Peaceful Societies

As part of its celebration this month of the installation of a new president, Dr. Nancy Leffert, Antioch University Santa Barbara is hosting an exhibit that focuses on the Mbuti people in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The exhibit, sponsored by the Tribal Trust Foundation (TTF), opened with a reception on Tuesday, March 1, at the university.

The university’s press release announcing the event indicates that the exhibit consists of recent photographs by Molly Feltner and older photos on loan from the Smithsonian by Eliot Elisofin. An alumna of AUSB, Barbara Savage, who is the president and founder of the TTF, gave the university the opportunity to be the opening venue for the exhibit, which will close at the end of the month.

The university believes that the exhibition “will foster global support for preservation of the rainforest in the DRC and for protection of the indigenous people who have lived there sustainably for thousands of years.”

To its credit, the university announcement not only mentions the traditional, forest-based lives of the Mbuti, but it also describes the tragic problems the people are suffering from the persistent wars and violence of recent decades. The Mbuti may “consider the forest to be their great protector and provider and believe it is a sacred place,” but they have to confront the realities of today.

Deforestation, over population among the surrounding peoples, mining, and depletion of wild animals all threaten the existence of the Mbuti. Traders buy bushmeat to sell to the burgeoning Congo population, which harms the Ituri Forest where the Mbuti have traditionally lived and the Pygmies who remain in it.

As a result, since many Mbuti have had to resettle outside the Ituri, their forest-based traditions, culture, sustenance, and way of life have been virtually destroyed. They also are discriminated against by the larger, majority societies of the DRC, which typically view the short-stature Mbuti as inferior and primitive.

The exhibit, located at 801 Garden St., Santa Barbara, California, is open for public viewing from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM Monday through Thursday and from 9:00 to 12:00 noon on Fridays, through March 31st.

Birhor girls living in the Indian village of Chalkari are learning, as the Deccan Herald delicately put it on Saturday, how to fight “for a better life.” The paper reported that numerous girls living in the village, located in the Dhanbad District, Jharkhand State, have taken up the sport of boxing.

Several sources reported nearly two years ago that Chalkari boys were responding to boxing instruction and appeared to be quite enthusiastic students of the sport. The girls were evidently not far behind.

Two 12-year olds, Malti and Dulali Kumari, along with 19 other girls ages 12 to 14, still clean, cook, and do the other daily chores expected of them in the village. But in the evenings, they put on their boxing gloves and practice their new sport.

Ashtosh Kumar Mairh, representing Samvedna, a self-help group in the nearby city of Dhanbad, notes that the Chalkari girls are in very good condition from their constant physical activity. They catch rabbits, help make ropes, and cook rice for their families. But Samvedna discovered that they also have a lot of determination to succeed.

A short distance from Malti’s house, Suman, another girl, practices in the courtyard of her home. “I will grow up to be a boxer,” she says. “We have the talent that people in the cities do not have.” Malti, Dulali, and Suman made it to the state boxing championships last year with their team, and they are brimming with self confidence. The team won gold medals at the amateur boxing match in the state.

Suman adds that she no longer plays with dolls—she and her friends only have time for boxing in the evenings when the chores of the day are done. The newspaper makes it clear that it was the boxing program for the Birhor boys, started in 2009, that sparked the interest of the girls.

While boxing is now important to the Chalkari girls, they continue to help fabricate ropes and nets, the traditional Birhor occupation. The Birhor used to make ropes entirely from fibers they found in the forests, but now they are scavenging, or buying, used plastic bags that held dry cement. They take strands from the plastic fibers and either spin them into ropes or weave them into nets, which they sell in the local markets.

Paritosh Kumar, the coach who introduced the Chalkari boys to boxing two years ago, is obviously proud of the girls he is coaching. He told the paper that he noticed the natural talent the girls had for negotiating the forests, climbing hills, and weaving nets. “Their wrist strength is immense and we are very impressed. We know one day these girls will make us proud,” he said.

A prominent Semai woman was honored last week in Kuala Lumpur with an award that recognizes her outstanding service to unite and empower the Orang Asli indigenous people. The Fraser and Neave Out-Do Yourself Awards were given to six Malaysians, or groups, that had displayed heroism or other acts of selfless service to the nation—actions which otherwise might not have been recognized.

