognized as an Indigenous tribe by United Nations Charter 309, our tribal community now lives like a minority in our own land. According to the 1991 census, the number of Lepcha speakers in India stood at 39,342, but the government has totally ignored our Native language, which has its own unique script. Our culture is being attacked from the outside. Our children can’t cope with foreign cultures and languages, so in West Bengal, we are lagging behind in all walks of life. The linguistic minorities like the Lepchas are losing ground.

Nobody pays any heed to what we are saying.

We are trying to address the lack of education and poverty in our tribal society. For instance, we are running six drinking-water projects in these villages, and we are doing it all by ourselves. We have submitted a petition to the government of India to recognize the ancient Lepcha language. The local government in West Bengal always swears that it honors and respects the Native languages, but it has done precious little to support them. The minority languages, including Lepcha, have not been introduced in our local schools.

So, instead of waiting for government support to revive our cultural tradition and to keep our language alive, we have opened our own Lepcha schools. So far, we have started 44 Lepcha night schools. These are cultural centers, where our children teach our traditions to foreigners, who in turn also teach English and literature to the children.

In 2003, the UK-based nonprofit Africa and Asia Cultural Survival Quarterly

Because the Lepcha homeland is increasingly being occupied by other peoples, Lepcha culture is at risk, and it’s more important than ever that children like these have those traditions reinforced.

Photo by Baronvonhorne.

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Right: Tibetan Buddhism is an important factor in Lepcha lives, and the Mangan monastery pictured here is central to them.

Photo by Amal Biswas.

Opposite page: In recent years the Lepcha have been standing up for their rights, and winning important victories for the preservation of their land and sacred sites, giving children like these a much brighter future. Photo

by Amal Biswas.

Venture first started the Gap Year teaching program in eight Lepcha villages in Kalimpong. Under a fourmonth-long program, teenage students from Britain and Belgium—who have just completed secondary school—come for stays in Kalimpong villages to learn about Lepcha culture. They stay in cottages as paying guests, eat home-cooked meals, and help their Lepcha family hosts in cooking, milking, and plowing land. Along with learning Lepcha songs, dances, and poems, some may try archery, which is one of the ancient games of the Lepcha tribe. Some of these foreign students compiled the LepchaEnglish Encyclopedic Dictionary. During the morning and evening hours, the foreign students teach English to Lepcha children and young adults.

I am the president of the Lepcha Indigenous Tribal Association of Kalimpong, which represents the Indigenous voice of the Lepcha people, our culture, and language. My father, Sambo Chrising 46

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Tamsang, was the panyasm (tribal chief) of our community and the founding president of the association. Our goal is to unite the community so that we can protect our ethnicity and cultural identity.

Lepcha language speakers originally were one the Indigenous tribes of the Sikkim state in North East India. They are now living in different parts of the country and the world, especially North Sikkim and Nepal. In December of 2009, we had a mass gathering at Kalimpong on the occasion of the 227th birth anniversary of our king Gyabu Achok. At this ceremony, with more than 20,000 Lepchas present from different parts of the country, we took an oath to preserve our ancient language and culture. We celebrated our traditions, wearing our colorful tribal clothes and ornaments.

In addition to farming the land for a living, I have tried to educate myself. I have learned the English language. I edit two bilingual Lepcha magazines,

Aachuley and Pano Gaebu Achyok. We publish articles on Lepcha language and culture and get contributions from different parts of the world. These days, I spend most of my time editing books in the Lepcha language and editing the magazines.

Additionally, I help my Lepcha people to understand their roots, language, and culture.

Our tradition has it that there was an ancient land called ne mayel lyang (“the hidden paradise”) in the highlands of the Himalayan mountains, where lived the peace-loving children of the mountains who called themselves mu-tanchi-rongkup rumkup, (the “children of the Rong and of God”). The Lepchas also refer themselves as rongpas, (“the dwellers of the valley”). My forefathers were farmers, but, they had another identity. They were warriors, too, who were engaged in protecting our land and its people from invaders. History holds that the Gorkhas invaded our land in 1760, and these Lepcha warriors joined a great battle to keep the invaders away. Even today, we are very serious about protecting our damsangs or the fortified places where our ancient security guards used to fight against the invaders.

