Peaceful Societies

India’s National Museum Institute, part of the National Museum in New Delhi, has taken a strong interest in preserving the unique cultural heritage of Ladakh. According to an article published last week, the Institute is focusing on what they call the intangible cultural heritage (ICH) of the Ladakhi people.

The National Museum Institute (NMI), which has a mission of promoting and preserving India’s arts, music, and culture, hopes the recent initiative in Ladakh will protect the heritage of the region, despite pressures for change brought about by modernization, tourism, and globalization. The focus of the initiative is to develop museums so that they can more effectively preserve the Ladakhi ICH .

The Director General of the National Museum, Dr. Venu Vasudevan, said that the NMI was providing in-service training for personnel from several Ladakhi monasteries. Monasteries preserve much of the Buddhist art, culture and religious heritage of the region. He said that “NMI is helping them adopt new techniques of conservation, display and documentation.”

Cultural preservation, the agency believes, needs to take place on several different levels. At one level, the Buddhist monasteries preserve many artifacts and traditions, and their needs for assistance are clear. NMI has been working for over a year on training and equipping monks and curators in the monasteries to better safeguard, document, and promote their heritage.

But protecting the secular cultural traditions is also important, both in the capital city, Leh, and in rural communities. Prof. Manvi Seth from NMI said that the agency has identified three villages—Gya, Chiktan, and Skurbachan—where it is exploring the possibilities of preserving their heritage by helping develop local institutions.

At Gya, the agency’s project involves documenting, conserving, and providing security for museum objects. “At present, substantial data has been collected from Gya,” Prof. Seth said. The proposed village museums, NMI expects, will be small and will be set up by the villagers, for themselves, though they may also serve to interest tourists in their cultures and their ways of life.

NMI’s intangible cultural heritage project for Ladakh, which began in September 2012, organized a six-day workshop in late October, 2013, to promote community participation in heritage preservation. Participants gave in-depth presentations about documenting the socio-cultural situation in Gya, such as the village stone carvings, the local weaving practices, their Losar celebrations, and the Amchi medicine tradition in the community.

Prof. Seth said that the Ladakhi people strongly desire a museum in Leh which will collect, document, and present their heritage, culture, and lives, both through tangible and through intangible manifestations.

Such a museum, she said, will seek “to become a platform not merely for preserving physical collections but for connecting the younger generation with their own identity, for stimulating dialogue on the present issues concerning culture, and for providing a mechanism for understanding and channelising the future course of cultural change.”

When a court appeal by the G/wi for unfettered access to their lands was denied in September, Survival International pledged to mount an international campaign for justice. The government of Botswana has sought to prevent the San people from hunting, from having access to water, and from living on their traditional lands. It hassles people when they try to visit their families.

The goals of the government in removing the San groups from the path of diamond exploitation in Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) have led to a recent pattern of confrontations. The San have won several victories in the nation’s courts, but they lost the most recent one because their British lawyer was denied an entry permit by the government.

Survival International, an indigenous rights NGO based in London, has been a firm supporter of the San peoples. “Survival will not rest until the tribe’s rights are restored,” the Director of the group, Stephen Corry, said in September after the loss in the nation’s High Court.

SI has mounted an international campaign to boycott travel to Botswana as long as that country continues persecuting the indigenous minority population and denying them justice. At a World Travel Market exhibition in London last week, SI campaigners gained notice from many in the travel industry by handing out leaflets urging people to join the boycott against Botswana. SI is calling for Botswana to grant the San people the right to free access, without hassles, to their historic lands in the CKGR.

The travel boycott is starting to have some effect, since some travel agencies are now supporting the SI appeal. The Annie Bulmer Travel agency in London, along with others, has pledged to not send any additional tourists to Botswana.

“We’re saddened and shocked to hear that Botswana’s bushmen are being chased out of their reserve by the government,” Ms. Bulmer said. “The Botswana tourism board would have tourists believe that the bushmen are one of the country’s greatest assets, but it seems soon there will be no bushmen left. Annie Bulmer Travel will not be sending tourists to Botswana until its indigenous residents are treated with dignity and respect.”

According to another industry source, Botswana was promoting its travel industry at the trade show all week. Next to diamonds, travel is the second largest industry in the country.