Cameron Highlands and Bidor Tijah Yok Chopil, the Semai woman, has become a leading advocate of Orang Asli rights, especially in Bidor, Perak state. She was quoted in several news stories in March 2007 when she protested the destruction of a traditional Semai forest under the government’s pretext of building a botanical garden. She was quoted again the following month in news accounts that provided more details about the project—and its opponents.

Later that year, Tijah Yok Chopil spoke at a national law conference in Kuala Lumpur, where she entertained the legal authorities with a lively, effective speech about living conditions in Semai villages. She emphasized that, while poor, the Semai at least have roofs over their heads. And they never have to contend with the rapes and thefts that sully life in the Malaysian cities. “We never have to resort to crimes like those who live in the city,” she told the conference delegates in 2007.

In March 2009, she was a leader in advocating indigenous rights at a time when the Perak state government was in flux. She spoke to the press two years ago in her role as Secretary of the group Jaringan Kampung Orang Asli Perak (JKOAP).

The judges presented her the award last week for establishing still another organization, Sinui Nanuk Sngik or SPNS, a group which holds classes for adults on many topics, such as paralegal training about land rights and basket weaving. SPNS evolved into the Orang Asli Village Network of Peninsular Malaysia, which champions indigenous rights. In accepting the award, she urged that the Orang Asli (original people) should not be marginalized from mainstream developments.

The awardees were each given a plaque, a certificate, some Fraser and Neave products, and RM5,000 (US$1,637.00). Fraser and Neave is a consumer products conglomerate in Asia, which had its beginnings as a beverage company in Southeast Asia. F&N started making the awards in 2008 in celebration of its 125th anniversary.

Witchcraft and traditional healing, long associated with the Fipa people of Tanzania despite their conversion to Catholicism over one hundred years ago, continue to intrigue other Tanzanians, and outside observers. Several police reports last week from the Rukwa Region of southwestern Tanzania, the traditional territory of the Fipa people, concerned the practice of witchcraft and one of its evil corollaries, the purchase and sale of albino people.

The first story early last week described the kidnapping of a three-year old albino boy, Juma Kapela, from the village of Itunya, in the Mpanda District of the Rukwa Region, along the shore of Lake Tanganyika. To judge by older news stories about the kidnapping of albinos in Tanzania, many people in that country believe that albino body parts can bring good luck. Albinos are captured, murdered, and their blood, hair, and limbs sold for their value as charms.

Juma was playing with friends and his five-year old sister, also an albino, with no adults providing supervision. An unknown person approached the kids, called Juma over, and when he responded, the suspect grabbed the child and fled with him. The other children went on playing.

That evening, when the parents returned and asked about their son, the story came out and they notified village elders, who then called the police. The police have been looking for the child in the fishing villages along the lakeshore, so far without success. Much of their searching has been on foot or by boat, since many of the villages are not connected by roads along the rugged lake shoreline.

A few days later, in an apparently unrelated incident in the Mpanda District, a couple suspected of practicing witchcraft were murdered by a mob late at night in their home. With circumstances reminiscent of an incident last April, the couple had been suspected for a long time by their neighbors of bewitching pregnant women in order to kill their unborn babies. They also, apparently, were suspected of killing small children.

The couple, Henchi Mponya, a 45 year old man and his 38 year old wife, Kangwa Nzemo, were asleep in their home in Intenka village, Mpanda District, late Tuesday night when a mob quietly broke into their home. They hacked the man to death with crude weapons and then turned on his wife. The attackers disappeared without a trace. The police have launched an investigation, but no one has been apprehended for the crime.

A news story on Friday provides a sense of hope, at least for the children in the region who are kidnapped for their body parts. The Mpanda District Council announced that it is building a primary school exclusively for albino children.

Ms. Naomi Nko, the Acting District Executive Director, told the press on February 25, “We have already started constructing the primary school and the work will go hand in hand with the construction of a hostel to accommodate the children.” She said the school will provide a friendly, safe environment for the albino children to learn and play. She expects to have it completed by July this year.

The Citizen, a newspaper from Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania, wrapping up the witchcraft news of the week, editorialized on Saturday that most citizens of their country are either religious Muslims or Christians. The belief or practice of witchcraft is puzzling, irrational, and foolish, the newspaper argued. The paper decried beliefs that attribute supernatural powers to extraordinary events. It opposed the idea that diseases, poverty, failures, accidents, infertility, and other unfortunate occurrences are caused by sorcery.

