by L.A. Shively INDIAN COUNTRY TODAY

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M., May 21 — The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples concluded its activities this week with a flurry of reports and announcements. By all accounts it was an exhilarating second annual session.     ‘If we can stimulate our products, the other problems, such as health and education, will improve as well. It follows that those problems will be solved if we are stronger economically. It follows.’ — JEREMY ATKINSON Arawak delegate from Guayana region of Venezuela TO THE INTERNATIONAL indigenous delegates: best of wishes for the journey home. Congratulations on a wonderful 12 days of dialogue and activities - focused on the theme of creating a positive future for indigenous peoples.

       Words are important. Self-representation is crucial. At the United Nations, for all its beleaguered status, representatives of many governments took notice and heard serious reports on the global condition of the Native peoples. Noeli Pocaterra, Wayuu elder and parliamentary leader from Venezuela, reminded us of words from Ingrid Washinawatok, when she quoted: “The silence must be broken.”

       Noeli was among the many wonderful Native leaders from around the world who gathered in New York. Quechua and Aymara from Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Mapuche from Chile, Amazonian peoples from several countries, Arawak from Venezuela, Massai from Kenya, Sami from Norway, Dene from Canada and many others among the core of the indigenous representatives and intellectuals active on matters of international law and international development attended.         SEEING LOST RELATIVES

       It was refreshing to see long lost relatives - among the South American Arawak and the Caribbean Taino, for instance - meet and greet each other, embrace and begin longed-for conversations. It was good to see veteran battlers like the Mapuche activist, Nilo Cayuqueo, who was there at the very beginning of the international struggle. Cayuqueo described the economic collapse in his native Argentina, where even the upper middle class is looting food stores as evidence of severe desperation, so, he said, “imagine the misery and desperation of the Indian people.” Nilo is a Native universalist spirit who traveled the hemisphere in the late 1960s, as the nascent Indian movement began its cross-country outreach. He is perhaps among four others of the 1,500 in attendance who participated in the seminal event of the international movement, the Geneva Indigenous Peoples Conference of 1977.

•  Indian Country Today front        Twenty-five years later, in the long, cold halls of the UN, Nilo introduced us to several tribal people from Colombia, focusing our editorial eye once again on the major heartbreak of that country’s gut-tearing, horrifically bloody “violencia” that has become social habit and entrenched mechanism - war without end. One story to pass on: the Embera Indian leadership in Colombia is being assassinated with impunity. FARC, the spirit-dead revolutionary movement, stands denounced; so does the widespread right-wing para-military violence, very often linked with the military. The silence was broken many times at the UN gathering. Important stories and viewpoints were told.

       Indian Country Today prepared a special edition for the event. One of our themes proposed stronger and more profound cultural and economic linkages between northern and southern Native nations and populations. We concur with the words of Jeremy Atkinson, a young Arawak delegate from the Guayana region of Venezuela, who put it this way: “We have resources, we have our people. From our lands and waters and from our own hands, we can improve our economics, grow our business practice. If we can stimulate our products, the other problems, such as health and education, will improve as well. It follows that those problems will be solved if we are stronger economically. It follows.”         ECONOMIC OPTION

       As with the strengthening of human rights initiatives, Native peoples need to explore economic options wherever they can find them. This is a current that does not please everyone, but it is the nugget of the fundamental solution to most of our peoples’ problems. Self-generated economies, wherever they can be stimulated, will provide the rotors of future self-determined Native peoples.

       The Indian unity which is sought has always been elusive. Native nations are just as good at competing with each other as they are in confronting the state and federal entities and the occasional ugly head of white supremacy that surrounds them. Furthermore, each is unique, facing very localized as well as national challenges. International development efforts, whether through foundations, the World Bank or now through Native nation-to-nation trade and commerce, is best served by great attention to local dynamics and conditions.

	       In the language employed to codify the rights of the indigenous peoples of the world, the broad-brush stroke is the genial half. But for answering questions of developmental impact - how a community betters itself economically and culturally and socially, how income is generated so families, tribal businesses and communities are able to expand themselves - understanding and incorporating the locally specific is key. Canada is not Venezuela and the Caribbean is not the Andes and even the U.S. situation of Indians varies greatly between Montana and the Southwest or the East Coast from South Dakota and California.

       Unity in diversity is a good indigenous definition. From small to big - being part of something larger that gathers one’s concerns and issues is as important as ever. Exertion of power beyond the small group, reaching beyond one community, to the regional and the national, to the international, this is important.         BUILDING BONDS

       The Native world could well benefit from a substantial initiative of cooperative and sustained relations across the hemispheres. All Native students, all Native children, should know that they are part of something substantially large. All Native youth should have the chance to know the intimate intents of the ancient and contemporary ideas of their peoples. They should know that they are part of something that is hemispherically, even globally, strong.

       There is an indigenous base of culture that values the kinship community. Families are large, extended, and as they overlap, the linkages of origin, from both matriarchs and patriarchs, reveal themselves. The core indigenous peoples’ experience of community life revolves around this principle and extends out from it - when it is strong and true - to the ever-larger concentric circles of relationships that form the families, clans, nations and populations of the Native world. In today’s world these overlap with the myriad federations and confederations, national organizations, international organizations, governmental coalitions, national and international cultural pilgrimages, circles and journeys, via ceremonial life, pow wows, business, legal cases and the many other ways that indigenous peoples coalesce with each other.

       The Native leadership of any community today that would utilize its best resources to ensure the future survival of its people should seriously generate cultural and economic and political relations with other Native peoples. The cohesive and common experience is crucial to building toward the future and the search for strength in common is more important than ever.