Peaceful Societies

The upcoming Administrator of Tristan da Cunha, Mr. Alex Mitham, paid a two day visit to the Isle of Man last week to get some tips on the administration of a British island dependency. His visit follows an island-to-island exchange, which started in February with the four month stay of a Tristan couple that was designed to strengthen their work skills. It appeared from a news report from the Isle of Man as if the government there is proud of the new relationship.

Flags of the Isle of Man and Tristan da Cunha In May, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the UK announced that Mr. Mitham had been appointed to succeed the present Administrator on Tristan, Sean Burns, who is taking a new post on the much larger British Atlantic island of St. Helena. According to a brief bio that Mr. Mitham sent to the Tristandc website, he has worked for the government for over 10 years in a variety of positions in Revenue, the Home Office, Customs, and the Foreign Office.

Before joining government service, he worked as an architect, primarily on projects designed to improve economic growth in the farming sector. He wrote that he is a fifth generation farmer and that he continues to work on a family farm. He is particularly interested in sustainable farming and wildlife conservation, which is one of the reasons he applied for the post as Administrator on Tristan.

He and his wife Hasene, who is originally from Turkey and has a PhD in international relations, are both avid hikers and outdoors enthusiasts. He wrote that they both look forward to their new posting. Anticipating his new assignment, he visited the much nearer, and far less isolated, Isle of Man last week to get an inkling of what it is like to administer an island community.

Will Greenhow, the Chief Secretary on Mann, and Della Fletcher, Director of External Relations, welcomed Mr. Mitham. During his stay, he visited the chief executives of the departments of Education and Children, Economic Development, Infrastructure, Environment, Food and Agriculture, and Health. He also met with Gary Roberts, the Chief Constable, plus other officers from the Isle of Man Constabulary. Then he had a tour of the island’s hospital.

Ms. Fletcher said, “The Isle of Man has a great affinity with other small island nations and is happy to share its knowledge on key issues such as sustainability. The Island takes its international responsibilities very seriously and continues to build friendships and understanding with countries around the world. We wish Alex well as he prepares to take up his new appointment.”

In response, Mr. Mitham said, “I am looking forward to living and working in Tristan da Cunha and being an active member of the local community. There are challenges ahead for the island in terms of securing economic growth and stability, so it is extremely valuable to see how things are done in the Isle of Man.” It is clear from earlier news stories that the Tristanians are also aware of the need to improve their financial situation.

With a population of 84,000, Mann is of course vastly larger, more complex, and more highly developed than Tristan with its 260 people, but the two dependencies of the UK appear to be developing links that may prove useful in many ways for supporting unique island societies.

Sporadic failures of rainfall in Namibia used to prompt coping measures by the Ju/’hoansi that helped foster their peacefulness, though the situation is different today due to the current drought. Reports indicate that it is the worst drought to hit the region in at least 30 years. In a normally arid country, rainfall measured during the last rainy season at Windhoek, the nation’s capital, was half the normal amount. Crops all over the country are failing, livestock has little to eat, farmers are selling their cattle, and some people face famine.

In May, President Hifikepunye Pohamba of Namibia declared a state of emergency and pledged $20 million of assistance for hard-hit areas. The estimated one-third of Namibians who are especially dependent on subsistence farming are particularly at risk, Aljazeera reports. People living near Tsumkwe, such as the Ju/’hoansi, are in the region affected by the drought and the threats of famine.

Early in June, the office of the prime minister reported that the distribution of over 40,000 tones of maize was proceeding well. The Prime Minister, Dr. Hage Geingob, who is heading up the relief efforts, indicated that water shortages also loom.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies launched an appeal for support on July 8th. Rural Namibians are having trouble even finding wild foods, and harvests of crops, presuming the rains return this coming November, will not occur until well into 2014.

The drought is already spawning social disruptions. The Oshiwambo farmers who invaded the N#a Jaqna Conservancy in late May, near the Nyae Nyae Conservancy of the Ju/’hoansi, claim they acted due to the drought conditions. Other issues might also be causing the problems, such as possible corruption in the administration of the N#a Jaqna Conservancy, though that has still not been resolved.

