The Role of Women in the Struggle for Environmental Justice in Ogoni

On the April 25, 1997, the Federation of Ogoni Women's Associations (FOWA), an umbrella organization for all women's groups in Ogoni, the oil rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria, made a resolution.

Burma's Elusive Liberation

No pie chart, list, nor map, patchworked with stripes and dots, can properly convey the beautiful yet tragic complexity of Burma's population. Inhabiting a diamond-shaped land the size of France, people representing cultures from the far reaches of Asia have been thrown together for many centuries.

UPDATE NATIVE NORTH AMERICA: Taxation and NY State Reservations

Taxation on Native American reservations is an issue that has plagued tribes and courts at all levels for decades. This issue has come to a head in New York state with a US Supreme Court ruling in February 1994 on the Attea case, named for Milhem Attea and Bros. of Buffalo, NY, a licensed cigarette stamping agent and non-native.

UPDATE AUSTRALIA: Aborigines Reject Proposal to Amend Act

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Commission (ATSIC) just released its comments on the Australian federal government's proposed changes to the 1993 Native Title Act. While it was agreed that there was a need to carefully monitor the type of claims being proposed by Aborigines, ATSIC considered the draft amendments to be totally unacceptable.

Tribes

New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1997. $45 (cloth) ISBN 0-517-70368-8

The Life and Death of David Alex and the Ongoing Struggle for East Timor

The Indonesian military quickly buried David Alex in a cemetery in Dill, the capital of Indonesian-occupied East Timor, after he died on June 25, 1997. The authorities did not allow his family to see the body.

NOTES FROM THE FIELD: Indigenous Peoples and Democracy in Latin America and Bolivia

The issue of indigenous peoples is one of the most timely national and international concerns. We use the terms indigenous and campesino (or peasant) indiscriminately in Bolivia and Latin America, as the majority of the poor are indigenous peasants. Indigenous People and the Nation-States of Latin America

Roads and Development in Eastern Congo: Declining Livelihoods and Growing Self-Reliance Among the Lese and Efe

Mail arrived yesterday from Kuli, the clinic health worker. It had been over nine months since we last received word from the Lese and Efe who run the community clinic and primary school in the Ituri Forest in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Kuli must have been determined to share with us the latest information about his community, Andisengi.

Memories of Solidarity: Anthropology and the Indigenous Movement in Latin America

The unfinished relation between the indigenous people of Latin America and Euroamerican humanitarians has followed a line of delicate and ambiguous dialectics.

Maasai and Barabaig Herders Struggle for Land Rights in Kenya and Tanzania

East African pastoralist societies face greater threats to their way of life now, than at any other time in the recent past. With the creation of game parks, private ranches, and commercial wheat estates, Maasai herders, in particular, are fenced off and evicted from lands that were traditionally and legally theirs.

Introduction: World System, Local Peoples

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.

Indigenous Peoples of the Russian North

Twenty five years ago, few Westerners comprehended the ethnic complexity of the Russian Federation, especially in its Asian hinterlands.

CS IN THE CLASSROOM: The Curriculum Resource Program at Cultural Survival

The Curriculum Resource Program creates classroom materials that teach about indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities and human rights at the high school level.

CS IN THE CLASSROOM: Student comments

The Last Lesson by Jane Brokaw, 9th grade, BCDS

CS IN THE CLASSROOM: Final Essay

The Aboriginal Struggle for Cultural Survival. Excerpts from final essay by Luis Rego, CRLS

CS IN THE CLASSROOM: Commentary

Betsy Grady, Ed.D., Head Teacher, Social Studies, Cambridge Rindge and Latin Pilot School.

BOOK REVIEW: The Guinea Pig; Healing, Food, and Ritual in the Andes

The popularity of the guinea pig in Andean regional cuisines has long offered an apt example of cross-cultural differences in food consumption for North Americans, who grimace at the thought of eating a household pet. In this volume, beautifully illustrated with his own photos, Edmundo Morales places the consumption of this high protein delicacy into its cultural and economic context.

BOOK REVIEW: Nation Making; Emergent Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia

Volumes of essays do not always have the rationale that sustains this excellent collection. In bringing together views from a single region, contributors enhance one another's perspectives in the timely reminder that, despite categorization ("nations" in the making, a "postcolonial" Melanesia), individual trajectories take their own paths.

BOOK REVIEW: Indigenous Peoples, Ethnic Groups and the State

David Maybury-Lewis has written a very timely book on an extremely important and much misunderstood topic: the nature and relations of ethnic groups and the disastrous political processes that are sometimes set into motion between such groups within larger policies.

SPECIAL PROJECTS UPDATE: Amazonian People's Resources Initiative; Building Partnerships in Health, Education, and Social Justice

In 1995, the Amazonian People's Resources Initiative (APRI) launched an integrated community defense program among the Urarina, a semi-nomadic, hunting and horticultural society of eastern Peru's Chambira Basin.

The Question of Minority Identity and Indigeneity in Post-Colonial China

China's indigenous peoples are generally referred to as "minority nationalities" given their official status in the Chinese administrative structure. This rubric does them a disservice, obscuring not only their own indigenous identities, but also the nature of multiculturalism and multiethnicity in China.