The People Who Live On This Island Will Kill Anyone Who Tries To Come Ashore

North Sentinel Island, located in the Bay of Bengal, between Myanmar and Indonesia, is home to an isolated tribe that has never been colonized or even made contact with. These people are one of the last Stone Age tribes on Earth whose culture has been completely untouched by modern civilization. Despite the fact that the island formally belongs to India, no one dares to visit it and approach the Sentinelese tribe. The reason is their extreme violence and hostility – anyone who has ever tried to come ashore the island was attacked or even killed.

The Sentinelese are believed to have lived on the island for 60,000 years! After this unthinkable period of time in isolation, it’s no surprise that they are so hostile to outsiders, which may be due to past conflicts with the outside world. In order to protect the Tribe and prevent unnecessary violence, the Indian government has also made it illegal to approach it closer than three miles. Due to the inability to study the tribe and the island, we don’t know much about them.

It is estimated that the tribe counts between 50 and 400 members and lives exclusively by hunting and gathering. Though it is difficult to observe the island from the air because of the dense tree cover, it is established that the Sentinelese are not familiar with agriculture. Their drive to protect their culture from the outside world is probably the reason they have survived in isolation for so many years. Who knows how long they will manage to live in the middle of the ocean without having the slightest interest in the “civilized” rest of the world. And perhaps being without contact with us is a good thing.

More at The Mind Unleashed, survivalinternational.org and dailymail.co.uk

American Holocaust

The powerful and hard-hitting documentary, American Holocaust, is quite possibly the only film that reveals the link between the Nazi holocaust, which claimed at least 6 million Jews, and the American Holocaust which claimed, according to conservative estimates, 19 million Indigenous People.

Millions of Americans Have Nothing to Celebrate on the Fourth of July

To ring in another July Fourth, most Americans will kick off celebrations with beer, BBQ and fireworks. Most, but not all.

On Independence Day, the stirring words of Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, promising "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," set the tone. Buried a bit further down, however, is another passage that is somewhat less well-known:

"...the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." 

That line, and America's subsequent history with Native Americans, goes a long way toward explaining why the holiday largely does not resonate with the United States' roughly 5.2 million indigenous peoples. 

"Any holiday that would refer to my people in such a repugnant, racist manner is certainly not worth celebrating," Simon Moya-Smith, a culture editor at Indian Country Today told Mic. "[July Fourth] is a day we celebrate our resiliency, our culture, our languages, our children and we mourn the millions — literally millions — of indigenous people who have died as a consequence of American imperialism." For him, Independence Day is a celebration of genocide. A number of tribes and nations contacted for this story expressed various levels of discomfort with the holiday.

More at mic.com

Indigenous Australians

Well into the 20th century, Indigenous Australians were – both in Australia itself and in many other countries – the subject of widespread crude racist stereotyping. For example, the American birth control campaigner Margaret Sanger could write casually: "The aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets" (What Every Girl Should Know, 1920).

By the end of World War II, many Indigenous men had served in the military. They were among the few Indigenous Australians to have been granted citizenship; even those that had were obliged to carry papers, known in the vernacular as a "dog licence", with them to prove it. However, Aboriginal pastoral workers in northern Australia remained unfree labourers, paid only small amounts of cash, in addition to rations, and severely restricted in their movements by regulations and/or police action. On 1 May 1946, Aboriginal station workers in the Pilbara region of Western Australia initiated the 1946 Pilbara strike and never returned to work. Mass layoffs across northern Australia followed the Federal Pastoral Industry Award of 1968, which required the payment of a minimum wage to Aboriginal station workers, as they were not paid by the Pastoralist discretion, many however were not and those who were had their money held by the government. Many of the workers and their families became refugees or fringe dwellers, living in camps on the outskirts of towns and cities.

In 1984, a group of Pintupi people who were living a traditional hunter-gatherer desert-dwelling life were tracked down in the Gibson Desert in Western Australia and brought into a settlement. They are believed to have been the last uncontacted tribe in Australia.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and more on Wikipedia

‘Wounded Knee: A Line in the Sand’

More info at ICTMN.com

Guatemala apologizes to people displaced for dam

Guatemala's president has apologized to 33 communities of indigenous Achi people who were forced to abandon their homes to make way for construction of the Chixoy hydroelectric dam in the north of the Central American country (with funding from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank).

