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PRESS BULLETIN FROM UNION OF ORGANIZATIONS OF THE SIERRA JUÁREZ OF OAXACA (UNOSJO, S.C.) – Oaxaca, Mexico
TO ALL STATE, NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL MEDIA SOURCES:
We kindly request that you publish the present bulletin in your respective means of communication.
Towards the end of 2008, the results of the research project México Indígena (Indigenous Mexico) were handed over to two Zapotec communities in the Sierra Juárez in the form of maps. Research had been undertaken two years earlier by a team of geographers from University of Kansas. What initially seemed to be a beneficial project for the communities now leaves many of the participants feeling like victims of geopiracy.
In August 2006, the México Indígena research team arrived at the Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca (UNOSJO, S.C.) to present research objectives and garner support to commence work in the Sierra Juárez region. At the time, the team included a Mexican biologist Gustavo Ramírez, an Ixtlán native well known in the area, who was responsible for initially approaching UNOSJO.
Project leader and geographer Peter Herlihy explained the project objectives to UNOSJO, S.C., initially stating that it was to document the impacts of PROCEDE [a Mexican Government program has had on indigenous communities. He failed to mention, however, that this research prototype was financed by the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) of the United States Army and that reports on his work would be handed directly to this Office. Herlihy neglected to mention this despite being expressly asked to clarify the eventual use of the data obtained through research.
Read more about indigenous Zapotec peoples and Oaxaca here.
The preservation of indigenous people’s history is a critical project in today’s world of rapid cultural and linguistic disappearance. As indigenous people are forced to change their lifeways, much of their history, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), and oral traditions are lost. In an effort to preserve this knowledge for future generations, indigenous peoples – often in collaboration with authors, activists, NGOs, and even governmental and state agencies – are in the process of working on ways to ensure that this knowledge and history is maintained. In a recent article entitled “The Tule River Tribal History Project: Evaluating a California Tribal Government’s Collaboration with Anthropology and Occupational Therapy to Preserve Indigenous History and Promote Tribal Goals,” one example of how indigenous people are working to preserve their history is lucidly articulated.
In 2004, the Tule River Tribal Council undertook an innovative project to preserve the indigenous history of the Tule River Native American Indian Tribe. The indigenous Tule River tribe is comprised of about 1,500 enrolled members. Of these, about 500 members live on the reservation in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, in Central California, about 15 miles from the city of Porterville. The reservation is in the San Joaquin Valley, about midway between Bakersfield and Fresno. The Tule River Tribal History Project, as this project came to be called, demonstrates a way that indigenous people can begin to ensure – and control – the preservation of their indigenous history and knowledge.
Read more about Native American Indian Tule River Tribal Preservation here.
Feast of Souls: Indians and Spaniards in the Seventeenth-Century Missions of Florida and New Mexico
Robert C. Galgano
2005
University of New Mexico Press
I am an advocate of comparative history, and the book reviewed here purports to offer a synthesis of the historical experience of natives living on Franciscan missions in Spanish Florida and New Mexico. The book has as its primary audience students; it also has, among others, the goal of translating history into teaching (pp. xi-xii). The author lays out the themes in the book in a short introduction, and then examines several chronological/thematic issues. Galgano provides an overly broad overview of native and Spanish religious beliefs, as one element of an interpretation that can best be summarized as mutual understandings, misunderstandings and accommodations that at times were less than accommodating. While there is a certain logic in comparing contemporary Franciscan missions in Florida and New Mexico, the author does not present a compelling reason for why he limits the scope of the book or why he does not examine the experiences of Franciscan missionaries and natives on other frontiers.
This short book (155 pages of text) is divided into six thematic/chronological chapters in addition to the introduction. The first chapter outlines, in a general way, the religious beliefs and practices of the major players in the story. This includes the Spanish and Franciscan missionaries, as well as the different native peoples the Franciscans attempted to convert. These were the Guale, Timucua, and Apalache in Florida, and the different Pueblo peoples in New Mexico. While Galgano attempts to draw interesting parallels between the belief systems of Iberian Catholicism and the natives of Florida and New Mexico, the discussion is too general to be of much utility, other than to provide a general sense of religious beliefs, without providing many specific details to distinguish between the practices of the Florida and New Mexico natives, or to explain how Iberian Catholicism evolved from the late medieval period through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As the author points out, religion certainly became a point of dispute during the seventeenth century, as seen in efforts to quash the kachina religion in New Mexico and the ball game in Florida–an athletic competition between villages that had religious overtones. Native leaders in Florida cooperated with the effort to suppress the ball game, whereas New Mexico natives took the kachina religion underground and used it as a point around which to organize resistance.
Read more about Feast of Souls: Native American Indians and Spaniards in Florida and New Mexico here.
