By Alex Glomset

Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous rights have always been a contentious issue in many parts of Latin and South America including Venezuela, and though progress has made on several fronts, there are still concerns that equal rights are not being given to these groups.  In the September 2014 review of Venezuela by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, several of these issues surrounding Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous children’s rights were addressed.

Since 2002, Venezuela broke with the traditional celebrations on October 12 of Columbus’s so-called “discovery” and began celebrating instead “Indigenous Resistance Day” as homage to the country’s indigenous populations, their history, cultures, and struggles to maintain their identity.

Cultural Survival Quarterly contributing arts editor Phoebe Farris recently spoke with Tony Castanha, author of  The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction: Continuity And Reclamation in Boriken (Puerto Rico) [Palgrave Macmillian, a division of St.Martin’s Press, New York, NY, 2011] about his recent work.

The annual commemoration of the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples was held on August 9, 2014 at the UN Headquarters in New York. The event highlighted the importance of implementing the rights of Indigenous peoples and marks the twentieth year of the global celebration.