Video of Hugo Blanco's Speech on Indigenous Struggles in the Western Hemisphere

Hugo Blanco Galdos, has been an activist his entire life. In the 1960s he led the Campesino movement and coined the famous chanted slogan for the movement: "Land or Death!" In his later years, he has returned to his roots as an indigenous Peruvian Indian and is championing the rights of South American Indians to remain on their lands and pursue ecologically sound development. He currently is publishing a magazine titled Lucha Indigena (Indigenous Struggle). We have included the following capsule biography from Wikipedia.

Following the capsule biography are YouTube videos of the speech he delivered last year at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C.

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Hugo Blanco

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For the Venezuelan musician, see Hugo Blanco (musician).

Hugo Blanco Galdos is a Peruvian political figure and leader of the Campesino Confederation of Peru.

In the early 1960s he led the Quechua peasant uprising in the Cuzco region of Peru. Captured by the military, he was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment on the island of El Frontón. During his imprionsment he wrote Land or Death: The Peasant Struggle in Peru.

Blanco was released from prison and expelled to Sweden in 1976^[1] following an international solidarity campaign that included Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Bertrand Russell. After spending several years of exile in Sweden, Mexico and Chile he returned to Peru in 1978, was a founder of the Workers Revolutionary Party and was elected to parliament on a left-wing slate.^[2]

He served in the Peruvian Senate as a representative of the Partido Unificado Mariateguista until 1992 when he fled to Mexico where he was granted asylum following^[3] due to Alberto Fujimori's "self-coup" and declaration of a state of emergency.^[4]

Hugo Blanco is currently Director of a Cusco-based newspaper called Lucha Indigena.

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This article is also licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Hugo Blanco"

It Is Not the Earth that Belongs to the People but the People Who Belong to the Earth

HUGO BLANCO The convert

Legendary campesino Hugo Blanco merges old-style Marxism with earth-first land reform philosophy
By WAYNE ROBERTS

Now Magazine

Artículo publicado en Canadá en septiembre del 2007

The western hemisphere has a new name. On October 12, indigenous peoples from many countries met in Bolivia to celebrate the United Nations declaration on their rights, and once again rechristened (so to speak) our continents Abya Yala.

In the Kuna language, this means "land in its full maturity." Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer of the late 1400s, lost his naming rights to descendants of settlers who arrived 10,000 years earlier.

The rising sense of power among the hemisphere's 50 million indigenous people is transforming politics in what used to be called South America. But few people have been changed as profoundly by this new politics of identity as Hugo Blanco, the legendary Peruvian Trotskyist revolutionary.

It was Blanco, back in the 60s, who invented the now famous chant of peasants and campesinos the world over: Land or death.

During a lecture tour of Canada last month, he showed how deftly he has wedded old-style Marxist revolutionism to his relatively recent encounter with his own indigenous heritage.
At a meeting at a Ryerson lecture theatre in September, Blanco sports the typical floppy sheepskin hat worn by the Quechua people of the frigid mountains of southern Peru. I only learn afterward that the young-looking 73-year-old wears the hat at all times on doctor's orders, for fear that his skull, which has suffered too many police beatings, can't withstand an accidental bump.

Even with his disarming appearance, Blanco's opening lines surprise me. They're nothing like what I remember from the fiery speeches that almost got him executed when he was tried for his role in a 1962 armed peasant revolt.

The reason native politics are so charged today, 500 years after Europeans invaded, he begins through a translator, is that mines and oil and gas wells are poisoning Pachamama, Mother Earth.

And the aggressive materialism of global corporations is destroying "ayllu," the indigenous sense of community that encompasses every being in a village, including hills, rivers, animals and plants, each of which is endowed with a spirit.

But he's still a socialist, he says at the end of the lecture. After all, reports of Inca civilization inspired Voltaire and Thomas More, contributing to Europe's tradition of utopian socialism.
One of Blanco's daughters, raised in Sweden during one of his many periods of exile, once led Swedish tourists through a Peruvian village and was told it looked like socialism. You have that backwards, he recalls her telling the Swedes; socialism looks like this.

But the world has changed since his youth, he says. "When I was young, I took up the struggle for equality. Now the struggle is for the survival of the species."

