Month: November 2009

Text of 1970 speech by Wampsutta, an Aquinnah Wampanoag Elder

When Frank James (1923 – February 20, 2001), known to the Wampanoag people as Wampsutta, was invited to speak by the Commonwealth of Massachusettsat the 1970 annual Thanksgiving feast at Plymouth. When the text of Mr. James’ speech, a powerful statement of anger at the history of oppression of the Native people of America, became known before the event, the Commonwealth “disinvited” him. Wampsutta was not prepared to have his speech revised by the Pilgrims. He left the dinner and the ceremonies and went to the hill near the statue of the Massasoit, who as the leader of the Wampanoags when the Pilgrims landed in their territory. There overlooking Plymouth Harbor, he looked at the replica of the Mayflower. It was there that he gave his speech that was to be given to the Pilgrims and their guests. There eight or ten Indians and their supporters listened in indignation as Frank talked of the takeover of the Wampanoag tradition, culture, religion, and land.

That silencing of a strong and honest Native voice led to the convening of the National Day of Mourning. The following is the text of 1970 speech by Wampsutta, an Aquinnah Wampanoag elder and Native American activist.

I speak to you as a man — a Wampanoag Man. I am a proud man, proud of my ancestry, my accomplishments won by a strict parental direction (“You must succeed – your face is a different color in this small Cape Cod community!”). I am a product of poverty and discrimination from these two social and economic diseases. I, and my brothers and sisters, have painfully overcome, and to some extent we have earned the respect of our community. We are Indians first – but we are termed “good citizens.” Sometimes we are arrogant but only because society has pressured us to be so.

It is with mixed emotion that I stand here to share my thoughts. This is a time of celebration for you – celebrating an anniversary of a beginning for the white man in America. A time of looking back, of reflection. It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People.

Even before the Pilgrims landed it was common practice for explorers to capture Indians, take them to Europe and sell them as slaves for 220 shillings apiece. The Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod for four days before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors and stolen their corn and beans. Mourt’s Relation describes a searching party of sixteen men. Mourt goes on to say that this party took as much of the Indians’ winter provisions as they were able to carry.

Massasoit, the great Sachem of the Wampanoag, knew these facts, yet he and his People welcomed and befriended the settlers of the Plymouth Plantation. Perhaps he did this because his Tribe had been depleted by an epidemic. Or his knowledge of the harsh oncoming winter was the reason for his peaceful acceptance of these acts. This action by Massasoit was perhaps our biggest mistake. We, the Wampanoag, welcomed you, the white man, with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end; that before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a free people.
What happened in those short 50 years? What has happened in the last 300 years? History gives us facts and there were atrocities; there were broken promises – and most of these centered around land ownership. Among ourselves we understood that there were boundaries, but never before had we had to deal with fences and stone walls. But the white man had a need to prove his worth by the amount of land that he owned. Only ten years later, when the Puritans came, they treated the Wampanoag with even less kindness in converting the souls of the so-called “savages.” Although the Puritans were harsh to members of their own society, the Indian was pressed between stone slabs and hanged as quickly as any other “witch.”

The Black Commentator for more

Dear Lord, Thank you for the Thanksgiving holiday. And for all the material possession that we have and enjoy. And for letting us white people kill all the Indians and steal their tribal lands. And stuff ourselves like pigs, even though children in Asia are being napalmed.”

Pakistan 12th most vulnerable country to climate change, suffers disproportionately

By Bushra Khaliq

Pakistan is among the countries which will be hit hardest in near future by effects of climate change even though it contributes only a fraction to global warming. The country is witnessing severe pressures on natural resources and environment. This warning has recently come from the mouth of Pakistan’s prime minister in a recent statement.

The PM has alarmed the countrymen by disclosing that Pakistan is the 12th most vulnerable country in the world, to environmental degradation, would cost five per cent of the GDP every year.

