really and these days there you don't really get them that large anymore welcome welcome very much a conversation where it's pleasure to welcome to the program to tell we're going to talk about the tie you know indian people here in the new world in particular in the caribbean basin but we're to talk also about the indigenous population of what was to become the americas and the situation that should be kept in mind as we think historically and so what and i would like to introduce to guess and get into a conversation where some things to demonstrate a couple of tapes that we're going to also a cousin i think you guys are cousins right and you're and you're both associated with the united confederation of title people right here and welcome gentlemen very very much tougher sake you want to be here yeah it's  short well i host a radio show on the b b ai and then point five here in new york called circle of red nations and that airs every monday night from nine pm to ten pm and basically what we do on the show  myself my co host raven we talk about issues contemporary traditional all focusing on the indigenous of the native peoples of this hemisphere we call it a lot of people may say american indian native american and we like to think that american indians and this is the way we really try to promote it that the indigenous peoples of the americas of the native peoples of the americas extended all the way from the top of alaska all the way down to the tip of south america was all those people being natives of the americas we would be considered american indians and that's what we try to promote so sometimes we may talk to someone right here at the chicago reservation on long island or we could talk to somebody as far away as  alaska or south america mexico we do interviews over the phone sometimes we do prerecorded taped interviews and we also play some music contemporary interdiction because we like to also have people aware that native people are not just or shouldn't be considered just in a historical sense but also in a contemporary sense as well meaning that we have lives today and although we might not dress and live the same way our ancestors did five hundred years ago or furthest were the people that were to become the brigadier the indigenous people of what was the pristine america and so with so that was a heck of a track they'd gone the people in brazil are gone ninety five percent the way around the world yeah they're migrating i think it's also important advances over the last few years he has and it just keeps going but then again the native peoples themselves the matter what continent they're from if they are from africa or asia or from the americas a lot of the traditional stories from certain groups talk about them always being in a certain oh i see right and i think it's just important that that that also is because when you think about it it makes sense in a way because the people now they're starting to say the archaeologist or i do know that opi people were here from maybe ten thousand years ago goes to show that even if there was these migrations that people have been in this hemisphere for so long that there's no remembrance of that travel well forty years if that's the case that's a long time very long that i have are but there are no evidence at all of any of proto  the in the americas anywhere no idea then you know what i guess really is interesting because look at all the construction in the developing the goes on right i mean you never know if if there was an archeological site that might have answered the question that has them all over the right mark or the migration it's only in the americas maybe an australia where the aboriginal peoples have not been able to generate enough force to make the people go back to where they came from rice in his words as you know yeah that that that that dialectic has a absolutely and so you know you have the the two the first time is of america's history right here which we're primarily focused on my people in the cabinet and i you know people you had the spanish conquest tour and you know it was a lot of you know  once again you know you had a different ideology coming over you have to remember that the europeans were coming out of the inquisition when they came over here and they were already doing that to their own people in spain and they were  colonization and a lot of the same tortures that they used against them or as against the jews against different peoples they just input that whole ideology of philosophy here in the americas and it was very easy because since the bible expressed or people talking about you know what were the philosophies of jesus i mean the people in the hemisphere least i know my own incest is religion in that way because at least in the caribbean it was a little different from maybe a place in the north like in alaska or in the oh yeah like circle because the caribbean has a year round growing season that's right the fishing from the islands themselves the into change of the people had a lot of time to develop themselves because they weren't as pressured for food or for hunting there was no large predatory animals on the land itself except on the sea we have sharks just like that so it developed the whole lifestyle where the people were just naturally very generous because their land was very abundant i mean i think that that needs to be said that you know columbus was the first trans less atlantic slave trader in the hemisphere he started it when he came to what's now called the dominican republic and haiti today yeah  mean they took people out of there to bring them back to spain to parade them around the spanish court to show the exotic people who they were and you know a lot of people don't say oh well it wasn't really columbus but he was actually the first one who brought slaves and three many of those people died along the way because he didn't even give them blankets and of course in the caribbean you have a year round temperature of about eighty five degrees so the people don't really need to wear anything in their going to a place like iberia spain which is colder a different climate long sea voyage i mean they were sea travelers again not not like that you know it's a thing in my view would have a could just pull out a couple of things against those we'd be human history because we now have the human history begins two hundred thousand years ago and we do come out of it and if you think about it they start in the in africa and then they migrated all the way to the eastward and then but to the westward they had moved hardly any degrees of longitude at all there was some rumor of as well because thought either that i had a hollow the whole idea of the people from the from the island of hawaii and you know as well as the polynesians that they actually came from what would be considered the east from them which is the pacific side of was yeah that yeah and it's well known now you have people from that area as well as many other areas of the new america is travelling and