Report

COMMON WISDOM HOLDS THAT NATIVE American cultures are relics of the past, destined to survive only as museum pieces. Underlying this unfortu- nate meeting point of many on the Left and Right is the belief that Indians are bound to abandon their ethnicity as modernity spreads its tentacles into the outer reaches of the Western world, eradicating the rural, the peasant, the illiterate.

Article

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui
Nayrapacha means ancient times. But not in the sense of a past that is dead, incapable of renovation.
Carol A. Smith
NATIONALISTS MAY FOCUS ON CULTURE rather than economic or political issues for tactical reasons. But it is not tactics that drives them to distance themselves from the traditional Left, whom they consider as culturally imperialistic as the Right.
Les Field
ON MAY 27, 1990, ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY Indians occupied Santo Domingo Cathedral in the heart of the old city of Quito. They demanded the immedi- ate resolution of land disputes in six highland provinces.
J. P. Slavin
For many Haitians, the presidency of Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide marked a joyous new beginning, a "second in- dependence." The first occurred on New Year's Day, 1804, when Haiti sepa- rated from France.
Brazil: War on Children by Gilberto Dimenstein, Latin America Bureau, 1991, 88 pp., $10.
Tony Hall
THE DRAMA BEGAN IN JUNE 1990 IN WIN- nipeg, the capital city of the province of Manitoba. A fluke of history put Elijah Harper, an Ojibway politician who is one of Canada's few Indian parliamentarians, in a position to kill an elaborate constitutional deal known as the Meech Lake Accord.
Tony Hall
THE GROWING FUROR OVER THE FUTURE OF hydroelectric development in the James Bay area in northern Quebec seems to be emerging as a microcosm of many of the tensions developing in the larger debate about the constitutional future of Canada. The provincially-owned company, Hydro-Quebec, plans to flood tens of thousands of square miles of aboriginal lands in order to produce electric- ity for export.
J. P. Slavin
Nowhere was Aristide's popularity and skill as an orator more evident than when he opened the gates of the white-washed national palace in Port-au-Prince forevents that had the aura of a rock concert or a fundamentalist revival meeting. One such occasion, a celebration mark- ing International Women's Day last March 8, started hours before the president's mid-day speech.
Carol A. Smith
ONE WOULD HARDLY HAVE EXPECTED Maya self-determination to be the rallying cry to rise out of the ashes of Guatemala's holocaust. Indians, after all, were the main targets of the violence in the 1980s-and still are today, though now dozens rather than hundreds are murdered or disappeared each month.
Charles R. Hale
WHEN I FIRST VISITED THE INDIAN COM- munities at the mouth of Nicaragua's Rio Grande de Matagalpa in mid-1985, the war had been going on for three years.' Sandinista troops were stationed inside the villages to fend offanti-government insurgents camped in the "bush" nearby.
Coke Up, Slim Down For the overweight who have tried everything, a really new offer: lose weight at altitude on coca-based prod- ucts. The last word in exotic slimming clinics is about to open on the Bolivian side of Lake Titicaca, at 12,500 feet above sea level.
Anne-Christine D' Adesky
The September military coup d'etat that overthrew Haitian president Jean- Bertrand Aristide shone a new spotlight on the issue of justice and human rights in Haiti. Aristide's great popularity stemmed from his outspoken commit- ment to human rights and to ending Haiti's legacy of dictatorship.
Jacob Bernstein
The white banner hanging over the stage proclaimed: "A Celebration of Cultures: The Columbus Quincenten- nial-with support from Safeway, Inc." The hundred or so spectators in busi- ness suits outside Washington, D.
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Democracy and Violence "The constitution is made ofpaper, but the bayonet is made of steel. " (Haitian proverb) HAITI'S DILEMMA REVEALS THE STRENGTHS and limitations of constitutional democracy in a soci- ety rent by class war.
Charles R. Hale
DEBATES OVER THE FUTUREOF AUTONOMY IN Nicaragua grew intense and urgent in August, when news of negotiations between the central government and a Taiwanese lumber company hit the front pages of Managua papers. Within days, leaked confidential correspondence reached the hands of Sandinistacosteiio legislatorRay Hooker, who went public with the details.
Stefano Varese
WHEN I ARRIVED AT THE MODEST HOME A few blocks from downtown Fresno, California, I was thinking about the Mixtec Indian villages I'd seen in Oaxaca, Mexico. In the High Mixtec region, nestled in the Sierra Madre mountains, even the poorest houses, made of logs or adobe with palm or tile roofs, have a certain dignity.
Wanblee Johnson
FIVE HUNDRED YEARS AGO Callicoatl sailed across the ocean in three Aztec boats and found a new conti- nent, a new Eastern Hemisphere, an event being commemorated this year with great fanfare and celebration. Every child knows the story: how Callicoatl convinced Montezuma II to support his journey, how the Aztec sailors nearly despaired on the journey, how they "discovered" a strange white-skinned race in the "New World.