What Indigenous Peoples Can Teach the World

The suggestions, proposals, and warnings of indigenous peoples about the irreversible forms of damage caused by the current model of development are ignored, even by the World Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance.

MEXICO CITY - International Day of the Indigenous People, August 9, has provided a much-needed occasion for the indigenous peoples to present their opinions and positions and to invite the international community to reflect on the main processes now underway throughout the world that directly or indirectly affect our peoples, as well as the rest of humanity.

In the course of the last decade, our planet has experienced an accelerated process of globalization, which has generated whole new areas of activity, new challenges, and new expressions of resistance.

It is time to sit down together and reflect seriously on what sort of world we would like to leave to our children. Globalization cannot continue to be the globalization of finance and speculation, drug trafficking, poverty and marginalization, the extermination of nature, and the destruction of hope for the planet.

We must not allow the imposition of a single mode of thought that makes it possible for a privileged minority - a fifth of the world's population - to consume 80 percent of the earth's resources while the vast majority are left with less and less. We will not allow the wealth of our patrimony to be reduced to the laws of the market as materialistic values are imposed as the model and vision of life.

Similarly, we must join forces to find a solution to the climate change that is now seriously affecting our planet and undoubtedly will become a global emergency in the near future. Despite this, among the environmental experts who always participate in forums like the Kyoto Protocol and the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, the indigenous peoples have been completely marginalized.

For thousands of years, the indigenous peoples have known how to co-exist with nature, respecting its cycles of life and regeneration. For us, nature is an integral part of our lives. We see life as a whole in which the different elements live together through complex mechanisms of respect in a fragile equilibrium. The experience of our peoples in conservation and protection of the forests, biological diversity, and the maintenance of essential ecosystems, could become an important contribution to harmonizing the behavior of humanity in this new century.

Unfortunately, when we make suggestions, proposals, and warnings regarding the irreversible forms of damage caused by the current model of development, we are ignored and excluded, and the present discriminatory, exclusionist system that dominates the rest of international decision-making bodies is reproduced yet again.

One of the best illustrations of this dynamic, as paradoxical as it may seem, can be found in the preparations for the UN's World Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, to be held in Durban, South Africa, Aug 31 to Sep 7.

A specific chapter addressing the reality of the indigenous peoples was not included in the original document of the conference, thereby omitting the essence of the claims that the indigenous peoples have made again and again in all the preparatory events of the conference, and which can be summed up as respect for our existence as peoples, recognition of our historic contribution to the development of humanity, and our right to a dignified and equal sustainable development with full access to and control over our lands and resources.

We indigenous people will not accept having these claims once again deformed and downgraded. We will not go along with endorsing an agreement that renders the conference a success at the expense of our dignity and rights. We recognize no right to cut or condition our needs or those of the social movements and millions of men and women who suffer many kinds of discrimination and who expect from this conference a clear and forceful statement against it and the impunity of those who practice it.

In today's world, our presence is a challenge to the unfulfilled promise of the United Nations system to put an end to the neo-colonial regimes that subjugated our peoples and created the oppressive institutions of slavery and servitude.

We must continue fighting to make the International Day of the Indigenous Peoples more that just symbolic. We call on the governments of our countries, the leaders of the most powerful nations, and the officials of the major global institutions to pause to think about and restrain this hurricane that is bearing down upon us. It is time to join forces and knowledge to reverse the devastating processes of ecological destruction, the worsening of poverty and hunger, intolerance, racism, and exclusion.(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Rigoberta Menchú, 1992 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, is a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador.