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...

The intention of this document is to give a general out­line to be considered by the "First Meeting of Anthropologists in the Countries of the Andean Region", of the most important aspects of the INDIAN LIBERATION AND SOCIAL RIGHTS MOVEMENT in Bolivia and its implications for the continent called America.

In this report we attempt to: present a profile of the indigenous population of the Territory of Roraima (Brazil), and delineate the most common processes of integrat­ion involving the indigenous peoples and their land. The results of integration to date have been very un­fortunate for the indigenous peoples of Roraima. It is not easy to find a positive solution. We feel that, given...

News of the massacre at Panzós reached IWGIA in the beginning of June. We were about to issue our IWGIA NEWS­LETTER No. 19 and therefore barely managed to include a short report on the matter by Jens Lohmann. However, we felt that the importance of the May 29th events, in all their horror and bestiality, was such that any information about what had happened, why and how it happened, should be...

IWGIA Document 33

i el Ecuador ha sido, es, y será, el país amazónico! "Ecuador has been, is, and will be, the Amazonian country!" reads the national rallying cry frequently emblazoned on official stationary within the Republic of Ecuador. Ostensibly, the slogan is a political one which no party would dare to ignore, let alone negate; it protests - and justifiably so - the loss of half of its Amazonian territory...

The present paper is concerned with the reactions of the people of Bellona Island, a small Polynesian outlier island in the Solomon Islands, when confronted with a recent plan of having the fairly large deposits of phosphate on their island mined by a foreign company.

In the moist tropics of South America, Native Americans -who are all too frequently referred to by Christopher Columbus' term "Indians" - are rapidly disappearing. Current literature documenting the rationality of the native peoples, together with detailed analysis of the processes of modernization and rapid change leading to their physical and cultural destruction, is reminiscent of the work of F...