read boats these of boats that are not made out of wood but actually like straw five is that way that taps late there you can heart where they discovered the potato we had for made food complex wheat and barley rice maize and the potato was a fourth where they went through from a hog from paleolithic hunting people to agriculture and then to high civilization and two hundred b c they had a civilization art and architecture that rivaled anything in the old world there in lake titicaca so that was a that was a real cultural hearth maze by the way it is a tie in a word to casa gives a really mice mice and instead of you know how and the others that were in there so but they had about one point five million maybe in what is now north america we had these very you had maybe a thousand different languages bespeaks a tremendous period of of geographic isolation where these very great river idea languages developed and then we had these various stages that there were there were there now the thai you know the word the where they are all walk where they the people are how do we fit with the our walk in the car are a lot of people in the caribbean well first of all you know we have to remember that when a lot of language groups are identified bandit apologise you know archaeologist they have to come up with a major term to describe people so might so as he rode down that in all the islands there is like a common language in that the people were able to communicate with themselves and that so when the anthropologists were understanding that and tried to figure out where or how the origins or how the troubles of the population movements went around they had to describe people and they used certain cultural i guess cultural ways of life and language to describe and identify different people and the closest people that they found to the thai you know and to the time you know language were people in what is now known as guyana and soren and today and they call those people are a walk but our walk interesting clean up i've been to guyan need language exactly right and so are our languages well in each of the islands the people had different names from the sublime they were able to communicate through a common language and this language would vary in dialects as you know the farther up you would go and so the arrow wax of people who are called our works the not even really traditionally don't call themselves their likes they're called but they've been called our wax for so long that now they're just comfortable a canoe and they were trading and they were fishing and so when you go down the island chain from the greater antilles cuba medicare republic haiti jamaica puerto rico and you go down all the way down to follow martin the dominic st lucia all these all the way down to had like a traditional i guess disagreements with their neighbors who would who are called r o x and so the other apologist kind of used that whole idea and imposed in the caribbeans in big as they develop what was known as like what they call kara but when you really look at the history and you really look at the investigations and the actual proof there's no real proof that the people who are called cannibals actually ate anybody yeah you know and this is what we what we would like to and they could be taken away and then you break down resistance like that over time yeah right and i mean even today if people have believe that they are cannibals from the tab in the end and it's you know just something that's been hit then anyway the myth going to make tinder and dread actually what it perspective they had come upon something pretty new i mean they were they were stuck in that if you think against that that they had not go the moslems that content over the block there eastward movement if they wanted to try moving my word and they go and they come this way and then they came in that was completing the eastward because we all began in africa again we had a line of longitude that would go up into you know into europe or north or west of europe there and that they had hardly move to the west and then when they did it was the eastward most in the western most extensions of mankind were meeting there on san salvador when columbus landed on october twelfth in the bahamas but i'd like to just kind of follow up on what you were saying about the holocaust and of course we need to think as roger was saying about the historical perspective but i think it's also important to understand that the contemporary perspective because when you think about it there has been no reconciliation or end really anyway i mean a few reservations now are economically sustainable from the casinos and things like that but that doesn't happen every reservation here in the united states now in latin america the situation is even worse because they didn't have the same treaty process as they did at least the natives here dealing with the english and the americans actually entered into treaties when you however were just ruthlessly broken hasn't really been one that's ever been you know knowledged it was still there not out of the head now they can at least go to court and to the supreme court of the united states and say look this is a document between nation to nation and as any international treaty is and they were able to fight and that's how you know a lot of american indians here in the united states are able to get rights for their land they're not able to do you don't have to be taxed because that was part of the agreements that they made originally and that has to be honored in latin america we didn't really have those kind of treaties you see so there was a lot more of a total obliteration and not only in that physical sense but also in a mental sense as well yes sure as you also had a whole dynamic of inventing the multi racial ideology or the nationalistic in other  away your ethnicity or national sense like in puerto rico for example we don't really have the opportunity to develop ourselves in ethnic sense whether people want to follow the african heritage or the heritage from europe which is spain or wherever else the right ordering  our indigenous heritage you see you just a blanket term puerto rican but within that we should be allowed to explore and affirm ourselves as who we see we are especially if we have those stories in our own family and while there may be mixing going on it's oh i'm not an indian you know what i mean it's that's the worst thing to be because that's seen as going backwards in the hopper to you know the least progressive of any of the races right at least progressive in that and also in that sense about the world modernization i of sense but there was a sense i mean there have been situations like that where you have a civilization like the the europeans were expansive in fact for the last five hundred years we lived in a european hero it was europe to colonize the world to colonize africa they c they were forced into a certain sense by the geo political and you know souls illogical realities of the world to go