The paper lashed out at the practice of witchcraft, which appears to be endemic throughout the country and not just a continuing tradition in the Fipa territory. The editorial concluded, “Superstition-fuelled atrocities and human rights abuses such [as] killings of aged women in rural areas [for example, the murder last April], female genital mutilation, and the slaughter of albinos are clear testimony to the deeply rooted ignorance of the population and the ineffectiveness of leadership. For how long will this country let the irrational belief in witchcraft hold the people’s minds hostage?”

The next day, this past Sunday, the same paper published a news story describing a scientific report about superstitious beliefs in Tanzania and in the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa. It analyzed the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures Project report, which described a survey of people in 19 countries south of the Sahara, including Tanzania, between December 2008 and April 2009.

Tanzanians, according to the study report, are among the most devout people in Africa, but they also strongly believe in traditional healing, witchcraft, reincarnation, evil sprits, and ancestor sacrifices. The report, titled “Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa,” characterized the people of Tanzania as the most superstitious in East Africa, and the third most superstitious in the entire sample, following only Senegal and Mali.

Sixty percent of the people of Tanzania told the investigators that they consult traditional healers when confronted with sicknesses in their homes. The survey included 907 Christians and 539 Muslims in Tanzania.

A Muslim cleric, Sheikh Ponda Issa Ponda, told The Citizen on Sunday that he agreed with the results of the survey, as did numerous others the paper interviewed. He said, “the findings that both Christians and Muslims [practice] their religions alongside witchcraft to a great extent has some truth in it. We have many Christians and Muslims mixing religions and witchcraft.”

A Christian clergyman, Reverend Christopher Mtikila, doubted the figures reported by the survey but he agreed with the overall findings—that traditional beliefs persist. He blames them on the failure of Christian teaching practices. People attend church for material reasons, not for spiritual nourishment, he thinks.

A cultural anthropologist who did not want to be named told the paper that Africans tend to cling to their traditional religious beliefs, as well as to their Christian or Muslim faith. He said that leaders of the major religions should do a better job of incorporating the traditional practices into their worship, without necessarily compromising their core beliefs.

The fame of Alexandria, Egypt’s second largest city, with over 4 million inhabitants, is based in part on its incredible history, its wonderful modern library, and its ancient tradition of multiculturalism. A cosmopolitan cultural center right from its founding in 331 BC by Alexander the Great, the city became home to sizable populations of Jews, Coptic Christians, Greeks, and others.

The great library of Alexandria was one of the intellectual treasures of the ancient world until it was burned by intolerant conquerors. The importance of the city was symbolically reaffirmed with the dedication, in 2002, of the new, high-tech, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a modern recreation of the famed ancient center of world learning.

The vitality of the city’s diverse ethnic communities began being augmented over 100 years ago by Nubian families who started moving to northern Egypt. Men who needed work, and were not satisfied with farming in Old Nubia, in southern Egypt, moved to Cairo and Alexandria, returning, perhaps sporadically, to their villages for brief visits.

With much of the world’s attention focused on Tahrir Square in Cairo recently, NPR decided last week to send correspondent Corey Flintoff to visit Alexandria, to capture the mood in that city, particularly among its famous minority communities. How would they be affected by the momentous changes occurring in their country?

Flintoff points out in his report that the historic toleration for the city’s minorities started to diminish during the nation’s successive military dictatorships beginning with President Nasser in the 1950s. Historian Mohamed Awad told NPR that the long tradition of multiculturalism, which had persisted for the most part throughout the Roman and the Islamic periods, has dwindled in recent decades. The horrific car bombing of an old Coptic church in the city, killing more than 20 people this last New Year’s Eve, highlighted this downturn.

But according to the NPR reporter, the minority peoples that remain, particularly the Coptic Christians and the Nubians, are hopeful that things will now be getting better. Alaa Setyan, a lawyer who works for human rights, expresses his hope that the Christians and the members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the city will fare better. He looks forward to a lessened workload.

Flintoff interviewed famed Egyptian novelist Haggag Hassan Oddoul, a writer born in Alexandria of Nubian parents who is well known both for his fiction about his people and for his outspoken advocacy of their rights. Oddoul was not overly optimistic about the future of the Nubians when he met the reporter in a cafe: “We are sad because the world, they don’t know about our case, they don’t know. We ask all the people of the world, look at us. We are in trouble,” he told him.

Oddoul told NPR that the Nubians were displaced from their lands in southern Egypt when the Aswan Dam was built in the 1960s, and they are now a marginalized people, scattered across the country. He did express hope that the revolution would encourage the Nubians to advocate their cause to the rest of the Egyptian people.

