NEWSLETTER FALL 2008

A Message from the Executive Director

By Mark Horowitz

Year end greetings to all of Village Earth’s friends throughout the world! The past year has been very satisfying for me as Executive Director. There were a number of significant events during the year, including:

• A very successful Village Earth fundraiser – the 90^th Birthday Gala for Maury Albertson - was attended by over 260 people. The keynote speaker was Dr. Bernard Amadei, founder of Engineers without Borders. Dr. Amadei was the first recipient of the newly created Albertson Medal for Sustainable Village Development.
• The launching of a close relationship with Engineers Without Borders, in which we will be providing training for their chapters, based on two pilot trainings we held in Santa Barbara and Champaign-Urbana.
• The development of a new four day Community Mobilization Intensive Workshop, and the completion of a major grant to enable Village Earth to expand our reach and services throughout the world.
• Our Pine Ridge project received additional bison calves to continue building the herds of the Lakota Bison Caretakers Coop members. In addition, the Coop was recently incorporated, a milestone in its development. We were also awarded a grant from the Indian Land Tenure Foundation to expand our strategic land planning work on the reservation.

Village Earth is now at a take-off point, with an invigorated Board, a new Executive Director and a very successful fundraiser. We are already preparing for our fundraising event next year, and we hope that many more of you can join us. I wish you all a great New Year.

Mapping for Change on Pine Ridge

Land issues on Native American Reservations are extremely complex and masked by layers and layers of bureaucracy. The old axiom, knowledge is power, is the name of the game. But the game has changed with the advent of computerized mapping such as GIS (Geographic Information Systems) which has created a common platform for the exchange, creation, analysis, and presentation of geographic information. In the past, geographic information was stored deep in filing cabinets, hard to comprehend, and controlled by a few gatekeepers. GIS has now allowed us to democratize this information making it more accessible and more understandable. Decolonization theorist Frantz Fanon recognized the importance of this early on when he said, “The colonial world is a world divided into compartments. Yet, if we examine closely this system of compartments, we will at least be able to reveal the lines of force it implies. This approach to the colonial world, its ordering and its geographical layout will allow us to mark out the lines on which a decolonized society will be organized.” Edward Said mirrored these comments when he said that “the slow and often bitterly disputed recovery of geographical territory which is at the heart of decolonization is preceded--as empire had been--by the charting of cultural territory."

Village Earth's work with the Oglala Lakota on Pine Ridge is a good illustration in how mapping can be a powerful tool for decolonization, but to understand how requires a look back at the history of land issues for Native Americans. Between the period of 1492 to 1887, Native Americans were left with a territory that consisted of only 150 million acres of land. Furthermore, the practice of communally managing lands by some tribes was viewed by the Federal Government as a non-productive and irrational use of resources. To address these interests, the U.S. Congress passed General Allotment Act (GAA) also known as the Dawes Severalty Act in 1887. The purpose of the act was to liquidate Indian land holdings by dividing the land into 40-160-acre allotments to heads of households. After all the allotments were issued, remaining tribal lands, which totaled over 60,000,000 acres, were opened up to homesteaders. Along with the liquidation of nearly 2/3rds of all “surplus” Indian lands, the GAA also created several contradictions for the use and inheritance of the remaining lands that would have deep implications for virtually all aspects of life for Native Americans:

• It broke apart communally managed lands into individually owned parcels destroying the ability of many communities to be self sufficient on already limited and marginal lands.

• It disrupted traditional residency patterns, forcing people to live on allotments sometimes far from their relatives, eroding traditional kinship practices across many reservations.

• Forced Fee Patenting, introduced with the 1906 Burke Act, amended the GAA to give the secretary of the interior the power to issue Indian allottees determined to be “competent,” fee patents making their lands subject to taxation and sale. According to the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, nearly 27,000,000 acres of land was lost as a result. The affects of this are still felt today.

• Indian allottees determined to be “incompetent” under the Burke Act were not allowed to live on or utilize their allotment, instead it was leased out by the Federal Government to oil, timber, mineral, and grazing interests.

• Under the GAA the land allotted to Individual Indians is not really owned by them, rather it is held in Trust by the Federal Government. This means the land can be used by the allottee but not sold. This situation has severely limited the ability of Indian landowners to develop assets on their lands including housing, business, and other infrastructure because they are not able to use it as a guarantee for loans.