In recent times, we have made a great move to preserve Dzongu, our holy place of worship, which we refer to as Kaokaram Faokram (the origin of

Lepcha existence). Dzongu is where God created Nazaong (the first Lepcha man) and Nyooking (the first Lepcha woman). Located in North Sikkim in India, Dzongu is the destination of an annual Lepcha pilgrimage. The region has plenty of sacred sites: caves where Guru Rinpoche meditated, the Keshong Lake, the Kongsa hot springs, and the Tholung temple, which is not only revered by Lepchas, but by all the Buddhists of Sikkim. Dzongu represents the last bastion of the Lepcha cultural heritage and the only place where we feel free to follow our distinctive cultural and religious traditions.

All Lepchas were deeply disturbed when we heard that 26 hydropower projects were to be built on our holy place of worship. Our Indigenous community members and other concerned nongovernment organizations actively opposed the projects, fasting for days. As a result, the government of Sikkim shelved four of the projects. For the Lepcha people, this was quite an achievement, and a sample of what we hope to accomplish in the future.

For more on the Lepcha people and links to Lyansong Tamsang’s magazines, visit the Cultural Survival website, www.cs.org. This article is based on an interview conducted by freelance writer Biswajit Chakraborti.

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TATA NOAH A PERUVIAN

FAMILY TALE

By Juan Esteban Yupanqui Villalobos (Túpac Isaac II) e was not very tall, but he was considered more Indigenous that other people from our country. His skin was almost white, like a Creole’s, and his eyes were the color of the sky.

Some of his children took the same eye color. He was my Tata Noah, the grandfather of my father, chief of Indigenous communities of Mollepata and Mollebamba. He was always working, whether in the fields that the villagers had dedicated to him, or at home using our machine to make ice cream with fruit. It was what I liked best as a child; the frozen fruit was so diverse and delicious. I always remember my grandfather Noah in the largest room of the house, with his ice cream maker.

The favorite of all Tata Noah’s children was my grandfather, his eldest son, who followed the tradition of our ancestors and married his first cousin, who gave birth to my father. I became his favorite when I was born.

I heard my Mamacona Herlinda say that Tata Noah cried when I was born because I was bleeding in the eye. He went into the hills for several weeks to conduct a ceremony to the ancestors and to ask our Apus (spiritual leaders) to heal me of what I was born with. He was gone for a month, and when he returned, he was very emaciated by fasting for his beloved grandson, but he was happy because the coca leaf had indicated to him that it was a sign: It was the beginning of the era of the condor, and this knowledge is a legacy, known only to the elect people of panakas, transmitted from generation to generation as a duty.

My friend was named Yume, which means, "He who keeps the sacred." I gave him another name: Tachito, because of his stooped and silent gait, and he always called me "Child." I do not know why.

After that, all the people called me "the Child." Why could they not call me by my name, like everyone else? When we went down to the communities where my Mamacona Herlinda had her fields, all the people there called me "The Child." Every morning a man named Eulalia brought me milk from alpacas,

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His body had the smell of flowers and he had a big smile.

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and I would drink it still warm. He would say, "My daughter Herlinda, I brought this milk for the Child." And then she took us to the kitchen, where we were invited to eat the cushalito, a potato soup with spices.

My Tata Noah was old, but was always was traveling to the Apus of the Cordillera Blanca to bring ice from the glacier make the ice cream. He would leave the town of Santiago with his herd of llamas, donkeys, and horses to bring the ice down. It was a beautiful sight: my Tata with his particular attire: his poncho brown with gold edging out, hurrying toward the snowcapped mountains. All the people from the town would face toward Cabracay to see him off, waving.