The NPR story closed by mentioning Mr. Awad again. The historian hoped that the spirit of cooperation he witnessed among Alexandria’s minority groups during the revolution would translate into a better future. He anticipated that one of the many benefits of the revolution would be that it will afford the city the chance to regain its intellectual, cosmopolitan status. Although Mr. Flintoff does not say so directly, one can infer from his report that Mr. Oddoul was far more guarded in expressing optimism about the Nubians.

Can an overabundance of alcohol prompt people to commit acts of violence? Can it make a society more violent? The Inuit of Nunavut seem to feel it can and they have been testifying about it recently to a territorial investigative commission.

The Nunavut Liquor Act review task force heard testimony in the territorial capital of Iqaluit on Wednesday last week, the ninth community the task force has visited so far. It plans to visit every community in the territory and solicit input on possible ways to address the problems that rampant consumption of alcohol pose in Arctic Canada.

The first speaker at the Iqaluit hearing was Mr. Joanasie Akumalik, a city councilor, who spoke of his experience 20 years earlier. He had been drinking hard one night, he said, and woke up in the morning to find his wife gone. He recalled vaguely beating her during his drinking. He searched the house, even looked in the large garbage storage bin—he was afraid he had killed her in his drunken rage.

What had happened is that he had broken her jaw, and she had been medevaced to Montreal for emergency treatment. He subsequently was given the option of serving time in jail for his assault, or undergoing a rehab program in Toronto. He chose the latter, and has been sober ever since. He made the point to the commission that he was only able to take advantage of the program because his employer was willing to allow him the time off from work. He asked the commission to urge employers in Nunavut to keep employees on their payrolls when they need alcohol rehabilitation.

Numerous speakers pointed out that alcohol is a foreign substance in Inuit culture, which explains why overdrinking fosters violence, suicides, child abuse, and poverty. Donna Adams, the President of Qulliit Nunavut Status of Women and chair of the task force, commented that “alcohol is everywhere” in the territory.

Many of the speakers made positive recommendations for the commission to consider. People suggested the need for treatment centers and rehab facilities right in Nunavut, so alcoholics could be helped nearer their homes and not have to go south to the big Canadian cities.

Being able to go out on the land while undergoing rehabilitation could be a positive aspect of the treatment, one man argued. “There’s a lot of people hurting…a lot of people who want help,” he stated. He believes that treatment centers right in Nunavut would help reduce the crimes caused by drunk people.

Another man wondered if Nunavut should emulate Greenland, which rations alcohol by community. He asked if the operation of territorial liquor stores would help control the sale. Another speaker responded, however, that when a liquor store opened in Iqaluit in the 1960s, there was an epidemic of homicides, drunkenness, and people freezing to death on the streets. She suggested that the bars should be required to monitor the behavior of their customers more closely.

One woman advocated abolishing the availability of hard liquor and allowing only the sale of beer and wine. She blamed the easy availability of vodka for many of the problems. But another said that cracking down too hard on the bars would spur the growth of the bootleggers’ businesses. Some speakers emphasized the importance of educating young people about the dangers of alcoholism.

The mayor of Iqaluit, Madeleine Redfern, advocated changing the laws to reduce the amount of liquor residents can purchase at any one time. Other speakers, blaming the problem on the bootleggers, had specific fixes for the problems they feel that those individuals cause. The Liquor Act Review task force will continue to meet in Nunavut communities through May, and take written testimony through the summer. Donna Adams, task force chair, indicated that people in all the Nunavut communities are saying similar things.

One speaker in Iqaluit expressed cynicism that the territorial legislature will do anything helpful, even after it receives a report from the task force. Isaac Sobol, the chief medical officer of the territory and a member of the task force, took exception to that possibility. “The government needs to think about its entire approach when it comes to alcohol,” he replied. “If [the members of the legislative assembly] are not doing that, get rid of them and get some people who will.”

News stories about the commission hearing did not mention that agencies already exist, such as Drug Rehab Nunavut, to help alcoholics get the treatments they need.

A Venezuelan news story last week suggests the possibility that traditional Piaroa aesthetic values, essential aspects of their peacefulness, may be spread more widely in coming years.

