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Guyana

In Guyana, Indigenous Peoples Fight to Join Conservation Efforts

Beginning in 1995, the government of Guyana in collaboration with the World Bank began pursuing plans to establish a National System of Protected Areas (NPAS). The idea was to establish 10 protected areas representative of the country’s ecosystems.

New Amerindian Rights Center Advocates for Indigenous Peoples of Guyana

As of March 29, 2000, citizens in Guyana have had access to legal representation provided by the first-ever facility of its kind, the Center for Amerindian Rights and Environmental Law. The center was created through a collaboration between the Guyanese Amerindian Peoples Association and The Rainforest Foundation in partnership with one of Guyana's leading lawyers, Melinda Janki. The center will offer communities a comprehensive range of services and training, with the goal of protecting their basic rights as well as an environment that is increasingly threatened by mining and logging.

Our Land, Our Life, Our Culture: The Indigenous Movement In Guyana

One of the strategies which Indigenous peoples have employed effectively to bind people together politically is a strategy which asks that people imagine a future, that they rise above present day situations which are generally depressing, dream a new dream and set a new vision. The confidence of knowing that we have survived and can only go forward provides some impetus to a process of envisioning.

The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion

The eighteen essays in this weighty tome provide much new information about a region that at one time had sufficient stature to be the cause of general European wars. Stretching from the Virgin Islands in the north to Trinidad and Aruba in the south, the Caribbean's Lesser Antilles were once the scene of the most advanced economic enterprises in the world. In the 1700s and 1800s hundreds of thousands of the eleven million slaves stolen out of Africa arrived in the Americas at tiny transit ports like Dutch St.

The Caribs of Dominica: Land Rights and Ethnic Consciousness

The last survivors of the once-powerful Carib people, the original inhabitants of most of the Lesser Antilles, now live on the two eastern Caribbean islands of Dominica and St. Vincent, and in Belize, Guyana, and Suriname. The Caribs' existence today, five centuries after the voyages of Christopher Columbus, is living testimony to their bold resolve to survive and to resist European colonial onslaught. The rugged terrain of both Dominica and St. Vincent provided the ideal conditions for protracted warfare against British and French incursions into what used to be their peaceful domain.

The Hagahai: Isolation and Health Status in Papua New Guinea

The Hagahai are a recently contacted group of seminomadic hunter-horticulturalists living in the fringe highlands of Madang Province in Papua New Guinea. Although occasional explorers and miners probably walked through their territory in the Schrader Mountains as early as the 1930s and several attempts were made to census them during the 1970s, the Hagahai effectively remained hidden from mission and government influence until the 1980s.

Indian Girls Make the Best Maids

FOR more than thirty years, the Amuesha Indian community of Miraflores (Oxapampa, Peru) has provided young girls as servants to neighboring haciendas and the homes of the region's lumber barons. During the past ten years, as the demand for servants in the urban areas has grown, more and more Amuesha girls have been taken to Lima to work in middle class homes.

THE AKAWAIO

The status of the Upper Mazaruni Hydro-electric project is still unknown. If completed, this project could lead to the relocation of some 4000 Indians in Guyana's Rupinuni region.

There are four reasons why the project is in question. The World Bank has commissioned an independent study of the hydro-electric potential of various sites in Guyana. The findings from this report will be available by July, 1982. Bank sources express doubt that the Upper Mazaruni site at Sand Landing will be ranked first. If it is, however, the World Bank would attempt to fund the project.

WORLD: Human Rights Council replaces enfeebled Commission

Date: 03/29/2006

On March 15, the United Nations General Assembly voted 170–4 to create a new Human Rights Council, effectively dissolving the oft-criticized Commission on Human Rights. Candidates for the Council will need to be elected by an absolute majority of 96 votes in order to secure a position, and once elected members can serve a maximum of two consecutive terms.

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