In this month – designated as “American Heritage Month” to honor them – isn’t it time to drop that colonial moniker and call it “Indigenous Month”?? What’s stopping us?? Those sourpuss who want to deny what it means to be “indigenous” in the modern world – and point out that SOME of the indigenous people are not really indigenous since they migrated here later than the colonialists – have shown their hand?? It’s not just a pedantic exercise to “set the record straight” – but actually an exercise to deny indigenous peoples their land!!
But the giants are too consumed with jealousy and envy to admit that it is not just their “indigeneity” that has given Indigenous people 18% of Guyana. It’s the same positivist law that Europeans used to arbitrarily occupy entire continents like Australia – declaring them “terra nullis” (empty land), but they couldn’t repeat it here because they acknowledged the existence of indigenous peoples by signing treaties with them. !!! Like treaties to trade or hunt runaway African slaves, for example. Then I couldn’t turn around and say as they looked into the jungle, “No one there!!!”
So when Burnham and crew went to London – with indigenous leader Stephen Campbell – to negotiate independence, the British recognized the indigenous peoples’ right to the land they occupied in Annex C of the independence agreement!! The rights of indigenous peoples to their lands in Guyana are equal to the rights of the Guyanese state to its crown lands!! How about that one??!! All we can do is argue for “usufructuary rights” like mining and such like – as is happening in the Chinese landing. What about the irony of this last name?! In the meantime, the authorities should continue with the granting of village titles to indigenous peoples after they meet the criteria set by the law!!
Now one of your eyewitness pet peeves about Indigenous Peoples Month (see?? The sky didn’t fall!!) is that most of the activities focus (carefully?) on young Indigenous people dancing around in grass skirts and feather headdresses . That’s all well and good… but what about their cosmology?? Or pharmacology?? So you didn’t think their medicinal plants constitute “pharmacology”?? Did you forget that quinine – which can cure malaria – was first isolated in 1820 from the bark of a cinchona tree, which is native to Peru and the Andes?? And known to indigenous peoples??
With the all-weather highway to Lethem finally looking set to be completed, this will be the equivalent of the railroads that opened up the US. Within a few decades, people will be living all over the interior – and perhaps even faster due to rising seas. Our indigenous peoples must decide how they will “integrate” (?) with the coast landers!!
…in opposition??Your eyewitness popped his popcorn and thoroughly enjoyed the United Opposition rally at Golden Grove on the East Coast. That it went on and on (and then some!!) didn’t faze him. He had some cold ones to wash down the popcorn. While it wasn’t quite the spectacle he’d been conditioned to expect after Game of Thrones’ House of the Dragon reboot — and its silver-haired, incest-loving Targaryen — his expectations were tempered, what it happened to Guyana just coming out of COVID-19 and hitting Monkey Pox!!
See also
All the speakers were predictable and it was only the local adaptation of the TV’s flashing “Applause” sign – the boom boxes suddenly exploded with some upbeat songs that added some energy. The only surprise of the evening for your witness was some small parties who made two presentations. From the AFL were the single, undisputed leader (Raphaeli is gone, isn’t he??) – Ramjattan and the inimitable Cathy Hughes. They were allowed TWO speakers after signaling they will say “sayonara” in December??Incentive to stay??
…but excluding??
Your eyewitness waited in vain for Sarabo-Halley who had founded the Guyana Nation Builders Movement (GNBM), Jailall Sharma of the Equal Rights and Justice Party (ERJP) and Keith Scott of the NFA!! Aren’t they still APNU members?