Interestingly, a diamond industry editorial last week also criticized the government for its treatment of the San, in light of Survival’s travel boycott and the pamphleteering at the London trade show. Rapaport News acknowledged the history of the industry’s involvement in Botswana, as well as SI’s claims that the government’s evictions and resettlement campaigns against the San peoples were perpetrated in hopes of having unfettered access to the diamond wealth.

Rachel Stenham, from SI, told the industry source that many of the San people are hoping for jobs from the mining development. Neither they nor SI are opposed to the diamond mining. Rather, they are distressed by the government’s unwillingness to accede to the court rulings giving the G/wi unhampered access to their lands and the rights to water and hunting.

While Rapaport News does not take a stand one way or the other on the SI campaign, it does indicate its distress at the obduracy of the government in the face of current developments in Botswana diamond mining. The news story indicates that after 100 years of working out of London, De Beers is about to move its sales operations to Gaborone, the capital of Botswana.

The article in Rapaport News expresses admiration for the positive ways the nation has developed its diamond industry and a complex of related businesses. Overall, despite concerns about ethical diamond production in other parts of the world, “Botswana has a powerful story to tell about its own product.,” the publication editorializes.

It concludes, however, that whether or not the charges by SI are true, the travel boycott will tarnish Botswana as a whole. It opines that the result will be a shame for Botswana, and for its role as a “burgeoning diamond hub.”

There is little doubt that Conrad Glass, the sole policeman on Tristan da Cunha, has a good sense of humor, at least to judge by the photo accompanying a press release last week. The release describes a somewhat whimsical public relations stunt by a firm that sells long underwear over the Web.

The PR effort involved the company giving 45 pairs of long johns to some working men on Tristan da Cunha to help them get through the recent austral winter. The press release mentions that the Tristanians agreed to have their pictures taken in their long underwear, and it includes two images of the men, one of which is of Mr. Glass posing in a shop building in the Settlement. He looks, from the picture, as if he were enjoying the humor of the whole situation.

The company behind the promotional stunt, Deadgoodundies.com, “is an online only retailer stocking the best in designer men’s underwear,” according to the release. The 45 pairs of men’s long johns they sent were shipped out of Bristol many months ago, and after a seven week sea voyage, they finally got to Tristan in time to help keep 45 male Islanders warm for the winter—the summer time in the northern hemisphere.

Dawn Repetto, Head of Tourism on the island, reported back to the company last week that the islanders were delighted with the long distance charitable donation. “Thanks to Deadgoodundies, the men of Tristan have been very warm this winter. The fishermen have been wearing them to sea, up the mountain herding sheep and out at the potato patches, and when it’s really cold, to bed as well!”

Officer Glass was one of those “kept cozy on duty in his long undies,” the release indicates. He was formerly the Chief Islander, and he wrote a book about the duties of the policeman on the island, Rockhopper Copper. That title was taken from the colony of rockhopper penguins on the island, which he has to check on periodically as one of his duties. The press release does not tell us if he wore the long johns during his most recent visit to the colony, much less how the birds reacted to his new attire.

Ms. Repetto provided additional notes in her report back to the online merchant. “The long johns have done their job so well a few of the island ladies have been yearning after a pair. I spoke with one elderly gent and he said, ‘Ya they’s rale warm, the easterly wind can’t get through ‘em.’ It is often said on the island that easterly is a lazy wind because it doesn’t go around you, it goes through you.”

It is worth glancing at the self-promotional materials from businesses when they can tell you with a straight face about the slothful habits of the east wind.

The four peaceful South Indian foraging societies included in this website have similar beliefs that tend to inhibit conflicts, and they have comparable techniques for resolving them when they do occur. Out of the 18 distinct foraging societies in South India, six have been extensively studied by anthropologists, and four—the Malapandaram, Paliyans, Kadar, and Yanadi—are included in this website’s Encyclopedia of Selected Peaceful Societies.

Peter M. Gardner, who has studied the Paliyans for many decades, pulls together an interesting, important analysis of the ways the six groups foster their internal peacefulness. In addition to the four societies already mentioned, Gardner also profiles conflict management approaches among the Chenchu and the Kattunayaka/Jenu Kurumba/Jenu Kuruba (those latter three groups are considered to be the same society by scholars).

Despite the physical distances that separate the six societies, they share many values that assist them in preventing conflict situations from arising. The first is that the people place a premium on autonomous individuals making their own decisions. That belief fosters a sense of mutual respect. Ehrenfels (1952), for instance, argued that the Kadar have a persistent love for individual freedom.