My grandfather walked with a very long stick adorned with many allegories. Tata Noah told me long ago that it represented our true nation, which was all unknown, because many of those living in the village had given in to the viciousness of the white people and did not follow the customs of our fathers. That hurt my Tata, so when I arrived, he ever and ever told me many things and stories of our nation, which was not recognized by the whites. He made me grab the big stick of authority as chief Apu, symbolizing the only legacy we had for our nations, and he told me that I had to realize their dreams because his body would turn to dust again.

The day he left this world is a painful memory.

His body had the smell of flowers and he had a big smile. I did not get the big stick of our nations, because I thought at the time that it should remain in the hands of my great grandfather, because our nations were still slaves in the Western world. I only said, “Goodbye, Tata Noah.”

Juan Esteban Yupanqui Villalobos is a direct descendant of the Inca’s Panaca of Tupac Yupanqui, ruler of Tawantisuyu. He was arrested and jailed as belonging to armed rebel groups for helping Indigenous communities in Jaén and San Ignacio defend their forests from international logging concessions, but was eventually released when the charges could not be proved. His poetry has been published in several languages, and he maintains his own website at http://juanestebanyupanqui.blogspot.com/

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34/3 Gold on Hold 2010.

34/2 Young, Aboriginal, Missing 2010.

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33/4 Showdown in Peru 2009.

33/3 Native Women’s Hidden Reality 2009.

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33/1 A Celebration of Pacific Culture 2009.

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32/2 Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples 2008.

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31/4 Sudan in Flux 2007.

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❏ 28/2 Worlds Transformed Indigenous Peoples’ Health in Changing Rainforests 2004. ❏ 28/1 Indigenous Lands or National Parks? 2004. ❏ 27/4 Indigenous Education and the Prospects for Cultural Survival 2004. ❏ 27/3 Models of Sovereignty and Survival in Alaska 2003. ❏ 27/2 Shamanisms and Survival 2003. ❏ 27/1 The Troubled Taiga The Last Nomadic Reindeer Herders of South Siberia, Mongolia, and China 2003. ❏ 26/4 Indigenous Responses to Plan Colombia 2002. ❏ 26/3 Melanesia: The Future of Tradition 2002. ❏ 26/1 The Kalahari San 2002. ❏ 25/4 Maroons in The Americas 2002. ❏ 25/3 From Our Readers 2001. ❏ 25/2 Endangered Languages, Endangered Lives 2001. ❏ 25/1 Mining Indigenous Lands Can Impacts and Benefits be Reconciled? 2001. ❏ 24/4 Intellectual Property Rights Culture as Commodity 2001. ❏ 24/2 Rethinking Childhood Perspectives on Children’s Rights 2000. ❏ 24/1 Problems in Paradise: Sovereignty in the Pacific 2000.

❏ 23/4 Visions of the Future: The Prospect for Reconciliation 2000. ❏ 23/2 Protecting Indigenous Culture and Land through Eco-tourism 1999. ❏ 22/4 Uprooted: Dispossession in Africa 1999. ❏ 22/2 Aboriginal Media, Aboriginal Control 1998. ❏ 22/1 Reclaiming Native Education Activism, Teaching and Leadership 1998. ❏ 21/4 The Internet and Indigenous Groups 1998. ❏ 21/3 25 Years of the Indigenous Movement: Africa and Asia 1997. ❏ 21/2 25 Years of the Indigenous Movement: The Americas and Australia 1997. ❏ 21/1 Museums and Indigenous Cultures: The Power of Local Knowledge 1997. ❏ 20/3 “Who’s Local Here?”: The Politics of Participation in Development 1996. ❏ 19/3 Culture, Resources and Conflict: Challenging Assumptions 1996. ❏ 19/2 Nationalism in Eastern Europe Nations, States and Minorities 1995. ❏ 16/3 Speaking for Ourselves 1992. ❏ 15/2 Western Oceania Caring for the Ancestral Domain 1991. ❏ 14/4 Land and Resources 1990.

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Since time immemorial, the Huichol people have made a 300 mile pilgrimage to conduct ceremonies at their sacred sites. They need our help to prevent Canadian mining company from desecrating the place where the sun was born. See our campaign alert on page 17.