Cano Grulla The Venezuela Symphony Orchestra, La Orquesta Sinfónica de Venezuela (OSV), visited a Piaroa village, Caño Grulla, on February 15 and 16 as part of its “OSV at My School” program. The outreach effort by the orchestra into the Piaroa community, located 60 miles south of Puerto Ayacucho, the capital of Amazonas State in southern Venezuela, kicks off its celebration of the nation’s bicentennial of its declaration of independence.

Alejandro Montes de Oca, President of the orchestra, indicated at a press conference last week in Caracas that the visit was to be sponsored by the Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Educación. The purpose of the visit was to encourage an appreciation for orchestral music by having the musicians interact and perform in small groups in the classes with the teachers and students.

In addition to bringing their instruments and music into the classrooms, the orchestra hoped to learn from the visit about the indigenous musical traditions of the Piaroa. A brass quintet and a string quartet from the orchestra were slated to give concerts in the community. The concerts were to be recorded for later production as audio and video documentaries. The orchestra has been increasing its visits to schools as part of its outreach program.

The most intriguing aspect of the news story is the statement that the orchestra will be seeking to learn about Piaroa musical traditions. Pioneering European composers such as Béla Bartók started visiting the villages of Hungary and Romania about 100 years ago to study their indigenous music and to then create profoundly inspiring compositions. Many other composers have done the same thing.

It is not clear from the press release and the news story if anyone will follow up the visit by the orchestra and really study Piaroa music, but one can hope that contemporary composers in South America, and elsewhere, might appreciate the meanings of their music and create new compositions based on it.

Stanford Zent (1994) indicates that Piaroa music consists basically of singing by the traditional shamans. “The songs are composed of an archaic language form stylized by metaphor and set to musical cadence and pitch,” he writes.

Joanna Overing (1989b) gives a much more detailed overview of the aesthetic values of the Piaroa and how they relate to their peaceful society. She writes that the Piaroa traditionally conflated their aesthetic values and their attitudes toward the production of economic goods. Production is either social or antisocial, they believe, and thus it is either beautiful or ugly. Controlled behavior is beautiful and conducive to the formation of community, while excess is opposed to community and is ugly. Beauty is therefore a moral conception. Piaroa aesthetic values reflect, and influence, their social and economic lives.

Overing argues that aesthetic knowledge enables the Piaroa to create their sense of community. The ability of the individual to maintain harmony with others is the essence of Piaroa aesthetics. They associate beauty with fertility, abundance, moderation, cleanness, restraint, and social and moral goodness. They associate ugliness with excess, madness, dirt and antisocial behaviors. [The present tense is used here, even though Piaroa beliefs may have changed in the 22 years since Overing’s article was published.]

The people connect their positive and negative aesthetic and social values with their uses of the resources of the earth. The negative qualities that they abhor—arrogance, a quarrelsome personality, greed, madness—are all produced by an inability to keep productive forces under control. Excessive use of natural resources, plus illegitimate political and social power, are all the result of antisocial evil forces.

The Piaroa recognize that they face a dilemma. They clearly have to use natural resources. They need to rely on their predatory abilities, as they see them, to garden, hunt, and transform plants into edible foods. Thus, their productive capabilities contain the seeds of violence and ugliness. The healing song of the shaman is also, potentially, the breath of the jaguar. The beads of life contain poisonous predatory forces. However, with the help of the shamans, the cleansing powers of the moon allow the Piaroa to overcome their dangers and expel poisons and wildness from the forces of production.

Their aesthetic works, such as the songs of their shamans and their art, clean, beautify, and civilize their productive use of natural resources. This cleansing gives them the ability to make personal moral decisions, to choose virtuous actions. Beauty for the Piaroa is thus a social skill tied to emotional control and reason: proper social and productive behavior becomes beautiful through control and correct action.

Piaroa values may have changed in today’s world, of course, under the influence of Christian conversions and modernizing forces. Time will tell if the visit of a national orchestra to a Piaroa village will transmit any of the traditional Piaroa musical and aesthetic values to a wider audience.

The Birhor in West Bengal state experience even more poverty than the ones in Jharakhand, Orissa, and Chhattisgarh, the other states of northeastern India where they live.

According to a report issued last week, the poverty of the Birhor in West Bengal persists despite the efforts of the state government to launch programs which could help them. Professor Sreerupa Roy, a member of the study team from the West Bengal Tribal Development Cooperative Corporation, Limited (WBTDCC), which completed the investigation, described the results for the press.