President Otto Perez Molina (accused of human rights abuses himself) says he asks forgiveness for atrocities and other human rights violations suffered by those communities over the project, which occurred during Guatemala's civil war. Some people were assassinated and others had their land expropriated.

The apology was delivered Saturday to a gathering of Achi as officials provided details of an agreement to provide $153.8 million in compensation for the damage inflicted on them. The money will be distributed among the 33 communities over the next 15 years. (Yahoo News)

Chixoy Dam massacres

In 1978, in the face of civil war, the Guatemalan government proceeded with its economic development program, including the construction of the Chixoy hydroelectric dam. Financed in large part by the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank, the Chixoy Dam was built in Rabinal, a region of the department of Baja Verapaz historically populated by the Maya Achi. To complete construction, the government completed voluntary and forcible relocations of dam-affected communities from the fertile agricultural valleys to the much harsher surrounding highlands. When hundreds of residents refused to relocate, or returned after finding the conditions of resettlement villages were not what the government had promised, these men, women, and children were kidnapped, raped, and massacred by paramilitary and military officials. More than 440 Maya Achi were killed in the village of Río Negro alone, and the string of extrajudicial killings that claimed up to 5,000 lives between 1980 and 1982 became known as the Río Negro Massacres. The government officially declared the acts to be counterinsurgency activities - although local church workers, journalists and the survivors of Rio Negro deny that the town ever saw any organized guerrilla activity. (Wikipedia)

The Canary Effect: Kill the Indian, Save the Man

Delving deeply into the often misunderstood and frequently over looked historic realities of the American Indian, The Canary Effect follows the terrifying and horrific abuses instilled upon the Indigenous people of North America, and details the genocidal practices of the US government and its continuing affects on present day Indian country.

filmsforaction.org

Amazon Warriors Fight Off Loggers

Illegal loggers have long invaded areas of the Amazon rainforest. Tired of what they say is a lack of sufficient government assistance, the Ka’apor Indians feel it is time to take matters into their own hands. The tribe sent out their best warriors to hunt down loggers and drive them off their land.

The Ka'apor Indians are the legal inhabitants and caretakers of the territory along with four other tribes. Together, they have set up monitoring camps in the areas that are being illegally exploited.

More at Reuters - Pictures at YouTube

The Invasion of America

Between 1776 and 1887, the United States seized over 1.5 billion acres from America's indigenous people by treaty and executive order. The Invasion of America shows how by mapping every treaty and executive order during that period. It concludes with a map of present-day federal Indian reservations.

Why Leonard Peltier is Still in Prison?

By Abby Martin (2014)

Diego Garcia

Producer Andrew Tkach and correspondent Christian Amanpour report on the hushed up eviction of the indigenous people of Diego Garcia to make way for one of America's most strategic air and navy bases.

Free Leonard Peltier

Leonard Peltier (born September 12, 1944) is a Native American activist and member of the American Indian Movement (AIM). In 1977 he was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment for first degree murder in the shooting of two Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents during a 1975 conflict on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Peltier's indictment and conviction have been the subject of much controversy; Amnesty International placed his case under the "Unfair Trials" category of its Annual Report: USA 2010, citing concerns with the fairness of the proceedings. Peltier is incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary, Coleman in Florida. Peltier's next scheduled parole hearing will be in July 2024. Barring appeals, parole or presidential pardon, his projected release date is October 11, 2040.

Wikipedia - leonardpeltier.info

Sign the only OFFICIAL Petition to FREE LEONARD PELTIER!

The American Holocaust

The powerful and hard-hitting documentary, American Holocaust, is quite possibly the only film that reveals the link between the Nazi holocaust, which claimed at least 6 million Jews, and the American Holocaust which claimed, according to conservative estimates, 19 million Indigenous People.