One source reports that the Namibian police appear to be trying to resolve the situation in the N#a Jaqna Conservancy. They ordered the invaders to remove their fencing and to leave by early July, but so far nothing more has happened. A news report on July 17th indicated that Attorney General Albert Kawana is refusing to accept the severity of the drought as a valid justification for the illegal invasion.

A report on Monday last week noted that food aid to the Tsumkwe Constituency of the nation’s Otjozondjupa region has run out. Tsumkwe is the central town for the Ju/’hoansi San and the Nyae Nyae Conservancy. The distribution of 13,000 bags of maize meal went reasonably well until the end of June when the program ended, though there were some problems with transporting it. Tjatjitirani Kandukira in the Chief Control Office of the Tsumkwe Constituency said that no reports of deaths due to the drought had yet come in. He appealed for more shipments of food.

Some news stories have blamed global warming for causing this drought. That argument may be correct, but anthropologists who studied the Ju/’hoansi while they still lived nomadically reported that the people maintained their peaceful social relationships partly because of the unpredictable rainfall and the potential scarcity of foods that have always been part of human life in that area of Africa.

Draper (1978) wrote that since the Ju/’hoansi lived in a very hostile desert environment, they had to keep moving in order to keep eating, since food and water resources were quite sparse. They did not have any periods of plenty, as people living in other arid regions might have had, and they had no way of storing food supplies. Their food security, she reasoned, rested on the peaceful solidarity of their groups.

Lee in 1972 said much the same thing, though his reasoning went in a slightly different direction. While the Ju/’hoansi lived on the land nomadically, he wrote, the compositions of their camps were quite flexible. People visited other camps frequently and shared their food resources readily. Territorial boundaries were vaguely defined and not defended. Lee found that a major environmental reason for this flexibility was the wide variation in annual rainfall. It varied by as much as 300 percent from one year to the next in any given location where the Ju/’hoansi camped.

He reasoned that the ability of the people to move from a drier location to another spot which had greater rainfall ensured their survival. Their reciprocal use of resources, in fact, helped foster harmony and allowed individuals to avoid violence by separating from one another into different camps.

Thus, the sporadic droughts prompted the Ju/’hoansi to be nonviolent both in order to effectively share resources and to separate from one another when serious conflicts arose. Those environmental conditions had other interesting social and cultural implications.

The variations in food supply meant that, while they were generally able to gather and hunt enough to sustain themselves, there was a lot of risk and uncertainty from the fluctuations. Wiessner (1982) found that the Ju/’hoansi reduced the risks through a method of social obligations and gift giving called hxaro. Those relationships pooled risks, particularly since food itself couldn’t be stored. Since shortages were likely to be localized, the pooling networks were widespread in order to most affectively distribute the risk. The hxaro relationships were particularly characterized by close friendships, which were often fostered through giving hand made items such as jewelry fabricated out of bits of ostrich shells.

The religious and cultural values of the Ju/’hoansi also supported these social adjustments to scarcity. Marshal wrote in 1962 that the Ju/’hoansi frequently addressed prayers to Gao/na, their chief god, for food, for relief from droughts, and for other needed benevolences.

She added that, in Ju/’hoan thinking, since the gods and spirits are capable of both good and evil, they give humans both fortune and misfortune. Human social ills are thus the fault of humans, which they need to address on their own. The gods will punish humanity for their own reasons. In other words, don’t blame the lack of rainfall on supernatural forces—just adjust human societies to cope with unpredictable weather.

It is not clear from current news, however, how the Ju/’hoansi are really coping with the latest drought. Biesele and Hitchcock write in their recent book (2013 [2011]) that part of the normal diet of the Ju/’hoansi now consists of foods from government aid, provided through four distinct programs. The programs are erratic, however, as exemplified by the July news stories, so when the aid periodically fails, the people rely on temporary work, the sales of crafts, and, no surprise, foraging.

