Indigenous Policy Summer 2004 Articles

Steve Sachs, "Circling the Circles: Indigenous Movements Towards an Alternative Appropriate Globalization."
Taiaiake Alfred & Jeff Corntassel, "Ancestral Homeland Security: Indigenous Self-Determination at the Close of the UN Indigenous Decade."
Michael W. Posluns. "The Fourth World: An Expression of International Solidarity."
Warner Woodworth, "Warrior Economics: Financing the Poorest of the Native American Poor."

"Circling the Circles: Indigenous Movements Towards an Alternative Appropriate Globalization."

As the peoples and nations of the World become increasingly economically interrelated, how is it best to develop the world economy? The current neoliberal thrust toward “Globalization” clearly creates massive problems and injustices, contributing to structural and open violence, as multinational corporations become increasingly unregulated by anyone, and as so called “free trade” benefits a few in the short run, while damaging all in the long run. The worst effects of globalization have been felt by indigenous peoples, though the impact varies according to the situation. In the developed U.S., for example, individual Indians may not feel the net loss of jobs, and of higher paying jobs, any more than Americans in general; and Indian nations may not have lost any more sovereignty than have states and municipalities in their abilities to regulate. By contrast, in Mexico, NAFTA bringing in subsidized U.S. corn at lower prices than indigenous people could produce it, triggered the Zapatista revolution, leading to increased repression by the government and paramilitary groups, while, currently, an imposed Plan Panama is threatening to force consolidation of land, as occurred in the U.S. with allotment of Indian land, and mass dispossession for imposed development projects.

Indigenous peoples are now organizing internationally to create an alternative globalization that will allow indigenous and other people to develop in their own terms, applying traditional values appropriately for the Twenty-First Century. This is exemplified by the June 2002 meeting of 350 indigenous organizations from across Central America in Quetzaltanango (Xela) Guatemala to work for the continued cultural and biological diversity of indigenous communities and plan alternative models of development to those being imposed upon Mesoamerica; the launching, in September 2002, of Advancement of Indigenous Opportunity International (AIO International) by Americans for Indian Opportunity (AIO) and Advancement for Maori Opportunity (AMO) of New Zealand, for creating an international indigenous leadership training program, whose graduates will serve as a network for indigenous peoples to dialogue about common concerns and to develop strategies to meet problems intensified by the growth of globalization; the February and March 2002 American Indian Education Consortium (AIHEC) New Zealand Tour of representatives of tribal colleges across the United States and Australia, hosted by the New Zealand Maori colleges and organizations, to begin the development of a world indigenous peoples organization for furthering the interests of indigenous controlled institutions of higher education; and the launching, in May, 2002, of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. As envisaged by AIO, the ultimate goal for indigenous peoples is fourfold: 1. To maintain cultural identity in the face of globalization; 2. To actively participate in the globalization process in order that indigenous peoples can control how it effects them; 3. To influence policy and public opinion; 4. To contribute indigenous wisdom, values and world view to the emerging world order.

As the world becomes more of an interrelated whole, the functioning of international economic institutions are becoming an increasingly major factor in the welfare of all people and nations. While even the best approach to globalization would face many challenges and problems, an appropriate set of international policies and institutions could achieve a great deal in the way of increasing the standard of living and economic condition of poorer nations and areas, while assisting the entire world population in living better. If the specific situations, values and cultures of each nation, people and region are respected in a constructive networking approach to globalization, economic justice, peace and protection of the environment can be enhanced, accompanied by a richness of cultural exchange bringing synergy through honoring diversity. Unfortunately, the current neoliberal approach to world wide economics, emphasizing "leaving everything to the market," with privatizing social services and minimizing regulation, combined with removal of trade barriers and economic subsidies, has produced very negative effects for most people, and has increased environmental degradation. In many instances indigenous people have suffered the most severe harm from globalization, which has tended to increase the loss of indigenous land, sovereignty, culture, wellbeing and quality of life.

The problems of neoliberal globalization fostered by the U.S., government, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are now well documented. A global network of over 1000 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), The Structural Adjustment Participatory Review International Network (SAPRIN), completed a four year review, in 2002, of the impact of the World Bank's structural adjustments program (imposing austerity measures on governments and encouraging privatization of public services) with the aim of improving national economic performance and reducing external debt. The report, "The Policy Roots of Economic Crises and Poverty," concludes that structural adjustment measures have significantly increased poverty, inequality and social exclusion in the 10 countries studied; led to: loss of domestic productive capacity and jobs; a reduction in small farm agriculture which brought on food insecurity; diminishing real wages, workers rights and job security; and reduced access to affordable quality services.¹ Following the imposing of structural adjustment policies, some reduction in the rise of external debt did occur. However, since the economies were weakened by the structural adjustments, those policies cannot be credited with the small reduction in the increase of external debt (and even if they were the entire cause, the cost would hardly be worth the relatively small gain).

The report was undertaken by the NGOs in cooperation with the World Bank and the governments of the countries concerned. In signing on to participate in the project, the Bank agreed to listen to and publicize the findings, saying that it wanted to improve its policies. On seeing the extent of the criticism, however, the Bank has played down, refused to publicize, and is not giving consideration to, the results of the study, leading involved NGO leaders to conclude that the Bank really does not want to change. It is probably more accurate to say that World Bank was looking for ideas for a new round of improvements, via modest adjustments, to what it believes to be a basically sound approach, rather than the total change of policy sought by its critics, including this author. From their perspective, the Bank's policy changes, giving some consideration to the environmental consequences of development, and to the impact of development on indigenous people,² are positive steps, but not nearly sufficient transform globalization into a positive force.

The negative effects of the World Bank and similar International Monetary Fund policies have been felt worldwide. In Latin America, these policies have been major contributors to recent economic crises, including the collapse of the Argentine economy, with devastating human consequences and the near 20% drops in the values of the Brazilian, Columbian and Chilean currencies in July of last year, triggering a banking crisis in Uruguay.³ From 1980 to 2000, under imposed austerity and free trade, per capita incomes in Latin America grew at only one tenth the rate of the previous decade when governments followed more interventionist and protectionist approaches. The Economic Commission on Latin America forecast in August 2002 that there would be no short run improvement and that Latin America's economy would contract by 1% during the year, largely because of the Argentine economic collapse. In Bolivia, incomes have been stagnant for 20 years and the economy experienced a sharp downturn in 2002.

Similar negative results were experienced in East European countries attempting to make the transition from communist to market economies via neoliberal policies after 1989.⁴ For example, from 1989 to 1997 in Poland, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Croatia and Russia, gross domestic product declined in all but Poland and Slovenia, where it rose to only 109% and 101% of its 1989 level, with the declines ranging from 63%-95% of the 1989 levels after eight years of neoliberal reform.⁵ Similarly, at the end of those same eight years, industrial production was by below 1989 levels in every nation except Poland (where it was at 110% of its 1989 level), standing as low as 49% in Russia and 50% in Croatia of what it had been in 1989. Meanwhile, from 1992-1996, every country in the group except Russia and the Czech Republic experienced at least 10% unemployment each year. Russia and the Czech Republic achieved low unemployment rates simply by keeping unneeded workers employed, without reeducating them or utilizing them for economic or socially productive work or investment. This merely delayed the economic crisis, ultimately making them more serious.

While numerous neoliberal economic policies contributed to the East European post communist economic and quality of life decline, one piece of the transition to the market program adopted by all nine countries is particularly relevant for this discussion.⁶ This was the combination of rapidly privatizing state owned enterprises, without making any investment to improve their ability to produce marketable products, while ending subsidies and eliminating tariffs and other import barriers. Among other ill effects, this led to potentially viable firms being unable to compete with imported products, leading to drops in production, increasing unemployment, and a worsening balance of payments, as sales of imports rose, while the sale of domestic products declined. A better strategy would have been to invest in the improvement of potentially viable firms, prior to privatizing them, and selectively and progressively lowering import duties as domestic enterprise productivity and efficiency rose, as a stimulus to continued growth in competitiveness. From 1968-1975, Hungary made significant gains with just such a policy for liberalizing its communist economy.⁷ Similarly, the economic advancement, since World War II, achieved by a number of East Asian nations, was accomplished by a careful process of incubation in which governments played a major role, in contrast to the neoliberal approach.⁸

More recent evidence is presented in the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Trade and Development Report 2003, released in October 2003, which found unequivocally that neoliberal economic policies of globalization, leaving development to the market (with minimal government services and regulation) for two decades has left subSaharan Africa in an economic wasteland, while declining shares of manufacturing output and employment ("deindustrialization") have accompanied rapid liberalization in many Latin American nations. Under neoliberal economic policies, "enclaves" of industrialization linked to international production chains have dotted this landscape, without, in most cases, translating into more broad-based investment, value added and productivity growth. The study reports an urgent need for global economic institutions and governments to rethink policies and return to carefully designed, vigorous government intervention to provide necessary economic stimulus and guidance, and to create and preserve an appropriate climate for development. The report concluded that the policies pursued to eliminate inflation and downsize the public sector have often undermined growth and hampered technological progress. As a result, "the current economic landscape in the developing world has an uncanny resemblance to conditions prevailing in the early 1980s", when many countries slipped into deep crisis. The target level of investment for catch-up growth - estimated by the Report to be in the range of 20-to-25% of GDP - has eluded most countries undergoing rapid market reforms. By contrast, active state participation in the economy in East Asia after the debt crisis produced a strong investment performance, growing manufacturing value added and employment and a rising share of manufacturing exports, with productivity and technology gaps with leading industrial countries rapidly closing. Elsewhere, the Report finds a less encouraging record: Industrial progress has halted in much of the developing world; only eight of 26 selected countries succeeded in raising the share of manufacturing value added in GDP between 1980 and the 1990s, together with a rising share of investment; In economies with lagging industrialization and a declining share of investment, the share of manufactures in total exports has also been stagnant or falling, while exchange rate depreciation and wage restraint have been the basis for bolstering trade performance; The production structure in much of Latin America and Africa has seen a notable shift away from sectors with the greatest potential for productivity growth towards those producing and processing raw materials; and Where trade and investment have risen in the context of international production networks, the tendency has been for an apparent increase in the technology content of exports without a similar increase in domestic value added.

The particularly harsh impact of much of globalization on indigenous people, is perhaps best seen in an examination of the impact of the imposition of neoclassical economics on Mexico, first with the agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to restructure its massive foreign debt in 1982, and then with the creation of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) among Mexico, the U.S. and Canada.⁹When the drop in the price of oil, a major Mexican export, left Mexico unable to keep up with foreign debt payments, it agreed to a "structural adjustment program (SAP)" with the World Bank in order to restructure the debt. SAP was intended to make Mexico more competitive in the world economy and thus more able to pay its debt, by cutting government expenditures and reducing regulations and tariffs, making Mexico more open to the international market. The result was just the opposite, however. Mexico's ability to pay its foreign debt became weakened as many sectors of the economy were undermined, while the government was less able to act to create economic development or to assist those who were suffering from economic decline. NAFTA exacerbated the situation by further reducing tariffs and the government's ability to regulate. Thus, at the end of NAFTA's first year, Mexico was suffering economic collapse with the peso suddenly losing half its value. In the following year, over 2 million people lost their jobs in Mexico, 1.8 million peasants and indigenous farmers were forced to leave their homes, the purchasing power of the average wage declined by 54% as inflation, in 1995, soared 50%. One third of Mexican businesses declared bankruptcy in the first nine months of that year, and the Gross Domestic Product declined by 7%. Moreover, NAFTA brought continued environmental decline¹⁰.

The neoclassical economic policies of SOP and NAFTA, were disastrous for small farmers in Mexico, including most of the indigenous population. The removal of import duties dropped the price of imported corn below the production cost for a very large number of indigenous and peasant farmers. Only some of the larger farmers and multinational agrobusiness made money. The government could not protect them with subsidies under SAP and NAFTA arrangements, and it could not afford, and had no mechanism for providing, alternative employment, or training for employment, nor were other means of making a viable livelihood available. Thus, it is not surprising, that the institution of NAFTA sparked the Zapatista rebellion, which in turn has been answered by people of wealth and power with increasingly violent and repressive activity, sometimes by the army and police, but more seriously by paramilitary groups with connections to the PRI, the former ruling party in Mexico.

Some people in Mexico have made short term gains from SAP-NAFTA, and some of them will be increasingly relatively better off than the average Mexican - if civic turmoil or political upheaval does not change their situation. These are primarily major businessmen, large landowners, and a number of people who have been able to be involved in higher technology business development, which is now less able to develop than previously. Some new jobs have also been created in Mexico as a result of SAP-NAFTA, but far less than have been lost, while high unemployment drives wages down and inflation robs even higher wages of their value.

Another problem of neoclassical globalization has been encouraging the development of crops for export at the expense of food self-sufficiency. This often involves reducing agricultural diversity (in itself an ecological concern) in order to produce one or a few crops for export. While there are benefits of foreign trade, there are also risks, especially when food self-sufficiency is reduced, because international prices for agricultural produce (and raw materials where economic development focuses upon extracting minerals for export) often fluctuate widely. For example, the Americas Program reported in March (http://www.americaspolicy.org/citizen-action/voices/2004/0402coffee.html, also reachable through Z-net: http://www.zmag.org) that Coffee, which is not indigenous to Mexico, has evolved into a central aspect of economic, social and cultural life with 320,000 growers, 65% of whom are indigenous, mostly on small farms in twelve states, employing over 3 million people, in rural areas directly effecting 25% of the population economically. 84% of Mexico's coffee growing townships have high or very high levels of poverty. 85% of Mexico's coffee is exported. International prices paid to producers have dropped severely over the last few years, with Mexican growers receiving record lows in 2002. Currently, coffee growers cannot break even, but the lack of other options keeps them trapped in a downward spiral. Failure to resolve the current crisis might not only destroy the livelihoods of thousands of growers, but could lead to massive out-migration, cultural disruption, and serious environmental damage to some of the nation's most valuable and vulnerable regions. Meanwhile, the crises in producer prices has created a buyers´ market that offers great profits to large intermediaries, particularly transnational roasters and branders. Transnational corporations have expanded their presence in the Mexican market as buyers, processors and retailers. Several factors have converged to distort the market: oversupply, a lack of product differentiation on the global trading level, defective and low quality coffee in the market and high concentration among roasting and branding companies.

Producers have few defenses in the present global context, with neoclassical economic polices having brought the Mexican government to dismantle the national production-processing-marketing board (Mexican Coffee Institute-Inmecafe), in1989. Thus most growers have been left to function on their own, with out the resources or infrastructure to deal effectively with the buying oligopoly. Most producers are operating at a loss, so that over the past two seasons many could not afford to harvest their crops, leaving an estimated 20% of last season's coffee rotting in the fields. Some growers, however, taking a modern version of an indigenous approach, have developed strong grassroots growers' cooperatives that can collectively negotiate higher prices, develop new markets and directly export their product. Some have been able to create their own collective processing and direct marketing, sometimes achieving prices 20% above the producers market. They have increased the quality of their coffees to access gourmet and specialty markets worldwide, bringing Mexico to lead the world in the production of organic coffee. The grassroots growers´ organizations pioneered organic production in the country and continue to convert to organic to save money on costly chemicals, avoid short and long-term environmental damage and take advantage of the premium paid for these coffees. By combining coffee cultivation with basic foods production and protection of some of the earth's richest biodiversity areas, largely indigenous peasant growers' organizations have marked a path toward socially and environmentally sustainable coffee production in Mexico. Their experiences offer elements for modifying the global economic model based on principles of equitable trade relations and conservation of cultural and biological diversity.

A major problem with the neoclassical economic approach to economic globalization is that it assumes, in essence, that there is, in effect, one economy in a country, and, indeed, in the world, once barriers to "free trade" are torn down, and that while following a change in the market, or of economic incentives, people can shift relatively easily and quickly from one economic activity or behavior to another. This is simply not the case.¹¹ So called national economies are composed of myriads of smaller economies, that while linked in varying ways, and to varying degrees, are separated to differing extents. In some instances people can change with only modest difficulty from one job or field to another, but often that is not possible. Especially in developing nations and parts of nations, there are segments of the economy, or secondary economies, often involving the majority of the population, that will be very differentially affected by economic policies or developments than are the "most technologically developed" segments of the economy.

