Tribal Nations – Report from Six Nations

Parallel made to vanishing rainforest; South American environmental activists speak at Six Nations forum on trees

Michael-Allan Marion

Monday, July 16, 2007 - 07:00

Local News - Indigenous people in the shrinking Amazon rainforest in South America and the diminishing Carolinian forest in southern Ontario have many common values and challenges, participants in an environmental forum learned on the weekend.

The central message imparted to about 200 who turned out to the one-day educational event in Six Nations Polytechnic is that the sustainability of the Amazon rainforest and the Carolinian forest is not just a matter of keeping developers and industrialists from chopping down trees.

Speakers from the Amazon Conservation Team and from the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy say it's about preserving and enhancing a holistic environment by accepting as wise guardians the indigenous peoples of each forest.

They says they're the ones who long ago learned to live in harmony with their respective habitats through appropriate diet, natural medicines and customs and codes of behaviour that remained in sync with the particular contours and rhythms of nature and now find them under threat.

Attendees heard speakers from the Amazon Conservation Team explain what that organization is doing to combat the assault on the Amazon rainforest that straddles Brazil, Colombia, Suriname and Venezuela through an unparalleled pace of development.

Using demonstrations and power-point presentations, team members Liliana Madrigal, Luciano Mutumbajoy, Doris Jacanamijoy and Julio Cesar Paiguaje explained how they are following their mission to work in partnership with indigenous people in conserving biodiversity, health and culture in tropical South America.

The team's work turns on the central belief that conservation is a moral issue. That belief runs as a theme through eight core values and objectives:

Developing processes of research, interdisciplinary study and consensus to achieve the integration of culture, nature and health. Preserving biocultural diversity.

Strengthening shamanistic knowledge systems and their transmission to the generations to follow.

This includes the spreading of shamanistic traditional apprenticeship programs and shaman gatherings, a code of ethics for indigenous medicine, health brigades, gardens for healing plants and construction of traditional ceremonial houses.

The study, recovery, protection and dissemination of traditional health systems.

Intercultural dialogue between indigenous wisdom and western science knowledge systems.

Supporting the rights of indigenous peoples.

Holding up the intrinsic value of nature.

Promoting environmental responsibility.

They are also working on the establishment of two hospitals, using both western and traditional medicine, with the support of the Ministry of Health in Suriname.

They also have the collaboration of Yale Medical School, the Medical Mission of Health Programs in Suriname, and the ethnomedicine program at El Rosario University of Colombia.

They also engage in the ethnocartographic mapping of traditional land uses in Brazil, Colombia and Suriname, with more than 27 million acres already mapped.

And they promote the protection of rainforest reserves in the different countries of the rainforest area.

Through it all, the team members said they have endured opposition from quarters where they are seen as a threat to economic progress, but they believe they're making progress.

In their turn, Confederacy Chief Allen MacNaughton, sub-chief Leroy Hill, Rick Hill, director of the Haudenosaunee environmental task force, and a Clan Mothers delegation said non-native society doesn't understand their attempts to do the same thing as their counterparts in the Amazon.

MacNaughton said the Carolinian forest , which is strongest on the reduced Six Nations territory, has undergone devastation due to the relentless pursuit of wealth.

He said there have been many prophecies of the environmental degradation that is coming to pass and portents are everywhere now of the consequences reaped from the relentless pursuit of wealth.

The water table in the Six Nations area has dropped after years of excessive watertaking by companies in the general area.

Much of the groundwater is polluted, he said, and many people are feeling sick a lot.

Trees are dying from the top down. Medical studies of the population have also shown cancer clusters, he said.

"We talk about it, but that's all, said MacNaughton. "These are warnings to do something about it, because it will affect our children and their children."

Aerial mapping shows Six Nations still has the most Carolinian tree canopy in this area of southern Ontario, he said, but added it's disgusting to think about all those trees going.

"There are more deer around here than ever before in my memory," MacNaughton noted. "You know why? The forest is disappearing and they don't have anywhere to go. It's another prophecy. These things have to be changed because the future is going to be terrible if they aren't."

MacNaughton also said a complete difference in world view between the Confederacy and federal and provincial negotiators is creating a stumbling block in land claims talks since the occupation of a development site in Caledonia more than year ago.

Government officials still think the problem will be settled by offering enough money, he said, while Confederacy negotiators keep stressing that the dispute is not over money but land.

"We are growing and we need more land for our people, so that we don't have to cut down the Carolinian forest."
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