The G/wi and the other San peoples are once again heading into court to appeal repression, but this time the government of Botswana is exerting its authority. It has barred their English lawyer from entering the country. News stories in Africa last week and abroad have criticized the most recent action.

The government of Botswana put Gordon Bennett, an English attorney, on what is called their “visa list.” English people normally don’t have to apply for visas in advance to travel to Botswana, but this latest move appears to be a way for the government to prevent him from returning to the country and serving as an attorney for the San peoples.

Mr. Bennett represented the G/wi and the other San societies when they won their appeal in Botswana’s High Court in 2006. The government had forcibly moved the G/wi to resettlement camps despite their having the legal right to live in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR), which had been guaranteed in writing since the British controlled the country.

Under Mr. Bennett’s leadership, the San appeal was approved by the High Court in November that year. The San no longer needed to have a permit from the government to enter the CKGR, the court ruled. The ruling was historic, probably the first in Africa to affirm land titles for a minority indigenous people.

In 2011, again with Mr. Bennett serving as the lead attorney, the San won the right to drill for water on their lands. Since it couldn’t stop the people from entering their homelands, the government had changed its strategy and had sought to prevent them from having access to water. The Botswana Court of Appeals heard that case, and again the G/wi and their allies won. They now have the right to drill wells.

In another San issue this year, one that is outside the boundaries of the CKGR, the government of Botswana sought to expel a San community from their homes in the community of Ranyane in the southwestern section of the nation. Mr. Bennett represented them in a court hearing in June, and once again his side prevailed over the government. Six days later, the government put him on the “visa list.”

This is causing problems for the CKGR San people, including the G/wi, who won that historic court decision of 2006. Despite the wording of the 2006 ruling, and the fact that the government had acknowledged at the start of the court proceedings in 2002 that it would apply to about 700 San people, the government subsequently claimed that only the 189 people who were signatories to the court case would be allowed to enter the CKGR without hassles.

All other San must apply for permits to enter. Those documents are issued for only one month at a time, and the San live in constant fear that government agents—wildlife scouts and paramilitary police—will arrest them for overstaying their permits. So the San scheduled another appearance in court for Monday, July 29, to appeal the government’s refusal to drop their restrictions on people living in the CKGR.

Mr. Bennett applied for a visa, but the Botswana authorities have used a variety of delaying tactics to prevent him from entering the country. It clearly wanted to delay him until after the 29th. Mr. Bennett’s comments last Thursday, reported by a release from Survival International (SI), are worth quoting in full.

“The right to a fair trial normally includes the right to be represented by counsel of your choice. Not in Botswana, apparently—or at least not if you sue the Government. Most of us would struggle to understand why one party to a legal action should ever be allowed to deprive the other of the counsel he has chosen, but the Government sees no problem. It does not even think it necessary to explain itself. Not a good day for the rule of law in Botswana.”

In reaction to this latest news, Jumanda Gakelebone, a prominent San activist, told SI, “it has never been our will to go to court, but the repression, evictions, harassment, and torture carried out by the Botswana government have forced us to talk to them in court.”

The director of Survival International, Stephen Corry, echoed these observations. “This is yet another calculated move by President [Ian] Khama to thwart the Bushmen’s access to justice,” he said. “It’s ironic that Botswana is still thought to be ‘transparent’ and ‘democratic’ when its government has spent years trying to destroy its original peoples. Now, after their successes in court, Bushmen are not even allowed their lawyer. This is a vindictive and repressive step.”

The judge in Monday’s court hearing reserved judgment about the case.

The Yanadi were stigmatized as a “Criminal Tribe” by the British, and while they are still very poor, a recent series of articles suggests conditions may be improving. The Hindu, a major paper in India, has run three news stories over the past year on a small Yanadi hamlet in Andhra Pradesh. They report some fascinating bits of information about the hamlet of Pamulametta, in the Jegurupadu Panchayat (village) of the state. They especially focus on the work of a progressive headmaster in the hamlet school.

An article at the end of June described how a wild civet came into the yard of the primary school and the headmaster, Chilukuri Srinivasa Rao, captured the animal and fed it fruits and vegetables. He explained to the Yanadi children that the civet, which looks somewhat like a cat, is known for its musk glands. They produce a substance that has been harvested for a long time by people for perfumes.

The headmaster said that the mammals used to be raised for the musk, but concerns expressed by animal rights groups, and the availability of synthetic substitutes, have nearly eliminated that business. There are numerous genera of civets, but to judge by the picture showing Srinivasa Rao holding the animal, it appears to be an Asian palm civet, Paradoxurus hermaphroditus.

The Hindu published an article back in September 2012 that may not have included a cute picture of a man holding a charming animal, but it did provide more information about the Yanadi people in Pamulametta. The ancestors of those Yanadi apparently migrated to their hamlet in the northeast sector of the state, the East Godavari District, 90 years ago from the Nellore District, 200 miles away near the city of Chennai.

At first, they subsisted on catching snakes and selling the skins in the local market. But the passage and enforcement of the Wildlife Conservation Act prompted them to abandon that and, instead, catch venomous snakes in the village and let them go in the country. Since the Yanadi are also known for hunting rats, they have helped farmers in the area by catching the rodents whenever their services are needed.

The government started a primary school for Yanadi children in the hamlet eight years ago, but administrators at first had problems attracting teachers. Mr. Srinivasa Rao, who has won several teaching awards at the state level, was willing to come to the hamlet and turn things around.

He worked with the sarpanch at the time, Ms. Y. Devadeevena Kumari, in developing the school programs. Sarpanch is the term for the mayor of a panchayat. They arranged for clothing, notebooks, haircuts, and bags for the 30 children who began attending the school. The teacher got the kids to start drawing as part of their schooling.

Two years after Mr. Srinivasa Rao had started, the school had changed dramatically. Paintings on the walls conveyed the idea of the importance of education and the value of avoiding alcohol. The former president of India, Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, gave an award to the school. It has also recently received an award as the best school in the district. Furthermore, most of the Yanadi men in the hamlet are now avoiding liquor, and the community is nearly alcohol free.

Last week, The Hindu carried its latest story about Pamulametta. Because of a quirk of Indian law, the paper reports, the post of sarpanch of Jegurupadu in an upcoming election is specifically reserved for a woman from a scheduled tribal community. The rich people of the panchayat have been flocking to Pamulametta, courting the support of the Yanadi women. (Another story in The Hindu this week reports that a Yanadi man is contesting the position of sarpanch for a different panchayat in Andhra Pradesh in local elections scheduled for July 31.)

The difficulty is that the candidate must be chosen from among only 110 registered voters out of the 200 Yanadi living in Pamulametta. Oddly, the candidate for sarpanch, according to regulations of the Election Commission, must have no more than two children, must have been a resident for at least five years, and must not have any criminal background. That last point is fascinating, considering Yanadi history.

The Yanadi were designated as a “Criminal Tribe” under the terms of the “Criminal Tribes Act,” a series of laws passed by the rulers of British India. The law, first passed in the 19th century and modified repeatedly, accepted the notion that when members of a tribal society were convicted of crimes like burglary or theft, the entire society could be classified as “criminal”. People such as the Yanadi were not only stigmatized, they became the subject of police harassment and restrictive regulations.

According to a journal article by P. C. Reddy published in 1947, because the Yanadi were excluded from society by the caste system, some of them did, indeed, turn to theft and burglary for their livelihoods. The Indian Criminal Tribes Act was an attempt by the British government to handle people such as the Yanadi, some of whose members coped with discrimination by committing such offenses.

Once a tribal society in a district was labeled as a “Criminal Tribe”, adult male members were then registered and required, for an indefinite period of time, to report to the nearest village police official at 11 pm and again at 3 am every night. A member of a Criminal Tribe accused of a crime could be convicted simply if he happened to be absent from his home that night. The Wikipedia article on the Criminal Tribes Act gives a detailed update on the haunting, and deleterious, legacy of those discriminatory laws for the 60 million people today who are descendents of those “criminal tribes.”