In many nations, most indigenous people are involved primarily in these secondary economies. Failure to take each of the segments of the economy into account, in its own terms, in economic decision making can be disastrous for those with no effective voice, and is likely to be injurious to the whole nation. Furthermore, without appropriate regulation to protect them, and without institutions and legal arrangements to protect their rights and provide them an effective voice in the making of policies (including preventing the absence of policy making and enforcement where appropriate government action is needed), the interests of the less powerful people in secondary economies are too often swept aside by the more powerful economic interests, including multinational corporations. Moreover, the expansion of international economic activity, particularly the increasing export of raw materials, energy and agricultural products with the involvement of multinational companies, increases the actions of powerful national local interests (political as well as economic). Thus expanding globalization has increased the forced taking of indigenous lands and removal of indigenous people from their homes with devastating economic, social, cultural and human consequences. In addition, the rise of biotechnology is increasingly subjecting indigenous, and some other, people to what they consider "biopiracy," the exploitation, often protected by patenting, of human and indigenous species genes and byproducts for profit, with usually no, and almost never adequate, compensation or consent. It is important to note that the harms inflicted upon indigenous and other people are not limited to them. As the impact of economic difficulties in a few Asian nations upon the rest of the globe, a few years ago, demonstrated, the peoples of the world are becoming increasingly interdependent, so that negative developments in one area are likely to have ill effects worldwide.

While neoclassical methods of economic globalization are generally more damaging to underdeveloped than developed economies (and thus tending to further accentuate North-South inequities), they create difficulties in developed economies as well, in part because of the existence of many economies in each national economy. In the case of NAFTA, for example, the agreements supporters predicted that the U.S. and Canada would gain far more jobs than would be lost from NAFTA's implementation.¹² To date, the reverse has been true, particularly in manufacturing.¹³ Meanwhile, in agriculture some producers, particularly of grains, have gained, while many others have suffered considerable losses. International food imports into Mexico from the U.S. often sell below small farmers costs, driving them out of business. There are substantial food exports from Mexico to the U.S., but predominantly by large farmers, most especially by multinational corporations.¹⁴One of the difficulties is that free market arrangements such as NAFTA tend to drive wages (and hence living standards) down in the developed world, when what needs to be done is to focus on bringing wages and living standards up in the underdeveloped world.

In general, the primary gainers from NAFTA have been top management and stockholders of a group of large multinational corporations, at an overall cost to the U.S., Canada and Mexico as a whole. Indeed, it is the political power of the large multinationals that has been the driving force behind the establishment of neoclassical approaches to economic globalization. This power has been particularly effective in the field of economic globalization because the negotiations involved in establishing international economic arrangements are carried on by the executive branches of governments, with little direct public scrutiny, and the governance of most international institutions takes place with considerable secrecy and virtually no direct public input. The general result has been to further free from public mechanisms for corporate responsibility, economic actors that by there multinational nature are already too removed from public control.¹⁵ In addition to the harms already discussed, this has led to injury to the environment and to human rights that international action needs to prevent and ameliorate.

To promote the wellbeing of the whole planet, including indigenous people, so as to enhance peace through equalizing development that is respectful of people and the environment, an alternative approach to that of neoclassical economics is needed for economic globalization and development. What is required for the establishment, reform and governance of international economic institutions are open processes with full public information and discussion in which all of the numerous parties are, in fact, represented, so that their concerns are taken into account. Mechanisms, such as trade (and other) regulations, and their removal, need to be seen as means for equitable development and its maintenance, which are carefully considered, regularly reviewed, and adjusted as appropriate. This means that governments have a positive role to play in fostering and maintaining appropriate development (as occurred in Western Europe after World War II and in the development of the Pacific Rim economies more recently). The main thrust of development, especially in less developed countries and areas, needs to be undertaken locally, through local democratic processes, assisted by outside expertise and resources and guided by appropriate community, national and international regulation. It should be noted that there is a long history of success with such development and there is a growing movement in the third world to undertake development in such a democratic and decentralized fashion.¹⁶ International regulations (enforceable by national governments, that should be free to create their own more stringent standards), need to include such things as protection for: the environment, human rights, workers' and labor organizing rights, and the provision of appropriate codes of business and corporate conduct.¹⁷ Finally, the democratization of multinational and other businesses through decentralization, employee ownership and employee participation will help make the globalization of the economy equitable to local communities and people, and a vehicle for the growth of nonviolent relations.

The Rise of Indigenous International Organizations Striving for an Alternative Globalization

A pattern of the development of international indigenous organizations is unfolding that in some ways mirrors the history of American Indian organization in the United States.¹⁸ From the early years of European incursion and U.S. colonialism, Indian people, from time to time, had organized pan tribally to resist external imperialism. The efforts of those, such as Tecumsah in the early 19th Century, and of the Society of American Indians, founded in 1911, attained only limited, and often temporary, success, as they were faced by a superior power of the United States, among whose citizens there was relatively little support for Indians. During the 1920s, a sufficient support for Indians in their own terms (to the extent that sympathetic non-Indians understood Native Americans), along with an appreciation by enough non-Indians that U.S. Indian policy had been extremely harmful to Indians, and was threatening to be even more so, led to the formation of the first really effective national Indian organizations, including the Association on American Indian Affairs and the American Indian Defense Association. These national pro Indian groups were led primarily by, and composed largely of, non-Indians. They collaborated with, and gave an amplified voice to native people, who had long been vocal in their own affairs, but previously relatively powerless, to achieve some major victories. As indigenous people in the U.S. gained increased intertribal and trans regional communication, and as they became more knowledgeable of how the U.S. political system worked, particularly during and just after World War II, they began to form their own national organizations. These groups largely replaced the previous mostly non-Indian led groups.

The most notable of the first Indian political organizations was the National Congress of American Indians, formed in 1944, and greatly energized in the struggle against the federal government's policy of termination of Indian tribes in the 1950s. The 1960's and 1970's, with stimulation from the civil rights movement and the War On Poverty - which promoted Indian nation building and leadership development through empowering native people to run many of their own programs - brought new waves of launching of national Indian associations. Some of these were specialized in their focus in such fields as education and energy policy. Others were more broadly politically directed. The Native American Rights Fund (NARF),¹⁹ for example, has focused primarily on the legal aspects of advancing the wellbeing of Indians, giving legal advice, engaging in court challenges to government policy and doing some public education. The American Indian Movement (AIM)²⁰ has worked largely to raise public consciousness of injustice and inequities to Native Americans, particularly in the 1960's and 70's, in a more confrontive style, with public events and demonstrations a major vehicle in their strategy and tactics. Americans for Indian Opportunity (AIO)²¹ has functioned as a collaborative think tank on Indian issues, developing some pilot projects and concrete programs, an Indian leadership and tribal capacity developing vehicle, and a lobbying organization for developing better government policies and processes, while undertaking some public education. One of AIO's main thrusts has been working for the development of government-to-government relationships between tribal governments and the federal, state and local governments. The move to achieve such relationships has included a long struggle for the creation of appropriate governmental structures and the changing of bureaucratic mindsets.

Internationally, there have long been indigenous efforts with the support of others. The first large scale international organizations promoting indigenous concerns in the current period have been organized largely by non-Indigenous people. Survival International ('Survival'),²² for example, was founded in 1969 after an article by Norman Lewis in the British Sunday Times publicized the massacres, land thefts and genocide taking place in the Brazilian Amazon, in the name of 'economic growth'. Survival is a worldwide organization supporting tribal peoples, providing them a platform to address the world. It stands for their right to decide their own future and helps them protect their lives, lands and human rights. It is currently working with around 80 tribes in 34 countries, and has supporters in 82 countries. It works for tribal peoples' rights in three complementary ways: education, public campaigns and funding. It works closely with local indigenous organizations, and focuses on tribal peoples who have the most to lose, usually those most recently in contact with the outside world. "We believe that public opinion is the most effective force for change. Its power will make it harder, and eventually impossible, for governments and companies to oppress tribal peoples." Survival was the first international organization to draw attention to the destructive effects of World Bank projects. Cultural Survival²³ was incorporated in 1972. It publicizes the concerns and situations of indigenous people in Cultural Survival Quarterly: World Report on the Rights, Voices and Visions of Indigenous People, and a series of reports. Its Indigenous Action Network maintains a continuously updated list of indigenous issues needing to be met on the organization's web site. Its Marketing Program assists native peoples obtaining a fair price by selling directly to the market. Its most recent undertaking is to use its research to collaborate with indigenous people in finding new strategies for meeting challenges, by undertaking joint analysis of what actions have been successful.
Slightly older, is the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA),²⁴ which was founded by human rights activists and anthropologists in 1968. It supports indigenous peoples' struggle for human rights, self-determination, right to territory, control of land and resources, cultural integrity, and the right to development. IWGIA collaborates with indigenous peoples' organizations all over the world, researching indigenous affairs, and publishing books, periodicals and a yearbook. IWGIA holds consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and is an observer to the Arctic Council.

As globalization has increased the injuries suffered by indigenous people directly from international causes, they have become more active in the countries in which they live and have increased international meetings and organizing. This is particularly the case in Latin America, where indigenous and other lower status people have been engaged in related political movements, as conditions have worsened after two decades of increasingly damaging neoliberal economic policies.²⁵

As has been referred to above, In Mexico, the 1994 Zapatista uprising, largely by Maya Indians in the southern state of Chiapas, was an important catalyst for democratic reforms and free elections, which ended 70 years of one-party rule in 2000. However, despite limited progress, demands for constitutionally recognized autonomy for Indian peoples continue, and Chiapas remains violently divided as indigenous uprisings have spread to neighboring states. A low level of repressive acts by the army and paramilitary groups continues, with some restraint in the face of occasional government protective action, such as the arrest in 2002 of 20 suspected members of a paramilitary group reported to have killed and terrorized Indians in Chiapas. In Guerrero, in 1995, 42 Tlapaneco and Mixteco communities created the Indigenous Community Police (JCP), a volunteer organization operating on a traditional basis, with elections held in regional assemblies. JCP brought about a major reduction of crime and corruption, but is now under attack by the government, which charges that it is acting illegally. The international Chiapas Media Project has been empowering indigenous people in Guerrero, Chiapas and other states to make their own videos and send them out on the internet.²⁶ This has helped limit repression.

Part of the problem in Mexico, and in all of Latin America, is the continued growth of neoliberal economic development plans initiated by the United States government. While Mexico's President Fox has made optimistic statements about investment in Chiapas, human and social development, his claims are not reflective of the government's practice. More than 82% of funds allocated under Mexico's version of Plan Panama (discussed below), in 2002, went to roads and transport, while poverty worsened. While the newly passed Indigenous Law does not recognize indigenous autonomy, Zapatista communities attempt to live peacefully, exercising self-governance and independence, in several parts of Chiapas, struggling to develop according to their own models of change.

A major issue for Indigenous people in Mexico was the official end of land reform in 1992, which terminated the right of campasinos holding land to pass on the right to use it, or return property to the communal group for distribution to landless individuals. Under the new method for entitling land, "PROCEDE," more than 24,000 of Mexico's 29,942 communal assemblies have voted to privatize land. Critics see privatization as the first step toward consolidation of small land holdings into saleable parcels for development, and see it as the root cause of many conflicts taking place across Southern Mexico. Many critics see the 1992 reform as equivalent to U.S. allotment of parcels of tribal lands to individual Indians, under the Dawes Severality Act of 1887, which led to the displacing and further impoverishing of huge numbers of Native Americans. In addition, wives are not included in new land titles, so that women are losing their right to inheritance, and an important basis of social status.

Conflicts over land use rights have brought increasing violence in Michoacan and Oxaca states, and have involved killings of indigenous people by the army, such as that at Agua Fria, where 27 people died, and near Orapicho, where a confrontation over land (the army said it involved drugs) resulted in 6 killed. Indigenous people and groups in Oxaca have been receiving support from Oxacan Indigenous Binacional Front (FIOB).²⁷ "FIOB is a community-based non-governmental organization that has a character of a coalition of organizations, communities, and individuals of indigenous origin (from the Mixteca, Zapoteca and Triqui regions in the State of Oaxaca, Mexico). It was founded in October 5, 1991 in Los Angeles, California. Its members are present in Oaxaca, Baja California Norte and California in the United States." Meanwhile the Council of Traditional Indigenous Midwives and Healers has been leading a campaign against the biotechnology projects, that it sees as biopiracy, attaining a victory in 2003 with the canceling of one of the planned projects of the U.S. International Cooperative Biodiversity Group to collect plant samples with very low payments to the Mexican government and no benefit to the indigenous population. Raramuri (Tarahumara) Indians in the Mountains of Northern Mexico have long been involved in a conflict to stop clear cut logging (as opposed to sustainable selective cutting) in their area. For a number of years, beginning in the mid1980's, a number of the Raramuri anti logging activists were murdered. Early 1n 2003, several of them were arrested on what they claim are trumped up charges, after a successful road blockade brought an end to logging by a non-Indian community, but were released in June of 2004 after the police officers who arrested the Raramuri were charged with committing crimes at the time of making the arrests.

At the same time, in recent months, paramilitary groups have escalated intimidation and killings of indigenous people in Chiapas, especially where PPP projects are planned. On June 13, 2002 one month into a protest, 200 Yaqui Indians blocked an international highway in Sonora, saying the Mexican state owes the tribe $3.1 million of monies appropriated by the state congress for ethnic groups. They are also seeking restitution for 6640 acres of land expropriated by the state in 1997.

In Ecuador, pressure from a grassroots indigenous movement resulted in 1998 constitutional reforms officially recognizing the country as a "pluri-national state." In 2000, the movement, led by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador led a national uprising that brought down Ecuador's president over his plans to make the U.S. dollar official currency, when a coalition of indigenous and military leaders supported by thousands of protestors set up a short lived government. March of 2002 brought a new wave of peaceful protests by thousands of Ecuadorian indigenous people, environmentalists and other activists against neoliberal economic policies and U.S. military aid to, and anti drug activity in, Columbia. In October, 2002 the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador allied with the country's second largest indigenous organization, the National Confederation of Campesino, Indigenous and Black Organizations, to win seats in Congress and to carry their candidate into the run off round of the presidential election. Then, this February, indigenous and grassroots groups in Ecuador began a mobilization to protest the government’s economic policies. Protesters’ demands included the resignation of President Lucio Gutiérrez Borbúa, an end to the U.S. government’s regional militaristic “Plan Colombia,” rejection of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and bilateral free trade agreements with the U.S., rejection of International Monetary Fund (IMF)-sponsored economic measures, withdrawal of a proposed “biodiversity” law which would restrict the rights of indigenous communities, and the withdrawal of security forces from the Sarayaku indigenous community. The protests were called by Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) and other Ecuadoran indigenous, grassroots and labor organizations. A general strike was called in the Andean province of Cotopaxi, which after considerable struggle in the streets resulted in an agreement, under which the government promised to spend $100 million in the province on education, social projects and public works, including sewer construction and highway repairs. The Provincial Assembly of Cotopaxi agreed to suspend the strike on the condition that the Cotopaxi Electrical Company be excluded from a government bidding process by February 26. In the southern province of Azuay, soldiers used gunfire, tear gas and firebombs to try to break up a protest in Shiña. Negotiations between the military and representatives of 22 local indigenous communities brought an accord, under which the army agreed to free detainees, cover all medical costs of those wounded, reforest the areas burned by their firebombs, and return vehicles and other properties confiscated during the conflict. In the midst of all this, the president of Ecuador's national Indian organization, Leonidas Iza. narrowly survived an assassination attempt, in February, when two individuals entered his office in the capital and opened fire. Four of Iza's relatives were wounded.