Very few Pakistanis took such warnings serious. There is no media uproar, no popular movement and no political clamoring over the issue. Sad! The majority of the Pakistani policy makers have no time to think about the horrifying picture of the future, caused by the worsening climatic conditions. The country is busy fighting US-led war on terrorism and now almost trapped in a complex political quagmire where it has found itself fighting a war with itself. Therefore, very little time planners find to apprise the people of Pakistan on the repercussions of adverse climatic effects.

The climate experts in the country are hinting at severe water scarcity saying that water supply, already a serious concern in many parts of the country, will decline dramatically, affecting food production. Export industries such as, agriculture, textile products and fisheries will also be affected, while coastal areas risk being inundated, flooding the homes of millions of people living in low-lying areas.

Pakistan’s north eastern parts already experienced droughts in 1999 and 2000 are one such example that caused sharp declines in water tables and dried up wetlands, severely degrading ecosystems.

Although Pakistan contributes least to global warming-one 35th of the world’s average of carbon dioxide emissions-temperatures in the country’s coastal areas have risen since the early 1900s from 0.6 to 1 degree centigrade. Precipitation has decreased 10 to 15 per cent in the coastal belt and hyper arid plains over the last 40 years while there is an increase in summer and winter rains in northern Pakistan.

Although Pakistan produces minimal chlorofluorocarbons and a little sulphur dioxide emissions, thus making a negligible contribution to ozone depletion and acid rain, it will suffer disproportionately from climate change and other global environmental problems. Health of millions would also be affected with diarrhoeal diseases associated with floods and drought becoming more prevalent. Intensifying rural poverty is likely to increase internal migration as well as migration to other countries. Given the enormity of the impact, adaptation and mitigation measures are critically important.

Pakistan’s eco system has suffered greatly due to climatic change; one such example is that of Keti Bandar; one of the richest port in the region of the coastal belt of Pakistan that lost privileges of being at some point in time. The former port facilities bordered both shores of the Indus River delta but have become submerged as a result of coastal erosion, leaving only a thin, 2km long isthmus by way of a land bridge to the mainland . There was a time when it was known to be an area thriving on mangroves ecosystem, rich with agriculture and boasting a busy seaport. Now the landscape is barren and thatched houses dotted on mudflats. Water logging and salinity is its major problem and the intruding sea has almost eaten up the villages. Thousands of peasant families and fisher folk community already had to migrate to other areas in search of livelihood.

International View Point

By M K Bhadrakumar

Discourse between India and Pakistan can be deceptive – like when cats hiss. You can never quite tell dalliance from discord. The fact remains that at different levels, despite their occasional shrill rhetoric, contacts have been going on between Delhi and Islamabad, including some unprecedented highly sensitive lines of communication, which neither side publicizes. India has also kick-started parallel efforts aimed at reaching out to Kashmiri opinion, with Pakistan in the loop.

At the responsible level of leadership in both India and Pakistan, there is a realization that extremism and terrorism do not and should not provide scope for zero-sum games, given the acuteness of security threats. There is no attempt on India’s part to take advantage of the pressing need for the Pakistani military to redeploy from the eastern border to the Afghan border.

Washington is privy to the alpha and the omega of what is going on, and yet it got a pithy paragraph inserted into the summit statement by US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao:
The two sides welcomed all efforts conducive to peace, stability and development in South Asia. They support the efforts of Afghanistan and Pakistan to fight terrorism, maintain domestic stability and achieve sustainable economic and social development, and support the improvement and growth of relations between India and Pakistan. The two sides are ready to strengthen communication, dialogue and cooperation on issues related to South Asia and work together to promote peace, stability and development in that region.
The untimely articulation raised eyebrows in New Delhi, as both Washington and Beijing know only too well that it isn’t in India’s DNA to accept minders or mentors – Western or Asian. Delhi lost no time brusquely rejecting mediation.

However, the Sino-American affair over South Asia presented Delhi with another puzzle. The fact remains that US and Chinese interests are so patently at odds in the region that the two countries cannot easily mate. Washington is actively undermining the stability of the Mahinda Rajapakse government in Colombo, with which both Beijing and Delhi enjoy close ties. The US has just begun a robust thrust in Myanmar to contest China’s influence.

