Peaceful Societies

The Cayley Hutterite Colony, located 30 miles south of the outskirts of Calgary, was recognized a couple weeks ago at a ceremony in the city for the flood relief it provided recently in southwestern Alberta.

According to an article in the Nanton News last week, the Hutterites had pitched in to help with flood relief in the town of High River, nine miles to the north of the colony when southwestern Alberta was inundated with very heavy rains last June. The storms caused extensive flooding, described as perhaps the worst in Alberta’s history.

Members of the colony then helped for 10 more days organizing and preparing food at a flood evacuation center in Nanton, 8 miles south of the colony. Many Alberta news sources expressed appreciation for the assistance provided by a number of Hutterite colonies that month.

The ceremony at the Regency Palace Restaurant on August 23 in Calgary was spearheaded by Wayne Cao, a member of the provincial legislature. According to Margot Paul Anderson, “Cao wanted to honour the Cayley Hutterites for all their hard work in Nanton during the flood.” She said that because it is the harvest season on the colony, she personally drove some of the members to the ceremony in Calgary.

Representatives from the colony were presented with a Queen’s Diamond Jubilee pin and legislative scrolls. A photo on the newspaper website shows Ms. Anderson with five Hutterite women, all looking very happy with the recognition the colony has received. Ms. Anderson described the women as “over the moon.”

News stories published in this website, and scholarly literature, confirm the importance of effective outreach and generous giving by the Hutterite colonies to their neighbors. A news story in December 2012, for instance, pointed out the extent of holiday giving in Saskatchewan, and one in 2009 described Hutterite flood relief work in Manitoba.

Chapter 12, “Relationships with Non-Hutterites,” in Janzen and Stanton’s interesting 2010 book analyzes in more detail the complex ways the colonies try to maintain good relations with their neighbors, yet retain their own cultural identity in the face of modernizing pressures and tempting technologies.

Aggressive Gorkha demands for independence from West Bengal, and moderate Lepcha responses to their agitation, have repeatedly shown the cultural differences between the two groups in India.

The Gorkha demands, which have been simmering for years, exploded into the news at the end of January this year when the Chief Minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, announced that she was going to be meeting with Lepcha representatives in Kalimpong, a town in the hills at the northern edge of the state bordering Sikkim. Bimal Gurung, the leader of the Gorkha people and director of its major organization, the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM), took offense and declared that his organization would begin a much more aggressive campaign for separation.

Ms. Banerjee, he declared, had a divide and rule policy. The Gorkhas, an important minority group in West Bengal, are descendants of the Gurkhas, famed for 200 years as fighters from Nepal. The Lepchas, while not as numerous in West Bengal, live in the same northern hills but they are well known for their peacefulness.

The trouble that arose in January and February simmered throughout the spring and summer months, but conditions deteriorated even farther in August. As a review of last month’s news shows, the Gorkhas, however just their demands may or may not be, often take aggressive approaches to promoting their agenda while the Lepchas react in less confrontational ways.

At the end of July, the GJM, not finding West Bengal state willing to meet their demands for more independence, called for an indefinite strike, referred to as a “bandh” in India, to start on August 3. Then the group called off the strike, but reinstated it when the government sent troops into Darjeeling, a large tourist town in the hills. “The state government is using force to quash our democratic movement. We won’t relent under pressure and [we will] go on an indefinite strike from Saturday,” Mr. Gurung said.

The Lepcha response, on August 15, was to present a folk dance in Kolkata during the festivities celebrating Indian Independence Day. The Chief Minister was there, but neither of the two news articles covering the celebration in the huge city mentioned participation by the GJM.

Nine days later, the Gorkha organization ratcheted up the tension. Mr. Gurung publicly declared that the GJM was adopting a policy of hukumat, a Hindi word which means “supremacy.” His speech was a reaction to the arrest of three GJM men, all of whom were carrying weapons. Police evidently had evidence that they were involved with an incident of arson earlier in August.