Blanco, educated in a radical European culture when he was a student in Argentina during the 1950s, confesses that he is still a recovering Eurocentric. It's easy to see he's struggling to make the transition from the polemical truths of his youth to something else.

South American radicals "copied our social analysis from Europe," he says, "yet socialism, social democracy and Communism have all been defeated in the South.

"I don't know how much Eurocentrism is still in me," he adds. "I am in the process of overcoming. We must initiate this revolution within ourselves."

What does this mean for future organizing? He doesn't know, "but little by little we move forward." The newspaper he edits, Lucha Indigena, follows what indigenous people are doing, not the line of a political organization such as the one he once led. Many of his statements end with a quotation from the Spanish poet Antonio Machado y Ruiz: "Walker, there is no road. The road is made by walking."

Working without a compass is something he says he learned from studying the Zapatistas of Mexico, another country he spent time in as an exile. Blanco has a totally different sense of power than the one he held during the 1960s, when the struggle for campesino and worker power was at the heart of the manifesto Land Or Death: The Peasant Struggle In Peru that he wrote on death row in prison.

"Among revolutionaries, we were negatively affected by an obsession with power," he now says. His movement has since overcome old-style illusions thanks to the experience of pseudo-revolutionary Shining Path terrorists, who once ordered him killed, he says.

Indigenous communities practised consensus, he says. "We are not about taking power, but building power," he says. He now likes to organize "peasant circles" that displace judges and corrupt government officials with self-managing groups at the municipal level.

I luck into a two-hour after-lecture dinner with Blanco, Phil Cournoyer, the translator of his memoirs, and assorted friends at a nearby Internet café serving Somali food.

When Blanco chanted "Land or death," Cournoyer tells me, the activist had "an incipient understanding" that it was different from the Hispanic tradition of "Fatherland or death," a popular cry in Cuba. It reflected a deep-seated and intuitive psychological and spiritual understanding that land, identity, meaning and life were one continuum.

It is not the earth that belongs to the people but the people who belong to the earth," Blanco clarifies.

From the leader of militant land reform during the 1960s comes a land reform philosophy for the 21st century.

[Editor's Note: For a really good article describing how Hugo Blanca's Lucha Indigena mobilized indigenous protests that repealed the Peruvian government's recent legislation (enacted in conjunction with the Free Trade Agreement with the United States) that would have opened up communally held indigenous lands to mining and oil extraction, check out Derek Wall's excellent blog, Another Green World. - Perry Chesnut, Editor, Native Rights News]

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© by NOW Communications Inc.

Native Rights News is making this material from Now Magazine available in accordance with the Fair Use Doctrine codified at Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107: This article is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information. Distribution of this material is for research and educational purposes that will promote social and economic justice and benefit society.

NY Governor Signs Bill to Tax Cigarettes Sold by Seneca Nation

Taxation to begin on reservations within 60 days
by Sharon Turano
The Observer: December 16, 2008

Seneca Nation of Indians officials will detail their response to Gov. David Paterson's decision to collect sales tax on cigarettes sold to non-Indians during a news conference at 11 a.m. today.

''The Seneca Nation of Indians will explore all of its options,'' report nation officials, who said the law threatens the nation's treaty rights and 1,000 retailing jobs in Western New York.

''This action is a threat to the Seneca Nation, and we have no choice but to explore all of our options,'' said Barry E. Snyder Sr., Seneca Nation president.

''Attacking tax-free commerce in our territories is short-sighted and disastrous for us and all of Western New York. The nation has a complicated and intertwined relationship with the state. Since this is the direction that the governor wants to take things, then we have no choice but revisit every aspect of our relationship with the state.''

''The issue here is not cigarettes, but the protection of the nation's treaty rights. We will do what it takes at the right time to protect those rights,'' said Snyder.''Because our Nation believes that diplomacy is always the best path when governments are in dispute, I have invited Governor Paterson to our historic territory to discuss how this problem can be resolved in a matter respectful of our treaties,'' said President Snyder.

GOV. PATERSON'S DECISION

Paterson also listed his reasons for signing the bill into law.

''Cigarettes sold by Indian retailers to non-Indians must be taxed,'' a news release from Paterson said.