Gardner quotes Morris (1982) on the Malapandaram and Rao (2002) on the Yanadi, both of whom pointed out that the spirit of respecting the decision making of individuals extends even to children. Among the Malapandaram, “children are treated as autonomous individuals and are not taught, or expected to obey their elders” Morris wrote (1982a: 146-147). Similarly, Yanadi children “attend school when they feel like and cannot be coerced by their parents” (Rao 2002: 95).

A second value that helps squelch conflicts is building self-reliance in children. Gardner cites his own study of the Paliyans done in 1966 to point out how kids as young as two are permitted to play with sharp tools such as billhooks without supervision, and how five-year olds are allowed to climb trees or start cooking fires by themselves. In order to foster self-reliance, adults do not provide explicit verbal instructions to their children. The youngsters observe adults and then draw their own inferences.

The third key value is equality, which is either explicitly described, or is at least implied, in the scholarship about all six societies. The Paliyans believe that one must avoid tarakkoravaa, a word which means lowering or diminishing the level of another. This is a way of saying that respect for others is based on equality. The Kadar disapprove of condescending behaviors toward others, and the Malapandaram treat one another as equals from the time they are eight years old.

Gardner summarizes by writing that these values “define in firm and absolute terms” socially acceptable responses to conflicts (p.300). In these six societies, absolute equality, respect, and lack of authority of one person over another foster anarchic situations where people lack leadership structures and abhor conflict.

Of course conflicts arise anyway. Not surprisingly, the people use comparable dispute management techniques to help out. One important technique for resolving conflicts is self-restraint, especially the practices of separation, silence, and tolerance. When people are feeling disrespected by others, individuals in these societies will usually pull back in order to quietly separate from threatening trouble. They will head out into the forest, or the hills, for a short time—or perhaps for several years, as the situation may seem to warrant.

Raghaviah (1962) wrote that “if you are angry with the Yanadi, he simply turns his face away and keeps himself out of your sight for a while until your temper cools down and you yourself invite him for a talk (p.224).” Gardner observes that the Paliyans, and most of the others, separate from people whenever conflicts threaten to escalate.

A second technique for resolving conflicts is silence—people will avoid discussing offensive activities, injuries, or threats. Furthermore, they will refrain from making overt criticisms, offering suggestions, or uttering any form of ridicule, all of which may seem to be domineering behaviors. A Paliyan person who is threatened will respond without making verbal replies or physical gestures. Gardner writes that the sight of a Paliyan simply walking away from a group may be the only signal one gets that the individual is avoiding trouble.

A third technique is for people to simply tolerate irregular behaviors by others. The author describes how an elderly Paliyan man had to cope with his young wife bringing home a still younger lover. Making it clear that the new situation was not his business, and showing an unusual tolerance and forbearance, the man simply said “the gods will get them (p.305).”

These peaceful societies, particularly the Paliyans and the Malapandaram, have conciliators who help resolve conflicts. Informal volunteers, conciliators are people who are skilled in helping others get past difficult situations. They typically lack any authority, though outsiders have often unjustifiably ascribed powers of leadership to them.

Another strategy, one that is rarely used, is to convene community meetings to deal with serious conflicts. Gardner suggests that this approach is new to these peaceful societies. It may be derived from the councils of elders held in many other Indian communities. He watched one in operation seeking to resolve a Paliyan dispute in 2001. The advantage of the public meeting was that the parties to the dispute were able to weigh their options and consider the value of public opinion about the conflict. He decided that, while it is a new technique for the Paliyan, it certainly is in keeping with their more traditional approaches to resolving disputes.

Gardner concludes that the South Indian forager societies have achieved both a remarkable degree of peacefulness within their own groups and have been able to completely avoid warfare with others. His article is included in an outstanding volume containing numerous essays on building peacefulness and avoiding warfare and violence. The article, and the entire volume, are important works that are certainly worth careful study.

Gardner, Peter M. 2013. “South Indian Foragers’ Conflict Management in Comparative Perspective.” In War, Peace, and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views, Ed. Douglas P. Fry, p. 297-314. New York: Oxford University Press.