According to a news story in the Times of India, the Gorkha hukumat declaration prompted the Indigenous Lepcha Tribal Association to announce a conciliatory move. It had earlier said that it had invited Chief Minister Banerjee to visit the hills, but the group said it would rethink that invitation. The convener of the Lepcha Tribal Association, Bhupendra Lepcha, said that the group had invited the Chief Minister a couple months earlier, but, “in view of the present situation,” he decided to convene an executive committee meeting to reconsider the invitation.

According to that news report, other Gorkha groups were beginning to turn away from the GJM. The bandh in Darjeeling had continued for so long, by mid-August, that it was imposing a considerable hardship on people who were not allowed to violate the strike by going out of their homes when they needed to. The Gorkhaland Joint Action Committee decided to lessen its support for the bandh, in part because of the way Mr. Gurung had made his latest announcement without even consulting other Gorkha leaders.

Two days later, it became clear that the Chief Minister was definitely not going to back down from her planned trip to the hills. The Lepchas were having second thoughts: they suspected that she has political motives for her actions. They were nervous about being caught in the middle between the state and the GJM. Both are more powerful, and certainly more aggressive, than they are.

Lepcha leaders have been avoiding reporters, but ordinary Lepchas in Darjeeling are nervous. “We fear the chief minister’s insistence on holding the felicitation [ceremony] in Darjeeling may convey the message that the hill society is divided,” one Lepcha individual said. This might provoke the Gorkhas. One GJM leader said that his organization had not firmly decided how to respond, but they might just prevent the Lepchas from appearing for the Chief Minister’s presentation. She might find herself making her announcements to no audience. Other Gorkhas suggested different strategies.

Last Friday, August 30, someone in Kalimpong put up some anti-Gurung posters around town, but others, presumably GJM supporters, quickly ripped them down. Confronting this sort of agitation that afternoon, a group of about 200 people, mostly Lepchas, held a peace vigil at the Trikone Park near the Kalimpong police station. They demanded that normal, peaceful conditions must be restored to the community.

Nima Lepcha said that the vigil, which he called a “Shanti Dhama,” would continue until peaceful stability is restored. “We want peace and normalcy to be reinstated in the Hills,” he said. “For this the bandh has to be withdrawn. Let the situation be peaceful as it was before. We do not want uncertainty and fear to prevail in the Hills. The present agitation has made the situation highly volatile.”

Chewong elders are often dismayed when animals that are killed in the forest are not shared in the village, a result of the economic and social changes occurring in their society. Signe Howell describes those changes, and the ways the Chewong are coping, in a recently published article.

Starting in 1977, Howell spent 18 months doing field work among the Chewong, a relatively isolated and highly peaceful Orang Asli hunting and gathering society in Peninsular Malaysia. She has returned to visit them in 1981, 1991, 1994, 1997, 1999, 2002, 2006, 2008, and 2010.

In her latest piece on that society, she describes not only the ways they have been changing over the past 33 years, she also analyses her own evolving relationships with the people. She compares her involvement with the Chewong with her fieldwork among the Lio of Flores Island in eastern Indonesia, whom she has also visited repeatedly. Her analysis of the changes in Chewong society, and the persistence of their core cultural values, is of considerable importance to any study of their peacefulness.

Howell notes that logging, new forest roads, and Malaysian government pressures on the Orang Asli (aboriginal peoples) to settle into permanent villages began not long after her initial period of fieldwork. Those outside forces introduced a money economy into their culture, especially cash incentives for harvesting forest products that would be sold to traders who had consumer goods for sale. Such economic incentives quickly produced changes in their social structures.

An elephant sanctuary, established next to their village in 1986, brought tourists to their community at the edge of the forest. Howell felt that she, herself, was becoming, on each visit, as much an historian recording upheavals in their society as an anthropologist attempting to understand their culture.

In this article, she identifies two core values which seemed to be essential in Chewong society 30 years ago, yet which, though muted today, still appear to have considerable importance. The two values she identifies are, first, a strong belief in equality and, second, a moral opposition to what they refer to as punén. The Chewong still cherish both values, though in modified form.