In Bolivia, where incomes have been stagnant for 20 years and the economy recently has turned sharply down, neoliberal polices have driven a strong indigenous and people's movement in reaction, that stopped the privatization of a major water system in 2001. In June 2002, Evo Morales, head of the Movimiento Al Socialismo (MAS), a new party, almost became Bolivia's first indigenous president, coming in second by only 1.5% of the vote. MAS is a coalition of social movements, including peasants, many of whom are indigenous, and worker's unions, with a strong stance against privatizations and corporate globalization. Then, in January-February of 2003, a mass mobilization of campesinos demanded the suspension of coca eradication, the repudiation of the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and re-nationalization and an end to privatization. The security apparatus nearly divided, but in the end remained with the government and repressed the movement, with over 20 killed and many more injured. But in October of last year, a massive popular mobilization of indigenous and other people in Bolivia, blocking all highways into the capital city and besieging the presidential palace, forced the resignation of the President, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, when the President lost key political support while the security apparatus was unwilling to stage a massive and bloody crackdown a-la Pinochet in Chile. The mobilization arose out of a non-violent movement, primarily involving Aymara peasants, an indigenous group making up about a quarter of Bolivia's population, based in El Alto, an Aymara city of some 700,000, but now extending, to the hillside neighborhoods of Upper Miraflores, Munaypata, Villa Victoria, Villa del Carmen, Villa Fatima and the Cemetery of La Paz. The movement's demands include the formation of a new Constituent Assembly, a repeal of the privatization and foreign investment laws, and a cessation of the government's plan for a $5.2 billion dollar natural gas pipeline project, controlled by a consortium of multinational energy companies to export Bolivia's natural gas to the United States, via Chile. The President had agreed to put the export plan up for a national referendum, but this was not enough to satisfy those demanding his resignation. The movement does not oppose gas exports by Bolivia, only the terms under which it was to be undertaken in the government's plan, which would have benefited only the elite, and not average Bolivians. How Bolivia's huge reserves of gas are to be exploited, and whom the benefits will accrue to, are heated political issues in Bolivia. Previous export cycles of non-renewable commodity exports of silver through the 19th century, guano and rubber later that century and tin in the 20th century have never laid the basis for a prosperous, productive and just society. On the contrary, Bolivia is one of the least prosperous and most unjust societies in Latin America. The question Bolivians are rightly asking is, 'how will this next round of non-renewable commodity exports be turned into real development?' The movement succeeded in ousting the President, despite terrible repression. There was a massacre in late September, and dozens more were killed by police and security forces during the siege of La Paz. The Vice President, Carlos Mesa, a former journalist, not previously a politician, put on the ticket to make de Lozada's candidacy more viable, and who distanced himself from the President during the siege, has become the new president, saying that he would serve as a nonpartisan caretaker until early elections can be held.²⁸ So far Carlos Mesa's programs are much more favorable to indigenous and lower income people than were those of his predecessor, but have not gone as far as movement leaders believe proper, so that he remains threatened by the possibility of mass demonstrations as he seeks to moderate amongst contending interests.

In Guatemala, despite harsh repression, particularly brutal and genocidal toward even the suspicion of native resistance, indigenous voices were critical in the democratic transition which ended two generations of military dictatorship in 1986, and remain central in the search for truth and accountability for past atrocities. With political instability increasing in Guatemala, while the human rights climate worsens, demands for constitutional recognition of Indian autonomy remain stalled, after some gains. Amnesty International reports that Guatemala has become a lawless country in which corporate interests, including subsidiaries of multinational corporations, conspire with the military, police, and common criminals to intimidate and eliminate those who get in the way of their economic interests, though with persistence and sufficient international visibility, some human rights work and convictions for past crimes of repression can still be accomplished. In Elections last fall, indigenous people helped prevent the election to the Presidency of General Efrain Rios Montt, who seized power in 1982 and whose brutal policies caused about almost 20,000 deaths in the next year and a half, and who intimidated his way into being a major candidate for President last year. Indigenous people are one of the forces for a more socially, economically and politically just and representatively governed society in Guatemala that may reverse the recent slide back toward increasing corruption, domination by the wealthy, repression and conflict. Exemplifying this movement, the Political Association of Maya Women (Moloj), in Guatemala, with assistance from the Soros Foundation, has developed an education program to empower and encourage indigenous people to participate effectively in the political process.

The Committee of Indigenous Peoples of Honduras (COPINH) staged a major demonstration early last fall, in front of Government House in Tegucigalapa, in which 18 demonstrators hung themselves on crosses, protesting the social ills caused, or not addressed, by government policies, which fail to provide adequate services in the nation's 18 departments for the country's poorest communities, while fostering globalization that is destructive to people in the countryside.

In Colombia, more than 30 years of violence is now escalating to the level seen in Guatemala a generation ago, with native people often caught in the middle, between government and guerilla forces. There, indigenous voices are demanding the right to neutrality in the conflict, and have declared their lands off-limits to leftist guerillas, rightist paramilitaries and government forces alike, as, Indian organizations insist the autonomy guarantees stated in the 1991 constitution be honored. The indigenous population has been suffering many casualties in the civil war, but its solidarity has provided resistance to armed incursions. Often this has been accomplished by posting guards to warn of an approaching force, so that the local population turns out en mass to face the invaders. On March 23, Indigenous lawmakers in Columbia denounced the government for failing to protect Indians in the northwestern region of Bojaya from combatants in the civil war, 550 Indians fled the region in the two years since 119 were killed in a church hit by guerrilla mortar fire. More than 550 have been killed since 1998 and no one has been arrested. New rounds of fighting erupted in the area this spring. In late May, an attack by paramilitaries killed many Wayuu Indians, and caused hundreds to flee their homes. Nearly all those killed were women and children.

Though indigenous people are less than 2% of the Columbian population, they currently inhabit about a quarter of the country and are well organized. Thus there are numerous indigenous mayors and some indigenous members of legislatures. The 1991 Columbian constitution guarantees indigenous peoples 25% of the land, but does not specify the details. Thus the indigenous peoples have been lobbying the government to specify appropriate boundaries and to insure effective autonomy. With increased United States involvement (including the sending of several dozen special forces troops to guard a U.S. oil company pipe line in eastern Columbia, in January 2003) the war has spilled over into indigenous areas of neighboring counties. Venezuela’s armed forces have exchanged fire with Columbian Paramilitary forces operating in their country and bombed a zone close to the Columbian boarder, in what President Hugo Chavez says is a warning to Columbian paramilitaries that have “invaded Venezuelan territory.”

In October of 2002, Venezuelan President Chavez signed a decree changing the name of the nation's "Columbus Day" to "the Day of Indiogenous Resistence," honoring Venezuelan indigenous groups. Indigenous people have been among the support from mostly poor citizens that President Chavez has needed to stay in power in the face of a coup attempt and a long national strike led by wealthy and middle class interests, and more recently an attempt to subject him to a recall election. Currently Cultural Survival is working with the Pume people and the Venezuelan government to determine how much land the tribe needs to remain self-sufficient. The project is intended to lead to the establishment of land tenure rights and ownership for the Pume. Cornell University Graduate student Bjorn Sletto, has been training indigenous Venezuelans in cartography so that they can survey their lands. The 1999 Venezuela constitution, promoted by President Hugo Chavez, contains a chapter on indigenous rights including the right of indigenous peoples to own ancestral lands. However, to date Venezuela's cash strapped government has not funded a commission to work with the Indians to make the demarcations official. There is concern, that if Chavez is removed, a new government may not be willing to appoint a commission.

In Chile, Pehuenche peoples continue to resist operations of the Endesa company, which plans to flood 9,000 acres of their traditional land in the course of building a dam on the Bio Bio river. A 1993 law prevents indigenous land from being sold (it can only be exchanged for land of equivalent value with the consent of all owners), but, in May, 2003, the Pehuenche were unsuccessful in getting the Chilean Supreme Court to review governmental appropriations for the project. Pehuenche families in the affected area have brought suite under the 1993 law.

In October 2002, Brazil elected labor leader Lula de Silva as President by a substantial margin, in which indigenous people were a small part of his support. De Silva has moderated some of his proposed leftist policies for bringing the nation out of economic difficulty with particular help to the poor. He has agreed to abide by existing government commitments to adhere to Brazil's foreign debt obligations and not violate an International Monetary Fund program strictly limiting government spending, in order for Brazil to receive the bulk of IMF funding under agreements made during the prior administration. Lulu has been amongst the leadership of South American countries resisting FTAA and international neoliberal economic policies.

Although President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva promised to respect the rights of Brazil's Indigenous peoples, during the first year and a half of his government, he has done little to protect those rights, while there has been a horrendous increase in violence against Indians, lack of progress on returning their land, increased militarization in indigenous areas, and threats to indigenous health care, with the Brazilian government's health foundation announcing that it will take over Indian health programs which it had previously contracted out to NGOs. This has caused serious alarm amongst those working with the Yanomami who fear that the government will not provide the specialist health care needed. Brazil's minister of justice announced, on December 23, 2003, that the president would ratify the area in Raposa Serra do Sol in which the Makuxi and other tribes, hard pressed by encroachment, live, and remove the 7,000 non-Indian inhabitants who are rice cultivators, farmers and cattle ranchers. A spokesman for the Indigenous Council of Roraima stated in January 2004 that 'ratification of Raposa Serra do Sol is the barometer measuring the attitude of the Lula government. If it acts now, Indians throughout Brazil will take this as a sign of the government's commitment to upholding their rights.' The government, however, continued to delay recognition of the Raposa-Serra do Sol territory, and has hinted it may reduce the size of the reserve to give Indian land to outsiders, while tensions rose between the indigenous population and colonists and ranchers who have invaded the area with the encouragement of local politicians. In the face of President Lulu's failure to protect Indian land and rights, in early April, Hundreds of indigenous representatives began gathering in the capital, Brasilia, to protest against government policies, holding a mass lobby of Congress on April 19, the annual 'Day of the Indian'.

The overall situation for Indians living in their traditional areas in Brazil is two sided. On the one side, the country is proud of its tradition of protecting indigenous people, and has established laws to do so. On the other side, pressures for development are strong, and often reduce legal protections to fiction. FUNAI, the government agency dealing with Indian affairs, believes that the few non-contacted tribes should remain isolated, and recognizes that indigenous people recently coming into contact with Brazilian society are the most vulnerable. However, its main work has been in determining what place not so isolated indigenous people will have, and this is a contentious issue. Compared with other countries in the hemisphere, the indigenous people are the smallest percent of the national population. But because of efforts to record them, and indigenous peoples' willingness to be recorded, combined with the provision of health care, Brazil's indigenous population, officially, is the fastest growing in the hemisphere.

In Brazil, Indians and ranchers are caught up in conflict fueled by the fact that the constitution gives land rights to both groups. In practice, Indian rights have been less often protected. Under Brazil's 1988 Constitution, all Indian lands were required to be demarcated within five years. But the process has been so costly, time consuming and controversial, that only 30% has been fully delimited, and made subject to protection by the legal system. Outside of those reserved areas, the ongoing spread of non Indians into indigenous lands has often been supported by legal process, leading to removals of Indians. To pressure the government to act to protect Indian rights, native people have engaged in a series of "retakings" to repossess traditional lands in mass. Eleven of the 15 Kaiowa-Guarani reservations created after 1988 are the results of these actions, which in general are tolerated though they are illegal. Throughout the Amazon region, Indians are suffering from the pressure of incursion, though the problems are most acute in rapidly developing areas like Mato Grosso do Sul.

In Peru, part Indian Alejandro Toledo was elected President on an Indian rights Platform, but after ten years has had difficulty achieving his program and has lost popularity. Meanwhile, the Federacion Nativa de Madre de Dios y sus Afluentes (FENAMAD) has been engaged in national and international efforts to support the rights of the Nahua (or Yura) and Piro who's legal rights the government has failed to protect against increasing incursions by loggers, even after a reserve was established in April 2002. In the central Chaco region of Paraguay, the Ayoreo Totobiegosode, a nomadic people and the last isolated tribe in the Amazon region, are struggling against extinction as their land is being taken over by ranchers, and forest destroyed, despite constitutional guarantees of Indian land ownership. A delegation of Nahua people of Peru, in initial contact with the outside world, arrived in Lima, in early November 2003, from a remote corner of the Amazon rain forest to call on the Peruvian government to remove oil concessions from their territories. The Nahua, who live adjacent to the controversial Camisea Gas Project in Peru's southeastern Amazon, fear that their right to life will be jeopardized by the return of diseases, which in the 1980s caused the deaths of over half their population after Shell Oil first contacted them. The Nahua also request an end to invasions of their territory by illegal loggers, and title for their ancestral lands. Recent unannounced visits to the Nahua community of Serjali by Camisea Project operator Pluspetrol could indicate that the Camisea production consortium, led by Hunt Oil, a Texas-based independent with close ties to the Bush administration, is preparing to drill for oil in that area, designated as Block 57. Nearly 75 percent of Camisea gas extraction operations are located inside an indigenous reserve for the Nahua, Nanti and Kirineri peoples, living with little or no contact with the outside world, some of whom have been forcibly contacted by the Camisea consortium. The Peruvian national indigenous organization AIDESEP has repeatedly denounced indigenous rights abuses by Camisea Project companies as a "threat to the physical, cultural, territorial and environmental integrity" of indigenous peoples. AIDESEP supports the Nahua in defending their lands and lives against the threat of expanding oil and gas operations. Meanwhile, the Peruvian government has established a category of communal ecological reserves for the benefit of local populations, with four of the six co-managed reserves established by early 2004 created in the last three years, while six proposals for additional communal reserves were being developed.

A number of national organizations support the struggles of indigenous people in their own Latin American countries. These include: Asociación Interétnica de Desarrollo de la Selva Peruana (AIDESEP) (aidesep@chavin.rcp.net.pe); Amerindian Peoples´ Association of Guyana (APA) (www.apacoica.org.gy); Confederación de los Pueblos Indígenas de Bolivia (CIDOB) (www.cidob-bo.org); Coordenação das Organizações Indígenas da Amazônia Brasileira (COIAB) (www.coiab.com.br); Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas de la Amazonía Ecuatoriana (CONFENIAE) (www.ecuanex.net.ec/confeniae); Consejo Nacional Indio de Venezuela (CONIVE) (conive_siglo21@hotmail.com, yajuraweni@latinmail.com); Fédération des Organisations Amérindiennes de Guyane (FOAG) (foag@nplus.gf, chefcoutumier.kourou@nplus.gf); Organisatie van Inheemsen in Suriname (OIS); Organización de los Pueblos Indígenas de la Amazonía Colombiana (OPIAC) (opiac007@mundo.com, jcestrada30@yahoo.com); and the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) (http://conaie.org).

Among other organizations active in Latin America, Coordinadora de las Organizaciones Indígenas de la Cuenca Amazonica (COICA) (http://www.coica.org/index.asp) "invited 15 representatives from 12 environmental groups to the 'First Summit Between Indigenous Peoples and Environmentalists' in Iquitos, Peru. Ten human rights and aid groups, Cultural Survival among them, were invited as observers. The meeting provided an opportunity for indigenous peoples and environmentalists to understand each other's concerns. Both sides attempted to establish a joint strategy for conserving the Amazonian rain forest by supporting indigenous claims for control of their territory and resources. The groups that attended agreed and signed the document called the Iquitos Declaration." Cooperación Amazónica (COAM) (http://www.pangea.org/~coam/coica.htm), was created in Barcelona in 1989 with the objective of collaborating in the defense of the more than 400 indigenous peoples that live in the Amazon region comprising parts of Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Columbia, Venezuela, Surinam and French and British Guiana. The Nahual Foundation (ignacio.ochoa@nahualfoundation.org), described in more detail in the Ongoing Activities section above, serves as think tank for indigenous people throughout Latin America, linked to local indigenous think tanks across Central and South America. It expects to soon post a web site and an online journal.

The South and Mesoamerican Indian Rights Center (SAIIC) (http://saiic.nativeweb.org/index.html) "provides information on the struggles of Indian people of South and Meso America to the concerned public and to environmental and human rights solidarity groups in northern countries. We communicate the Indigenous viewpoint to policy and funding institutions whose work affects Indians. SAIIC produces and distributes educational audio-visual and print materials offering the Indigenous perspective on social justice, environmental and international issues. We also facilitate communication among Indigenous peoples in this hemisphere. To make international resources accessible to Indians, SAIIC provides technical assistance to Indian organizations and communities. We provide training in computers, electronic communications, fund raising and journalism".

Thus Indian people are active all over Latin America, with different degrees of influence according to their situation. Across Latin America, economic decline, following two decades of neoliberal economic policies, is bringing great pressure on ruling classes, almost entirely of European descent, as new political parties are forming in a number of nations with many rising leaders from indigenous peoples and other previously excluded classes in a shifting political landscape. The new directions in public, and particularly economic, policy are not entirely clear, and vary by country, but the move is toward a return to more state participation in the economy with protection of some secondary economies. These new movements have been most successful in a number of nations in South America, causing the Bush Administration to put less effort into plans to rapidly extend a free trade zone over the whole hemisphere, and to concentrate on Central America, with Plan Panama (PPP), while making bilateral agreements on a country by country basis, further South, as recently occurred with a U.S.-Chile free trade pact, while continuing to promote free trade across all of the Americas in the hopes of success in the medium run.