Under the law, those selling cigarettes to retailers must provide the state tax department with certification the cigarettes will not be resold to untaxed retailers to resell without collecting taxes on the products. The state Department of Taxation will have 60 days to issue a certification form and prepare to receive the certifications that will be submitted.

Under the law, tax law violators are subject to revocation or cancellation of its license. A false certificate could be referred to a district attorney's office for prosecution for perjury or filing a false instrument.

''This law has not been adequately applied for far too long giving non-Indians easy access to tax-free cigarettes both on the reservations and over the internet,'' Paterson said. ''However, the signing of this bill should not be seen as anything other than enforcing the tax laws of New York in a fair and effective manner. My commitment to the sovereign powers of New York's Indian Nations has not and will not waver and I will continue to seek a comprehensive negotiated solution with all of New York's Indian nations.''

Although cigarettes sold by agents to retailers for re-sale to non-Indian purchasers must bear tax stamps, the state has, for many years, adopted a policy of non-enforcement, and unstamped cigarettes continue to be sold by agents to Indian retailers who sell them to non-Indians at discount prices, his press release states.

''Tomorrow, I will present my 2009-2010 budget proposal and while we will continue to aggressively and responsibly address New York's current budget crisis, this bill is not only about collecting revenue for the state of New York, it is also about protecting the health of our citizens. Smoking has long been a tragic public health crisis in New York and around the world,'' Paterson said.

He said cigarette taxes have been one of the state's most effective tools in addressing this crisis.

''To the extent that the tax is undermined, our efforts to fight smoking are also undermined,'' Paterson said.

GROUPS PICKING SIDES

Bills that state tobacco manufacturers can't sell untaxed cigarettes to retailers for resale were passed by the state Assembly and Senate over the summer and were awaiting the governor's signature to become law.

''I urge the governor and the Seneca Nation to undertake discussions to find a peaceful and productive resolution to their differences,'' said state Sen. Catharine Young, R-Olean.

''I am disappointed that Governor Paterson has signed this legislation without further negotiation with the Seneca Nation of Indians,'' said state Assemblyman Joe Giglio, R-Gowanda. ''I believe that this is a complicated issue, and negotiations among the involved parties should take place prior to the effective date of this legislation.''

Convenience store lobbies, such as the New York State Association of Convenience Stores, have requested taxes be collected.

''In the quest for tax fairness, this would be a step in the right direction,'' said James Calvin, executive director of the association about the governor signing the bill into law,'' he said.

Members of the Seneca Free Trade Association, a private-non-profit cooperative assoication of individuals and businesses licensed by the Nation to develop commerce and industry within and around Nation territories, could not be reached to comment Monday.

They previously called on the public to ask Paterson to veto the bill.

''We are both saddened and angered by the continued attacks upon our indigenous rights and sovereignty by narrow-minded New York politicians and government officials,'' they wrote in a letter seeking support for a veto. They called the legislation ''a misguided assault upon Seneca Indian sovereignty.

''Because tobacco and the trade of tobacco have long been an integral part of our Seneca culture and heritage, we view this recent effort by the New York Legislature as a direct, discriminatory attack on the Seneca people,'' they said. ''Seneca Indian business owners have no intention of helping New York's incompetent bureaucrats close their state's budget deficit, which has been created by their misspending and mismanagement of your tax dollars.''

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© 2008 The Observer

Native Rights News is making this material from The Observer available in accordance with the Fair Use Doctrine codified at Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107: This article is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information. Distribution of this material is for research and educational purposes that will promote social and economic justice and benefit society.

Mexican Development Plans Threaten Land and People of Chiapas

IntercontinentalCry.org
December 12, 2008

Threatening the Land and People of Chiapas
by Ahni (John Schertow)


The Mexican government has announced plans to bring ‘progress’ and ‘development’ to Chiapas, under the renewed “Plan Puebla Panama” scheme, now called the “Mesoamerica Initiative.”

“A renewed push to exploit and destroy the land and people of Chiapas,” says rootforce, the plan involves the ‘four horsemen of Chiapas’: mining, infrastructure, bio-fuel, and oil.

