28.4 (Winter 2004) Women the World Must Hear

Cultural Survival Quarterly: Can you tell us about the path that brought you to the United Nations?

Stella Tamang:

We are mountain people. I am the first person from my tribe to get a formal education.

Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship & Empowering Communities
By Devon Abbot Mihesuah & Angela Cavender Wilson
University of Nebraska Press 2004
ISBN 0-8032-8292-3

The Peoples of Mpimbwe Fund celebrated the opening of two of its inaugural projects this summer and has begun planning for a third in the Mpimbwe Division of Tanzania.

On March 10, Stella Tamang participated in a special workshop on the participation of indigenous women in conflict prevention, management, and resolution and post-conflict peace building. Tamang, of Nepal, is the chair of the Indigenous Womens Caucus of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the chair of the South Asia Indigenous Women Forum, and an adviser of the Nepal Tamang Women Ghedung. The workshop was organized in conjunction with the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.

Four hundred years after Champlain sailed up Maine’s St. Croix River, another ship is coming. Its impact threatens to be as deadly to the indigenous people of the coastal Wabanaki region as small pox was in 1600. Life on this bay can be traced back 12,000 years.

The violation of indigenous rights in the process of national development, particularly in dam construction projects, is a familiar story.

In Saami Land, Women Are Encouraged to Become Lawyers— But Many Would Rather Be Reindeer Herders

I have been a member of the Swedish Saami Parliament since 2001. I am from the southern Saami area and from a traditional reindeer herding family. My father herds reindeer and I have a few of my own, but my father cares for them because I am too busy with my other work. Only a minority of the Saami people are reindeer herders now, but it is the traditional living of the Saami.

Today reindeer herding has become modernized and male-dominated.

After living with paramilitaries for several months, one morning in April the village of Bahía Portete, in Colombia’s northern Guajira peninsula, suffered a massacre that left 12 people dead, 20 missing, and 300 displaced, according

How often do we say something important only to find that the person we were speaking to did not understand a word of what was said? We repeat ourselves, raise our voices, use body language to express our frustration, but to no avail. More often than not, one of the two cardinal rules of good communication—Speak to be Understood and Listen to Understand—has been broken. If we speak before thinking through what we want to say, or select words that alienate or antagonize the person to whom we are speaking, they are likely to stop listening.

Joênia Batista de Carvalho, 30, a Wapixana woman, mother of two, and Brazil’s first female indigenous lawyer, received a Reebok Human Rights Award in May 2004. The award recognizes her efforts to secure indigenous people’s rights to their ancestral lands against the encroachment of outside commercial, farming, and hunting interests, and her work to defend indigenous victims of human rights violations in Brazil.

Batista de Carvalho was raised in poverty.

With only months left in the International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People, the movement to adopt an international instrument to secure indigenous peoples human rights received a rare opportunity this fall. Multiple extra sessions were scheduled by the United Nations so that indigenous peoples and governments could negotiate and adopt a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Some 400 members of the Anuak ethnic group in Gambella in southern Ethiopia were killed on December 13, 2003, by government security forces and members of highland ethnic groups. The assault followed the deaths of eight Ethiopian and foreign refugee workers traveling in a United Nations vehicle.

On August 6, Guatemala’s Constitutional Court ruled against the creation of a United Nations-led International Commission to Investigate Illegal Bodies and Clandestine Security Forces (CICIACS) to investigate crimes that have mostly tar

Mirian Masaquiza Jerez benefited from a unique upbringing in a Quichua family of women. Today, at 28, she works in the United Nations to ensure young indigenous voices are heard.

Mirian Masaquiza Jerez, a Quichua woman from Ecuador, has worked since 1998 with the Confederación Nacional de Campesinas, Indigenas y Negras del Ecuador (Confederation of Indigenous Peoples, Afro-Ecuadorians, and Rural Organizations, FENOCIN). She is currently the associate social affairs officer for the Secretariat of the U.N.

I am an Armenian American who was raised in an assimilated household that taught me nothing about the Armenian language, culture, or history. I was in college when I first learned about the 1915 Armenian Genocide, in which over 60 percent of the Armenian population was killed by Ottoman Turks and 90 percent of Armenian land was stolen. Both of my parents are Armenian.

Hundreds of indigenous and non-indigenous film enthusiasts from around the globe met from October 20 to 24 for the fifth-annual imagineNative Film Festival. The festival is one of the few solely indigenous-run and programmed festivals in the arts community.

Introduction by Ledama Olekina

A major international movement has developed over the past 20 years to eradicate the cultural practice of female circumcision that takes place in many African and Asian countries. At the Nairobi International Conference on Female Genital Mutilation in September, attendees from nations where female circumcision is practiced urged states to adopt political, legal, and social measures to eliminate the tradition.

Eulynda Toledo-Benalli Has Devoted Her Life to Saving Diné Knowledge

Eulynda Toledo-Benalli is my Western name. My Navajo name is Nídeezbaa’. It’s a warrior woman name. All Diné women have warrior women names signifying the way we go to war and the way we behave in confrontation—the warrior-ness in us.

My father, who did not speak a word of English, was snatched from his hogan at age six by the U.S. government and taken to a boarding school about 300 miles away in Colorado. His hair was cut and his moccasins were taken away.