She describes punén as the Chewong abhorrence for eating alone, for not sharing available food. It is a highly condemned, supremely anti-social act. All foods killed or gathered, according to punén rules, are carefully shared. Sharing is—or used to be—a foundational value for people living in a foraging economy. To not share properly might lead to condemnation by everyone, as well as attacks by the spirits.

But the careful rules that prescribed how, when, and what to share have been eroding due to the availability of money and the tendency of people to purchase foods with their own earnings. People still invoke the punén rules, but more selectively now. Foods and other products bought in shops belong to the individuals who purchased them. This contemporary process, of not sharing widely, still makes the people uncomfortable.

Hunters continue to kill game in the forest, and they will still share meat with close family members in the gateway village. But they often will not publicly display the carcasses as they used to, and they may try to withhold information from others about their hunting successes.

However, when game killed in the rainforest is consumed in forest settlements, it will still be shared according to traditional rules. But even while people are living in those forest settlements, the men are also spending time collecting minor forest products for sale. The goods subsequently bought at the store will be retained for family use and not shared.

These changes are fracturing their earlier commitments to equality. Men are earning more money than women, so they are becoming the decision-makers for their families. They also spend excess money on the goods that they want for themselves—televisions, clothing, motorbikes, and such.

The outsiders, the store owners and traders, of course notice the men who are the more successful wage earners and give them increased attention, thus creating additional inequalities in Chewong society. However, counterbalancing this trend, the Chewong are not engaged in the long term acquisition of wealth, which helps preserve their deeply engrained ideology of equality.

In the gateway village, while the men are working, at least at times, for money, the women are mostly confined to childcare and cooking. Nothing prevents them from cultivating crops, but they don’t seem to be doing that. Instead, they are becoming more passive in their settled lives. Howell observes them increasingly sitting about drinking beverages and eating cookies. Female obesity is a new phenomenon, she notes.

The Chewong may feel pressured by the Malaysian authorities to live in the settled village, but they are not helpless victims of modernization. They are fascinated by consumer goods, happy to have easily purchased foods, and to some extent willing to allow their society to change.

But the changes do not always go just one way. When she visited in 1991, she noticed that many Chewong had moved into the gateway village and were using purchased TVs and motorbikes. They seemed increasingly addicted to the consumer lifestyle. On her next visit in 1994, she quickly realized that many had returned to the forest, and the gateway village was mostly abandoned. The reason, the people told her, was that they disliked being so close to all the outsiders.

They also told her how they missed the forest foods and the wild game. The women appeared as if they were enjoying their active lives in the forest more than they had the passive lifestyle of the village. But they were weighing the advantages of both. Some seemed to prefer the forest, others the village, and still others moved for short periods between the two.

The continuing existence of the forest is only possible because their village backs up to an important game preserve, so the land is mostly protected from being logged. The Chewong thus continue to have the choice between the forest life, with the peaceful sharing and equality it entails, and the gateway village, where sharing is less possible and equality is harder to maintain, but consumer goods are easily available.

Howell, Signe. 2012. “Cumulative Understandings: Experiences from the Study of Two Southeast Asian Societies.” In Returns to the Field: Multitemporal Research and Contemporary Anthropology, Ed. Signe Howell and Aud Talle, p. 153-179. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

The Dalai Lama was pleased last week to be involved in opening a solar lighting installation in Ladakh, the latest in a series of alternative energy projects in the region. According to a news report last Thursday, he took part in a ceremony opening a new, 10 KW solar plant in Leh, the capital of Ladakh.

The small power plant was developed by the Ladakh Renewable Energy Development Agency (LREDA), an office in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, of which Ladakh is part. The new plant is located at the Jevetsal Photang, the Summer Palace of the Dalai Lama in Choglamasar, a suburb of Leh.

According to the news release, the Dalai Lama has been an advocate of measures which will help people cope with climate change. He said that it is important to use clean solar power in order to meet the rising demands for energy by the world’s growing population. He argued that access to energy should be a right for all people, without any discrimination.

The spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists said that solar energy will help humanity live harmoniously with the natural environment. He commended LREDA and the Ladakhi people for setting an example for India, and the rest of the world, by establishing many solar photovoltaic power plants in extremely remote villages.

During the inauguration ceremony, Jigmet Takpa, the Director of LREDA, in turn presented the Dalai Lama with a multipurpose solar light, which he seemed to appreciate. LREDA has distributed 15,000 of them since 2011, a number equal to 70 percent of the households in Leh. The costs of those lighting fixtures are affordable even for the people in the isolated Ladakhi communities.

The news report indicated that LREDA’s 125 micro projects scattered across Ladakh, with a combined capacity of 11.2 MW of power, are felt to represent the world’s largest off-grid renewable energy installation in one region. These small scale, solar photovoltaic power plants serve 39 remote villages. They also provide power for commercial greenhouses, heating installations, medical facilities, educational institutions, and religious establishments.

LREDA is also doing research on helping homes to reduce their energy consumption through better management. The Leh District of Ladakh, which previously did not have enough electricity, has become much more energy self sufficient. A majority of the people in the district now benefit directly from renewable energy.

The LREDA website indicates that the agency has developed a comprehensive renewable energy plan for Ladakh, which includes the development of hydro power as well as renewable solar projects. The plan calls for the installation of 10,000 solar cookers, 25,000 solar water heaters, 4,000 solar houses, 7,000 passive solar buildings, and 80 more solar power plants.

A major national energy planning report focusing on the development of rural solar electric grids in India, released in Mumbai in late July, singled out the renewable electrification of Ladakh as an outstanding example for the rest of the country. According to the report, diesel power plants provided 65 percent of Ladakh’s power in 2010, but that number has dropped to 11 percent today and is projected to drop to only 3 percent by 2015.

The report refers to LREDA as “noteworthy.” The authors indicate that it has worked effectively with a wide range of political and management interests to bring renewable energy to many remote areas of Ladakh.

Amish farmers in Ohio are effectively modifying their farming practices to cope with changing global climate conditions.

The Amish “are very well read,” said Dale Arnold, who is the director of energy policy for the Ohio Farm Bureau. “They’re adapting and doing things with hybrids and tiling and sub-surface drainage,” he added. It’s their way of dealing with the problems caused by the changing climate.

Mr. Arnold, who is also a member of the Ohio Climate Change Dialogue Group, added that a major issue for both Amish and non-Amish farmers in the state is keeping water in the soil. Because of the vagaries of climate change, several summers of drought may be followed by rainy seasons. “Amish farms have bought into agricultural drainage in a big way,” he says.

A news article from Ohio last week explored the ways both Amish and English farmers are coping with climate change issues. One of the major differences between the two groups is that the Amish are limited to what they can do with their small-scale technologies. Dean Slates, a program assistant for the Soil and Water Conservation District in Holmes County, explained that Amish farmers do as much as they can, but they work on a small scale compared to the big farming operations.

“If something requires a lot of dollars to adopt, that’s a problem for them” he said. “Technology that requires large outlays is problematic. They don’t have thousands of acres to spread the cost of the technology. Their power requirements for technology are limited to what a horse can do.”

A news report earlier in 2013 described the advanced agricultural practices adopted by an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania, and it appears as if the Ohio Amish are also adopting the latest techniques, despite their reputation for being resistant to technological changes.

But like every other segment of the population, the Amish are not unified in their thinking about global climate change, according to Mr. Arnold. In fact, they do not necessarily agree that the climate is actually changing. Whatever they may think, they all have to cope with the shifting, and sometimes adverse, weather conditions.

Last year, two researchers in the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster, part of the Ohio State University, conducted a survey and found that 83 percent of the Amish respondents felt that there was not enough evidence to support a conclusion that the climate is actually changing. In contrast, 47 percent of non-Amish groups agreed that the climate is changing. The researchers admitted, however, that they had only 12 Amish responses to their survey.

Mr. Arnold summarized, for both the skeptics and the believers in climate change, that “there will always be traditional cycles of drought and rain. The issue is how we can adapt through technology for planting and husbandry to strike that balance.”

