I have worked with Indigenous people in many parts of the world but Indians of North America are especially closer to my heart. I have gotten to know them better, they made me realize that just a medical degree alone was insufficient to take care of their HEALTH and made me an Anthropologist. I have always worked with traditional tribes in various parts of this country, they call the Turtle Island.
During my early days with them, in one tribe or another, I would come across tribal members who had been taken from their home while young and returned if lucky alive, stripped of their culture and language. These people, of various ages, lived in a liminal suspension as they lived surrounded by their relatives who were still traditional and knowledgeable in their ways and they while looking Indian having their soul stripped in the Boarding Schools of the Government and Catholic Institutions.
While they lived a life of "social death", at least they were alive. But hundreds and perhaps thousands of children all across the "new world" countries colonized by settlers, died, some perhaps of sheer homesickness. Skeletal remains found in the mass graveyards in churches in British Columbia and Saskatchewan has revealed children as young as three..
In Australia they are referred to as the Stolen Generation and a beautiful movie RABBIT FENCE depicted a true story of two sisters.
Lost Generation. Loss of Culture. Loss of Language. Loss of Life. Loss of their position in the society
Forgotten Generation. Many of the stories are not known to the majority of Australians, North Americans.
With the same tenacity of cruelty that took these children away from their homes and parents and landscape, the rubber barons of the Amazon and also along the Putamayo river in Colombia brutally murdered hundreds and hundreds of Indians in search for Rubber and Wealth.
In a beautifully written Anthropological text, The Australian psychiatrist, Michael Taussig, desribed the history of terror for the Indians.
SHAMANISM COLONIALISM AND THE WILD MAN A STUDY IN TERROR AND HEALING
I had the chance to visit some of these areas of RUBBER exploitation along the Peru and Brasilian Amazon.
In a beautiful poem about the exploitation of the Americas by the Settlers, Pablo Neruda cries out the agony of the Indian who is buried while the Dictator Flies swarm around the wealth of Americas.
from United Fruit Company
Among the blood-thirsty flies
the Fruit Company lands its ships,
taking off the coffee and the fruit;
the treasure of our submerged
territories flow as though
on plates into the ships.
Meanwhile Indians are falling
into the sugared chasms
of the harbours, wrapped
for burials in the mist of the dawn:
a body rolls, a thing
that has no name, a fallen cipher,
a cluster of the dead fruit
thrown down on the dump.
The Settlers with their greedy mouths continue the torture of the Indians, just yesterday many fires were burning in the Amazonia and many settlers had illegally occupied the Yanomami territory.
July 1 had been chosen as the day of mourning for the children laid down on unmarked graves in the church cemeteries in various parts of this north american continent. Orange is the colour. A space and time to mourn.
we remember the innocent indian children sacrificed in the name of civilization.
Who is the one who is civilized ?