Considering that history, it is fascinating that candidates for the position of a village sarpanch now must be found from within a small Yanadi hamlet.

What prompts violence and warfare among human beings? What are the best ways to promote peacefulness within societies, and peace between them? Is humanity fundamentally aggressive?

Douglas P. Fry Numerous scholars and writers have argued all of those questions. Some seek to prove that all humans are warlike in nature. Their arguments have been based, in part, on assumptions that hunter gatherer societies were frequently at war, facts supposedly derived from the anthropological literature.

Douglas P. Fry and his colleague Patrik Söderberg, both at Ǻbo Akademi University in Vasa, Finland, have written a brief but fascinating article for this week’s issue of Science that addresses those arguments.

Fry and Söderberg review what they call mobile forager band societies (MFBS). They cite several studies, works which have argued that hunter gatherers are, or were, often at war. Warfare is therefore broadly pervasive among human societies, or so the argument goes, and humanity is basically warlike in nature.

The authors suggest, however, that a variety of factors should predict that this is not so. They list nine such predictive issues, such as the observation that the sizes of groups of people in these societies are usually too small to support warfare. Furthermore, the structures of their groups do not facilitate the formation of warlike alliances and they tend to have egalitarian social networks without the need for strong leaders.

But Fry and Söderberg went beyond making suppositions in order to develop a careful research strategy. They extracted a sub-sample of 21 societies from the standard cross-cultural sample (SCCS) using a method that prevented sampling bias. Then they examined the primary scholarly works about each of the societies identified in order to tabulate the instances of lethal aggression in the literature.

Their detailed tables with their findings are presented in supplementary online pages included with subscriptions to the journal, but the results are summarized by the article. They identified 148 instances of lethal aggression in the 21 MFBS. Of those 148, 135 included unambiguous data about the perpetrators and victims of the lethal violence.

They found that 36 percent of what they call “lethal events” occurred right within the small bands—usually consisting of extended family groups—and for 85 percent of the total lethal events, the perpetrators and their victims were members of the same society. The remainder involved people from outside the society: missionaries, colonists, or individuals from neighboring societies. Females were the perpetrators of the violence for only 4 percent of the events. Furthermore, 55 percent of the incidents involved just one killer and one victim. In essence, while there was some violence, incidents of warfare were rare.

Reasons for the violence varied widely, as would have been expected, but most of the events involved what the authors consider to be personal reasons. A large number were related to men fighting over women, unfaithful spouses, revenge killings, interpersonal disputes, thefts, and so on. The authors found that of the 21 societies they looked at, the Tiwi of Australia accounted for nearly half of the incidents of violence, 69 out of the original 148. Their results look far different when they look at just the 20 societies without the Tiwi.

For instance, intergroup disputes resulting in violence accounted for one third of the lethal incidents, but the Tiwi account for three quarters of those. Thus, if the Tiwi results are dropped out, intergroup violence (that is, some type of warfare) drops to only 15 percent of the whole list. Also, regular strings of killings occur frequently in the Tiwi literature, but not nearly so often in the other 20 societies.

From all of their data, the evidence clearly shows that 20 of the 21 MFBS are not especially warlike. Also, the authors write that there were very few instances of violence caused by scarce resources, one of the arguments often made by advocates of the warlike-humanity school of thought.

The authors note that about half of the societies experienced violent events that involved only single individuals. Thus, the facts they turned up about this scientific sampling of MFBS show quite effectively that statements about the prevalence of warfare in among hunter gatherers are not supported by the evidence.

In making their arguments, Fry and Söderberg are infallibly polite and respectful to their opponents, one of the best aspects of the article. Their evidence points to the conclusion “that killing is an exceptional event in human societies…” This is a fascinating study of an issue that is quite important for understanding human peacefulness. Highly recommended.

Fry, Douglas P. and Patrik Söderberg. 2013. “Lethal Aggression in Mobile Forager Bands and Implications for the Origins of War.” Science (July 19) 341: 270-273. DOI: 10.1126/science.1235675

Reports in June that the Tahitians were not allowed to speak their own language in the French Polynesia Territorial Assembly have irritated people in Tahiti. The assembly has taken up the matter and issued a protest, though some members of the opposition, the independence party, are opposed to even asking France for permission to speak their own language.

