Every country in the Americas sits on aboriginal lands. In most of them there remain some aboriginal peoples. They are typically the poorest of the poor. Yet somehow this never got focussed on, much less made into a unifying theme. Thursday Matthew Coon-Come, the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, came and spoke powerfully along these lines on an environmental panel that included David Suzuki.
Conquest keeps coming, now by resource exploitation and environmental degradation.
His appearance at the Peoples' Summit was good, but neither the AFN nor any other aboriginal organization had an institutional presence. To have a forum one had to have money and that either didn't exist or wasn't forthcoming from any source in the case of aboriginal peoples. Indigenous peoples' leaders from throughout the Americas came instead to a conference sponsored by the Canadian government in Ottawa in March. There were, I'm told, lots of corporate suits there and some of the indigenous delegates from outside Canada went home in disgust. Mike Little Moustache of the Blackfoot said he'd been here since Monday and had been hassled one way or another by the police every day he'd been here Finally, late afternoon on Thursday, there was a session on indigenous peoples.