Conceivably, China has a good grasp of the situation in Pakistan and can estimate how deeply unpopular the US has become in that country. Ironically, the day the Obama-Hu statement was released in Beijing, a Gallup poll revealed that Pakistanis see the US as a bigger threat (59%) than India (18%) or the Taliban (11%). Why should Beijing stake its “all-weather friendship” with Pakistan to salvage America’s reputation?

Meanwhile, a concerted media campaign has begun in the US to discredit Chinese policies toward Afghanistan – that China is involved in “brazen examples of corruption” to grab Afghanistan’s wealth of mineral resources. Quoting US officials, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday that state-run China Metallurgical Group Corp (MCC) paid a bribe of US$30 million to the concerned Afghan authorities for receiving a $2.9 billion project to extract copper from the Aynak deposit in Logar province.

Asian Times

By Ansar Fayyazuddin

THE YEAR 2009 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, as well as the 150th anniversary of the publication of his celebrated book On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Darwin left an indelible mark on our understanding of the world we live in and our place in history.

Darwin is the subject of vast amounts of scholarly research, including much writing appearing in this anniversary year. Here I want to touch on a few aspects of Darwin’s life and work that I find interesting.

Darwin was born in 1809 into a wealthy family headed by his medical doctor father and his mother, the daughter of Josiah Wedgewood — the industrialist who made his fortune manufacturing fine china. Darwin’s mother died while he was still quite young. Charles’ father Robert, and grandfather Erasmus, were freethinkers, who rejected Christianity and, in the case of Erasmus, openly sought a materialist understanding of the natural world.

Indeed, Darwin’s grandfather believed in the interconnectedness and common origin of all species. In fact, the idea that species were related was an idea with some currency even before Charles Darwin made his contributions to the subject. The Linnaean taxonomy of the living world, in which the similarities of different living forms were used to classify them hierarchically as belonging to different kingdoms, phyla, classes, orders, families, genera and species was already in place.

The taxonomy posed — in retrospect at least — the question: if each species was created separately, as a literal reading of the Bible would imply, why were there structural similarities across species, genera, classes etc? Why was Linnaeus’ classification sensible?

While the interconnectedness and common origin of species, as a general idea, predates Darwin’s work by many years, what was lacking was a compelling mechanism for affecting the transformation of one species into another. Lamarckism was the one exception — it provided a way in which incremental changes could accumulate to give rise to the bigger differences that separated one species from another.

Lamarckism was based on the idea that physical changes accrued over the lifetime of an organism can be inherited by offspring. While I cannot dwell on this subject, I want to note that Darwin did not reject out of hand Lamarckian mechanisms in evolution, even in his later writings. (The genetic mechanism for evolutionary change wasn’t understood till much later.)

Careful Study, Brilliant Insight

Darwin presented a mechanism for accumulating incremental change based on a series of brilliant extrapolations from his own detailed factual knowledge of the natural world. Darwin’s reliance on knowledge acquired through careful study of nature distinguished him from the majority of his contemporary theorists of evolution, whose motivations were at times more ideological than scientific.

Solidarity

By John Allen and Adiel Ismail

Cape Town — Botswana continues to be seen as Africa’s least corrupt, and Somalia as the continent’s – and the world’s – most corrupt country, according to a new survey published this week.

But Botswana comes in at only 37th place in a list of 180 nations, which New Zealand tops as the perceived least corrupt country in the world. Three-quarters of the nations of sub-Saharan Africa fall in the bottom half of the list.

These are among the revelations of the “Corruption Perceptions Index 2009,” published by Transparency International, a civil society group which describes itself as a global coalition against corruption.