back except in the americas and perhaps in australia you know where those colonization efforts became a permanent pattern rather than one that could be a hard thing to walk reconciliation and there has to be some kind of retribution it recurring sation in every kind of sense for example time with our ancestral remains if you go throughout the caribbean islands throughout the united states back in the ground too for that follow up for that for that way for that cycle you know and to take those bones out and to put it behind glass cases into rupp's a process that our ancestors put into motion and that we today in our own minds in this new york area or urban lifestyle can really grasp because we don't live that type of lifestyle or we go to the store to buy our food we don't have to go to a wine city you know yeah i wonder where the food is coming from where our water is coming from how do we world and they had a feeling an attachment to the world and the environment that is something that was just run roughshod over in the modernization process of many people every morning so your values a lot of those are being picked up by people to a large scale where they say th e you know the extension of capitalist or globalization or whatever you want to have a materialistic values don't have any room for certain kind of bridges which in the long term as a collective society human society is going to have to retreat to invite in it's from there that we might find some we were living the adam and eve story with its own paradise for us i mean the whole thing has been totally corrupt and is very disgusting yes and you know it's just the place today i mean we've been somewhat removed from that you know but the town and now it's a very negative person feel it you know that's why we pray that's why we close our eyes and that's why and the people who were treated so shabbily isn't nearly a strong enough word both in north north and south and caribbean and in north america they've been treated so shabbily and so still i mean the one just really we still are fighting just the images that were made today you have the cleveland indians you know  washington redskins that were great on you you know of course it was weird if anybody else if you drew a caricature of an african person with a ball there was no is a big lips like that they used to do it and why did your ego sure right but people kind of come to the many i think was the disease yes this is easy apart from the forced labor didn't come into the slavery that they are i had to put them tried to do that many of the people of the the indigenous people of the caribbean did not set it well that i mean i would think that you know just common sense if that if they figure it out if you have a people who are motivated by profit motive you know in other words try to get the most god of gold out of this area and try overwork people that you're going to try to get the most the workers that you can so that of course they're going to come up with any kind of story that they can get even more people and the slave trade out of africa you know i've across had already begun with the portuguese they were already dealing in that you know you know so it was a way also to say that since people were kind of feeling bad about the indian situation the quote unquote in the in situation in the islands and they were coming up with these laws to stop the slavery of the indians before it's too  late and all and all the other rhetoric that was going on they had to figure out a way that they could still extract those resources and the gold itself in the caribbean wasn't really not everybody there going women they you know they really needed people to work the fields animal you have the figure he did yes so they were already on their way to go and they had far much much more gold you know and that and that type of resource and this is and we work until age where that was the means by which a species by which wealth was measured they were really on the search for gold and they were so they didn't want to have anything to do with the caribbean really except that the caribbean was a good place like a jumping point in his one you know to think you know for people on a route you know coming from a long way from europe to stop in the caribbean to make their pick up people they had a large slave trade going out of cuba you know which is one of the large areas that they would import in exports right right right border quotable people who were enslaved you know because it's easy to say slaves right but now i've remember that they were  the there was a spiritual tradition which was very close to you know to like a religious kind of attitude toward the world the mother earth of the spirit earth so the spirit thing these were these were these were things that were talks about some of the things we've been talking about but expressed through our song and dance and there's some explanations this is part of a presentation by the casa but what cultural society  come that word comes from one of our creation stories of the night radiation stories and that's talks about the cave of the hog or the black cave and that's the place of emergence for the title people after the great flood that had covered the whole earth had subsided the people were able to come out of the darkness and into the light again jesus got a geographical location i suppose well somewhere they say it's somewhere maybe in what's now known as the medicare republic but i think it was more of a spiritual sense about talking about an actual time because obviously even the bible talks about a great flood what is there at that i know so even our you know stories have that and there was two caves there was and you know which was the place of the others so that's what we know there was other people on the earth also but from our people our culture we emerged from and that's where the name of the society comes from and these were things were had been handed down over the generations yeah and it was a written  as we would have it like this in english yeah but we did were able to communicate and you and roger know that because we've been together photographing a lot of these things the petroglyphs that yeah they look at drawing you know the caves and there you can talk about actual events  things that happened connections with the spirit world or with other forces the other energies you know besides the human rights that the people would deal with my wife be good for humanity as a whole to be able to get a sense of all or of sense of association with the other people have more consciousness and than nothing yeah right well you guys might have been leading it was it let's show that film right ok we can in this do you set it up in a roundabout what five ten minutes or five seven minutes i'm maybe seven maybe about seven minutes so we'll set that up and then we'll se type of this is a thing the cassette of that kind of music but it reminded me a little bit of the music of the i'm ira in bolivia you had the flute you know it had a