“There are no fixed patterns in the Mbuti way of life—whenever the mood takes them, they move deep into the forest and set up a hunting camp.” The narrative that accompanies a marvelous film about the research of famed scientists Terese and John Hart also provides a great deal of information about the Mbuti way of life in the Ituri rainforest of the D.R. Congo.

The 51 minute film “Heart of Brightness: John and Terese Hart’s Research on Okapi in the Ituri” was written and produced by Alan Root for Survival Anglia in 1990. It was just uploaded to YouTube on Oct. 23rd by Sarah Hart, the oldest daughter of Terese and John. She was 12 when the movie was made.

The Harts and their three daughters lived in Epulu, the forest settlement made famous decades earlier by Colin Turnbull. That community served as a base of operations for their research on forest animals. Watching this film is almost like seeing a movie based on Turnbull’s classic works The Forest People (1961) and Wayward Servants (1965). The film is a fine complement to those books.

The video opens by telling us that Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was a place of horrors and hardships. But for Terese and John Hart it became the place where they decided to do their scientific research, raise their family, and interact with the indigenous forest people—the Mbuti. For them, it was the “Heart of Brightness.” The Harts admit that they were only able to advance their work because of the Mbuti.

In the opening section, we see 12 year old Sarah Hart leading the way along a forest trail, “out in front where she can watch the creatures of the forest undisturbed.” She stops to examine something, which turns out to be a goliath beetle, a huge striped insect that she lets walk across her hand. It is as big as her palm. Terese has a baby carrier on her back and her four month old baby girl in it. The eight year old daughter plays at the rear with her young Mbuti friends, acting as if she is scared of the forest spirits.

But the main actors in the first half of the movie are the Mbuti and the duikers, the small forest antelopes that the Harts are studying. The Mbuti “do not just live in this forest, they live with it,” we are told. The forest knowledge and skills of the Mbuti have benefited the Harts’ research. For instance, Terese doubts that a small duiker could eat one of the large fruits, even though the Mbuti assure her that they do. Then, we see one of the little animals chewing on such a fruit and the Harts are convinced. They thus add to their knowledge about the role the antelopes play in dispersing seeds when they defecate in the forest.

The film tells us—and shows us, as a book can’t do—many aspects of Mbuti forest life. We see how they erect the frameworks for their temporary forest huts, cover them with leaves, and move in. We witness them painting their faces, making nets, and using them for hunting antelopes in the forest. One of the most dramatic scenes in the movie occurs when a couple men climb to the top of a giant forest tree to reach into a large hole occupied by a bee colony. They pull out many honey combs and lower them in a basket to the ground, ignoring the scores of stings they get on their bare bodies from the swarming bees. One wonders about the bravery of the Mbuti—and of the filmmaker with his close up video camera.

We are told that the Mbuti do have their times of tensions. A fight breaks out between a man and his wife, and we see them yelling angrily across the camp at each other. But the group clearly disapproves, so while the people do not suppress their emotions, they quickly “get it off their chests with no deferrals and no hard feelings.” They break the tension and go on with camp life.

The second half of the film concentrates on research by the Harts on the okapi, a large forest animal and a relative of the giraffe. The Mbuti continue to play an important role in this segment. When two Mbuti assistants find that one of the traps has caught an okapi, the finders have to race back to camp to alert the Harts. Their small size, the narrator says, is an advantage to them in moving quickly through the forest, where “they can slip through tangled vegetation that would slow a bigger person to a crawl.”

Mr. Root clearly had the instincts of a composer as he developed this production. The work is filled with the human and animal choruses of the woods. The first and second acts open with aerial scenes of the great forest, like overtures out of Wagner. Recurring shots of the Harts’ three beautiful daughters are leitmotifs that punctuate the main libretto, the Mbuti and the wildlife, respectively the friends and research subjects of the scientists.

Mr. Root indicated on his website that the 1990 film “was probably never distributed in the U.S.” Terese Hart also posted a comment about the film on her website: “Some of the singers and some of the dear friends and colleagues of this film are no longer with us, but I think of ‘Hearts [sic] of Brightness’ as a tribute to them all and to the way of life they still maintain.”

Anyone enchanted by the Turnbull books, and by the scrappy peacefulness of the Mbuti, will be charmed by this film and grateful to Sarah Hart for making it available on YouTube. It’s a treasure.