For some time now Chiapas has been faced with major challenges surrounding minerals exploitation, particularly from Canadian mining companies, who, as we should all know well by now, “are notorious throughout Latin America [and the rest of the world] for their ruthless eviction of traditional communities and for their devastation and pollution of lands and rivers,” says Jessica Davies.

This is precisely what awaits Chiapas where “there are apparently 55 new mining applications pending… for the exploration and extraction until 2056 of gold, silver, copper, barite, lead, titanium, iron, zinc, antimony, molybdenum, and other minerals needed for the oil industry,” Davies adds.

Regarding infrastructure, the government wants to help the extractive industry and expand tourism by constructing roads, bridges, and various other developments.

For instance, in the Northern part of Chiapas, a so-called “eco-archaeological tourism” theme park is currently in the works.

Located at the pre-colonial Mayan city of Palenque, the ‘them park’ will consist of “[a highway and 3 bridges] as well as hotels, restaurants, related businesses and an expansion of the Palenque Airport,” according to the Chiapas Support Comittee. “The highway and other construction will cut through and divide the land of the living Maya while facilitating the tourist exploitation of [their ancestors].”

Plans for the final two ‘horseman’ - oil and bio-fuel - were announced by the Mexican Energy Secretary Georgina Kessel, on November 21.

Kessel said that in 2009, Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned oil company, would be allowed to start prospecting and drilling for oil in the Lacandon rain forest, among other areas.

Kessel further announced a plan to produce bio-diesel in Chiapas, using a plant called “Jatropha curcus.”

Also known as the “Black Vomit Nut” Jatropha is a very controversial plant because of its highly toxic properties. Consuming as few as three of its seeds can be fatal to humans.

Overall, this four-part scheme, which has been pledged to “save the economy” and bring “progress and development for the benefit everyone,” implies “very serious threats to the rich biodiversity of the state of Chiapas and to the rights and the lands of the indigenous peoples of the region,” states the NGO ‘Maderas del Pueblo’ in a November 23 communique.

With it, “the federal and state governments have shown that they have embarked on a ’schizophrenic demagogy’ in which, at the same time as they announce policies, programmes and ‘green’ resources to tackle climate change, there is an obvious contradiction as they are clearly demonstrating themselves in favour of a return to a savage capitalism, of a short-term and extractive character, together with the interests of grand capital, of the biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors, of those producing bottled water and all those keen to convert wood and forest cover into ’sinks’” for the multinational carbon market; of all those hiding behind a disguise of green philanthropy and supported by cross-governmental, national and international organisations, and calling themselves ‘conservationists’, and who have been encouraging and applauding the official policy of pillaging and plundering the biodiverse indigenous territories and turning them into ‘Protected Natural Areas’ ‘for the benefit of humanity’,” Maderas del Pueblo continues.

“The basic question [now] is: Will the indigenous people and campesino communities, with their lands, natural resources and rights all threatened, permit this proposed plunder to take place?”

photo:redamazon.wordpress.com


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Article originally published by intercontinentalcry.org

Native Rights News is republishing this article under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.

Huge Land Rights Victory for Brazilian Indians

Indians rejoice as Supreme Court affirms land rights

Survival International
11 December 2008

Indians across Brazil are celebrating today as the majority of judges in the Supreme Court ruled to uphold indigenous land rights in a key case. Indian representatives have called the decision, made yesterday on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a ‘great victory’.

The ruling concerns the indigenous territory Raposa-Serra do Sol (‘Land of the Fox and Mountain of the Sun’) in the Amazon state of Roraima. A small group of powerful farmers, who want the Indians’ land and are supported by local politicians, had petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn the Brazilian government’s legal recognition of the territory. President Lula signed the territory into law in 2005.

Yesterday eight out of eleven Supreme Court judges affirmed the Indians’ rights to the land, saying it had been demarcated according to the constitution. They affirmed the importance of maintaining indigenous territories as single, continuous areas and stated that territories on Brazil’s borders do not pose a risk to national sovereignty.

The five tribes of Raposa-Serra do Sol had struggled for thirty years to reclaim their ancestral land. The group of farmers refused to leave the area when it was demarcated as an indigenous territory, and since the demarcation they have been waging a campaign of violence against the Indians in order to resist being removed from the land.