In the face of U.S. efforts to bring about neoliberal economic development across Latin America, Indians across the region have come together to promote an alternative. While the Mexican government hosted a conference, at Merida in June, 2002, bringing together the Presidents of Central American Nations involved in Plan Puebla Panama (PPP), a comprehensive development plan for the region, a counter meeting of 350 indigenous organizations from across Central America met in Quetzaltanango (Xela) Guatemala to work for the continued cultural and biological diversity of indigenous communities and plan alternative models of development to those being imposed upon Mesoamerica. At least three quarters of the participants were indigenous and campesinos (farmers) chosen by their organizations to represent their concerns. A major focus of the meeting was that the PPP, being undertaken by seven Central American nations and partly financed and advocated by the World Bank and the Interamerican Development Bank, which poses a serious threat to bio and cultural diversity throughout the region. While the PPP claims that it intends to "realize the potential of the human and ecological richness of the region within the scope of sustainable development that respects cultural diversity," in violation of Convenio 169 of the International Labor Organization, recognizing the right of indigenous peoples to control their own economic, social and cultural development, it has proceeded without any consultation with the communities that are in the path of planned projects, including the constructing of pipelines, highways and hydroelectric facilities. The plan simply intends to impose privatization and land consolidation for the establishment of industrial plantations, with the presumption of employing those dispossessed, at wages lower than those currently paid on the U.S.-Mexican boarder. This leaves no room for indigenous autonomy, with development according to local values and interests, and respect for the land and other property rights of indigenous people. As of fall 2003, in southern Mexico, the government was beginning to move on massive PPP development projects in hydro electric power, oil exploration, extraction and pipe line building, super highway construction and biotechnology development that will disrupt indigenous communities and force massive migration. The Zapatistas say that they will resist the relocation efforts that would be undertaken by the army.

PPP would transform the region into a transit area for primary resources and manufactured goods to be extracted by multinational businesses for export to the U.S., Europe and Japan. This would complete the destruction of local and area economies, while leaving the regions people even more vulnerable to shifts in international markets. A recent example of this problem is the hardship experienced by coffee growers, no longer providing food for their own subsistence because of their focus on exports, by the drop of $.25 a pound paid to coffee producers during 2002. In contrast to the destructive effects of the Plan's free trade capitalism, already seen in the difficulties created for indigenous, and, indeed, most people in Mexico by NAFTA, several work groups at the meeting focused on developing economic self-sufficiency by living an alternative economic model, "the economy of solidarity," building on traditional exchanges of goods and services. The idea is to work with the relationship of producers and consumers to improve the conditions of life for all. One Mayan participant stated, "We need to change the concept of economy, not just in terms of money, but revalue the economy with other goals, that of the common good. We need to include those ideas in the education of our children." To meet the threat to biodiversity by the introduction of transgenic corn in Central America (including genetically engineered corn which arrived in Mexico as animal feed, but subsequently some of which was planted), regional seed banks and registries were proposed. Proposals were also made to halt biopiracy and regulate bioprospecting.

To the South, more than 10,000 people protested when the Seventh Ministerial Meeting of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) was held in Quito, Ecuador at the end of October of 2002. The Bush administration continued to state that it hoped the treaty would be in place by the end of 2004 to expand economic development through free trade. Indigenous people joined farmers and civic society leaders from throughout Latin America in coming to object to a proposal that they believe: will destroy security in work; bring in produce at prices below farmers costs and in a number of ways be destructive of the secondary economy of the vast majority of people; will encourage environmental damage and increase the denial of property and cultural rights of indigenous peoples, contributing significantly to their physical and cultural genocide. The Fifth Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organization, September 10-14, in Cancun, Mexico, and the Eighth Ministerial Meeting of the Free Trade Area of the Americas November 20-21, in Miami, demonstrated that the opposition to neoliberal economic globalization is increasing grassroots efforts in mobilizing. As a result, the ministerial meeting to negotiate a Free Trade Area of the Americas in Miami was only able to produce a heavily diluted agreement, revealing that there no longer is a free trade consensus in the Americas. As a result, the Bush Administration has delayed plans for FTAA, to work on smaller agreements, including concluding the Central American Free trade Agreement (CAFTA) with El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua in December.

Throughout Latin there is currently a higher degree of international indigenous collaboration and organized discussion then in any other region the world, though across the globe, indigenous groups are struggling for rights with international support. A few examples outside the Americas that have been in the news in the last two years include the attempts by the Tibetan people to gain an end to Chinese repression and a return to self rule; the interruption of much of Nigeria's oil production by intertribal conflict between the Itsekiri and Ijawa, who are leading a campaign for a greater share of Nigerian oil wealth, almost none of which reaches local people, with the Nigerian share almost entirely going to the national government and corrupt officials in the capital; and the struggle by Indigenous people of Aceh with the Indonesian army and government for at least autonomy.

Meanwhile, world wide indigenous organization has been developing as globalization has expanded. The International Indian Treaty Council²⁹ (IITC) was founded in 1974 at a gathering by the American Indian Movement at Standing Rock, SD, attended by more than 5000 representatives of 98 Indigenous Nations. IITC has long worked at "Addressing violations of Indigenous Peoples’ rights and presenting issues of concern to the international community. Primary focus areas include: Environment Protection and Sustainable Development; Treaty and Land Rights; Cultural Rights, Sacred sites and Religious Freedom; Rights and protection of Indigenous Children." The Council operates Mentorship Programs providing intensive training and leadership development to representatives of Indigenous communities, including youth. "The IITC supports grassroots Indigenous struggles through information dissemination, networking, coalition building, technical assistance, organizing and facilitating the effective participation of traditional Peoples in local, regional, national and international forums, events and gatherings." Its work in international organizations is discussed below.

Among the international indigenous organizations with a narrower focus is the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism (IPBC),³⁰ "The IPCB is organized to assist indigenous peoples in the protection of their genetic resources, indigenous knowledge, cultural and human rights from the negative effects of biotechnology." The Council "provides educational and technical support to indigenous peoples in the protection of their biological resources, cultural integrity, knowledge and collective rights. The IPCB is a service-based organization that provides community education and outreach to tribal governments, institutions, organizations, and individuals." It maintains "an on-going research agenda of ethically questionable research happening within indigenous communities, both nationally and internationally." The Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN)³¹ "is an alliance of grassroots indigenous peoples whose mission is to protect the sacredness of Mother Earth from contamination and exploitation by strengthening maintaining and respecting the traditional teachings and the natural laws." Founded in 1990, IEN focuses on indigenous peoples' right to food and water and food security; maintenance of planetary biodiversity and protection of indigenous people from biopiracy; the protection of indigenous lands, resources and sacred places with healthy physical and cultural environments. First Nations Development Institute³² was founded in 1980 by Native people with the mission to assist Native communities in controlling their assets and in building capacity to direct their economic future. Its programs and strategies focus on assisting tribes and Native communities so they control, create, leverage, utilize and retain their assets. Its International program is First People's World Wide. An important new development, was the March 2002 American Indian Education Consortium (AIHEC) journey to New Zealand by representatives of tribal colleges across the United States and Australia, to meet with leaders of the particularly strong and well developed New Zealand Maori colleges and organizations. This was the first step in launching a world indigenous peoples organization for furthering the interests of indigenous controlled institutions of higher education. This was followed up in Februarty 2004 with 30 indigenous people from 11 North American and Canadian Indian nations visiting New Zealand Maori language schools, to help develop total immersion programs for their own people. With language immersion from infancy to doctorate level, the Maori lead the world in indigenous language development.³³The World Summit Of Indigenous Entrepreneurs: A New Mechanism for Shared Prosperity (WSIE) took place in Toronto, Canada, August 18th-20, 2003, as a program of the World Trade University in Honor of the United Nations Decade of the World's Indigenous People.³⁴ The Goals of the Summit are to:1) Develop a dialogue with fellow indigenous entrepreneurs; 2) Initiate a flow of ideas and information across all boundaries and borders; 3) A potential formation of joint ventures and development of organizations to promote indigenous products; 4) Possibly establish an institute for indigenous knowledge; 5) Discuss issues of greatest importance to Indigenous entrepreneurs; 6) Provide networking opportunities between entrepreneurs and venture capital organizations. The World Summit of Indigenous Entrepreneurs (WSIE) was designed to provide a global forum for indigenous entrepreneurs from a variety of industries in countries around the world, as well as other entrepreneurs who wish to do business with indigenous people.

There are numerous indigenous caucuses in international organizations and at international meetings.
For example, the International Forum on Globalization (IFG)'s Indigenous Peoples and Globalization Program³⁵ has completed a map with text depicting the negative impacts of economic globalization on indigenous peoples on every continent except Antarctica. To view or download the map, go to: http://www.ifg.org/programs/indig.htm. Examples of indigenous caucuses at major international meetings are the Indigenous Peoples' Caucus at the 11 Sessions of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, and the International Indigenous Peoples Summit on Sustainable Development, Khoi-San Territory Kimberley, South Africa, 20-23 August 2002, as well as the indigenous Kari-Oca Declaration, at the first such summit in Brazil, May 30. 1992.

A new stage in international native organizing appears to be opening with the launching of an international indigenous leadership development and networking project, arising out of the success of Americans for Indian Opportunity (AIO) in the U.S. with its Ambassadors Program.³⁶ The Ambassadors was launched by AIO to help young native community leaders increase their inner strength to enhance the development of their own leadership styles through experiences that reconcile their traditional indigenous values with contemporary global reality. Participants are selected for the program who are already doing work for their Indian communities, reservation or urban, and an important piece of the, now two year, work of each Ambassador is a project for the betterment of the community. Another fundamental aspect of the program is participation in decision making using a contemporary framework that follows traditional values of deciding by consensus.³⁷ Ambassador Alumni remain active in a communication network and regularly join in meetings to discuss Indian policy issues and to make decisions concerning AIO programs and policy. As there are now Ambassador Alumni working in virtually every major national Indian organization and in almost every federal agency that deals significantly with Indians and Indian policy, the network has become an important and helpful information and communication vehicle for Native Americans.

Throughout its more than 30 years of service, AIO has been involved in international networking, and each year's Ambassador group has visited a country outside the U.S. In 2001, an AIO group held a meeting with Maori contacts in New Zealand, hosted by Wananga o Aotearoa, the largest Maori tertiary education institute, to share ideas for the formation of Advancement for Maori Opportunity (AMO). The assembled Maori found that they held the same core values as did their American colleagues, as that general way of seeing is almost universal among indigenous thinkers around the world. AMO was established to promote the following: "to take an active stand for Universal Peace, Harmony and Empowerment through influencing the world by sharing our fundamental values and practices as Maori together with all Indigenous peoples of the world; to promote and develop educational cultural exchanges with other Indigenous cultures nationally and internationally; to promote and build leadership amongst Mäori people by the establishment of an 'Maori Ambassadors Programme;' to advance Te Reo (the language) and tikanga Mäori (Mäori customs); to initiate projects deemed by AMO to benefit the practice and objectives of the movement including leadership, culture, sports, education, health, environment, economic development and other related areas."³⁸ AMO has been undertaking research and development, community capacity building, and advocacy of community development with indigenous communities in the Pacific Islands.

Following up on the 2001 sessions in New Zealand, AIO and AMO ambassadors, board members and advisors met in September 2002 in Washington, DC with indigenous and concerned people from a number of nations, and staff of the Agora Institute, for a participatory "Wisdom of the People Forum," to design an international "Transitional Indigenous Leaders Interaction in the Context of Globalization."³⁹ The result was the setting up of Advancement for Indigenous Opportunity International (shortly renamed, Advancement of Global Indigeneity (AGI)) to develop transnational connections among indigenous leaders and communities to develop long term strategies and support for actions appropriate to each community. "These self-determined communities will be able to rely on a world wide network of indigenous leaders who successfully weave their core cultural values into their decisions and institutions and who recognize that they have something unique and vital to share with the world." The launching of this enterprise was made with "three major assumptions. The first is that all peoples have a right to coexist in peace. Secondly, Indigenous peoples have an alternative worldview to contribute to global discussions. And third, it is imperative to world peace that we find ways to contribute our indigeneity to global society.... It is important to remember that although there is a great diversity among Indigenous communities, there is a strong, spiritual inter-connectedness that is key to our collective vision,"⁴⁰

AIO and AMO held a follow up meeting in New Mexico, in October 2002, to begin to put together an organization for Advancement of Global Indigeneity on the basis of the findings of the Washington forum, and to explore sources of funding. The U.S. and New Zealand indigenous NGO's decided to deepen their collaboration in the future, including regularly mingling their ambassador programs, in connection with incubating the new international leadership development and networking operation. In June 2003, a group from Americans for Indian Opportunity (AIO) had a joint meeting in New Zealand with Advancement of Maori Opportunity (AMO) to support development of AMO's Ambassador Program of leadership development and networking, which is now in its third year, and to enhance international collaboration in developing Advancement of Global Indigeneity as a networking vehicle for international indigenous cooperation for improving the globalization process for the benefit of all peoples. To enhance their collaboration and enrich both organizations, AIO and AMO arranged to each have members of their partner organization on their own board. AIO International held its first board meeting in Crete, in July, in conjunction with AIO and AMO participation in the "Agoras of the Global Village" Annual Conference of the International Society for Systems Sciences, which included AIO and AMO facilitating the indigenous "Wisdom of the People Forum." AIO and AMO met, again, in New Zealand in April. Networking with other indigenous peoples and groups is on going, and additional meetings have been planned,

A significant development is the growth of activity by indigenous peoples in international organizations. A large number of indigenous groups have long been active with international bodies, as exemplified by the International Indian Treaty Council, which in 1977, became the first organization of Indigenous Peoples to be reorganized as a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) with consultative status to the United Nations Economic and Social Council. The IITC has focused on building indigenous peoples’ participation in key U.N. fora such as the Commission on Human Rights, the Working Group on Indigenous Populations, the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, UNESCO and the Commission on Sustainable Development. In recent years, IITC has also participated in the International Labor Organization (ILO), U.N. World Conferences, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the World Archeological Congress to systematically address concerns vital to Indigenous Peoples. The IITC has submitted testimony, documentation and formal complaints to these fora, as well as to the U.N. Center for Human Rights and the Organization of American States (OAS), to redress grievances, increase awareness and impact the development of international standards protecting the rights and survival of indigenous peoples. The council has been working for: implementation of an effective plan of action for the International Decade of the World’s Indigenous Peoples which began on December 10th, 1994; adoption of the Draft Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples with appropriate final language; and Development of a permanent forum for indigenous peoples within the U.N. system.

The finalizing of the language for the Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is an issue of currant major concern for indigenous people. At the Session of the Working Group on the Draft United Nations Declarations on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, in Geneva, Switzerland, December 2-13, the clash in worldviews between representatives of many of the most established nations and participants from indigenous nations continued to make it very difficult to make headway.⁴¹ To date only two of the proposed twelve articles have been drafted.

The United States was the most resistant of all to the indigenous proposals. The larger issues were most often framed in battles over details of language. The U.S. insisted that instead of "self-determination," the document should say "internal self-determination." The U.S. and other nation-states fear their power and control will be undermined, and that giving too much power to indigenous people would end up being very expensive to governments, non-indigenous citizens and major - especially multinational - corporations that have tremendous influence in the U.S. and other nation-states. Besides, the international establishment is concerned about regional and world stability. Even the nation-state is outmoded in a shrinking world. Look at the chaos that occurred when the USSR broke up.

On the other side, indigenous peoples have been and continue to be denied everything from life and dignity to culture and prosperity by the colonialism and imperialism of the established nation-states. While even internal self-determination has often not been respected, granting only that has often meant, and could very well continue to mean, that indigenous people only have the right to police their own concentration camps, whether called "homelands" or "reservations," wherever, however and whenever the surrounding nation-state wants to create, destroy, modify or move them. Clearly, there are legitimate concerns on both, and indeed, all sides, that could be worked through if the parties would discuss them in terms of the long term mutual benefits of equitable solutions.

Unfortunately, the most powerful nation-states, and particularly the United States, are driven by the fear and greed, not particularly of average citizens, but of the most influential economic interests. The U.S. has been delaying completion of the document by being stubborn in the small battles over words. Now it threatens to have the whole document considered null and void if it is not completed in two more years, when the International Decade of The World's Indigenous People is concluded. The U.S. and the other establishment nation-states need to see that the pressure also comes from the other side, and that given the rising dissatisfaction of repressed peoples and people, indigenous and otherwise, in Latin America, the Middle East, and, indeed, around the world, it is in the established nation-states medium and long run interest to engage in real dialogue for mutual benefit.

