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Volume 5, Number 1 Pages: i thru iv |
LUKANKA(*)
by Rudolph C. Rÿser
© 2002 Center for World Indigenous Studies
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Since
the founding of the United Nations there have been five “development
decades.” Each of these periods served as a global goal-setting agenda
intended to transform LDCs (Less Developed Countries) into progressively
improved economies, governing systems and social systems. Despite prodigious
efforts, each of these planned periods of development has failed.
Planners, administrators, political leaders and workers have through
various international and domestic development agencies undertaken to apply
their skills and best thinking to raise the standard of living of peoples who
have long suffered from too little food, too little comfort, too little
quality of life and health. Yet expenditures of such great effort and wealth
donated by various states governments have failed to achieve the goals set for
each decade. Indeed, the level of
world poverty is, in many respects, greater now than it was fifty years ago. While
the United Nations Development Decades have clearly failed (2 billion and more
impoverished worldwide) is it the case that those who seek the improvement of
life for so many millions of people are inept, lacking in skill or both?
Why have the efforts of so many been unable to transform the world? Perhaps
the problem is less in the people and even the institutions than in the
conceptual framework. Maybe “development” is the wrong focus. Maybe the idea
that human beings can and should dominate the natural environment,
progressively change the life condition of people through “programs and
aid” and promote modernity is erroneous. The
authors of essays in this issue of the Fourth World Journal offer alternative
ways of thinking about the wealth and life quality of peoples in the world.
While “development” is assumed by most who use the term to be an
“ultimate good” maybe there is a difference between “introduced
development,” or “imposed development” and “self-directed
development.” Maybe the problem
with all the failures is that someone on the outside presumes to have all the
answers for inside-nation needs. Maybe
“sustained development” and externally introduced development produce
serious problems and failures because human culture doesn’t respond well to
imposed solutions, but works much better when human societies adapt and absorb
outside ideas, technologies and ways of life according to the dictates of
inside-cultural pace instead of outside ideas for success. Dr. Leslie Korn directly
approaches this point of view as one who lived most of her life in the Fourth
World in Mexico with clarity and thoroughness.
She examines in “Community Trauma and Development” the
traumatic affects of externally imposed development on Fourth World societies
and discusses the implications of community trauma that she sees resulting
from development in Fourth World nations throughout the world. Dr. Korn’s
insights point the way to a fundamentally different and necessary analysis of
the meaning and affects of development in the Fourth world. Dennis Easter, in “Post
Colonial Ghost Dance” approaches the problems of development from the
perspective of a Fourth World philosophy looking at indigenous medicine,
biopiracy and biotechnology. Springing from the Oglalla LaKota Ghost Dance Mr.
Easter considers the sacred knowledge system inherent in the dance as a way of
evaluating and commenting on introduced ideas. Damien Short, addresses
the nexus at which meet the needs and aspiration of peoples living in mature
Fourth World cultures and the imposing aethos of externally imposed changes in
his essay “Reconciliation, Assimilation and the Indigenous Peoples of
Australia.” How to mediate the competing demands of Fourth World peoples
and those of the international state is considered within the framework of
reconciliation. Dr. Andry Onsman, opens
his insightful discussion on “Law and Identity” with an examination
of the current indigenous identity literature and policy discussions
internationally and domestically. He brings his discussion home with a
personal yet widely significant discussion of the indigenous identity of the
Friesian people who have for 50,000 years resided in northwestern Europe.
Perhaps one of the more important aspects of development discussions
has to do with “who defines who are the original peoples, and who are the
immigrants?” Is it the case
that the “immigrants” are most likely to impose “development” on the
original peoples than the other way around? Ali, M. Emran and Toshiyuki
Tsuchiya peel the onion to its very middle as they discuss the land rights
controversy surrounding the fourteen and more Fourth World Nations in the Chittagong
Hill Tracts Region of Bangladesh. The territory of the Chakma, Tripura, Pankho,
Khumi and ten other nations became the focus of a World Bank sponsored
“transmigration program” which devolved into a genocidal war carried out
by the Bengali government in Dhaka killing hundreds of thousands from 1975
until the early 1990s. The
“best land” for agriculture and development was and is under the feet of the
Fourth World nations of the Chittagong Hill Tracts.
This Editor spent the better portion of ten years seeking an end to
that despicable war that was conducted in the name of “development.” Emran and Tsuchiya’s much needed historical analysis in “Land
Rights of the Indigenous People of the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh”
commands our attention. Brandon Yoder
sheds a bright light on the exploits of big corporations and their efforts to
impose development for their benefit and the disfiguring of the earth and
destruction of Fourth World peoples in “Indigenous People and Oil
Production In Ecuador's Oriente.” The spearhead of global
development is filled with oil and the demands of “developed countries”
for oil. The Fourth World nations of Ecuador’s Oriente have not made demands
for oil development. Yet corporate greed in business and in state combine to
threaten the lives and way of life of whole nations with impunity. Danielle Elford offers and
insightful and stimulating discussion of an utterly different analysis of
“development.” Offered from the Fourth World perspective, Elford makes a
major contribution to the discussion of the importance of self-determination
in economic, environmental and social change. Writing in “Conservation by
Self-Determination in Central America” Ms. Elford applies considerable
scholarship to argue a fundamentally different approach to social, economic
and political change. Navaya ole Ndaskoi
provides an “inside-out” analysis of how externally imposed conceptions of
Fourth World life can be used to mislead and alter the practical cultural
requirements of a society. In “Maasai Wildlife Conservation and Human
Need” Mr. Ndaskoi explodes distortions applied from the outside on
Maasai in Kenya and Tanzania. His insights are especially appropriate for our
discussion of alternatives to “development.” I
regard the discussion of “development” and alternative analysis and
approaches to human need an essential part of the global controversy about
“globalization” and its affects on the original peoples of the world.
Despite appearances and claims to the contrary there is nothing permanent or
inevitable about globalization. The authors in this issue of the Fourth World
Journal demonstrate that alternatives do exist and carry weight from their own
strength. Rudolph
C. Ryser, Ph.D. Editor
in Chief (*) Lukanka is a Miskito word from Yapti Tasba meaning “ideas,” “thoughts,” “thinking.” |