Brasscheck TV

Honor The Treaties

A few years ago, Aaron Huey journeyed to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota to photograph members of the Oglala Lakota Nation. The disarming stories of deceit, heartbreak, and violence he heard there changed his life forever. (Featuring Shepard Fairey)

Upworthy.com - Reelhouse.org - Aaron Heuy Ted Talk: America's native prisoners of war - www.aaronhuey.com

In Brazil, a dual struggle against neoliberalism

In Brazil, students and the indigenous may be fighting different fights, but they are ultimately part of the same struggle against the neoliberal state.

While the world has been watching Turkey, another country is experiencing revolt: Brazil. Just like Turkey, Brazil has recently experienced relative success in economic terms. But just as in Turkey, the spoils of this economic growth are divided extremely unequally. Just like in Turkey, a relatively small provocation has sparked a much more widespread chain reaction. Unlike in Turkey, that provocation is a direct attack on living standards. But the anger exploding as a result of it appears to run just as deep.

According to the BBC, “the demonstrators were mostly university students, but the authorities said there were also groups of anarchists looking for a fight.” The idea that some students might be anarchists by conviction, and that some anarchists go to college because they like to learn, apparently does not occur to either “authorities” or the BBC. And the ones “looking for a fight” were above all the rabid police troops themselves, who used excessive amounts of teargas and rubber bullets against mostly unarmed demonstrators, some of whom did attack shops and set fire to tyres. But that’s what desperate people do if you make their lives even harder by rising the prices of public amenities in a context of rapid inflation.

Overall, more than 50 people were left injured and the number of arrests exceeded 200. According to the BBC, “police say they seized petrol bombs, knives, and drugs.” Sure. And yes, “police acted with professionalism”, according to the state governor. Obviously. After all, repression is their profession.

More on ROAR Magazine

DNA study links indigenous Brazilians to Polynesians

Indigenous people that lived in southeastern Brazil in the late 1800s shared some genetic sequences with Polynesians, an analysis of their remains shows. The finding offers some support for the possibility that Pacific islanders traded with South America thousands of years ago, but researchers say that the distinctive DNA sequences, or haplogroups, may have entered the genomes of the native Brazilians through the slave trade during the nineteenth century.

Most scientists agree that humans arrived in the Americas between 15,000 and 20,000 years ago, probably via the Bering land bridge linking northeastern Asia with what is now Alaska. But the precise timing and the number of ‘migration waves’ is unclear, owing largely to variations in early Americans’ physical features, says Sérgio Pena, a molecular geneticist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

One broad group of these Palaeoamericans — the Botocudo people, who lived in inland regions of southeastern Brazil — stands out, having skull shapes that were intermediate between those of other Palaeoamericans and a presumed ancestral population in eastern Asia.

More on Nature.com

Rio police evict Amazon natives from World Cup site

Police in Rio de janeiro evicted two dozen Amazon natives on Friday from an old Indian museum that will be demolished to clear areas adjacent to Brazil's legendary Maracana soccer stadium, the main venue for next year's World Cup.

The Indians from different Amazon tribes had been living on the grounds of the Rio de Janeiro museum since 2006 and were resisting its demolition, which caused further delays to the overhaul of the stadium complex.

Riot police handcuffed the Indians, some of whom wore feathered headdresses and body paint, and used tear gas to disperse street demonstrations by sympathizers trying to block the eviction.

Brazil is on deadline to deliver stadiums that will host the 2014 World Cup, a global sporting event that is a chance to showcase the South American nation's emergence as a world economic powerhouse. It is also a challenge for its deficient infrastructure that could become an international embarrassment.

Yahoo! News

Indigenous Mapuche People Struggle Against the Chilean State and Private Companies

Most recent hunger strike by imprisoned activists over “politically motivated prosecutions” and state application of Antiterrorist Law comes to a close as conflict between Mapuche communities and the Chilean state intensifies.

The Real News

In the matter of Genocide in Canada by Church and State

Hunger striking Chief Spence smear campaign

Hunger striking Chief Spence smear campaign (interesting from 03.00)– Google News