The survey ranks perceptions of corruption on an index of 1 to 10, with 1 indicating the highest level of corruption and 10 the lowest. The index is a “survey of surveys,” relying on research done by 10 organizations, ranging from the African Development Bank and World Bank to the Economist Intelligence Unit and the World Economic Forum.
The only African countries ranked above 5 on the index are Botswana (5.6), Mauritius (5.4) and Cape Verde (5.1).

The survey suggests that Africa’s 10 least corrupt countries are (world ranking in parentheses): Botswana (37), Mauritius (42), Cape Verde (46), Seychelles (54), South Africa (55), Namibia (56), Ghana (69), Burkina Faso (79), Swaziland (79) and Lesotho (89).

It ranks the 10 most corrupt as: Somalia (180 in the world), Sudan (176), Chad (175), Guinea (168), Equatorial Guinea (168), Burundi (168), Guinea-Bissau (162), Congo-Brazzaville (162), Democratic Republic of Congo (162) and Angola (162).

Although the survey warns that it “is not intended to measure a country’s progress over time,” a number of African countries have dramatically improved their positions in world rankings in the past year.
Gambia leapt 52 places, from 158 to 106, and Liberia 41 places, from 138 to 97 in the world. Perceptions of Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and Rwanda have also pushed them towards the ranks of less corrupt countries.

But the positions of other countries have slid back in the rankings, with Tanzania dropping 24 places, from 102 to 126, Mauritania 15 places, from 115 to 130, Madagascar and Senegal both slipping 14 places, from 85 to 99, and Nigeria, dropping nine places from 121 to 130.

All Africa

SPECIAL BOOK EXCERPT
From the forthcoming book GOOD WITHOUT GOD: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe by Greg Epstein. Copyright © 2009 by Greg Epstein. To be published on October 27, 2009, by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

By Greg Epstein

“It’s not easy to live a good life or be a good person—with or without a god,” writes Harvard Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein in the introduction to his new book, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe.” Tolerant, fair-minded people of all religions or none do not dwell on the question of whether we can be good without God,” Epstein continues. “The answer is yes. Period. Millions and millions of people are, every day. However, the question why we can be good without God is much more relevant and interesting. And the question of how we can be good without God is absolutely crucial. Those are the questions in this book—the essential questions asked and answered by Humanism.”

[The following section is excerpted from Chapter 6, “Good Without God in Community: The Heart of Humanism,” with permission of the author and the publishers.]

Art, Nature, and Being Alive Twice

Another important and Humanistic alternative to prayer you don’t need me to tell you about—but which is important to mention—is the appreciation of nature and the arts. Just as frequent reminders of the importance of compassion and the golden rule can be helpful (see chapter 4), we secular people can’t be reminded too often that art and the natural world are always there waiting for us to appreciate and take part in them. A psychologist friend of mine likes to say that every Sunday he attends the “Church of the Blue Dome.” Or as the eighth-century Chinese poet Li Po said to his friend and colleague Tu Fu, “Thank you for letting me read your new poems. It was like being alive twice.” What, after all, is making or appreciating art if not taking what we find in the world around us—its radiant natural glory and toxic ugliness, our own love and hate, passion and ambivalence, anger and humor—and transforming it all into something that makes life more beautiful, more worthwhile? One finds this kind of sentiment again and again among great artists and Humanist lovers of art. Katha Pollitt, whom the right wing has labeled the “Atheist in Chief” at Nation magazine,has in fact written sensitively that atheism alone, as the rejection of gods and the supernatural, cannot meet our deepest human needs for connection and inspiration, but “perhaps art can go where atheism cannot.” And musicologist Daniel Levitin gets at a similar idea in a beautiful chapter entitled “Comfort” in his book The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature. The chapter is subtitled with some words a Joni Mitchell fan blurted out to her in gratitude while Mitchell and Levitin were eating dinner together one night. Explaining that Mitchell had helped her get through a rough decade in the 1970s, the fan said, “Before there was Prozac, there was you.”