Shocking footage taken in May this year shows gunmen hired by one of the farmers attacking a Makuxi Indian community, throwing homemade bombs and firing assault rifles. Ten Indians were wounded in the attack.

The judges also ruled that the farmers must leave Raposa-Serra do Sol, but did not specify when. This will be decided when the ruling is concluded during the court’s next session starting in February 2009, when the remaining three judges deliver their rulings.

Makuxi leader Jacir José de Souza of the Indigenous Council of Roraima (CIR) said today, ‘The land is our mother. We are happy that [our land] has been reclaimed and that the Supreme Court has vindicated indigenous people.’

The Indians of Raposa-Serra do Sol believe that the loss of their land would have destroyed their way of life. Indians elsewhere in Brazil also feared that if the Supreme Court had overturned the demarcation of the territory, it would have left their lands open to similar legal challenges.

Survival’s director Stephen Corry said today, ‘This is fantastic news for the people of Raposa-Serra do Sol. The Brazilian government must now make sure that the farmers leave the area and that the campaign of terror against the Indians ends. It must also ensure that Indian land rights are upheld nationwide, so that never again will we see such blatant attacks on Indians on their own land.’

For more information please contact Miriam Ross at Survival International (+44) (0)20 7687 8734 or (+44) (0)7504 543 367 or email mr@survival-international.org

Act now to help the Indians of Raposa–Serra do Sol
Your support is vital if the Indians of Raposa Serra do Sol are to survive. There are many ways you can help.

Donate to the campaign for the Indians of Raposa Serra do Sol (and other Survival campaigns).

Write to your MP or MEP (UK) or Senators and members of Congress (US).
Write to your local Brazilian high commission or embassy.

If you want to get more involved, contact Survival…


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© Survival International, 2008

Native Rights News is making this material from Survival International available in accordance with the Fair Use Doctrine codified at Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107: This article is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information. Distribution of this material is for research and educational purposes that will promote social and economic justice and benefit society.

Climate Proceedings Refuse Recognition of Tribal Peoples' Rights to the Forests They Live In

UN talks on climate change exclude tribal peoples

Survival International
12 December 2008

Tribal representatives at the UN conference on climate change in Poznan, Poland, have slammed the proceedings for excluding indigenous voices and refusing to recognise tribal peoples’ rights to the forests they live in and protect.

The United States, Australia, New Zealand and Canada acted together to delete all reference to tribal peoples’ rights in a draft agreement prepared for the conference. All four countries also refuse to sign the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and none have ratified the international law for tribal peoples, known as ILO 169.

The Poznan draft agreement sets out how an international scheme to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) could be implemented. It had initially referred to ‘noting the rights and importance of engaging indigenous peoples’, but rights are not mentioned in the amended version.

The REDD scheme, where rich industrialised countries pay less industrialised countries to keep their forests intact, is rapidly becoming a centrepiece for global action on climate change, and is expected to form a large part of whatever agreements replace the Kyoto Protocol when it runs out in 2012.

The scheme risks seriously damaging tribal peoples’ lives and health, unless their rights to the land are recognised and respected at the outset. Research has shown that one of the best ways to protect the rainforest is to protect the rights of the people living in it. 162 million hectares of the Amazon rainforest have been recognized as indigenous territories, and are secured against deforestation.

Davi Yanomami, a Yanomami shaman from Brazil, has said ‘The forest cannot be bought; it is our life and we have always protected it. Without the forest, there is only sickness, and without us, it is dead land. Give us back our lands and our health before it’s too late for us and too late for you.’

The lands of many tribes remain unprotected, and even land which has already been recognised is under threat. The Indians of Raposa Serra do Sol are reaching the end of a battle in the Supreme Court of Brazil to maintain recognition of their land after a powerful consortium of farmers and politicians tried to overturn the demarcation.

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Native Rights News is making this material from Survival International available in accordance with the Fair Use Doctrine codified at Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107: This article is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information. Distribution of this material is for research and educational purposes that will promote social and economic justice and benefit society.