The Nyae Nyae Conservancy in northeastern Namibia, run by the Ju/’hoan San, is a highly successful development project, one of the best in southern Africa, according to the authors of a new book. The conservancy is not without serious problems, however. The invasion of the Herero farmers from Gam in 2009 is still not resolved, and the invaders continue to live in Tsumkwe, the town at the heart of Nyae Nyae.

The invaders use resources that the Ju/’hoansi can ill afford. The government of Namibia meanwhile makes statements about the Ju/’hoansi need for justice, though it does not actually resolve the problem. But despite that difficulty, the conservancy continues its effective development projects.

Megan Biesele and Robert Hitchcock, the authors of the current book about the Ju/’hoansi, are anthropologists who have done extensive research on the San societies and have long-standing commitments to the people whom they have studied. Their book is a history of the activism of the Ju/’hoansi in the years leading up to the independence of Namibia in 1990, and the 23 year period since then.

Their work is a testimonial to the creative abilities of those San people in resolving their problems. It is intended as an update to the classic ethnographies of Richard B. Lee, Lorna Marshall, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Polly Wiessner, and many other ethnographers who have done fieldwork in this society. The study of peaceful societies is much richer because of the work of these two scholars.

A bit of background will help. Tsumkwe, the town at the heart of the traditional Ju/’hoansi lands called Nyae Nyae, was established by the South African government in 1959, and a borehole providing water was opened a couple years later. The government developed it as a modern community, with a store, agricultural fields, a police station, and housing—enticements that worked to draw the nomadic, foraging people away from their wandering lifestyle and into the benefits of a modern, civilized town.

Many Ju/’hoansi settled in, hoping for an easier life, but they soon encountered an increasing population density and the concomitant environmental, social, and health problems which their social system was not adapted to handling. Water resources in the area rapidly diminished and the diet of the people deteriorated due to substituting maize meal for more varied wild foods. Fights became routine, while abuse and rapes became common. As the rates of homicides soared, the Ju/’hoansi themselves began calling Tsumkwe “the place of death” (p.10).

By the early 1980s, many Ju/’hoansi, disillusioned with some of the facets of town life, began searching for ways to get out of Tsumkwe’s squalor and violence. They wanted to live at permanent water sources remote from the town and take their chances at raising crops, herding livestock, and foraging—a mixed economy, as the authors term their new lifestyle. They wanted to reestablish half-forgotten social patterns.

Some started a “back to the land” movement, a flight from the town into the bush where they, or their parents, had previously lived. The heart of this book focuses on the ways the Ju/’hoansi themselves, with help from outsiders, took charge of their own lives and instituted the changes they wanted to make.

At that time, they realized that numerous other people—mining companies, forestry firms, military officials, and non-Ju/’hoansi pastoralists—coveted the lands they had abandoned a couple decades earlier when they had moved into Tsumkwe. In March 1981, a liquor store opened in town, funded by government loans, and the people saw the dangers it posed.

The increased availability of alcoholic beverages, many realized, would exacerbate social tensions and increase violence. Returning to the n!oresi, their former resource areas, would be a way of helping them reinstitute their traditional, effective, approaches toward diffusing conflicts. It would also reassert their rights to lands threatened by outsiders. By 1982, the first pioneers, three communities, had moved back to the land, followed by seven more in 1987. By 1992, the Ju/’hoansi had reoccupied 30 n!oresi (the singular is n!ore) outside Tsumkwe.

After Namibia gained its independence in 1990, new national leaders expressed a commitment to working with local people to learn about their needs. The government helped set up an important conference in Nyae Nyae in July 1992, the third in a series of wildlife management and planning meetings. By the end of the three-day conference, the outsiders—bureaucrats, officials, scientists—realized that the rest of the country needed to be engaged in managing its lands and wildlife as effectively as the Ju/’hoansi had been doing.

The story that Biesele and Hitchcock tell is not all roses. They describe the missteps made by the Nyae Nyae Conservancy, its predecessor agencies, various funding groups, Ju/’hoan leaders, and outside officials and scholars. The wealth of details provides depth and honesty to a story in which both authors, especially Biesele, have played important parts.

One of the best features of the book is the way the authors explain how the Ju/’hoan society has changed, and yet held onto their traditional values in modified ways. For instance, they point out that ancient social rules preventing direct confrontations and avoiding overt criticisms still apply. People still inform others of their thoughts through indirection, to avoid the unpleasantness of direct confrontations and the possible exacerbations of existing conflicts. These approaches “are long-term tenets of Ju/’hoan social life that have persisted,” they write (p. 185).