“Today, we can all feel the energy and buzz of Nubian youth. As a community, we Nubians have accomplished some of our goals, but the best is yet to come,” Haggag Oddoul said in an interview published on Friday. The comments by the famed Nubian Egyptian writer were included as part of a 5,000 word feature in Al-Ahram Weekly, a major Egyptian publication.

The journalist, Gamal Nkrumah, provides rich details as he covers the background of Nubian discontents, the divisions among the 3,000,000 Nubians, and, most critically, how they have been faring during the recent events that have riven Egyptian society.

The worldwide news coverage of the military coup in Egypt on July 3, and, last week, the bloody suppression of Muslim Brotherhood protests by the Egyptian armed forces, should prompt anyone to be concerned about the fate of relatively peaceful societies, such as the Nubians, caught up in the midst of such turmoil. Mr. Nkrumah, the eldest son of the late president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, is an editor at Al-Ahram Weekly, and has clearly done a lot of research for this article.

He features his interview with Oddoul several times in his lengthy piece. The novelist has often expressed his support for the Nubian right of return—to the lands along the Nile from which they were expelled in the mid-1960s due to the construction of the Aswan Dam. “I have been engaged in the Nubian people’s right to repossess their ancestral homeland for the past 22 years. It is a struggle that has cost me dearly,” Oddoul told the journalist.

Oddoul spoke about himself during the interview. He explained that he was born of Nubian parents in Alexandria, and raised in that city. He and his wife, also a Nubian, lived in Alexandria where he worked as a junior civil servant until he retired at age 55. His fame as a writer only occurred late in his life, in 2005 when he won an award.

He told Nkrumah that he is not optimistic about the chances that the newly launched Nubian Nile Party will achieve much for the Nubian people. He said that the new party was founded by Hamdi Suleiman, a Nubian living in Europe.

Nkrumah may not entirely agree with Oddoul’s assessment. He writes that many young Nubians are quite enthusiastic about the new party, which shows, he feels, that they are still optimistic about improving Egyptian, and Nubian, society. The party was founded early this year, driven, Nkrumah writes, by a desire to escape from racial discrimination, oppression, and the appropriations of their lands. However, he argues that a large majority of Nubians believe their interests are better served by forming political pressure groups or by lobbying efforts than by joining political parties.

Relatively few Nubians joined the Freedom and Justice Party, formed by the Muslim Brotherhood of the ousted President Mohamed Morsi. They were alienated by the preparation of the new Egyptian constitution last year. The lone Nubian involved with the document drafting process, Manal Al-Tibi, resigned in disgust because of the biases insisted upon by the Muslim Brotherhood majority. The constitution appeared to denigrate the African aspects of the Egyptian population—namely the Nubians—in favor of a supposed Arab and Muslim national cultural unity.

The new Nubian Nile Party has yet to be officially registered, probably because 1,000 signatures are needed on a petition for this to happen. The party was not able to get any representatives into the now-closed parliament. In Nkrumah’s view, the importance of the new party is that it brings into the open the discriminations suffered by the Nubian people, their desires for a return to the banks of the Nile, and their other sensitivities.

Adel Moussa, a spokesperson for the Nubian Nile Party, explained to the journalist what he sees as its advantages. “We Nubians have deep roots in Egypt,” Mr. Moussa said. “We reject those who question our Egyptian identity and commitment to Egypt.” He argued that the new party should help prevent other parties from exploiting Nubian issues for their own purposes.

The Al-Ahram Weekly piece fortunately goes well beyond current politics. It explains that Nubia—southern Egypt—is of huge strategic importance to the nation, even if the opinions of the people living along the Upper Nile have not been valued very much. The Aswan Dam itself is a strategic asset to the country, and Nubia provides a physical and cultural link with the rest of Africa to the south. Furthermore, Nubia is rich in minerals, such as gold, manganese, phosphates, petroleum, and high-quality granite.