Professor Roy indicated that the government of Jharkhand State has been more successful in making the Birhor aware of development opportunities than West Bengal. He blamed the failure in West Bengal on the fact that the Birhor there have been reluctant to give up their nomadic, forest-based, lifestyle for the benefits of development.

The study team, conducting its investigation in Purulia District, West Bengal, found that the Birhor population had increased from 271 to 327 in the 20 year period 1991 to 2011. It reported that the Birhor are looked down upon by other tribal groups in the district due to the fact that, until very recently, they still subsisted on nomadic hunting and gathering.

“The forest formed an integral part of their culture and tradition,” the report stated. The news story about the study didn’t note that their name, Birhor, actually means “people of the forest.”

In 2008, when a range of hills was deforested, some Birhor were relocated to concrete, hut-shaped buildings, but they preferred to continue their nomadic lives in the remaining forests. The report indicates that they have a low life expectancy because of nutritional deficiencies and diseases. They have also begun consuming alcohol, bought in stores, as a substitute for their traditional beverage, which had much less alcoholic content. Due to deforestation, the plant they had used to make that beverage is no longer available.

The Birhor also used to fabricate ropes for sale in market towns, their primary source of income in the 1980s according to Adhikary (1984b), but the plants they formerly gathered to make the ropes are gone. The government of West Bengal indicates that their primary source of income now is from day labor.

Sudhir Dutta, Director of WBTDCC, says that NGOs and government agencies are aware of the problems the Birhor face and are trying to help. He believes that if the efforts of the different organizations were better synchronized, the Birhor might benefit.

In a separate news story last week, the Times of India reported that the students in a school in Jharkhand State decided to investigate a Birhor community in the context of the 34th National Games. The biennial sporting event, a mini-Olympics for the Subcontinent that is being held this year in Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand, started last Saturday, February 12, and will run for two weeks.

A team of college engineering students visited the Birhor village of Chalkari and handed out pictures of the mascots for the National Games as a way of trying to develop an awareness in the village of the sporting event. The students were aware of the reputation of the Birhor as being more attuned to their natural environment than other people, so part of their reason for visiting was a hope that they might gain from them some ideas about developing a better balance with nature.

But the students were very disappointed to see abject poverty in the village, and to learn that the benefits, as they saw them, of development had not reached it. Chalkari does have a primary school, and it has been in the news for other reasons in February 2009, July 2009, and February 2010.

The government of India, a research foundation, and a volunteer organization have teamed up to help an impoverished Yanadi community begin an eco-friendly, low-input crab farming operation. According to a news report in The Hindu on Friday, the new project, fostered by the cooperating agencies, is located in the village of Sorlagondi, near Nagayalanka, in Krishna District, Andhra Pradesh, southern India. The village is 200 miles north of the city of Chennai, near the coast of the Bay of Bengal.

R. Ramasubramanian, Senior Scientist for the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation based in Chennai (formerly Madras), described the crab farming operation for the press. Since the crab farm is located on a tidal river, no pumping of water is necessary—the reversing tidal flows provide the necessary exchanges of water. Mangroves planted along the banks give shelter for the animals and supply nutrients, so there is no need for any food input. Evidently, a similar technique is being used at a research site in Tamil Nadu to the south and in some Southeast Asian locations.

A. Balaram, Assistant Director for inland fisheries in the Indian government’s Department of Fisheries, told The Hindu that the Yanadi in the village have harvested crabs worth Rs. 35,000 (U.S. $768) from their two-acre facility. G. Rathinaraj, Deputy Director of the Marine Products Export Development Authority, another Indian Government agency, said at a media event on Wednesday last week that there was, potentially, a large market potential for the crabs.

The president of Praja Pragathi Seva Sangham, a volunteer organization that has been involved, said that the initiative will help the Yanadi fishermen earn more income. They have been suffering due to declines in their fish catches. The new approach to fish farming should allow them to raise both small fish and crabs in the same ponds. Mr. Balaram emphasized the eco-friendly nature of the project. He hoped that the approach could be encouraged elsewhere.

The cooperation and involvement by the different government agencies provides a striking contrast to the way the Yanadi were recently treated in another district of Andhra Pradesh, as reported last July. The treatment in Krishna District also contrasts with 40 years ago when the Indian Space Research Organization decided to turn the marshy, coastal Sriharikota Island, located on the Bay of Bengal nearer Chennai, into the national space launch center. The Yanadi residents of the island were unceremoniously removed from their huts and moved off the island.