certain pattern and everything like it has got a kind of similarity there was a similarity typical music of the region's kind all of that was taken elements of that were taken in incorporated with the spanish instruments like it or you know and then you have a really you know a different style of music emerging in death with the people you know kind of you range yeah potato and they kino and the oak and they had to stablish the whole food base for a high civilization but that's another but it is in a certain sense the same because it has a question i had in mind is because we have these rich traditions we have some of these traditions go way back and there's pressure upon those indigenous cultures and so forth by the forces of modernization themselves and it is a danger of losing them is there a danger that we're losing the languages other languages being being lost to the mists of  written down except in the glyphs and the graphic in homeric time right and so what you have is in europe where you have written languages them less expressive and so i think in that and the history of linguistics the eastern european language is ac most recent languages and of less expressive and and so you know it's a big concern for us and it is well marshall mcluhan uses if i may marshall mcluhan used to say you know that the major metaphor for western civilization was phonetic alphabet and it was were you strong out you have to take you have to take a b c do you have to string it out and on a long line like this and michener will write eight pages in a book to describe you know the sun in the bird in the sea and this all of these things literally i think it's quite true we're going now the cybernetic thing we're going back and we're going back we're going to the internet is now going to be going multimedia and we're going back to icons and we're going back to it e o grahams or chinese  grams and different kinds of things which are pre literate culture and that literate culture established even ideas of what is rational you know everything else restrung out linearly and this will be important i think we've got lessons to learn from the traditions are you guys have been carrying on have immediate meaning to the modern world you know when we first met at the united nations because there are a lot of issues that still need to address to know there are a lot of concerns that indigenous peoples have not only you know as they you know people but throughout the had because we've seen in our in our own countries wherever we come from we haven't really been able to progress process certain point so now that the world is coming up with international conventions on racism on genocide and he had the geneva convention you had all these things that internationally there's becoming a kind of consciousness that's been raised through the formation and a common a with the formation of the united nations in other words people of the world started saying ok we need to really think about you know we had world war two you know we had world war one but we really needed to think about what's happening in a global sense as people keep expanding and dealing with other people and economics and stuff like that so within that indigenous peoples as well are also coming to the united nations and to that form international forum to say hey within that makes while you're coming up with international conventions while we had the agenda twenty one that was made in rio and i ninety two would be overt some of you know we have a very important role and a very important voice to be to add to that whole process that i made of people's whether we've been colonized with whether we still maintain our traditions intact or whether they've been altered because of you know and we should be part of that process because with the end that within all these nation states that have been developed like the united states of america our issues as native people have not yet been addressed by any group that's right you know that has come in and that has that has taken over or that has been you know we're focusing on urban areas you know not an urban ism but you know there's even you know many of us who live here in the city sure have you know and so whether we live in this city or whether we live in our right yeah identity yeah rights world culture the hip hop culture has taken over i mean i remember going back to puerto rico as a young boy and then coming back later in life and seeing the change i mean i could in areas where change and how many things from new york have been imposed now on the kids in puerto rico instead of the opposite you know so all of that has to be addressed on a local level on a national level and on an international level and this is why many people are coming out to say hey you know we have to fight for rights but we're not only fighting for ourselves because as we're we're losing our languages oppressive we're losing the earth we're for mother earth you know that's the main point yeah i know i know it isn't and the thing is we have to instead of it just being some great sort of thing to not to say i really meaningful towards finding a way in which we're going to relate as the as the as the technological systems and so what begin to go full circle i think there's going to be more and more appreciation of some of these traditional values particular some of the ones relate ecological we hope so appreciation and so forth and he's going to think that we can learn from them and we have i'm very quick where we do are bad shape i just heard on the news you know the there were some scientists that just went up to the in the territorial by the technology in the last hundred years and really what it suggests is that we've been burning a lot of fossil fuel you know what does that create that creates the missions of pollute the atmosphere the air that we breathe and it also adds to the type of greenhouse warming effect that would the traditions that you've been treating trying to keep going now we only got a minute or so left what about you you have your program on every month and there is a network of people like i said you marry some of the people in the american indian mov with trying to carry forth this kind of a thing but it's important that there be institutions and you're doing that and you're going at it chance you could start putting some of this programming maybe into the network here in los so louis in addition to roger what do you think i think that's an important vehicle i mean television especially in the metropolitan area really has ability to focus what we feel is being a point of almost thirty million people but you know a lot of that takes a lot of resources as well and the timing about the net rabbit just finished the whole thing at the united nations yeah i know but i go most all summer you know chair of the millions committee or the committees and so we've been really maybe too active and so it takes away from some of the things i would like to do and so we have a lot of younger people a lot of people that are