Thanks to the increased political power of Indians in many nations in Latin America, the framing of the Draft American Declaration of Indigenous Rights by the Organization of American States Working Group on Indigenous Peoples is moving more quickly then is finalizing the U.N. declaration.⁴² Where several years ago some Latin American government leaders would not even sit at the table with indigenous representatives, three years of debate has produced a consensus on some key issues that provide lay the groundwork for completing the document. Several more years are expected to complete the detailed drafting.

From May 13-24, 2002, after years of effort by indigenous and other people and organizations, the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues⁴³ held its inaugural meeting at UN headquarters in New York, marking the first time that the worlds 350 million indigenous people have had any direct voice in the UN. The Council is composed of 16 members, who make recommendations to the Economic and Social Council. Eight indigenous members are appointed by the President of the Social Council, following consultation with regional indigenous groups and organizations. The other eight are nominated by governments and elected by the Council. The members of the forum serve three year terms and may be reelected once. The forum makes recommendations on economic and social development, culture, the environment, health, education and human rights. The Forum also functions to raise awareness, promote integration and coordination of activities relating indigenous issues within the UN system, and prepare and disseminate information on indigenous issues. The Forum meets once a year for a ten day working sessions. The U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues has two working groups. The Working Group on Indigenous Populations, has a two fold mandate: 1. to review developments pertaining to the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous peoples. 2. to give attention to the evolution of international standards concerning indigenous rights. The open-ended inter-sessional working group carries on the work of the forum between annual meetings.

As the Forum undertook its second annual session, in May of 2003, with a focus on indigenous children, its secretariat was in the process of being established. At this juncture, the forum faces several important challenges. The first, and also the ultimate, task is to build upon the increased successful activity by indigenous organizations and the growing recognition amongst the world's publics of the importance of the wellbeing of indigenous peoples, that made possible the launching of the forum, to overcome the resistance to adequately addressing indigenous concerns of some of the established nation states, driven by wealthy multinational interests. The second effort, discussed in the Forum's second session, is to make the work of the forum more known to indigenous peoples, world wide, and to fulfill its mandate to raise awareness of the work of the forum and of indigenous concerns throughout the labyrinth of UN organizations. This is essential to completing the forth requirement for an effective indigenous forum: overcoming resistance by the UN bureaucracy so that the Forum's secretariat can be appropriately established and enabled to function properly.⁴⁴ This is partly a political and partly a cultural endeavor.

Organizations have cultures and their members have mindsets that are partly formed by their organizational experience and history. As Indians, their tribal governments and NGOs, such as Americans for Indian Opportunity, found in working with governmental agencies in the U.S. in the long process of building government-to-government relations between tribal governments and the federal, state and local governments, native people have different mindsets and needs than most of those in the bureaucracy are used to working with. Thus it will take some persistent diplomacy and education to get the rest of the UN organization to understand what the needs of the Forum's secretariat are, and to allow it to fulfill its function appropriately, hopefully allowing the Indigenous Forum to play a role in changing the nature of globalization.

Because many indigenous peoples and people have been especially harshly impacted by neoliberal globalization, they have been particularly active among those resisting it. It is to be hoped that the expansion of international indigenous organization will contribute significantly to the dialogue about how best to transform it, and to the collaborative effort to realize that vision.

Note: This article is a revision and update of a paper presented at the American Indian studies Section sessions of the Western Social Science Association Meeting, April 2004, in Salt Lake City, UT.

1. See Chris Strohm, "Deaf Ears: No Thanks, World Bank says to critical study," In These Times, June 24, 2002, pp. 5-6. The countries studied included Bangladesh, Ecuador, Hungary, Mexico and Ghana. Also worth looking at is the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Trade and Development Report 2003, which in October, found unequivocally that neoliberal economic policies of globalization, leaving development to the market (with minimal government services and regulation) for two decades has left subSaharan Africa in an economic wasteland, while declining shares of manufacturing output and employment ("deindustrialization") have accompanied rapid liberalization in many Latin American nations. Under neoliberal economic policies, "enclaves" of industrialization linked to international production chains have dotted this landscape, without in most cases translating into more broad-based investment, value added and productivity growth. The study reports an urgent need for global economic institutions and governments rethink policies and return to carefully designed, vigorous government intervention to provide necessary economic stimulus and guidance, and to create and preserve an appropriate climate for development. The report concluded that the policies pursued to eliminate inflation and downsize the public sector have often undermined growth and hampered technological progress. As a result, "the current economic landscape in the developing world has an uncanny resemblance to conditions prevailing in the early 1980s", when many countries slipped into deep crisis. The target level of investment for catch-up growth - estimated by the Report to be in the range of 20-to-25% of GDP - has eluded most countries undergoing rapid market reforms. By contrast, active state participation in the economy in East Asia after the debt crisis produced a strong investment performance, growing manufacturing value added and employment and a rising share of manufacturing exports, with productivity and technology gaps with leading industrial countries rapidly closing.. Elsewhere, the Report finds a less encouraging record: Industrial progress has halted in much of the developing world; only eight of 26 selected countries succeeded in raising the share of manufacturing value added in GDP between 1980 and the 1990s, together with a rising share of investment; In economies with lagging industrialization and a declining share of investment, the share of manufactures in total exports has also been stagnant or falling, while exchange rate depreciation and wage restraint have been the basis for bolstering trade performance; The production structure in much of Latin America and Africa has seen a notable shift away from sectors with the greatest potential for productivity growth towards those producing and processing raw materials; and Where trade and investment have risen in the context of international production networks, the tendency has been for an apparent increase in the technology content of exports without a similar increase in domestic value added. Similarly, study released in January found that, when taken as a group, all of the less-developed countries that depend on exporting oil, have seen the living standards of their populations drop--and drop dramatically (World Developments section of Nonviolent Change, Vo. XVIII, No. 2, Winter 2004.

2. The World Bank's indigenous policies are discussed in Shelton H. Davis, "The World Bank and Indigenous Peoples" on its web cite at: http://wbln0018.worldbank.org/essd/essd.nsf/28354584d9d97c29852567cc00780e2a/f0eb151669712593852567cc0077f6a4?OpenDocument. At the May 2002 session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, A representative of the Indigenous Caucus on Sustainable Development complained that the World Bank and other financial institutions were highly resistant to indigenous people because they catered to elite sectors of society (See Forum Press Release HR/4675, 5/22/03, available on its web page at: http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/pfii/index.html).

4. See Ladislav Rusmich and Stephen M. Sachs, Lessons from the Failure of the Communist Economic System (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), particularly the Introduction and Part III; and A.A. Amsden, J. Kochanowicz, and A. Taylor, The Market Meets Its Match: Restructuring the Economies of Eastern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

5. Bank Austria East West Report, 2/96, p. 29. See the discussion in Rusmich and Sachs, Lessons from the Failure, Ch. 11.

6. For an analysis of the transition to the market programs in East Europe, see Rusmich and Sachs, Lessons from the Failure, Part III, particularly Ch. 11.

8. Ibid., pp. 300-301, and John b. Judis, "World Bunk: Japanese officials think Western austerity measures are the wrong medicine for Eastern Europe," In Theses Times, December 13, 1993, pp. 14-15.

9. An excellent and easy to read study of this is Sarah Anderson and John Cavanaugh (Institute for Policy Studies), and David Ranney (University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs), NAFTA's First Two Years: The Myths and Realities (a 50 page report available from its publisher for $7.50: The Institute for Policy Studies, 733 15 St. NW, Washington, DC 20005 (202)234-9382.

10. Ibid., p. 1. For recent examples of complaint about NAFTA continuing to encourage environmental decline, see Elliot Spagat (Associated Press), Power sites in Mexico under fire: Critics' suit claims plants at border that sell power to West coast avert U.S. controls," Imdianapolis Star, Juine 15, 2003, P D1, D6.

11. Rusmich and Sachs, Lessons from the Failure of the Communist Economic System; and Amsden, Kochanowicz and Taylor, The Market Meets its Match.

12. Anderson, Cavanaugh, and Ranney, NAFTA's First Two Years: The Myths and Realities, pp. 4-17.

13. According to Timothy A. Wise and Kevin P. Gallagher in Foreign Policy in Focus, October 24, 2002, NAFTA has been unsuccessful, to date, in purely economic terms, reducing jobs in the U.S. and slowing economic development in Mexico.

14. Ibid., pp. 40-41; and Ginger Thompson, "Nafta to open Foodgates, engulfing Rural Mexico" The New York Times, International, 12/19/02.

15. David Korten, When Corporations Rule the World (New York: Kumarian Press, 1995) and Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, Ed., The Case Against the Global Economy and a Turn Toward the Local (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996), Part I.

16. This is discussed in John Cavanagh, Daphne Wysham and Marcus Arruda, Ed., Beyond Bretton Woods: Alternatives to the Global Economic Order (London: Pluto Press, with the Institute for Policy Studies and Transnational Institute, 1994) and Michael Shuman, Towards a Global Village: International Community Development Initiatives (London: Pluto Press, with the Institute for Policy Studies and Transnational Institute, 1994).

17. These measures are discussed briefly, but more fully in, "The Alliance for Responsible Trade, Citizens Trade Campaign and the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade," A Just and Sustainable Trade and Development Initiative for the Western Hemisphere: An Initiating Statement (16 page Document of the Citizens Alternative for Western Hemisphere Presidents Summit, Miami, FL, December 1994). It is available from the Institute for Policy Study and: The Alliance for Responsible Trade, 733 15 St., NW #290, Washington, DC 20005, (202)234-9382 (Contact: John Cavanagh); Citizens Trade Campaign, 1025 Vermont Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20005 (202)879-4297 (Contact: Jim Jontz); Action Canada Network, 251 Laurier Ave. West, Suite 904, Ottawa, Ontario K1P 5J6, Canada (613)133-1764; Mexican Action Network on Free Trade, Godard No. 20, Col. Guadalupe Victoria, 07790 Mexico, Mexico, D.F. (525)556-9375. Additional discussion of such measures and related issues are contained in Ibid. (all three works).

18. On the pattern of Indian organization development in the U.S., see Ladonna Harris, Stephen M. Sachs and Barbara Morris, "Honoring the Circle: Developing Government-to-Government Relations Between Tribal Governments and the Federal, State and Local Governments," in Proceedings of the 2002 American Political Science Association Meetings (Washington, DC: American Political Science Association, 2002), pp. 1-9; Angie Debo, A History of the Indians of the United States (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989 Ch. 18-21; and James S. Olson and Raymond Wilson, Native Americans in the Twentieth Century (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1984), Ch. 4-8 and Epilogue.

19. Information about NARF is available at: http://www.narf.org/. "The Native American Rights Fund (NARF) is a non-profit organization that provides legal representation and technical assistance to Indian tribes, organizations and individuals nationwide. Our Mission: Preservation of tribal existence; Protection of tribal natural resources; Promotion of Native American human rights; Accountability of governments to Native Americans; Development of Indian law and educating the public about Indian rights, laws, and issues."

20. See, Olson and Wilson, Native Americans in the Twentieth Century, pp. 166, 170-174, 190-192, 198 and 206; Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane" The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: The New Press, 1996); and George Pierre Castile, To Show Heart: Native American Self-Determination and Federal Indian Policy 1960-1973 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998).

21. Information concerning AIO is to be found at: wwwaio.org. "Americans for Indian Opportunity is a national nonprofit advocacy organization headquartered on the Santa Ana Pueblo reservation in New Mexico. AIO catalyzes and facilitates culturally appropriate initiatives and opportunities that enrich the cultural, political and economic lives of Indigenous peoples. Founded by LaDonna Harris (Comanche) in 1970, AIO draws upon traditional Indigenous values to foster enlightened and responsible leadership, inspire stakeholder-driven solutions, and convene visionary leaders to probe contemporary issues and address challenges of the new century. AIO's American Indian Ambassadors Program, a Native American community capacity-building leadership development effort, is designed to help early to mid-career Native American professionals strengthen, within a cultural context, their ability to improve the quality of life, well-being and growth of their communities. AIO also seeks to create new avenues for international Indigenous interaction to influence globalization. AIO projects and initiatives include: The American Indian Ambassadors Program; A partnership with the Advancement of Maori Opportunity (AMO) in Aotearoa (New Zealand) to develop international Indigenous interaction and foster Indigenous leadership on a global scale. Development of and facilitation using the Indigenous Leadership Interactive System (ILIS tm), a specially designed computer software program coupled with an interactive issues management process that affirms the value of diverse opinions, clarifies a group vision, and fosters ownership in the collective outcome; Liaison work between tribal governments and federal agencies to institutionalize intergovernmental relations and establish guidelines for carrying out government-to-government policies; Bringing together diverse groups and initiating discussion on a wide variety of issues affecting Indigenous cultures, and presenting educational material on American Indian modern history and the unique political status of tribes in the U.S. federal system; Acting as a resource center to host visiting groups and act as a clearinghouse for Native resources by sharing AIO's database of more than 4,000 tribes, organizations, agencies, and individuals".

22. For information about Survival International go to: http://www.survival-international.org/about.htm. For more details contact Sophie Thomas tel (+44) (0)20 7687 8731, st@survival-international.org. To receive Survival's news releases or monthly updates by email register at: http://www.survival-international.org/enews.htm.

23. For more details about Cultural survival go to: http://www.culturalsurvival.org/.

25. On Latin American developments, see, From: Andre Cramblit <andrekar@ncidc.org>, Mon, 12 May 2003 13:27:16 -0700, Subject: Get Up Stand Up (native rights), The indigenous resurgence in Latin America, Posted: May 12, 2003 - 10:08am EST by: Bill Weinberg / Today Correspondent/ Indian Country Today; Russell Greaves and Alissa dill, "Pume Staking a Claim in Venezuela," Cultural Survival Quarterly, Summer 2003, p.58; David Mauberry-Lewis, "Hope for the Indigenous People of Brazil," and Theodore Macdonald, "Ecuador Elections, Put Indigenous at the Top, on the Ground," in Cultural Survival Quarterly, Spring 2003, pp. 5, 9; A number of articles focusing on "Indigenous Reponses to Plan Columbia" in the Winter 2003 issue of Cultural Survival Quarterly; Kari Lydersen, Plan Columbia globalization stirs unrest in Ecuador", and David Bacon, House arrest: Indigenous organizers jailed in Baja California," In these Times, April 29, 2002, pp. 5-7; Linda Farthing and Ben Kohl, "Shock to the System: A growing indigenous and people's movement in Bolivia," and Yvonne Zimmerman, "Taking to the Streets [in Bolivia]," In these Times, September 16, 2002; Kari Lyderson, "Murder in Chiapas: Low-intensity conflict continues," In these Times, November 11, 2002, pp. 4-5; Ben Ehrenreich, "Another World is Possible: 100,000 people traveled to Brazil for the World Social Forum, where looming war with Iraq dominated the agenda," and David Moberg, "A Maturing Movement: But activists still disagree on the best course to 'another world'," In these Times, March 3, 2003, pp. 17-20; "Larry Ritter, "Latin countries Chafe at Strings On I.M.F. Help," The New York Times, August 11, 2002, pp 1, 6; Ginger Thompson, "NAFTA to Open Foodgates, Engulfing Rural Mexico," The New York Times, December 22, 2002; Juan Forero with Larry Rohter, "Native Latins Are Astir and Thirsty for Power," The New York Times, March 22, 2003, p. A3; "Tanks protect president as violence continues," Indianapolis Star, February 4, 2003; Timothy A. Wise and Kevin P. Gallagher in Foreign Policy in Focus, October 24, 2002; Jeanne Simonelli, "Southern Mexico simmers with discontent: Native Mesoamericans meet to plan for diversity," Brenda Norrell, "Chiapas Media Project moves to Guerrero: Site of worst human rights abuses in Mexico," News From Indian Country: The Independent Native Journal, Mid July 2002, pp. 12-13; and Niko Price, "Adapting to Modernity: Latin America's Indians making gains, still face racism and poverty," and U.S. plan to benefit international corporations endangers Guatemala Maya, other Indigenous peoples, News From Indian Country: The Independent Native Journal, Late December, 2002, pp. 9A, 14A; Amnesty Now, Vol. XVII. No. 3, 2002, p. 3. "Schools for Chiapas - Escuelas Para Chiapas - Chanob Juntic Ta Chiapas," (A Project of Grassroots International, schoolsforchiapas@mexicopeace.org, escuelasparachiapas@mexicopeace.org, www.mexicopeace.org), "Indigenous Mobilize," Resource Center of the Americas.Org, March 3, 2004, http://www.americas.org/index.php?cp=item&item_id=13805; the "World Developments" section of the spring and fall 2003, and Winter 2004 issues of Nonviolent Change, at: www.circlepoint.org, and in the Spring 2004 issue at http://mypage.iu.edu/~ssachs/; and Helen Newing and Lissie Wahl, "Benefiting Local Populations?: Communal Reserves in Peru." in Cultural survival Quarterly, Spring 2004.

