Today, I want refer to “movements” for the “rights of the indigenous.”
Having served and visited extensively in Central and South American
countries with large “indigenous” populations, I can freely state that
the region’s “indigenous” cultures largely ceased to exist hundreds of
years ago thanks largely to European brutality and diseases.
“Indigenous” culture now means rural poverty. Calling to protect
“indigenous culture” really means seeking to preserve rural poverty; to
keep people poor, sick, illiterate, and isolated from the great and
small wonders of our age. It means helping condemn them to half lives
consumed with superstition, disease, and watching their puny children
struggle to live past the age of five. It’s a call to keep certain
people as either an ethnic curio on the shelf for the enjoyment of
European and North American anthropologists or, equally vile, as
exploitable pawns for the use of political activists, such as the
reprehensible pseudo-indigenous President of Bolivia, the old drug
trafficker, and Chavez toady, Evo Morales.
When I hear these calls, I think, “We don’t protect rural poverty in the
USA. Western man no longer lives in caves or trees, terrorized by solar
eclipses and at the mercy of an unforgiving environment. Why should
these people? Why should humans live little better than animals in
disease-infested jungles, or exposed on wind-swept plains?” I am struck,
for example, by how much effort “pro-indigenous activists,” often
themselves urban upper-class types or foreigners, expend on “land
reform.” Instead of working to develop an economy where land ownership
does not determine whether one lives or dies, the activists seek to
chain the “indigenous” to, at best, a brutal life of scratching out a
living on postage stamp-size lots of land. Often land reform involves
“giving” the rural poor these plots but without the right to sell or to
use them to secure loans from banks. The poverty and hopelessness
increase.
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