The article quotes Saleh Zaki Murad, the head of the General Nubian Club in Cairo, who insists, as numerous others do, that the primary issue for Nubians is the right of return to their ancestral lands along the Nile, not religious versus secular concerns. The Nubian people are divided on many issues, not just on politics, but they agree that they need the right to return.

On that issue, they feel they have a common cause with the Palestinians. But unlike them, the Nubians feel that they also suffer discrimination due to their dark African skin color, a racial issue that is not as important among the Palestinians.

Nkrumah emphasizes his perception of the Nubian people: “They have taken their cue from the Nubian youngsters and have by and large shifted to a more forceful attitude,” he writes. He doesn’t explore whether traditional Nubian peacefulness will be compromised by the more assertive approaches of the young people.

Nkrumah, Gamal. 2013. “No Benighted Nubia.” Al-Ahram Weekly, August 16.

Allan Agaw, a 16 year old student, clearly cherishes the sharing tradition of his society—he hopes to give back to his Buid community in the Philippines after he completes his education. The spirit of giving and sharing, an outstanding characteristic of the Buid, was noted in the scholarly works of Thomas Gibson and, more recently, in news stories about Laki Iwan, the generous Buid elder who died in 2006 after donating land for the school where young Agaw is now studying.

A news report from the Philippines last week indicates that the school that Laki Iwan founded in the mountains of Mindoro Island is trying to teach traditional Buid values while educating young people with skills for the modern world. This current report updates earlier ones about the Buid school published in 2006 and 2008.

The issues are similar in all three accounts. Buid children have difficulty fitting into schools composed of mostly mainstream Filipino students. Also, they have problems retaining their cultural values in the face of the dominant Filipino society. Yet many realize the importance of preserving traditional Buid social values—such as the sharing exemplified by Laki Iwan, and, apparently, Allan Agaw.

Mr. Iwan was a 90 year old farmer who died in 2006 after donating numerous plots of land to found schools. He insisted that Mangyan children should be educated and learn Western ways, but that they needed to retain the best of their own culture, such as, for the Buid, their unique written language. (Mangyan is the generic name for the seven different indigenous societies of Mindoro Island, including the Buid.)

The school he founded for Mangyan children in his village, Danlog, had 10 students enrolled in it when he died in 2006. In 2008 it had 48 students, and last week’s report indicates that it now has 60. A Facebook post from 2011 put the number of students at 108: 57 in elementary programs and 51 in high school. It is likely that the news story last week was only giving the enrollment in the high school, though that wasn’t clear.

The reporter last week told stories that are similar to the ones of five and seven years ago, though it differs in some of the details. One difference: last week’s report says that the school, named Pamana Ka, and acronym, was established by the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary (FMM), while the two earlier accounts indicated that it was founded by the Mangyan people. Presumably, both were involved in getting it started. The most recent report indicates that the current director of the school, Aristea Bautista, is from the FMM.

The reporter found that everyone in the school emphasized the importance of Buid traditional culture. Bapa Ane Arevalo, an elder who teaches the ancient Buid script, said, “there are Mangyan[s] who, after studying in the lowlands, come back to the community but don’t speak our language anymore. It’s as if they’re ashamed of being a Mangyan.”

Before Pamana Ka was built 14 years ago, young Buid who wanted an education had to study in schools in the lowlands that are part of the majority Filipino culture. Clara Panagsagan, a science teacher, recalls being told, in such a school, that as a Mangyan she knew nothing.

Alma Aguilan, a mathematics teacher, noted that at a lowland school she was laughed at and humiliated because of her inability to correctly pronounce the word “present” the first time attendance was called. As time went on, even when she knew answers, she still hesitated about participating in classes for fear of having similar experiences. The need for Pamana Ka, a school by and for the indigenous kids, was evident.

Students remain on the Pamana Ka campus most of the year in dormitories, one for the boys, one for the girls, since their homes are so far from the school. The staff also live in the community because their home villages are scattered all over the mountains of Mindoro.