26. The Chiapas Media Project (CMP), a bi-national partnership that provides video and computer equipment and training to indigenous and campesino communities in Southern Mexico, now makes its award winning videos available for purchased on-line at: www.promedios.org or with check or money order: Chiapas Media Project, 4834 N. Springfield, Chicago, IL 60625. For more information contact: (773)583-7728 or: cmp@chiapasmediaproject.org. T\In a similar effort, he Indigenous People's Human Rights Project in Minneapolis supported the efforts of young indigenous activists to document on film antiglobalization protests at the WTO meeting in Cancun, Mexico, in September, and to collect stories of how neoliberal globalization has been injuring indigenous peoples. For information, contact Amalia Anderson: chapona_us@yahoo.com.

27. Information about FIOB can be obtained at: http://www.laneta.apc.org/fiob/index.html. "FIOB constituted the Centro Binacional para el Desarrollo Indígena Oaxaqueño, Inc. (CBDIO, INC.) or Binational Center for the Development of the Oaxacan Indigenous Communities in the United States in order to be able to receive economic resources to support the communities with development and educational programs". Its objectives are: To maintain the cultural, social and linguistic integrity of the indigenous communities. To promote and defend the human, labor and civil rights of the Oaxacan indigenous communities. To promote the economic, social, and cultural development of the communities. To guarantee women's leadership and participation within the organization and the communities. To strive to revert the ecological deterioration in our territory in Oaxaca by promoting self-help development projects based on communities' practices in combination with modern technology. To promote the cultural and political autonomy of the Oaxacan indigenous communities by supporting the change of Mexican and international legislation. To reach these general objectives, FIOB and Centro have been working closely with the migrant and non-migrant Oaxacan indigenous in the promotion, orientation and development of our communities by implementing specific projects that aim to improve their well-being".

28. More information is available from ZNet's Bolivia Watch: http://www.zmag.org. Other sources include: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com, http://www.essential.org, http://www.fpif.org, and http://www.consortiumnews.com.

29. Information about IITC can be obtained at: http://www.treatycouncil.org/contact.html.

32. First Nations Development Institute is at: http://www.firstnations.org. Its International program, First People's World Wide, is at: http://www.firstpeoples.org/.

33. See "Maori 'leader' in native tongue development" at http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2807481a7694,00.html, reported by Andre Crambit, Digest for IndigenousNewsNetwork@topica.com, issue 252, February 9, 2004.

34. For more information contact Phillip Trip (Karuk), (415)283.4757, dla1@aol.com, or Co-Chair of the Summit and Global Coordinator Sujit Chowdhury wsie@wtuglobal.org, or go to: http://wsie.wtuglobal.org.

35. The International Forum on Globalization is at http://www.ifg.org/. IFG's Indigenous Peoples and Globalization Program is at: http://www.ifg.org/programs/indig.htm.

36. Information about AIO and the Ambassadors Program can be found at: www.aio.org; in: AIO's newsletter, The Ambassador; Lillian Beams, "Americans for Indian Opportunity ambassadors meet," News From Indian Country, Mid June, 1995, p. 17; and in AIO press release, "1984 University of New Mexico Graduate Takes Over The Helm of a Thirty-Two Year Legacy," December 1, 2002. The author has been working with Americans for Indian Opportunity since 1990.

37. For a technical discussion of the process see Benjamin J. Broome, "Collective Design for the Future: Structural Analysis of Tribal Vision Statements," American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1995. For a discussion of the use of the process in tribal decision making see, LaDonna Harris, Stephen M. Sachs and Benjamin J. Broome, "Wisdom of the People: Potentials and Pitfalls in Efforts by Comanches to Recreate Traditional Ways of Building Consensus," American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 1, Winter 2001.

39. Kenneth C. Bausch, Alexannder N. Christakis, Diane S. Conway, LaDonna Harris, Laura Harris and Bentham Ohia, Designing A Transitional Indigenous Leaders Interaction in the Context ofGlobalization: A Wisdom of the People Forum (Co-Laboratory of Democracy), Final Report (Bernalillo, NM: Americans for Indian Opportunity in Collaboration with Institute for 21^st Century Agoras and Advancement for Maori Opportunity, October 2002). The author was an observer/participant in the meeting. See, also, The Ambassador: Newsletter of the American Indian Ambassadors Program, Winter 2002.

40. LaDonna Harris, "Letter from the President," The Ambassador, Winter 2002, p. 2.

41. See Jim Kent, "Indigenous, UN member states collide in cultural perspectives," News From Indian Country, Late December 2002, p.12A.

42. Interview by Gloria Hidalgo, translated by Denise MvVea, "A New Era? Dialogue in the OAS Working Group on Indigenous Peoples," Cultual Suvival, Fall 2002, pp. 69-70. for more recent information from the OAS,go to: http://www.oas.org/OASNews/2001/English/May_2001/art1.htm. The OAS web site is at: www.oas.org.

43. For information about the Permanent UN Forum on Indigenous Issues, including reports of its sessions and texts of actions and press releases, go to: http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/pfii/. On request of the Forum, Cultural Survival produced a 30 minute documentary film on the first session, Threatened Voices: The First Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. For more information contact Bert Ryan (617)441-5410, ryan@cs.org.

44. The author conversed with members of participating indigenous NGOs and staff of the secretariat during the Second meeting of the Forum in New York.

"Ancestral Homeland Security: Indigenous Self-Determination at the Close of the UN Indigenous Decade."

Few people may realize that we are living in the United Nations’ “International Decade of the World’s Indigenous Peoples” (1995-2004). As with other UN designated Decades - Women (1976-1985) and the Eradication of Colonialism (1990-2000) - the goal stated at the outset of the Indigenous Decade was ambitious: to strengthen international cooperation for the solution of problems faced by Indigenous peoples in the areas of human rights, culture, the environment, development, education, and health. As the Decade comes to a close this year, it is apparent that the Decade has been remarkable only in the emptiness of the UN’s rhetoric and in how so little has been done by states and international organizations to bring practical effect to their hollow concern for Indigenous peoples.

The most pressing goal for Indigenous peoples during the Decade has been revising the UN draft Universal Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, for eventual ratification by the General Assembly. However, since advancing to the Intercessional Working Group of the Commission of Human Rights in 1995, only two of the draft Declaration’s forty-five articles have been approved. Mocking the UN’s theme of “Partnership in Action” for the Indigenous Decade, it has been obstructionist behaviour, sometimes open but most often times covert, by state representatives in the Intercessional Working Group (especially the Canadian Métis Wayne Lord, elected member to the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues) that has stalled important processes and blocked ratification of the draft Declaration. Given that the Decade ends with a failure to see the draft Declaration ratified, it is a fair question to ask if any gains have been made in the pursuit of Indigenous self-determination through activism in global forums ever, much less over the past ten years?

We must remember that long before the UN designated the rhetorical Indigenous Decade, and before the establishment of the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations in 1982, Indigenous peoples have been active and ever vigilant in protecting their ancestral homelands, and using whatever means necessary to ensure their security and survival, including engaging global forums. In April of 1923, Deskaheh, a Six Nations Cayuga, petitioned the UN’s precursor organization, the League of Nations, through the good offices of the Government of the Netherlands (Petition to the League, 1923:3):

We have exhausted every other recourse for gaining protection of our sovereignty by peaceful means before making this appeal to secure protection through the League of Nations. If this effort on our part shall fail we shall be compelled to resist by defensive action upon our part this British invasion of our Home-land, for we are determined to live the free people that we were born. August 7, 1923. Page 3

Then, as now, Indigenous peoples’ efforts to achieve justice were rebuked by the international community. Deskaheh ultimately failed to gain the recognition and support of Haudenosaunee sovereignty from the members of the League of Nations. So if it has been impossible to gain the recognition of Indigenous national sovereignty in the past, and if states today refuse to accept of a simple declaration of respect for the fundamental human rights of Indigenous peoples, what is the potential for accomplishing anything in regards to Indigenous people within the UN system?

In 1993, the UN Voluntary Fund for the Indigenous Decade was established to finance Indigenous activities and programs. However, no funding was available for Decade related activities until 1997. Very few states make regular contributions. Seventy percent of the overall contributions to the Voluntary Fund, amounting to a meager $185,162 in 2003, are donated by only three countries, Switzerland, Sweden, and Denmark – shamefully, the United States has not contributed at all, and Canada’s 2003 contribution of $9,747 (for clarity, that is: nine thousand seven hundred and forty-seven American dollars) is ridiculously small in comparison to the its rhetorical support for Indigenous rights. Clearly, the Decade’s objectives and goals have been undermined by the decision of states to withhold financing of its initiatives. Given the lack of financial and human resources provided by states during the Indigenous Decade, it is amazing that substantial programs have in fact been developed.

In 2000, a Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues was created by the Economic and Social Council. This is one of the most significant developments of the Decade. However, the Forum was compromised from the start. Even in terms of its name, states refused to approve a “Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples” (our emphasis) fearing that use of the word “peoples” would imply a recognition of Indigenous peoples’ right of self-determination. As well, appointed Indigenous and government representatives attending the inaugural meeting of the Permanent Forum in New York (Report of the First Session, 2002:20) stressed that it should function in support of research and policy-making in relation to Indigenous peoples and not as a “house of complaints” and political debate, a reference the long-running and contentious annual meetings of the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations in Geneva.

Couching the human rights abuses brought to the world’s attention by Indigenous people at the Working Group and now the Permanent Forum, including genocide and torture, as “complaints” is an act of cowardice and obfuscation by the appointed representatives. To go further in suggesting that the Forum serves only state policy communities and ignore the opportunity the gatherings provide for promoting awareness of contention and conflicts over Indigenous peoples’ rights is reprehensible. As it stands, delegates attending the Permanent Forum have approximately three minutes to convey the needs of their communities within pre-determined topic headings such as “Health”, “Environmental”, and, “Economic Development.” Even as a permanent organ within the UN system, the Permanent Forum provides no formal recourse for Indigenous delegates to remedy human rights violations occurring within their communities. Given its severe limitations in addressing or acting on the blatant injustices and continuing genocide perpetrated against 370 million Indigenous peoples worldwide, structuring the Permanent Forum to function solely as an internal report writing and data-gathering agency for state policy circles is tantamount to an act of criminal negligence on the part of the UN.

Indigenous organizations and individual nations have continued to assert themselves during the Indigenous Decade demonstrate by refusing to compromise their rights and sovereignty in the face of state pressures to do so, and there have been a proliferation of Indigenous declarations across a wide range of issues also attesting to their defiance and to the shortcomings of the Indigenous Decade in substantially addressing issues of importance. Unfortunately, given the rhetorical style, political context, and non-binding legal status of these documents, they are ignored by states. Listed below are a few of the recent Indigenous declarations:

Indigenous Peoples Seattle Declaration (1999);
Baguio Declaration (1999);
Declaration of Indigenous Peoples on Climate Change (2000);
Indigenous Peoples Millennium Conference statement (2001);
Declaration and Platform of Action on the occasion of the First Indigenous Women’s Summit of the Americas (2002).

Similar to the efforts of Deskaheh over 80 years ago, the words of today’s Indigenous leaders provide insight into their communities’ needs for survival and self-determination. For example, one better understands the self-determination needs of some thirty Indigenous representatives from Asia based on their assertions in the Baguio Declaration of 1999 (The Baguio Declaration, 1999):

The implementation of the right of self-determination is fundamental for the survival and achievement of human security for indigenous peoples, including, but not limited to, their cultures, values, languages, religions, economies, political and legal institutions, indigenous knowledge systems, way of life, ancestral territories, lands and resources.

This declaration is like most of the other Indigenous declaration emanating from activism in global forums – is a clearly stated and consensual statement of Indigenous political identity and objective. But the question is not whether Indigenous peoples are capable of stating their belief and position; the real important question centres on how Indigenous peoples can promote state accountability to high principle and to Indigenous peoples’ rights within the UN system. Clearly, the activities undertaken thus far during the Indigenous Decade suggest that getting Indigenous issues on the UN agenda is not enough to ensure the protection of Indigenous peoples’ human and political rights.

Activities within other global forums do offer some promise. Recent rulings by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, such as the 2001 case of The Mayagna (Sumo) Indigenous Community of Awas Tingni v. The Republic of Nicaragua, have given legal protection to Indigenous communities against continuing state and corporate encroachment on their lands. However, the enforcement of such decisions is inconsistent at best.

Eleven countries have ratified the International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 169 “Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries” during the Indigenous Decade - the political effect of these ratifications in promoting Indigenous rights is limited though, because only seventeen states in total have signed onto the Convention. As well, the substance of ILO 169 is a very weak statement on Indigenous rights: the phrase “self-determination” does not appear anywhere in its 44 articles, and Indigenous rights are cast not as international law but as existing within the legal authority the state governments, essentially making Indigenous self-determination a “domestic” issue for states to regulate (ILO 169, 1989: Article 1, Section 3):

The use of the term "peoples" in this Convention shall not be construed as having any implications as regards the rights which may attach to the term under international law.

Yet even the limited “paper rights” of ILO 169 and other international treaties have yet to be fully recognized and implemented.

This review of recent developments on Indigenous rights within the UN system leads us to conclude that Indigenous peoples need to head in a different direction and begin the process of rearticulating Indigenous rights within global forums. Our experience (and that of the many other people who have worked within the UN system for much longer than us) points to a few possible directions:

- Shift towards engagement and activism in forums similar to the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO). This would offer the potential to work outside the state-centric confines of the UN system. Founded in 1991, UNPO membership is comprised of 52 nations (not state governments as with the formal UN system) acting together to promote common goals of self-determination. In fact, the UNPO’s steering committee confirms that individuals claiming to represent Indigenous peoples actually speak for, and truly represent, those communities.

- Emulate the strategies of successful Indigenous nations. For example, the Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (CONAIE), formed in 1986, represents 80% of the Indigenous population in Ecuador, and has been successful in decolonizing governmental structures in that region. In fact, CONAIE actually secured ownership of two million acres of their land from the Ecuadorian government after a 1992 uprising that exerted political and economic pressure that resulted in the ousting of Ecuador’s Presidents in 1998 and 2001.

- Give declarations real effect by using them as political instruments. Declarations must be made into more than rhetorical statements designed to advance a negotiating position in state-regulated processes. Indigenous declarations would have power if they were reflections of consensus and unity, rearticulated the meaning of Indigenous self-determination, and were starting points for practical assertions of movement to build a new relationship with the state.

- Build unity among Indigenous peoples by reinvigorating the process of treaty-making between Indigenous nations.

These are just a few ideas that spring from a reflection on the paucity of progress towards our peoples’ goals during the UN’s Indigenous Decade. There are new challenges facing our peoples every day, including the spectre of state-supported biopiracy and other insidious forms of neo-colonialism manifest as attacks against our very being, our knowledge, and even our DNA. As we move through to the end of the Indigenous Decade, the main lesson of the last ten years has been that if we hope to survive as Indigenous peoples we need to get beyond rhetoric of all forms and move toward the real assertion and defence of our self-determination and our connections to the land. Paper rights cannot achieve self-determination nor can they promote state accountability to moral precepts and international law. Until we resolve to do this, we will continue to voice our resistance to the state-centric system, just as our ancestors have so eloquently promoted Indigenous self-determination in the past, but like them we will continue to see our people abused, our rights denied, and our Indigenous existences slip away from us.

Note: This article is a revision and update of a paper presented at the American Indian studies Section sessions of the Western Social Science Association Meeting, April 2004, in Salt Lake City, UT.

The Baguio Declaration, Conference on Indigenous Peoples’ Self-Determination and the Nation State in Asia, Baguio City, Philippines, 18-21 April 1999. [http://www.inkarri.net/ingles/indioeng/fil37.htm, accessed November 17, 2003]

Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989 (No. 169).[http://webfusion.ilo.org/public/db/standards/normes/appl/appl-byconv.cfm?conv=C169&lang=EN, accessed November 17, 2003]

Petition to the League of Nations From the Six Nations of the Grand River. Communicated by the Government of the Netherlands. C.500.1923.VII. August 7, 1923.