Levitin’s story reminds me of a conversation I had with a fan after I quit the rock band I’d been singing with for a few years and announced I was headed to graduate school to study Humanism and religion. “Religion?” He asked incredulously, his disappointment in me palpable. “But music is religion!” I don’t think I mustered much of a response at the time—hell hath no fury like a music fan scorned—but upon reflection, I can say I love music as much as ever today, but the problem with the idea of music as a secular religion is that a concert is not a community. As “cultish” as the fans of some contemporary musical acts or artists can be, such cults rarely get to the point where their members are inspired by their common fandom to support each other in living well and meaningfully, or to come together to help others and make the world a better place.

The Humanist

By Miranda Wilson

A young woman is facing deportation to the Philippines, miles away from her partner and young daughter.

Cheryl Laws, who is 29, spends her days at Yarl’s Wood removal centre waiting to find out if she will be next. If her appeal to stay in the UK fails, her family say, she’ll be forced to move thousands of miles away from her 9-year-old daughter, a UK national who lives with her father in Kent. Cheryl, who was born in the Philippines, moved to Malta in 1998 where she met her now ex-husband, who’s British, and had her daughter, Jasmine. They moved to the UK in 2001 and eventually settled in Bournemouth where Cheryl worked as a nurse in a local hospital. Three years later the marriage ended, which is when Cheryl’s troubles began. She started using drugs, became addicted to cocaine and then moved on to dealing, heavily influenced by a new and negative relationship, says her boyfriend Daniel Brookes. In February 2008 Cheryl was convicted of conspiracy to supply a Class A drug and sentenced to five years in prison. This conviction means Cheryl now faces deportation to the Philippines.

‘She was a law-abiding citizen. Her life has been destroyed by the nine months she spent being dragged into a life of drugs. Cheryl did wrong, she knows this. No one’s arguing with this. She was convicted of a crime and has served two-and-a-half years of her sentence,’ says Daniel, who’s leading the fight against Cheryl’s deportation. He says she faces a double punishment simply for not being born in Britain and that as well as serving time in prison at HMP Send she now faces a further sentence: life without her daughter. ‘It will tear the family apart. Her daughter would be absolutely devastated. She’s the one who will suffer from the deportation along with me and my son who has also become close to Cheryl.’

‘She’s a fantastic woman who’s re-educated herself in prison, has a new career as a fitness trainer and has a good relationship with her daughter and me. Why are we being punished? It’s unfair that violent criminals are allowed back into society and she’s being removed when she’s no threat to anyone. She’s been rehabilitated, it makes no sense to send her away. Her life is here. She hasn’t lived in the Philippines for more than ten years.’ Daniel says their only hope is that Cheryl’s right to family life, embedded in the European Convention of Human Rights, will be recognised.

IRR

By Bunn Nagara

Thailand’s worst problems have long gone south. But who will do the right thing?

WHAT do former president Jimmy Carter, actor Jet Li, footballer Hidetoshi Nakata, former Miss Thailand Cindy Bishop, singer Trisha Yearwood and singer-actor Rattapoom Tongkongsap have in common?

During the week at least, they joined 3,000 volunteers from 25 countries to build 82 homes for the poor in the San Sai district of Chiang Mai province, Thailand. The work was to honour King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who will celebrate his 82nd birthday next month.
Chiang Mai in northern Thailand is known for its cool climate. Fruit enthusiasts also know it for the best longan in the country.

Some may also know Chiang Mai as the home province of billionaire former premier and convicted fugitive in self-exile Thaksin Shinawatra. However, few if any know it for abject poverty.

Like in many other developing countries, Thailand’s rural populations are less endowed than their urban counterparts. And agricultural Chiang Mai is among the country’s rural provinces that was recently hit by violent storms.

Indeed, Thaksin’s efforts at alleviating poverty in the northern provinces contributed to a vital power base for his political career. It turned the northern region into his stronghold until today.
However, there was still a gap between what Thaksin had done and all else that still needed doing. There was also the question of whether his perceived generosity was genuine altruism, or largely for the self-serving purpose of building a loyal following.

The Star