According to Agrawal, Reddy and Rao (1984), the Yanadi exiles from Sriharikota had numerous problems afterwards. As of the date of that article, they were required to live in a couple permanent villages, which caused problems. They no longer had the freedom to manage the space around their huts as they had before or to construct separate huts for their older children. They were restricted from utilizing the spaces in front of their huts for their living activities, and they were restricted from enjoying the individualism that their hut-placement previously had fostered.

Confined to specific localities in the resettlement villages, they no longer had the ability to gather at will in their neighborhoods. Furthermore, local resources were over-utilized, and the concentration of people produced a lot of pollution. Human relations in the resettlement villages were also affected, as people lost their individual privacy and independence.

Rao subsequently published (2002), a book-length ethnography of the Yanadi which provides a more up to date analysis of the changes to the society and economy suffered by the Sriharikota Yanadi people when they were resettled. The recent, multi-agency, fish pond project farther to the north is a hopeful sign of official interest in the society, at least the people of Sorlagondi.

The Kadar are now being noticed. Their plight, if not their peacefulness, is receiving some attention lately. A lot of meetings and news stories over the past five years about the proposed Athirappilly Dam on the Chalakudy River in Kerala have focused on elephant corridors and hornbill habitat, with only brief mentions of a Kadar village which would also be destroyed. Some reports didn’t even mention the affected people.

But perceptions about the tribal societies may be changing in India. Several news stories last week focused more on the affects the proposed dam would have on the Kadar villages than they did on hornbills, elephants, and riverine ecosystems. This is not to deny the importance of natural habitats, or the value of charismatic fauna, but it is interesting to note the ways a news story have evolved over the years.

One of India’s leading papers, The Hindu, published last week a story describing a meeting with the press conducted by the head of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Committee, Madhav Gadgil. Mr. Gadgil said that the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers Act stipulated that the tribes in India had the right to conserve, protect, and manage forests as community resources or as individual land rights.

With that perspective, he argued that the community rights of the Kadar villagers had not been recognized in the planning for the dam. “Though forest rights committees have been formed, they are not functioning properly,” he charged. He added that the natural riparian forest vegetation in the Western Ghats, the chain of mountains that dominate the western side of the Indian peninsula, had not as yet been adequately studied.

Mr. Gadgil’s committee, formed by the Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests, is charged with identifying the ecologically important areas of the mountains and preparing a conservation strategy for them. His group has been meeting with members of the indigenous societies in the mountains, other residents, the Kerala State Electricity Board, the Kerala Forest Research Institute, and the River Research Centre during their investigation. It expects to submit its report to the ministry in New Delhi next month.

At the meeting last week, Gadgil told the press that his group is not necessarily opposed to the construction of the dam. Instead, it is focusing on preserving the environment. Others presented their own testimonies, including a representative of the Kadar village, Ms. V. K. Geetha. She said the dam, if built, would force over 90 Kadar families from the Vazhachal and Pukalappara communities to be resettled. “The proposed site for the dam is hardly 400 metres from the Kadar settlements. Our livelihood is solely dependent on the forest and the river,” she added.

Another news story last week from IPS, the Inter Press Service, took a broader perspective on the treatment of the Kadar in India. It quoted a 60-year old Kadar, Ayyan, who described the way many of their huts would be destroyed if the dam is built. But he took a wider view: “We hear the death knell of our beloved river,” he said. “The government does not give adequate basic amenities to us at the settlement area, where living conditions are very bad. Their assurance on amenities is a pipe dream. Now they want our river and forest for their benefits.”

Other authorities in South India assert that the continuing existence of the Kadar society is not assured. P. Gopakumar, a local writer, told the press that the state government, acting on behalf of promoters in the private sector and their government allies, may be guilty of inflicting violence against the Kadar in the rush to build the dam.

The Human Rights Protection Centre, based in the Kerala city of Thrissur, argued that ever since the government forcibly sterilized some Kadars in 1976, it has not let up on its persecution of the tribe. Other experts quoted by the news story describe changes in the economy and health conditions of the Kadar over the past 70 years. S.P. Ravi, convener of the Chalakudy River Protection Forum, commented that the Kadar need highly nutritious foods in order to combat problems with anemia. The changes in their lifestyle in recent decades, Ravi said, have prompted a high rate of morbidity, and there is no health facility at one of their settlements.

The fact that two major news organizations would focus specifically on the problems of a very small tribal society last week is heartening.

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