The only reasonable criticism of this important work is that it needs a glossary, since readers interested in peaceful societies will use it repeatedly. “Now what, again, was the Ju/wa Farmers Union,” one might wonder next year when turning to this essential reference source. Hopefully, the authors will continue to keep the work up to date, and will include a glossary in their next edition.

The book was published in hard-back in 2010 for U.S.$120.00. In 2013, the publisher, Berghahn, decided to make the updated edition available in paperback for only $34.95, a price that is within the reach of ordinary budgets. The authors need to be congratulated on their important work—and the publisher for making it available to a broad audience.

Biesele, Megan and Robert K. Hitchcock. 2013. The Ju/’hoan San of Nyae Nyae and Namibian Independence: Development, Democracy, and Indigenous Voices in Southern Africa. New York: Berghahn.

Last week, a nonviolent rebel group in Tahiti made its latest peaceful attempt to establish an independent nation in the Society Islands, free from French control and influence. The somewhat quixotic group, styling itself as the Republic of Hau Pakumotu, attempted to raise its flag over land it claims, but it was stopped by French Polynesian security forces.

The rebel movement began nearly four years ago on Moorea, one of the Society Islands located just to the northwest of Tahiti itself. An early leader of the movement, Beky Teamo, and about 100 supporters held a public meeting on January 19, 2010, at which they proclaimed the inauguration of their new state.

Observed by police, the Tahitians declared that they were unhappy with the high cost of living and said that they were no longer subject to the laws of French Polynesia. Mr. Teamo announced that they had appointed 12 ministers who would serve 15-year terms, plus three senators and seven representatives.

Teamo’s solution for the unemployment problem on Moorea was to hire 130 firefighters. One of the members of the group told Radio Australia that there were 50,000 supporters of the new nation on the island. However, the census of 2007 showed slightly over 16,000 people living there.

It didn’t take long for the government to react. On January 28, the news reported that the police had seized illegal money and identity cards issued by the self proclaimed new nation. Jose Thorel, a French prosecutor, told one source that the government was focusing on allegations of the false use of titles and swindling.

In early June 2010, Athanase Terii, who seems to be the real leader of the group, used a room in the Assembly of Polynesia to meet with about 80 of his supporters. He appeared wearing a crown and a toga, declared himself King Pakumotu, and said that all of French Polynesia was now under the control of his government. He was personally to be in charge of state imports and exports. Two days afterwards, he was arrested by the police.

Later in the month, free again, he was circulating copies in French, Tahitian, and English of a declaration of his claim for his own ancestral ownership of French Polynesia—its islands, waters, and airspace. He declared that French Polynesia was a mistake, which was now replaced by the Pakumotu Sovereign Republic.

On July 16, 2010, along with a dozen of his supporters, he appeared at the assembly building of French Polynesia so he could hold the initial meeting of his reign. He intended to raise the flag of his new republic, but after a couple hours of demonstrating, the king and his subjects lifted their siege. The building happened to be closed anyway. Three of the royal bodyguards were arrested.

They didn’t go away. Two years later, in July 2012, they were back in the news. The king and about 40 of his subjects occupied an abandoned hospital on Tahiti for several days, claiming to be the rightful owners of the land. About 60 French Polynesian police took control over the situation and ended the occupation.

In April 2013, Terii and 30 followers tried again to take down the territorial flag and raise the Pakumotu banner on the assembly building in Papeete, the capital of the territory.

Last week, the group attempted to occupy land in Outumaoro, an area of northwestern Tahiti that they had evidently been expelled from earlier. Security forces once again foiled their plans.

It is not clear if the declarations that Terii passed out in late June 2010 ever made it onto the Web, and no website for the group has been located. The only official document from the group available in English is a translated proclamation of independence made by Terii in June 2010 and available on YouTube, part one and part two.

In contrast to prominent legislators such as Richard Tuheiava, who use their political positions to champion Tahitian culture, this group appears to thrive on demonstrations and nonviolent protests against French control over the territory. At least their rebellious activities so far have been peaceful and the police responses have been restrained.

