Understanding Indigenism: Building A Different Future for Us All :: Essays Papers

Understanding Indigenism Building A Different Future for Us AllDefining ones culture is a feel long process, according to Indian rights activist Norman DesCampe of the Grand Portage Chippewa Tribe. You have to comprise it. Today, the life long process of understanding indigenous cultures is limited by terms of cultural survival. The ability of future generations to define themselves as Inuit or Kayapo is threaten as their natural environments and social integrity is hurt by government negligence indigenous cultures must be protected under a governmental structure that allows the people to live as they choose to live, outside of the transformative power of established nation-states, and the assumptions of these powers.Thus, international organizations must actively ensure the rights of impoverished indigenous states inwardly states The right to exchange equitably (Rose 234) as autonomous states with nation states is the basis for the new politically explosive global phenomenon (N eisen 1) of indigenous sovereignty and cultural autonomy. However, in Western government, native peoples ar in the way because they are thought to undermine the state- whichever state they find themselves in- because of their struggle to maintain their own ways of life (Wolfe, Tribes). Because they present economic challenges to shoot use and resource exploitation, indigenous peoples share sufferings under political oppression, deracination and racism and are, as in the case of Australian Aborigines, the poorest of the poor. Destroyed by a rhetoric of hate, genocide and mass murder are the tools of nation states to control the unwanted obstacles in economic development (Niezen 55).Colonialism alter the indigenous life of the Yanomami, the Maasai, the Hawaiians, the Aborigines and hundreds of other indigenous peoples. Industrialization moved humanity beyond the world in which people mattered to a world in which they are expendable (Wolfe). Today, still entrenched in the imperialis tic ideology of colonialism by modern forms of globalization, nation states noisily quarrel over the rights to exploit both land and people for economic power without regard to indigenous existence. Non-Hawaiian haoles crudely render false historical interpretations of their settler society as a blessed bitstock of civilization to the pitiful feudal Hawaiians (Trask). Some indigenous people attempt to assimilate, as for years one Aboriginal man had sweetened himself up just like tea, onerous to make himself and others understood to invading Western cultures but nothing been come back. Just nothing (Rose 195). Without political muscle, indigenous people are forced to kick upstairs ecologically harmful projects, such as hydroelectric dam proposals, to survive within the paradigm of the Western world.