AFN Chief Calls Canada's Record on Human Rights for First Nations Peoples Shameful

Canada's opposition to the human rights of Indigenous People at UN Conference on Climate Change is shameful says AFN National Chief
OTTAWA, Dec. 10 /CNW Telbec/


Assembly of First Nations


This International Day for Human Rights on December 10 marks the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

"The United Nations theme for this year's anniversary is 'Dignity and
justice for all.' The Universal Declaration of Human Rights represents an
international commitment to dignity and justice for every person, for all
peoples, everywhere. Human rights are not a luxury; they belong to everyone.

Canada's denial of the rights of Indigenous people offends the core values,
principles and rights the UN Declaration of Human Rights represents," said
Assembly of First Nations National Chief Phil Fontaine.

This statement comes after Canada opposed the recognition of Indigenous
rights in a new international initiative on climate change that was advanced
this week. The climate initiative known as the Reduced Emissions from
Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) at the United Nations Conferenceon Climate change is currently being held in Poznan, Poland.

The National Chief stated, "It is incomprehensible in an advanced
democratic state as Canada to choose to ignore the rights of Indigenous
people. We are physically, spiritually and culturally tied to our natural
world. We are tied to the land, water, and all aspects of the physical
environment. The denial of our rights in this important global climate change agreement violates our fundamental human rights as Indigenous peoples."

Canada, the United States and Australia expressed interest in including
reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in this agreement. It aims to fight deforestation in developing economies by tapping emissions trading markets in a future climate agreement that will follow up on the first phase of the UN's Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

However, as the text was being drafted yesterday, Canada joined the
United States, Australia and New Zealand in insisting that references to
Indigenous rights and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples be struck from the text.

"Canada's position at the United Nations Conference on Climate change is
the latest in a series of hostile decisions against Indigenous rights which
continue to affect Canada's international reputation as a defender and
promoter of human rights," said AFN National Chief Phil Fontaine.

The National Chief added that the refusal of the Canadian government to
sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
despite a motion passed in the House of Commons on April 8, 2008 which called on Parliament to implement and adopt the principles in the declaration offends Canadian law.

"Moreover the rights of our children are also compromised in this
country. The federal government has refused to address discrimination against First Nations children in the Child Welfare system and education. First Nations Child and Family Services agencies receive, on average, 22% less funding than provincial agencies, a point the Auditor General remarked upon in her May 2008 report," said National Chief Phil Fontaine.

The Auditor General criticized the program indicating that shortfalls in
funding mean the federal government is not providing First Nations Child and Family Services agencies with adequate funding requirements to meet the number or the needs of children in state care.

In October, the Canadian Human Rights Commission decided to put the case before the Canada Human Rights Tribunal. However, the federal government
recently filed for a judicial review on technical issues that will delay the
hearing and stall justice for thousands of First Nations children who are
living under state care.

"This is a complete contradiction of the Government's position, which in
the last Parliamentary session insisted that the Canadian Human Rights Act apply to First Nations citizens on reserve. However, this inconsistent
standard of human rights promotion and protection by the Canadian Government for First Nations children violates the principles of equality, fairness and universality of human rights. The rights of our children or any children should not be suspended on technicalities," the National Chief remarked.

Similar to the Child Welfare issue, other core programs for First Nations
children, such as education, have been capped at 2% a year, which does not
keep pace with inflation or the growing First Nations population.

"The deepening gap in the quality of life and well-being for First
Nations compared to Canadians continues to widen and this is not acceptable for any person or child, including First Nations," Fontaine noted.

Currently, First Nations students receive $2,000 less per child annually
for educational support than students in provincial schools. In 2007, INAC
identified a need for 69 new schools while another 95 schools needed major repairs. Approximately 40 First Nations communities do not have schools at all. INAC's current plan addresses only 27 of those sites, but the funding is on hold.

"On this day which celebrates human rights, I call on the Government of
Canada to do the right thing and uphold and promote the human rights of
Indigenous people and the human rights of our children".

The Assembly of First Nations is the national political organization
representing First Nations citizens in Canada.

For further information: Karyn Pugliese, Communications Officer, Cell:
(613) 292-1877; Gina Cosentino, Government Relations and International
Affairs, National Chief"s Office, Cell: (613) 314-2661, gcosentino@afn.ca


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© 2005 Groupe CNW Ltée

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