President Ali addressed this year’s Toshaos Conference at the Convention Centre, and with elections just a year away, he not surprisingly reminded his audience of what the PPP have done for Indigenous Peoples since they came into office in 1992. The sordid truth is that while the entire country had been punished under the PNC’s dictatorship, Burnham had intensified the historic neglect of Indigenous Peoples.
For the previous three centuries after the Dutch decided the Indigenous Peoples weren’t suitable for plantation labour, they were used to hunt down escaped Africans, enslaved people. As such, it was in the interest of the Dutch to keep them in the jungles!! So, while we’re called the “Land of Six Peoples”, the Indigenous ones never really mixed or mingled with the others. Missionaries were used by the Brits to “civilise” them to Christianity and “Western ways”, but much of the Indigenous People’s own culture was wiped out in this “civilising” mission. So, when some talk about reviving their “old ways”, those ways are really being reinterpreted through Western lenses.
While that may be the story of all the other five peoples, it’s most noticeable with the Indigenous Peoples, since the Western scorn for their way of life has been drummed into the hearts and minds of us on the coastland – who were exposed more thoroughly to the Western “education”. Remember that nasty incident at the “elite” Mae’s School in Georgetown, when that Indigenous kid who’d moved to “town” was told to show up in traditional wear – but was turned away because being in grass skirts was too “primitive”? They aren’t even allowed to express their heritage!!
In the last couple of decades, Indigenous Peoples have been increasingly migrating to the coastland. This brings home the sordid fact that even those coastlanders complaining about clapboard “shithole” houses they live in should appreciate they’re still attractive enough to attract Amerindians!! In every survey that’s been conducted over the past century – into the new millennium – the Indigenous Peoples have stubbornly been relegated to the “poorest of the poor”.
But it’s of more than passing interest that those in the Opposition purporting to be championing the cause of the “poor and the powerless” don’t focus on the Indigenous Peoples, do they?? So it’s not by chance that, starting literally from ground zero in 1992, the PPP now gets the majority of the Amerindian vote – which holds the balance between the two major blocks! It’s not just the symbolic things like designating September in 1995 as Amerindian Heritage Month; but, as Pres Ali identified, there’re all the roads, schools, hospitals, scholarships, land titling and job creation the PPP launched since 1992.
Amerindians still have a long way to go, but they’ve been given the boost needed to catch up!!
…the PNC’s wiles
The PNC-led government had diligently followed the droll advice of comedian WC Fields towards the Amerindians: “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” With their eyes firmly fixed on 2020, the PNC gave the Amerindians the ole full-court press!! Unfortunately, it was all BS!!
Take that “Industrial Park” they were gonna launch in Lethem. What happened? Since they’d jettisoned Burnham’s “state capitalism” mantra from the old days, exactly which companies did they encourage with appropriate inducements to plunk down their hard-earned cash on the Rupununi plains?? Heck…it was the same “bait and switch” conmen use to set up their marks. The proof of the cassava bread and pepperpot has always been in the eating; and for industrialization, the factories!!
So, proving that they were on to the PNC like cheap suit, Amerindians in 2020 followed another bit of advice from WC Fields: “Hell, I never vote for anybody, I always vote against.” And so it’ll be in 2025!!