With financial support from the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, we are developing a “land recovery atlas” of the Pine Ridge Reservation to provide the information necessary to clarify the steps to identify, consolidate, and utilize their lands. It contains instructions and diagrams on how landowners can use the descriptions from their “interest reports” (a Tribal land title created by the Federal Government) to locate maps of their lands, instructions and procedures for consolidating lands, and how to remove lands from the Federal leasing program, partition lands, and create wills. It also contains maps of the current leasing patterns as well as maps of the traditional communities that were broken apart by the Dawes Act and federal housing programs. In conjunction with a series of strategic land-planning workshops, one-to-one consultation, and by training a corps of local land-planning consultants in each district, we hope to help reverse some of the damages created by 120 years of exploitative land policies on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Summer Solidarity Tour to Peru

By Adam Hafnor, member of FACT at Colorado State University (CSU)

This summer myself and six other student activists from CSU were lucky enough to travel to the Peruvian Amazon with Village Earth to experience first hand the community work being done in solidarity with the Shipibo nation. From the moment we arrived we were greeted as if we were royalty, which is really a testament to the way that the village adored Village Earth. The community had prepared a ceremony to welcome the seven CSU students. Throughout the week, we were able to truly be immersed in the Shipibo culture and we were also able to share parts of our culture as well.

One of the first days we went fishing with several Shipibo fishermen and learned a few of the techniques that the locals use. We were able to tour a nearby university and also meet several members of the indigenous rights group ODDPIAP, which is a group focused on fighting for the empowerment of the Shipibo people. ODDPIAP from its beginnings has maintained a close relationship with Village Earth and one of the members of the group had even visited Ft. Collins during his work with Village Earth. We were all shocked to meet a Peruvian wearing a Colorado State University T-Shirt. During the trip we were also lucky enough to visit the site of a reforestation project that the Shipibo have been working on. The lands surrounding San Francisco have repeatedly been infringed upon and it was so encouraging to see the reclamation of village land and the positive actions being taken to return the land to its organic state. We were able to form a more comprehensive view of so many issues facing the Shipibo and the ways in which Village Earth is working in solidarity with the Shipibo people.

New Training Opportunities

Village Earth in partnership with the International Institute for Sustainable Development at Colorado State University are working to continually expand and update our training opportunities. We are increasing our range of training services to create specialized courses for groups like Engineers Without Borders and for service learning organizations that send young people abroad to do volunteer work and study programs.

One new workshop that we have developed is our Community Mobilization Intensive Workshop. This workshop has been designed for busy development practitioners, community organizers, and government officials interested in learning how to use a participatory approach in the work they are doing. The aim of this intensive workshop is to offer participants a basic understanding of several tools and principles that can be used to support communities in their efforts toward self determination and access to resources. We believe that for projects to be successful and sustainable, communities must be involved in both the planning, implementation and evaluation of those projects. Thus anyone interested in developing strategies to better engage communities in the planning, design and implementation of their vision and related projects is invited to participate. For more information about this workshop, please visit: www.colostate.edu/Orgs/IISD/Short_Course

We also have some new online courses to complement our Certificate Program in Community-based Development including Gender Equity in Development, Communications and Networking in Development, Participatory Project Preparation and Research Methodologies, and Community-based Forestry. Check out our schedule online to view upcoming course offerings for 2009: www.colostate.edu/Orgs/IISD/Online

Visioning for a New Iraq

This past August, Village Earth was invited to provide a short workshop in our methodologies to a group of 16 Iraqi students visiting Colorado State University. Village Earth facilitated a visioning session with these future Iraqi leaders to learn from them their vision for creating a new Iraq. Their vision included more transparency and social responsibility, realization of human rights, acceptance of diversity, but most importantly, they added, was to love each other. We could all stand to learn something from this group of optimistic young Iraqis.

The students found Village Earth’s empowerment approach consistent with their values and hopes for the future. When asked if these methods could be useful in their home communities they responded that they believed visioning was an important facet in democracy and added that they liked the Village Earth approach of both structural and personal empowerment as being the basis for inclusive, sustainable development.

Upcoming Events

November 19 – Join us for Giving Twice Night at Ten Thousand Villages in Fort Collins, CO. 10% of all sales from 4-7 p.m. go to benefit Village Earth.
For more information: www.villageearth.org

Visit the Village Earth Online Fair Trade Store

www.villageearth.org/Store/index.html

Do your holiday shopping quick and easy online while supporting Village Earth and indigenous artisans!

Lakota quillwork jewelry, Lakota leather medicine bags, Shipibo paintings, Village Earth t-shirts, Shipibo jewelry, Village Earth DVDs, Shipibo fabrics and tapestries. Appropriate Technology Library Holiday Sale (Nov 17-Dec 17, 2008) $100 off Regular Price The AT Library contains the full text and images from over 1050 of the best books dealing with all areas of do-it-yourself technology. Portable and easy to use on 27 CDs or 4 DVDs.

To order your CD or DVD set today,

call: (970) 491-5754

or go online: www.villageearth.org/Publications/ATLibrary/