Margie Munoy Siquico, who formerly taught at Pamana Ka, told the journalist that the education of the students doesn’t stop for vacation breaks. She says that all the subjects taught in the school—reading, science, math, Filipino—are infused with Mangyan traditions and cultures because all the teachers themselves are from Mangyan communities.

The Buid elders in Danlog also play an important role in imparting their skills, practices, knowledge, and spiritual values to the students and teachers, especially through the stories they tell. Aristea Bautista, the school director, indicates that the school is committed to restoring “the faith … of the children in indigenous knowledge systems and practices…”

To further that goal, the school curriculum includes the subject “lupaing ninuno,” or “ancestral domain.” Taught at the end of the afternoon every day, the class focuses on teaching Mangyan cultural values, rituals, and agricultural practices.

Juanito Lumawig, Jr., who teaches science in the school, values the ancestral domain course. He told the reporter (in an English translation), “our dream, along with accepting the type of education that we advance, is for everyone to regard our ancestral domain as our sacred spring of knowledge and life.”

The Mangyan students at Pamana Ka raise vegetables and fruits in the fields around the school, and they take care of poultry and fish in a pond on the campus, all of which provide foods that they eat.

The school is getting some financial support from the Department of Education—Indigenous Peoples Education Office, assisted by the Australian Agency for International Development.

When a new cultural center opens in Gjøa Haven, Nunavut, this fall, it will include some items taken from the community over 100 years ago by Roald Amundsen, the famed Norwegian explorer. The Inuit town is named after the small ship sailed by Amundsen and his crew, the Gjøa.

According to a news story last week, and an article in the Wikipedia, Amundsen sailed into the Inuit community in October 1903 and stayed nearly two years, until August 1905. When he finally left, he took with him about 1000 items—tools, weapons, clothing—all materials the Inuit had traded with him. He was evidently fascinated by the artifacts of ordinary daily life, the stuff used by people who were well adapted to living in a polar region.

The following year, 1906, Amundsen and his crew finally became the first exploring expedition to make it successfully through the Northwest Passage to Nome, Alaska, and five years later, in December 1911, he made history when he became the first person to reach the South Pole.

When Amundsen returned to Norway from Arctic Canada, he handed over his ethnographic collection to the University of Oslo, where most of the items remain on display at the institution’s Museum of Cultural History. Since some artifacts have been sent to other museums, the staff at the museum decided to repatriate 15 items to the new cultural center in the community where they had come from.

With the community’s new Netsilik Cultural Centre anticipated for completion this fall, the Oslo museum expressed willingness to send some artifacts. Construction of the facility was first announced in 2011. Mayor Soanni Sallerina of Gjøa Haven expressed his excitement about the news of the repatriated items. “It will be very satisfying to see the artifacts that were taken from our ancestors displayed in our museum so our youngsters and elders who are left are able to see them,” he said.

People involved with the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo also appear to be excited about the transfer of items. Tom Svensson, a retired social anthropologist at the university, said, “this will attract more visitors who can now read a full story about the Netsilik, both historically and contemporarily.” He has been helping with the repatriation process.

The Head of the Exhibits Department at the museum, Tone Wang, has traveled to Gjøa Haven to help oversee the transfer of artifacts. She provided details about the Amundsen collection. She said that while the famed explorer was doing scientific work in Gjøa Haven, such as measuring the direction of the magnetic north pole, he also worked on learning Arctic survival skills from the people in the community.

She added that he acquired local artifacts with an unusual degree of enthusiasm. Members of his crew complained, according to their diaries, about their small ship being crammed with Inuit stuff. “They said ‘he’s going completely crazy: he’s stuffing this tiny little boat with ethnographic materials,’” Ms. Wang indicated.

She explained that the items lack any flashy characteristics—they are the stuff used in daily life by the men, women, and children of the community. “He was extremely interested in functionality,” Ms. Lang said, as she pointed to ladles, fish hooks, driftwood bowls, and such.

A firm date for the opening of the new cultural center has not been announced yet, but Mayor Sallerina expects that the materials should be available for public viewing by the end of September or early October.

