The purpose of this document is to provide as complete a picture as possible of the current situation of the Yagua by integrating all the sets of constraints to which they are victims. After more than three centuries, and with particular intensity in the last decades, the Yagua are suffering the consequences of the white colonisation of their territory, three centuries of dependence and oppression...

This Newsletter contains articles from Alaska, Arctic, Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, CISA, Colombia, Costa Rica, East Timor, Ethiopia, Guatemala, New Caledonia, New Zealand/Aotearoa, Nicaragua, Pacific, Palau, Peru, Tanzania, United States, Vanuatu, West Papua.

This Newsletter contains articles from Alaska, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Indian Ocean, Mexico, Pacific, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, USA, Venezuela.

Since July 1982 the situation on Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast has rapidly deteriorated. What before merely seemed possible is today a certainty. Open battles have begun in the Puerto Cabezas area between the Sandinist army and armed units of several thousand men who have invaded from Honduras. Supported by the Honduran army and equipped with North Ameri­can arms, the opponents of the Sandinist R...

This Newsletter contains articles from Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Panama, Peru, Arctic, Australia, Philippines, West Irian, East Timor, New Caledonia, Kwajalein, Canada, USA, Kalahari

When talking about the indigenous peoples of northern Arg­entina, one must use the past tense. Hunter/gatherer societies in that region have been constantly undermined since the late 19th century as indigenous resources of land and labour were pulled into the capitalist economy. Vestiges of the identities and cultures of the Matacos, Tobas, Mocovles and Vilelas (though twisted and changed as a...

This document is an edited English version of a brief written for the Supreme Court of Norway with an added general introduction to the Saami, the Alta/Kautokeino project and the context of North Norway. The proposed Alta/Kautokeino hydro scheme brings the Saami world in Norway very close indeed to its 'to be or not to be'. The likely consequences are so encompassing. They affect sendentary as wel...

The present report on Indian Areas threatened by Hydro­electric Projects in Brazil, by Paul L. Aspelin and Silvio Coelho dos Santos, is written specifically for the IWGIA DOCUMENT series. An earlier version of the document was presented by Paul L. Aspelin at the XLIII International Congress of Americanists in Vancouver, Canada, in August 1979. Silvio Coelho dos Santos also presented an earlier...

The Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT)/Summer Institute of Lin­guistics (SIL), one of the largest missionary enterprises in the world, aims to bring »the Word« to the »Bibleless tribes«. In pursuit of converts, SIL missionaries have profoundly affected indigenous societies throughout the world. SIL's method of proselytising and its relationships with host countries have provoked many questio...

The purpose of this collection of documents is to show three points: Firstly, Indonesian atrocities in East Timor; secondly, the responsibility of the Western democracies; and thirdly, the cover-up in the Western mass media. The collection opens and closes with UN testimonies by Noam Chomsky. The documents in between are arranged by origin and topic, rather than in a chronological sequence. For r...

A lot has been said about the development of the Bolivian Department of Santa Cruz; most assuredly, quite a bit has been achieved in this area. The establishment of new types of industry and the extension of existing ones have led to a demographic development which, percentwise, tops the list of Bolivian departments.

Fourth-world colonialism, by which I mean the coloniza­tion or exploitation of indigenous minorities whithin third­world or "developing" nations, is as pernicious - as damaging to the colonized - as any other kind of colonialism, the more so that it often goes unrecognized. Ethnocentrism can be as narrow-minded and relationships as exploitative when India or China, for example, deal with H...

In 1974 I published an article in the IWGIA Document series (Smith, 1974) in which I told of the struggle of one Amuesha community with a catholic Franciscan mission to retain control over a small area to which these Arnuesha had retreated. In 1976, the Peruvian government awarded this community, now called Tsachopen, title to an area of slightly over 760 hectares; these were precisely the lands w...

This paper is intended to first, report on the very critical situation of the Yanoama Indians in north Brazil who have been affected by the construction of the Perimetral Norte highway; second, to make public the events that led to the abrupt end of the "Yanoama Project", a plan designed by an anthropologist to assist the Yanoama Indians in Brazil, as well as describe the activities of the Project...

Despite so much that is common to the cultural heritage and colonial experience of the Australian Aborigines and American Indians, the present legal and socio-political position of the Aboriginal people in Australian society remains even worse than that of the Indians in the United States. The rights of the Indian peoples to land, minerals, water, and a degree of self-determination and cultural di...

This short account of my people, the Mapuche, is written in the midst of a difficult period for the Chilean people, and I myself am a long way from the Araucanian territory. Life in exile leaves time for writing, reading, listening, and thinking, as well as drawing some conclusions concerning the Indian issue from a global point of view, i.e. in respect of all our Indian brother peoples on the Ame...

The Indians of Bolivia, already exploited by a military dictatorship, will have to take up more of the white man's burden if South Africans and Rhodesians accept an in­vitation to colonise the country. White South Africans, ac­customed to the excesses of their own police, will find much that is familiar in Bolivia. Police used violence against a mass hunger strike in La Paz recently and br...