Last Thursday, the Nattilik Heritage Centre in Gjoa Haven officially opened. It displays Inuit items taken by Roald Amundsen during his historic voyage through the Northwest Passage. According to earlier news reports, Amundsen stayed in the small community in Nunavut, named after his ship the Gjoa, for nearly two years, from October 1903 to August 1905.

While he tarried in Gjoa Haven, he was particularly fascinated by Inuit material culture. He traded with the local people in order to collect many items which he crammed into his ship. Finally sailing west, he went on to command the first expedition to successfully travel through the Northwest Passage, reaching Nome, Alaska, in 2006. When he returned to Norway, he gave his trove of Inuit items to the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo. He later became the first explorer to reach the South Pole.

Learning of the new museum under construction in Gjoa Haven, officials at the university’s museum decided to donate 15 Inuit items to the new facility, duplicates of pieces in their collections. According to a news report about the opening celebration, the Inuit of Gjoa Haven are quite pleased to see the museum artifacts, which were used in the daily lives of their ancestors.

Items included in the new display include ivory and soapstone carvings, snow knives, traditional oil lamps, and harpoons. The news report about the opening includes an image of a soapstone qulliq, an Inuit oil lamp on display at the museum.

Tommy Tavalok, an elder from the town, reminisced about the way such mundane household items were commonly left at graves. But none remain, even at grave sites. “To be able to see them today gives me a warm feeling,” he said.

In order for the museum in Oslo to agree to return the artifacts to Gjoa Haven, the new facility had to have climate controlled display cases, in order to provide proper protection for the items. Thus, the cases are completely sealed from the outside with a gel included in each case to control relative humidity and keep it stable. This protects the artifacts from drying out.

A committee writing a new constitution for Egypt has banned forced evacuations, like the one 50 years ago that destroyed most of Old Nubia. According to a news report last week, Hoda Al-Sadda, chair of the Rights and Liberties Subcommittee, indicated that the measure is aimed at protecting minority groups—not only the Nubians from southern Egypt but also the Bedouin people of the Sinai region.

Nights of Musk The chair of the full, 50-member committee, Amr Moussa, confirmed the intentions of his group to make the constitution broadly inclusive: “This constitution will be new in the sense that it will be aimed to serve the interests of all Egyptians, rather than the 2012 Constitution that was tailored to serve [solely] the interests of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Moussa added that the new constitution will be completed by the end of November. He will then forward the document to Interim President Adly Mansour, who will place it before the Egyptian electorate in a national referendum.

Another news report, posted to the Internet early last week, explored in greater detail the way Nubians are advocating their interests in the constitution-writing process. The article is based on an interview with famed Egyptian writer Haggag Oddoul, author of a prominent volume of short stories, translated into English as Nights of Musk. Oddoul is serving as one of the 50 members of the constitution committee.

He provided some background about himself. Though born in Alexandria, where he lives to this day, Oddoul is proud of his Nubian heritage. Both of his parents moved north to Alexandria from their village in Nubia. Before he became a writer, Oddoul did construction work and served in the Egyptian army during the 1967 and 1973 wars. He views Nubian relationships with Egypt as one of “rapprochement rather than separation.” He said he appreciates the value of ethnic and racial diversity, and of harmony among peoples.

When he began writing about Nubian issues, he found himself becoming a leadership figure, a role he didn’t necessarily seek. He said he was the one who applied the phrase “right of return” to the Nubian people, exiled from their native lands in southern Egypt due to the construction of the Aswan Dam, yet deserving of the right to move back to the Upper Nile valley. That phrase has potent meaning in the Middle East, where Palestinians forced out of their homes feel they too should have the right of return to their native lands.

He said his activism made him subject to backbiting and criticism, so several years ago he decided to focus his energies on writing his next book. His attitudes changed, however, after the Egyptian Revolution over two years ago. He supported the work of activist Manal el-Tibi, who was the only Nubian member of the committee writing the constitution last year. She attempted to represent their interests, but she resigned due to the animosity of the Muslim Brotherhood majority on the committee toward minority groups.

Oddoul (his name is spelled Adul in last week’s news article) attempted to champion other leading Nubians, such as el-Tibi, for the Nubian seat on this year’s critically important constitution committee. However, he found that he was very widely supported as the favored representative of the Nubian community at large.

He told the journalist that the committee is working in a reassuring, consensual fashion, and he is trying to champion Nubian interests to the full committee in the same way. He keeps a supportive team of other Nubians constantly informed of the issues being discussed by the committee, and he represents their views to it.