Gjøa Haven is also the nearest community to a Back River camp of the Utku Inuit band, movingly portrayed by Jean Briggs in her book Never in Anger.

A museum in northwestern Montana is now displaying a special exhibit about the Hutterites, designed to dispel the false images about them aired a year ago by the National Geographic Channel.

The exhibit, prepared by Kristy Calvery, Curator of the Conrad Transportation and Historical Museum in Conrad, Montana, showcases the realities of nearby Hutterite colonies. Conrad, the seat of Pondera County, is located 140 miles northwest of Lewistown, Montana, and is at the edge of the Rocky Mountains. The King Colony, portrayed by the National Geographic Channel (NGC), is located near Lewistown.

National Geographic filming at the King Colony was planned in 2011, and the ten part series that resulted was aired weekly beginning in late May last year. The producers heralded the opening of the television series with a fair amount of self congratulations. NGC executives claimed that there would be no feeding of lines to participants—the series would be a true portrayal of life at a typical Hutterite colony.

A few weeks after the series started, however, Hutterite leaders at the King colony and elsewhere expressed their dismay at what they felt were betrayals by NGC. They claimed that the programs gave “a distorted and exploitative version of Hutterite life that paints all 50,000 Hutterites in North America in a negative and inaccurate way.” They went on to state that scenes and dialogs were contrived, resulting in make believe situations.

Ms. Calvery decided to counteract those inaccuracies by mounting a museum exhibit focusing on the five Hutterite colonies of her own county. She visited those five colonies, which are all part of the Lehrerleut branch of the Hutterite faith. To judge by the museum website, she drew most of her artifacts for the display from a visit to the Midway Colony. According to Janzen and Stanton’s book The Hutterites in North America, that colony is near Conrad.

The display provides basic facts about the Hutterites, and emphasizes the contributions that the colonies make to the broader Montana society. The five Lehrerleut colonies in the county are Birch Creek, Kingsbury, Midway, New Miami, and Pondera.

The exhibit, and the museum, will be open for the rest of August, Mondays through Fridays, from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM.

Reports last week indicated that a Zapotec town has peacefully closed down an unwanted North American mining project. The action contrasts with the violence that has marred relations between some other mines in Mexico’s Oaxaca state and nearby communities.

A news story on July 26th said that the Minera Plata Real mining company had operated in Magdalena Teitipac since May of 2009. Protestors recalled the irregularities of the original mining permits, and the fact that the people had not been properly consulted about the development of the project.

The article alleged that a local official, Andrés Molina Martinez, had been bribed, had then not properly consulted the town Assembly, and had signed a five year contract with the mining firm.

Community members demanded that arrest warrants that had been issued against local protestors be cancelled. They also argued that the mining operations in the Jacalote and Colorada hills were causing serious pollution to the local river, the Rio Dulce.

The Magdalena Teitipac Assembly, at a meeting on February 26, 2013, voted to expel the company. The company evidently then decided to back down and withdraw. Between July 9 and 13, it removed its mining equipment. Company officials René Hernández and José Pilar Salazar supervised the removal of company equipment and personal property.

In the wording of a Google translation of a news release from the community on July 29th, “Magdalena Teitipac reaffirms its opposition to any project that threatens the integrity of its territory and revokes [the] contract assembly agreement signed by the agricultural authorities to conduct exploration work….”

Both the news report of July 26 and the later community press release of July 29 indicated that Minera Plata Real is a subsidiary of the Canadian firm Linear Gold Corporation. A correction was published on August 1. In fact, a Denver-based company, Sunshine Silver Mines, became the owner of Minera Plata Real in 2011.

The August 1st story quoted the cautious words of Neftalí Reyes Méndez, an activist with Alternative Education Service in Oaxaca City. “We cannot affirm that it is a definitive triumph of the community, however the act of having the company take away its machines represents a significant advance in defense of the land,” he said.

News articles in April 2012 and February 2013 described the conflicts, and the violence that has resulted, in other Zapotec communities as they face the presence of international mining corporations and the pollution they sometimes cause in local rivers.

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