Report of the First Session of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. E/2002/42, Supplement 43. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. New York, 13-24 May 2002.

"The Fourth World: An Expression of International Indigenous Solidarity."

Michael (Mickey) Posluns, Ph.D.
St. Thomas University

The phrase “the fourth world” has come to be very widely identified with international solidarity. A search on the Internet will show any number of institutional names and titles of books that include the words “the fourth world.” A short note on the origins of this phrase will, I think, be useful as an insight into earlier aspirations for international indigenous solidarity.

I first heard the term when I was collaborating with George Manuel, then the president of the National Indian Brotherhood on a biographical memoir which was eventually published under the title The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (Collier Macmillan, Toronto and The Free Press, New York, 1974). George came over to my house for one of our weekly interview sessions quite excited about a conversation he had had late the night before with the First Secretary of the Tanzanian High Commission [1]

George said, “He said to me, ‘they call us the Third World. When your people come into your own, you will be the fourth world.’” George knew then that that phrase would become the title of his book. He could not, of course, have known that it would also become the title of a great many other books as well.

What excited me at that time was the strong sense of international solidarity that was emerging, initially largely through the work of Marie Smallface Marule, a Blackfoot woman. George had brought Marie into the National Indian Brotherhood as the executive director shortly after she had returned from four years in Zambia as a volunteer with Canadian University Students Overseas (C.U.S.O.). Marie had developed a strong sense of the possibilities of an international indigenous solidarity movement. She began by bringing looking for every opportunity to bring her network of African contacts together with her “Indian” (First Nations) contacts.

Marie was particularly successful in turning George on to the possibilities of international solidarity. George had accompanied a parliamentary delegation from Canada to New Zealand and Australia and spent time visiting Maori communities both with the parliamentarians and on his own. He also developed a solid working relationship with the chairman of the House of Commons Indian Affairs Committee, Ian Watson, who, upon their return to Ottawa, started drafting a report of a subcommittee on Indian Education. A spin-off of this new relationship was that Ian brought each new chapter to review with George before completing it. When the Watson Report on Indian Education did come out George described it as “The first report of its kind to be written the way Indian people would talk about these same issues.”

George’s friendship with the Tanzanian First Secretary led him to make a trip to Tanzania, to observe various experiments in integrating traditional tribal institutions with the institutions of a modern state. The flight to Dar es Salaam required a stop over in apartheid South Africa. In public speeches about that trip George often remarked that the South African government offered “to make me an ‘honorary white’ for the duration of my visit. I told them, ‘That’s what the government back home in Canada wants to do, make us all honorary whites.’” His exploration of coloured washrooms was, on some nonverbal level, no less important than his meeting with Julius Nyerere, the president of Tanzania.

George Manuel’s international travel became increasingly focused, over his later years in office, on meeting national and regional leaders in Sami land, in South and Central America as well as in Australia and New Zealand and laying the foundation for the World Council of Indigenous Peoples.

It soon became apparent that many indigenous peoples were subject to authoritarian states, particularly those in South East Asia and in Siberia under Soviet rule. Only a limited number of these would be allowed out of their country to attend meetings and then also allowed to return without dire consequences. A great deal of energy went into enabling the attendance of those who had some slight possibility of attending and returning home safely. No less important than their attendance was the need to leave them free both to speak and not to speak in public meetings.

The last chapter of George’s book, The Fourth World begins with the words, “The fourth world was always here in North America.” I suppose that everyone can take from that statement, as we all do from other historical-prophetic statements, whatever we wish. What I, as his collaborator, understood George to have meant was a vision of first nations exercising their own autonomy while living in relatively peaceful ways both with their neighbours and with the “natural world”. I think he also had in mind the kind of solidarity that he experienced as he drove from one Indian reserve to another crossing Canada, returning through the U.S. or visiting Aboriginal communities in Australia and Maori communities in New Zealand and Sami communities in Norway and Sweden. In his accounts of these trips it was always a temptation to refer to the indigenous communities in other countries as “reserves” or “bands”.

Most of all what I think George Manuel meant in saying that “the fourth world was always here in North America” was that the vision of international solidarity was, in his mind, of one piece with the sense of history underlying his account of the struggle of successive generations of his own people (the Shuswap) and of other first nations he had visited across Canada.

Mickey Posluns has recently been appointed an assistant professor in the Native Studies Programme at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, N.B. For the time being, at least, he can still be reached at mposluns@accglobal.net.

"WARRIOR ECONOMICS: FINANCING THE POOREST OF THE NATIVE AMERICAN POOR."

Warner Woodworth

Marriott School, Brigham Young University, warner_woodworth@byu.edu

(The author is cofounder of 14 NGOs that operate microenterprise and other development strategies around the globe. Last year we raised and allocated $8 million, gave out over 20,000 loans and trained over 100,000 poor microentrepreneurs. This is the first in a series of articles on indigenous economic development on several contenents.)

The year 2004 concludes the activities of the United Nations during its “International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People” (1995-2004). It has culminated with a global forum of 1,500 participants from some 500 tribes and groups meeting at UN headquarters in New York City. “Partnership in Action” was the motto of the ten-year effort to address the hopes and aspirations of those in poverty, exchange best practices, and broaden the participation of indigenous communities in decisions that affect them.

An equally significant event is coming up with 2005 declared to be “The UN Year of Microcredit.” It will consist of building awareness of the global poor, many who are indigenous villagers, through conferences, seminars and other events to emphasize the potential that microlending strategies bring to alleviating poverty.

Both of these important occasions are relevant to Native American economic well-being. This article attempts to describe what microcredit is and why/how it has potential to benefit tribal groups. After defining the basic ideas and tools of microcredit, the paper reports on several intriguing applications in contemporary Native American communities.

In much of the Third World, contrary to popular belief, economic conditions have been getting worse over recent decades. Today some 1.2 billion people suffer from chronic poverty, trying to subsist on less than $365 per year, which works out to only $7 a week (Daley-Harris, 2002). Glancing back at the past four decades, one sees that during 40 years the wealthiest 20 percent of the world consumed some 70 percent of all income. By the beginning of the 21^st Century, that share had mushroomed further to over 80 percent. Simultaneously, the poorest 20 percent of the world's population saw decreases in their meager share, from 2.3 percent of all wealth dissipating to a mere 1.4 percent (Brown, 2000). Among females in the Third World, absolute poverty has grown by 50 percent in the past two decades (UNIFEM, 2001).

Unemployment is a major aspect of poverty creation, but underemployment is perhaps equally significant. It refers to the condition in which people do not hold jobs equivalent to their abilities and training. In the Philippines, for instance, it is widely known that although many people are literate and well-educated, good jobs are hard to find, resulting in underemployment well above 50 percent during recent years. Projections for the future of the world's poor suggest that poverty may only worsen in the coming decades. For example, an International Labor Organization (ILO) study predicts that during the next quarter of a century, 1.5 billion new jobs will be needed to provide incomes for the growing global population. It assumes that if present rates continue, there will be some 3.6 billion working-age people on the face of the earth, and that possibly a third of them will be unemployed. Is it really feasible to create 40-50 million new jobs annually throughout the coming decades? Not if history is an indicator. Over the last three decades, the world's workforce increased by nearly a billion people needing work. But tens of millions did not obtain jobs. To make matters worse, only ten percent of future jobs will arise from the industrialized nations, meaning that 90 percent will be needed for the Least Developed Nations (LDCs)—in other words, for the Third World where population is growing, but poverty is booming.

Traditionally, social scientists have conceptually divided a society's economic activities into the formal sector, such as labor at a factory or work as a government employee in an office, or the informal—survival on the street as a vendor or provider of services. Informal or underground economy workers are essentially considered to be problems themselves by some experts. These are small, clandestine, unregistered individuals or family-based economic activity that do not produce taxes to the state. Typically, such people can observed in Third World cities living in shanty towns, or functioning as street vendors. Often marginalized, they subsist by “hustling” or sweat equity, making up for the shortcomings of formal jobs such as factory employment or government positions. While the informal economy has often been viewed by traditional economists as a minor phenomenon, or a temporary reaction to natural or financial disasters, reality suggests the opposite. The Third World informal economy is growing. It is here to stay and makes up a significant percent of many LDC cultures (Sanyal, 1991; de Soto, 1989).

Models for Third World economic development in the past have tended to consist of large-scale, top-down approaches like the Green Revolution through which huge multinational agribusinesses attempted to overcome world hunger with John Deere tractors and Monsanto seeds. Today, there are new, small, grassroots methods like microfinance as alternatives for fighting poverty from below.

This new tool, the offering of microcredit, is beginning to yield impressive results. Such a strategy consists of developing technical assistance centers that provide microloans as well as savings programs, often with training and consulting, to create self-employment and income-generating activities. Such workers bootstrap themselves, essentially creating their own jobs. Most of this type of work requires one's own sweat and equity, perhaps including that of one's family. It is a bottom-up method for building an income and becoming self-reliant, enjoying considerable success in certain countries as a new, innovative path to earning a living and caring for one's own. Often, training is provided, along with access to capital (microcredit) so that the small entrepreneur is able to acquire raw materials, equipment, or whatever else is needed in order to grow the business.

Global microfinancing may be classified as small-scale loans of $30 to $100 that are accessible to the very poor, primarily in the Third World. With even a small amount of such capital, microenterprises may be started, or perhaps expanded. In the mid 1990s, the World Bank conducted an analysis of microfinance schemes, finding that there were in excess of nine hundred institutions in 101 nations that offer microcredit to the poor (Paxton, 1995). The organizations studied had been in existence at least three years and each had over a thousand clients. They included banks, credit unions and numerous Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs). Today there are perhaps thousands more of newer, smaller such programs not included in the bank's original analysis. But a sample of 206 of the 900 institutions studied in 1995 enjoyed an aggregate loan portfolio of almost $7 billion, totaling over 14 million small loans to poor people for their tiny enterprises. Approximately 53 percent of loan recipients resided in rural regions around the globe. By extending microfinance capital to the poorest of the poor, millions of new jobs have been created among those languishing in extreme circumstances, thereby empowering individuals and families to gain a greater degree of control over their destinies in the move toward sustainability (ibid).

Early in 1997 the first world-wide Microcredit Summit was held in Washington, D.C. to launch an ambitious plan for empowering a hundred million of the world's poorest families through microloans and job creation. Twenty-seven heads of state and thousands of NGO representatives participated in this global organizing effort. The method advocated at the summit for obtaining credit is sometimes referred to as group, or “village banking” (Woodworth, 1997). The typical operations of such programs are quite simple: The NGO essentially offers small or “micro” loans to each of five to ten villagers at market interest rates. They need no collateral, nor are they required to have a strong credit history. Instead, the borrowers as a group are jointly liable for paying off both the interest and principal. Social pressure and trust thus become powerful incentives for assuming one's own financial responsibility and personal accountability. The payback rates range from 94 percent to 100 percent. In 2002, the Microcredit Summit + 5 conference was held to assess progress since 1997. It was reported that the movement has grown to 5,225 NGOs providing microloans to over 50 million poor borrowers and their families (Microcredit Summit, 2002).

With the preceding introduction, we now document a Third World case of microcredit, that of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.

This case began with the innovative financing scheme developed by Dr. Muhammad Yunus, a U.S.-trained economist who started experimenting with tiny loans in the 1970s which together only totaled $27 to help the poor in rural Bangladesh. It has grown to become an impressive illustration of a bottom-up approach, a capacity-building mechanism known as the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh (Wahid, 1993; Yunus, 1997).

Bangladesh, a country in Southeast Asia with 128 million people, is among the poorest of all nations with $208 per capita GDP, and over 80 percent of the inhabitants live below the poverty line. In spite of modernizing influences, most of the population lives in rural areas. Nearly 11 percent of all babies die before their first birthday, and life expectancy is a mere 53 years. Although the mortality rate had decreased substantially from 7.0 in 1970-1975, it still remains moderately high at 4.7 (United Nations, 1995).

The low status of poor rural women in Bangladesh, combined with their informal economic activities, made it difficult in the past for them to receive credit from traditional banding systems to support the development and growth of their income-generating efforts. Banks perceive poor women, as well as men, to be high-risk groups with limited ability to pay back their loans (Mayoux, 1995). Furthermore, the poor generally desire loans that are not even of sufficient size to cover the bank’s transaction costs (Berger, 1989). In some systems, a husband’s approval and signature are required in order for a loan to be approved for a woman (Tomasevski, 1996; Berger, 1989). When banks are located in urban centers, time and geographic mobility are necessary to make multiple trips to the bank to complete the lengthy application and approval process. These become major constraints for women, particularly because of traditional property and seclusion norms (Berger, 1989; Mayoux, 1995). Illiterate women are also often unable to read and fill out the required multiple written forms. The whole process of applying for a loan tends to be forbidding to a rural, uneducated, poor woman without previous experience in dealing with the formal lending sector. Collateral requirements are especially difficult for women since property is typically registered in the names of the male household members and passed from father to son (Berger, 1989; Todd, 1996; Woodworth, 2000).

Organizations in Bangladesh, such as the Grameen Bank and other NGOs, have sought to overcome these barriers women encounter when accessing credit. Collateral requirements are replaced by loans to a cluster of women who act as peer groups to give support and exert social pressure for repayment. Bank workers go to the villages to meet with the women and disburse loans, thus eliminating the need for women to travel to unfamiliar urban areas. Furthermore, women are specifically targeted and sought after by Grameen. This motivation to loan to females stems not only from the desire to help poor, rural women, but also to help their families. When women have their own income or control over the household income, they are more likely to spend money for food, health, and education for their children (Sebstad & Chen, 1996; Tomasevski, 1996). Thus, by targeting poor women, development programs feel they have tapped into a way to help the family as a whole.

The results since Muhammad Yunus was inspired to create the first village bank in the mid 1970s among landless peasants in Bangladesh are impressive. At the time, the country was condescendingly referred to by then U.S. Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, as “the basket case of the world.”

Based on the author’s visits and interviews with managers in Bangladesh at Grameen headquarters (Woodworth, 2000), and other published data (GF-USA, 2004) as well, the following picture emerges:

· Some 5 million family members benefit from these credit and savings programs.

· Total savings, including individual and group funds, exceeds U.S. $100 million.

· The bank has staff of over 12,600. Only 583 work at bank headquarters while about half of the rest conduct banking in villages. The remaining 6,000 staff are engaged in technical projects such as wells and shrimp farms.

These numbers illustrate a dramatic change from the paltry $27 in capital Yunus first loaned to 42 poor women over two decades ago (Fuglesang, 1995; Yunus, 1990).

While microcredit seems to hold much promise for the word’s poor, it seems particularly relevant for Native Americans and other indigenous groups. We turn to such relevance now.

The state of indigenous people, according to the UN “International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People,” is one of social exclusion, suffering, illiteracy, and poverty (United Nations, 2004). Some 5,000 groups of over 300 million indigenous people live on five continents within approximately 70 countries. They include Native, First Nations, and/or Aboriginal classifications, and may be rural, or in some cases, urban dwellers (WSIE, 2003).

To address these problems, experts, politicians, and huge multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have argued that globalization will improve conditions for the poor. Their rhetoric is that programs like NAFTA will bring jobs and better incomes to indigenous people, and that free market, top-down capitalism, operating as a rising tide, will “lift all boats.”

But poverty-stricken indigenous groups around the globe often feel otherwise. Under NAFTA, for example, Mexican official poverty has grown, instead of declining as predicted. Even worse now, many maquiladoras, the foreign firms which invested in new factories along the U.S.-Mexico border in the 1990s, are shutting down as capital shifts to lower-cost nations such as India and China. Mexican buying power has dropped by 40 percent (Salgado, 2000). Such worsening conditions fueled the 1990s Zapatista rebellion in the state of Chiapas where armed conflict has exposed economic suffering.

Likewise, in Ecuador a group of Indians took control of the presidential palace during January 2000, precisely at the time of the World Economic Forum held by the rich countries in Davos, Switzerland. This indigenous revolt occurred to protest the globalization process, a strategy that has consisted of harsh economic reforms that lead to native stress and strain. Indigenous Ecuadorians struggled to survive on only some $40/month income, and 39 percent of those in rural areas were chronically undernourished (Coffey, 2001). The uprising grew to over 15,000 people in Quito alone.

