For this year’s Amerindian Heritage Month”, the theme selected is “Our Culture, Earth’s future: Save the Environment, Live the Indigenous Way” is very timely. It connects “our” way of life (our “culture”) with the need to save our environment and Earth by asserting that this can be achieved by living the “Indigenous way”.
There are several elements that need to be highlighted however, one of them being confining our gaze to the connection between ways of life and the environment and not “culture” writ large – as one insensitive soul presumed and unleashed a firestorm.
That our Indigenous Peoples lived in harmony with their environment is illustrated rather simply by pointing out that even though the Caribbean Islands were densely inhabited, when Columbus and later Europeans stumbled over them, they described the terrain in rather Edenic terms.
Christopher Columbus’s letters and journals, for instance, emphasised the climate, presence of fresh water, and lush, green vegetation of the Caribbean in terms that recall biblical descriptions of paradise.
Sir Francis Drake’s account of his voyage to the West Indies describes Santo Domingo as “having in it many sorts of goodly and very pleasant fruites, as the Orenge trees and other, being set orderly in walkes of great length together. Insomuch as the whole Island being some two or three miles about, is cast into grounds of gardening and orchards”.
This meant that the cultivation of the crops to sustain the population and the construction of shelters to house them were accomplished in a way that did not demand wholesale destruction of the environment. It was those same Europeans who introduced “plantations” for agricultural products that led to the razing of millions of acres of forests and woods and where in Haiti, the lack of vegetation to hold the soil together created mudslides and barren hills.
It was not too long ago and continuing into the present right across in Brazil that Indigenous Peoples had to fight pitched battles to save their traditional lands – not just the forests but the savannahs of their “Cerrado” – from being overrun by “agricultural” progress.
Analogously, there is much talk in governmental circles about “opening up” the Rupununi Savannahs for “mega farms”, which is the new euphemism for “plantations”. Is this au fait with the “Indigenous Way” to save our environment? Remember this is not just a mechanistic check to verify whether “environmental standards” are maintained but whether there is a harmonious balance struck between the imperatives of “modernity” and the worldview of Traditional Indigenous culture.
And this raises the question of the relationship between the original practices of the Indigenous Peoples and those inculcated after hundreds of years of being literally forced to “modernise”.
Take the drive to expand “educational” opportunities to the Indigenous Peoples in their traditional lands – such as with the infamously incomplete billion secondary school at Kato. Were the traditional practices of the Indigenous Peoples incorporated into their curriculum? Are the dozens of their brightest students who are brought to the coast to be “educated” exposed to those practices?
Another issue that arises is the relationship between Indigenous practices and the new holy grail of “sustainability” in development strategies. Phrases such as “the greening of Guyana” cannot be reflexively assumed as compatible with either sustainable or Indigenous. As the UN publication, “State of Indigenous Peoples” declare: “The biggest challenge faced by indigenous peoples and communities in relation to sustainable development is to ensure territorial security, legal recognition of ownership and control over customary land and resources, and the sustainable utilisation of lands and other renewable resources for the cultural, economic and physical health and well-being of indigenous peoples.
Indigenous peoples’ economies now represent the greatest continuity with pre-industrial modes of production and traditional livelihoods in the contemporary world. These economies, representing sustained interaction and adaptation with particular locations and ecosystems, are among the longest-standing and most proven examples of “sustainable development” in the 21st Century.”
All Guyana should cherish this heritage.