Oddoul sees himself as acting in three different capacities. First, he serves on the committee as a citizen of Egypt, someone who has been in the armed forces of his country. Secondly, he serves in the capacity as a Nubian activist and thirdly as a creative writer. He integrates those three roles in his own thinking.

He believes in the importance of Nubian integration within Egyptian society, and disagrees with Nubian separatists. He strongly emphasizes his argument. “We are smart, and we are calling for additional integration, not more isolation.” He does not expect that there will be specific articles in the new constitution dealing with Nubian issues. But he is working with others to make sure that there will be constitutional provisions protecting ethnic and cultural pluralism in their country.

He warns of the impatience of younger Nubians for the recognition of their rights. “Some have said that Egypt, which does not take our rights into consideration, is no longer our country,” he said. “Thus, it is necessary to develop solutions to counter this growing discourse.” The first solution is obviously the development of a fair constitution that encourages respectful exchanges and equitable solutions to problems such as the historic discrimination suffered by Nubians.

Oddoul mentioned how his suggestions in the past about promoting the Nubian people and their culture have been ignored by Egyptian authorities. For instance, he suggested to Farouk Hosny, the former Minister of Culture during the Mubarak regime, that an African cultural festival should be organized at Abu Simbel, the famous temple complex in southern Egypt south of Aswan.

He saw this as a way of promoting Egypt’s connections with the rest of Africa. Such a festival would have spotlighted the Nubian people, of course. Hosny supported the idea, but the rest of the Mubarak government was negative to the suggestion, so it got nowhere.

The U.S. government shutdown because of Republican unhappiness with Obamacare prompts the question why the law exempts the Amish from the mandatory medical insurance provisions. According to a Reuters news story last week, the Amish don’t have to purchase the insurance because they insure themselves, within their own communities and in their own ways.

An Amish carpenter told the reporter, “we have our own health care.” He added that when the Amish need medical care in a hospital, the church community will pay the bills if the family can’t. The reporter writes that the Amish handle medical bills that exceed the resources of individual families with auctions, church aid, and negotiated discounts with local hospitals, which accept cash payments in return for lower rates. The article expands on these points.

The exemption for the Amish in the U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010—commonly referred to as the Affordable Care Act or simply as Obamacare—is really an extension of the much older Social Security system. The Amish refused to go along with the provisions of social security or to cooperate with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, which was charged with taxing people like self-employed farmers.

According to Donald Kraybill, well-known expert on the Amish society, “there was an Amish guy who refused to pay Social Security. IRS agents confiscated his horses while he was out in the field plowing.” It was a public relations disaster.

But a 1965 U.S. law exempted the Amish from the requirement that they must participate in social security. The provisions of that law were then included in the Affordable Care Act to also exempt them from the newly mandated required individual health insurance. As Prof. Kraybill explained, “the basic religious reason driving their resistance [to insurance] is that, as a religious faith, the church community should take care of its own members.” He added that the Amish also come together to help out when other disasters occur, such as tornados or fires.

Some of the Amish in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, carry identification cards—without photos—which identify them as members of an Amish community. The cards help area hospitals confirm that the bearer is a participant in a local Amish coverage plan.

An Amish man from Kinzers, a community to the east of Lancaster city, explained his opposition to taking aid from the government by saying, “we don’t want government paying for our things. We want to pay our own way.” He explained that most of the Amish families in Kinzers make monthly payments into a hospital aid fund. They also give free-will offerings when families are faced with extra large bills.

Their auctions can generate substantial funding to help with medical expenses. Nicknamed “mud sales” because of the conditions in the fields where they are usually held, these benefit auctions can raise a lot of money. The journalist attended one in Gordonville, another community east of Lancaster city, on a recent Saturday. Hand made quilts donated for the benefit auction went for several hundred dollars each, and used buggies sold for over $4,000 per buggy.

An Amish man at one auction summed all this up by saying that they often rely on assistance to pay their hospital bills. “It’s not stressful. It’s there when you need it.” Jan Bergen, the Chief Operating Officer at the Lancaster General Health System, a major hospital in Lancaster, summed up the Amish approach to medical costs in slightly different terms. “The way they come together to pay for health care is amazing. It’s a tithing. Their sense of responsibility extends beyond themselves and to the community.”

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