More recently, in 2003 Bolivian Indians organized a national strike that effectually shut down transportation, retail and factory production, eventually forcing the country’s president out of office. Militants complained of closed mines and unemployment, high gas prices, government corruption, and other extremely painful economic conditions. Huge demonstrations called for more jobs and less inequality between haves and have-nots. Similar indigenous upheavals have also occurred in African and Asia since 2000.

Traditional strategies for global economic development during the past century were often limited to just two options: state-run Marxist economics in which huge industries were controlled by government bureaucrats; or, the other option, trickle-down capitalism in which private, market-based logic promised economic well-being to all.

With the collapse of the now-discredited dictatorship of the proletariat in countries of the USSR and Easton Bloc, many observers assured that unfettered free-trade strategies would quickly dominate world politics. However, leftist elections continue to occur around the globe; most recently illustrated by India in May, 2004 and by the socialists in Spain a month earlier.

An alternative model, the “Third Way,” has emerged as another vision that combines some of the values of the other two paradigms that prevailed throughout most of the 20^th Century. This Third Way attempts to integrate economic markets with the values of socio-economic justice. According to former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich (1999), the new paradigm requires “that the economically displaced must be brought along,” not dropped along the side of the road to so-called progress. Reich’s argument is that “Third Way leaders will have to broker a new social contract between those who have been winning and those who have been losing” (ibid).

For Reich, as well as Clinton and others, microfinance is one vehicle moving toward an expanding Third Way. In fact, Bill and Hillary Clinton even advocated the creation of U.S. microenterprise back during their governorship era in Arkansas. The two of them collaborated in the creation of the Good Faith Fund for the poor in 1988, one of the first microcredit programs in the U.S. Likewise, during the presidential years of the 1990s, they each labored to accelerate microcredit both domestically and internationally, through speeches, legislative advocacy, and otherwise.

The viability of the Third Way approach to development around the globe, as well as within the U.S., may or may not endure long term, but it is being experimented with. Let us turn to the Native American experience with microcredit as a partial solution to tribal economic pain.

The picture of Native American poverty is not unlike that of Third World indigenous peoples. There are huge gaps between the white majority and the native minority in education, healthcare, employment, decent housing, and income. On the positive side, some justify this by pointing out that at least indigenous Americans enjoy government payments for reservation abuses, as well as welfare and unemployment benefits, oil reserves from multinational corporations, growing tourism, and in recent years, increasing revenues from the new casino economy.

On the negative side there are factors such as centuries of exploitation, forced relocations to lands with few natural resources or arable land, a brutal history of genocide, and today’s often contentious relationships between the tribes and local Anglo government entities. Add to these, inept BIA officials, mismanagement, and corruption, along with ongoing questions about tribal sovereignty and inter-clan conflicts, and the results include alcoholism, poor health and high mortality rates, feelings of dependency and helplessness in the lives of many. Of course, a 43 percent unemployment level only exacerbates many of these problems.

While a more extensive picture of the plight of poor American and Canadian Indians, as well as Alaskan Natives, is far beyond the scope of this paper, suffice it to say, much needs to change. Various roads to economic improvement are advocated by native leaders, government advisors, business consultants, and academic researchers. They include expanding tourism and developing the hot, new phenomenon of eco-tourism; increasing educational access for more Indian children; turning parts of reservation land over to toxic waste management firms for generating new sources of income; the creation of “healing funds” such as the $350 million account established in Canada to compensate for systemic abuses committed in the past; mobilizing native activists to achieve greater political clout in the electoral process of selecting delegates and participating in candidate races, conventions, and so forth.

But a number of studies suggest that past government-led initiatives have tended to preserve the status quo rather than fuel change. For example, William Lawrence, Red Lake Band Indian and publisher of The Native American Press / Ojibwe News wrote a provocative piece entitled “Do Indian Reservations Equal Apartheid?” (2003). He argues that the U.S. established the reservation system much like whiles created black townships in South Africa to racially divide groups of people, resulting in a two-tiered system. In spite of billions of dollars spent over the years, supposedly to benefit Lawrence’s neighboring tribes in Minnesota alone, massive socio-economic difficulties still exist today. The author argues that the current system perpetuates the problem, and, therefore, needs to be demolished.

While such a proposal may seem extreme, a 15 year series of studies by Harvard University’s Project on American Indian Economic Development suggests that federal bureaucratic controls and the unwillingness to relinquish their power, coupled with tribal mismanagement and politics, tend to suffocate indigenous autonomy. A basic premise is that “…sovereignty matters. When tribes make their own decisions about what approaches to take and what resources to develop, they consistently outperform non-tribal decision-makers” (Harvard Project 2003). Researchers Cornell and Kalt (1998) make a cogent argument promoting self-determination as perhaps the single most important factor in effective tribal economic development. They and their associates point out that Indians who obtain government grants to start companies usually do not enjoy long-lasting firms. Hiring is often compromised by patronage, profits go to a few favored people rather than being reinvested for enterprise growth, and eventually the money disappears.

So what is to be done? This paper suggests a different method: Rather than big grants to tribal corporations that only last short-term and suffer from accompanying governmental bureaucracies and inefficiencies, independent Native American microcredit could become a viable alternative. Indeed, small, grassroots-operated microenterprise development may become a catalyst for achieving greater tribal self-sufficiency. The Lakota Fund, albeit small, is a case in point.

The Lakota Fund became the first microcredit financing for Native Americans in 1986. This effort on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation was established because the region in South Dakota was among the poorest within the United States. Unemployment tended to range between 70-85 percent.

In the past, the 22,000 Native Americans at Pine Ridge have largely survived on federal funds to schools, healthcare and tribal government. Otherwise, agriculture has been the only source of income except for a few small private firms. Thus, the Lakota Fund was established in Kyle, a central village in the reservation. Over the past decade and a half, hundreds of tiny loans have been accessed by tribal members starting new microenterprises.

It began as a 1986 project of the First Nations Development Institute based in Fredericksburg, Virginia. The Institute was the idea of Rebecca Adamson, daughter of a Cherokee mother in the Southern states. Taught Indian ways by her maternal grandparents, she had become involved with the Lakota people during the 1970s. Shocked at learning of the massacre of hundreds of tribe members a century earlier in the Battle at Wounded Knee, she became an activist for native children’s education at Little Wound School. She taught kids, organized protests, was arrested, and fought for the inclusion of indigenous languages and traditions in reservation schools. She ultimately helped push through Congress the Indian Education Self-Determination Act which began to give tribes local control of their children’s education.

But Adamson saw that genuine power would require economic clout as well. She began to search for alternatives to large-scale BIA corporate projects which she viewed as “boondoggles.” Often encouraged by outside business experts, such ventures often failed, exemplified on many reservations today by desolate industrial parks and tourist motels that are deteriorating and empty. The only way to overcome dependency, she felt, would be strategies that meshed with native culture. Thus, small-scale enterprise development seemed a better indigenous path to the future (Ridley, 1997).

So Adamson incorporated First Nations in 1980 and shopped her ideas to the biggest U.S. foundations. Eventually the Ford Foundation liked her proposal enough to give a $25,000 grant for planning the start-up as she overcame doubt from the outside world, as well as from the native community. Since 1980, First Nation has offered technical assistance to nearly 2,000 Native American entrepreneurs and tribal organizations. Its $7 million grants fund has assisted 225 tribes in 22 states. It helped the Oregon-based Umatilla Tribe get back its former land, and it secured $10 million in trust funds for Michigan’s Saginaw Chippewa Tribe that the federal government had wrapped up in a bureaucratic morass.

But channeling loan capital to the Lakota Fund has been one of First Nation’s and Adamson’s greatest successes. Over 300 loans totaling about a million dollars have been given to would-be microentrepreneurs at Pine Ridge. As a result, Ms. Magazine awarded her with its “Woman of the Year” designation. Ms. founder, Gloria Steinem, said of Adamson, “When Rebecca speaks about indigenous economics she calls it economics with values added. . . . It’s just a broader and deeper measure of things” (Cabral, 1997).

Two different programs within the Lakota Fund operate with their respective financial services. One is that of “Circle Banking,” based on the group lending model of the Grameen Bank. Small peer groups of 4-10 individuals form their group and participate in five microentrepreneurial training sessions. Most participants would not be considered “credit worthy” according to traditional U.S. banking criteria.

Upon completion of the Circle business education, the group is “certified” and its members then determine who will receive what amount of loans, usually ranging from $400-$1,000, with which to start. Like other microcredit programs, Lakota uses the social collateral of others in the Circle to guarantee that each loan is repaid. As co-debtors, this practice assures a high loan repayment rate of about 90 percent. As loans are repaid, another larger amount may be borrowed to expand one’s microenterprise.

Several examples illustrate the type of borrowers and businesses financed through microlending. Roselyn Spotted Eagle is an older woman who lives on the Pine Ridge Reservation in a two room house without running water or decent heating. She supports not only herself, but a grandson who is afflicted with fetal alcohol syndrome. Ms. Spotted Eagle makes beautiful beaded crafts for the tourist market, and through microcredit she has been able to purchase new tools and a greater inventory of beads and other materials to expand her microenterprise. Other microentrepreneurs obtain loans for agricultural projects. Bamm Brewer owns a piece of tribal land for starting a buffalo herd. With a Lakota Fund loan, he was able to construct a strong fence to contain the animals (PBS, 2000). Robert Hornbeck, and his sister, Connie Two Crow, established a floral shop and video store (Cabral, 1997). While indigenous artisans make up the bulk of borrowers, others include a caterer, pig-farmer, musician, and tire-repairman who needed new tools.

What features help to explain Lakota Circle banking success? Several factors seem critical. First, it is not just about money, but training and education. The course modules include basic business skills such as budgeting, marketing and sales, quality, tax and licensing, and so forth. Borrowers also may participate in life-skills education that covers topics such as problem-solving, goal setting, drug abuse, and alcoholism issues. Elsie Meeks, executive director, reports: “If I were to identify the one most valuable aspect of Circle Banking, I would have to say that learning to deal with and solve problems is more important than even the loans” (SCN, 1997, p.91). She cites the example of a mother of five children and recovering alcoholic who underwent Lakota Fund training and received a $250 microloan. With that she launched her own craft microenterprise, became team leader of her Banking Circle, make on-time payments, and qualified for larger loans after each was repaid. With a new sense of dignity and self-worth, she successfully won her battle over alcoholism and moved off welfare. The business grew and other Native Americans became inspired by her success (ibid.).

A second factor in Lakota Fund’s achievements is its native control. Rather than be operated by Anglos or other outside “experts,” the fund has a staff of four members from the tribe. They are overseen by a nine-person board of directors who, with one exception also live on the reservation as tribal members. The other slot is reserved as a rotating seat for an outside professional. At times it has been filled by a white person, or an expert from another tribe who is skilled in banking. Thus, indigenous values and culturally appropriate policies are embedded and maintained over the years (Meeks, 2000).

Another facet that ensures the Lakota Fund’s achievements is strict adherence to the Grameen model, not a break-off U.S. variation. In the early 1980s when the project began, it was simply a small business program giving individual loans to tribal members. It experienced a number of failed start-ups and very high delinquency rates. So its staff went around the world to Bangladesh to see first-hand how Grameen had succeeded so well. According to a Lakota loan officer, Dani Not Help Him, “We didn’t go to [any] model… [but] went to the real one … in Bangladesh” (Garr, 1996). Deciding to revamp the fund’s operations so that the staff rigorously adhered to Grameen’s group lending program dramatically turned around a troubled system. The Lakota Fund also insists that borrowers deposit at least $5 every two weeks as a nest egg of personal savings, also a replication of the Grameen system. Thus, members invest in the process personally and learn important financial practices like savings and long-term planning.

The second mechanism for entrepreneurial start-up is the Lakota Fund’s Small Business Loan (SBL) program. In contrast to microcredit for Circle Banking enterprises, SBL started by giving initial loans for up to $25,000, quite a bit more money than that of the microenterprise level. However, candidates have to first participate in a seven-week training program where they obtain the basics of small business success and develop a feasibility plan. Lakota Fund staffers conduct the training and provide hands-on technical assistance in writing business plans and helping with marketing studies.

These in-depth training and performance demands help to screen applicants so that only the most sincere, hard-working candidates survive. The grueling requirements of preparation thus become an additional factor in ensuring success and high loan repayments at Lakota.

Interest rates on SBL’s loans is around 11 percent for large amounts, to be repaid over 5 years. Examples of successful enterprises needing more capital than Circle Banking include such businesses as construction, electronic repairs, gravel hauling, restaurants, and hair salons (Garr, 1996).

SBL also adds another ingredient that helps Native Americans in their business achievement. It is the synergy that develops from small firms working together, the Indian way, rather than individualistic competition, the Anglo way. To illustrate, in 1995, the Lakota Fund acquired commercial land and started to construct a new Lakota Trade Center. It has 13,000 square feet, large enough to not only house the Fund itself, but seven start-up service or retail firms. As those firms grow and succeed over 3-5 years, they can then afford to move out on their own, freeing up space for other new start-ups. This $1.2 million construction project has helped a number of small firms get started as a kind of incubator, and it pays for itself with revenue from leasing fees.

The Trade Center has grown to include a craft shop, an art gallery, a Tribal Business Information Center that partners with the U.S. Small Business Administration, the Oglala-Sioux Parks and Recreation Agency, a fund-raising business, and a hospice. The fund has also launched a pilot project to build a ten-unit housing development called “Eagle Nest Homes” in Wanblee, South Dakota. This strategy is all about community development and how to impact family life positively by strengthening and stabilizing residential services. But it is more, since it also generates employment, empowers Native Americans, and produces revenue for the creation of more small enterprises (Lakota Fund, 1998).

Can Native American self-help strategies for building economic sustainability survive? Are they replicable elsewhere? I think the answer to both questions is a resounding, “Yes!”

The Lakota Fund continues to grow and it increasingly is rewarded and recognized as a viable model. For instance, in 1999, Women of Vision International selected the Fund as one of its collaborative partnerships, i.e., providing seed money for expansion. The Hewlett-Packard Development Company established a Microenterprise Development Fund, and in 2003 gave over $100,000 as a grant to the Pine Ridge program. The U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs (2002) received written testimony about the Lakota Fund’s success at its hearing on “Capital Investment in Indian Country,” specifically regarding the role of Native Community Development Financial Institutions (NCDFIs). The report suggested that lack of business experience and access to capital are major barriers to tribal economic development. When the Lakota Fund began, 85 percent of its borrowers had never had a savings or checking account, 95 percent had no business experience, and 75 percent hadn’t received a loan in their lives.

Yet, the LF now is transforming individuals like these into business entrepreneurs. The fund operates the center, gives out loans of up to $200,000 currently, and has expanded its available loan capital to $3.5 million with backing from government, private donors and foundations. As the center has grown, a Pine Ridge Area Chamber of Commerce was started, and the number of housing units has risen from ten to thirty. Most of all, Native Americans have developed new capacities perhaps never before envisioned by the participants.

The Lakota Fund has also begun to have ripple effects that spread far beyond Pine Ridge. For instance, a Four Bands Community Fund has been established on the Cheyenne Reservation. The Lakota housing unit project has been studied by the Navajo Partnership for Housing, Inc. to provide homebuyer education and to develop small loans to fund the gap in its housing market. New NCDFI startups recently include Hochunk Community Development Corporation of the Winnebago tribe in Nebraska, the Affiliated Tribes of the Northwest Indians Revolving Loan Fund in the state of Washington, the Four Direction Development Corporation of several tribes in Maine, and the Hopi Credit Association in Arizona. Thanks to the Lakota Fund, these other organizations have created their own promising new ventures to build Native American self-reliance from the ground up.

Hence, quite a microenterprise track record of expanding impacts and applications seem to be occurring from a small simple idea. The Lakota Fund is clearly becoming a model for other tribal entities. And like much of the global Third World, several tribal elements in Native American culture seem to facilitate microcredit as a viable, innovative movement. Strong indigenous communities within U.S. reservations tend to have a high degree of trust, collective norms, and interpersonal networks. All of these factors may be more fully integrated thorough the pursuit of shared tools for economic betterment. Collectively they make up what I call “social capital”―the availability one has in times of hardship to draw upon support and concern from other people, to “count” on them when needed.

It just may be that Native American social capital is the most critical factor in expanding the access to financial capital among U.S. tribes. In the future, microcredit may become a constructive new strategy in achieving that objective. It holds much promise for empowering “the poorest of the poor” among Native American families. Once proud tribal members who today suffer from a lack of self-worth may again become confident warriors as they move from dependency to dignity.

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