David

Are there indigenous peoples in Africa? Not in the sense that there clearly are in the Americas or in Australia, namely peoples who occupied their territories before outsiders from another continent moved in on them. One might say that all black Africans were indigenous during the colonial era, when they were subject to white domination, but even that generalization was challenged by white South Africans who claimed that they had occupied what was literally a no man's land before black Africans moved into it from the north.

Rwanda is the most densely populated country in Africa. And in 1994, as we all know, Rwanda was also e site of a horrific genocide, in which over half a million people were killed in less than three months.

According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, at least 10,000 protected areas have been designated to conserve our planet's natural environment. As Stevens points out in the first chapter, 5,000 indigenous peoples with a population of 600 million, "...today inhabit, and claim as traditional homelands, at least 20% of the earth's surface...four to six times more territory than is encompassed within the entire global protected area system." Most protected areas cover regions which have been or continue to be the traditional territories of indigenous peoples.

To many people the term `subsistence' connotes barely eking out an existence, a marginal and generally miserable way of life. That is not, however, the standard dictionary definition of the term, nor is it the way in which the word is used in Alaska. In Alaska, `subsistence' has come to stand for a class of hunting and fishing rights that, under federal and state laws, has enjoyed a legal preference superior to competition sport, commercial, and personal use rights. For Alaska Natives, subsistence also became a political and cultural rallying cry some years before it became a law.

In Alaska, Native peoples and immigrants have a second chance to avoid the terrible mistakes made elsewhere in the U.S.

Imagine waking up one morning to discover you can no logner understand the world around you. Imagine turning on the radio or the television, only to hear the news reported in a foreign language. Imagine hearing your children suddenly speak a strange tongue. Imagine your friends and colleagues discussing issues and events you know nothing about. Imagine trying to communicate. Imagine how disorienting, frustrating, and isolating this would be.

In America, we worry and argue a great deal about the effects of television in our homes and in our society. We fear that it distorts our elections, glamorizes violence, and all too often subverts the values that we cherish. Above all, we are uneasy about the insidious power of the media to influence us in spite of ourselves. Imagine then how indigenous minorities feel, in the United States and elsewhere, when they experience the power of the media for the first time.

One of the most enduring myths about indigenous peoples is that they wish to isolate themselves from the rest of the world in order to cling to archaic ways of life.

We hear a lot about the "world system" these days, especially since the implosion of the former Soviet Union has enhanced the idea that we do all inhabit one world after all. North Korea, perhaps the only unregenerate communist state still left, is literally dying of starvation. The rest of us, whether we live in America or China, are trying to get used to a new world dominated by multinational corporations operating in a climate of privatization and free markets, aided and abetted by the twin revolutions in communication and information technology.

Twenty five years ago it was widely assumed that indigenous peoples were dying out; that they were either being physically extinguished by disease and the savage onslaughts of the modem world or that they were abandoning their indigenous identities and disappearing into the mainstream of the societies that surrounded them. This assumption was quite wrong.

The idea of gathering things, normally beautiful things, together and putting them on display is very old. Babylonian kings had their private collections in the sixth century BC. The emperors of China and royal personages in other parts of the world certainly had collections of their own. The idea of a museum, however, comes to us from the Greek word museion, which did not originally refer to a collection. Instead it indicated a seat of the muses, a place for philosophical contemplation or for artistic performances.

To be human is to make music, and the music we make says a great deal about who we are or, at least, who we think we are. That is why music is not just humanity's way of banishing the eternal and terrifying silence of the universe.

Indigenous peoples have for centuries suffered at the hands of those who conquered their territories.

From the very beginning America has been about religious freedom. That is why the puritans came to these shores. That is why we insist on the separation between church and state - because people should be free to worship as they choose without permission from or consultation with any authority other than their own consciences.

The Ditidaht First Nation from the west coast of Vancouver Island is using geographic information systems to predict where ancient habitation sites and culturally modified trees may be located.

A new spectre is haunting the world - the fear of ethnic conflict and of the ethnic cleansing to which it seems to lead. The end of the cold war, the reunification of Germany, the emergency of a new South Africa, even the cautions steps towards peace between Israel and its neighbors would have seemed like miracles ten years ago. Now our relief seems to be dissipated by the gloomy prospect of worldwide carnage and ethnic unrest. Is this to be new world dis-order?

Ethnic conflict is not a given, either in our genes or in our cultures. How then do we account for the atrocities that flicker daily in our TV news reports?

This special issue of Cultural Survival Quarterly features selections from our forthcoming book, State of the Peoples: A Global Human Rights Report on Societies in Danger, to be published by Beacon Press in September 1993. Cultural Survival has built up an international network of scholars and specialists who help us document what is happening to threatened societies.