Édouard Fritch, the President of the Territorial Assembly, asked the President of France last month to help change French laws which require debates in the assembly to be conducted exclusively in the French language. Two laws had been struck down by the Supreme Court of France because the debates on those measures had been conducted, in part, in Tahitian. Fritch pointed out that the debates are translated simultaneously, and that the records of the debates are kept in French.

Last week, the Territorial Assembly passed a resolution requesting that France should recognize Tahitian officially. It asked the president of France to introduce a bill into the national legislature to amend the constitution so it would recognize the language.

Oscar Temaru’s pro-independence party, which is now in the minority in French Polynesia, abstained from voting. One member voted no, however, reasoning that Tahitians did not need the permission of France to speak their own language. Temaru himself added that he would like to have the French language banned in the assembly.

Richard Tuheiava, a senator from French Polynesia, said that the people should not have to ask permission of the government in France on matters like this. “The use of the … Polynesian language is something that is inalienable and inherent to the identity of the Maohi [Tahitian] people—the native indigenous people of French Polynesia,” he said.

The senator explained that Tahitian is widely spoken throughout all of the archipelagos of French Polynesia, each of which has its own languages. Tahitian, however, is clearly the dominant language. “I would say that 75 per cent of the population here in French Polynesia is Polynesian, and out of this…more than half speak the Tahitian language,” he added.

The language is clearly not disappearing, he said. The Tahitian language has been an important part of the work of the assembly since it was created, and asking permission of France to continue to use their own language represents a step backwards, in his opinion. He refers to it as “begging the French government” for permission to speak in Tahitian.

Senator Tuheiava links the preservation and use of the language with the identity and culture of the Tahitian people. “We are obliged … to assert, or to reassert, our identity through our language, our culture, and our land. [This] means that we have to advocate, of course, for the recognition of the official-ness of the Tahitian language.”

Thousands of Ladakhis last week protested a terrorist attack on the Mahabodhi temple at Bodh Gaya, in Eastern India, a spot revered by millions of Buddhists worldwide.

The ancient temple complex in India’s Bihar state was erected on the site where Buddhists believe that Gautama Siddhartha, the Buddha, sat and meditated under a bodhi tree and gained enlightenment. After a further period of meditation, he began to travel and teach about Buddhism.

The Mahabodhi temple, perhaps built about two thousands years ago and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, consists of an elongated spire 55 meters high plus a bodhi tree supposed to be a sapling taken from a bodhi tree in Sri Lanka, which devotees believe was taken as a sapling from the original tree under which Buddha gained his enlightenment.

For reasons that are still not clear, and the news accounts differ, terrorists detonated four or five bombs in the temple premises at the beginning of last week, plus several others at an adjacent monastery. Other bombs were defused. Fortunately, all were fairly low intensity and no one was killed in the blasts. After the first bomb went off, the temple complex was filled with smoke.

An eye witness, Rakesh Kumar, reported that 200 or so people panicked. “It was really terrifying. I am grateful that Lord Buddha saved us,” he told a reporter. The only damage to the temple was to some stairways near the bodhi tree, plus some broken windows, according to an official at the temple. The temple has rapidly grown into an international pilgrimage site in recent years.

The news prompted outrage from Buddhists in Leh, the capital of Ladakh, 800 miles to the northwest. The Ladakh Buddhist Association called for a bandh, a uniquely Indian form of peaceful protest in which, generally, shops, businesses, and public transportation will close for a few hours or a whole day.

On Monday, July 8, Leh was completely shut down, including most government offices, schools and businesses. The roads were deserted. Thousands of Buddhist monks, nuns, and local people formed a procession in the city protesting the attack on perhaps the holiest shrine in the world for Buddhists. They demanded that India should provide security to the Mahabodhi temple equal to that provided for other important temples, churches, and mosques in the country.

The next day, the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council, a governmental organization in the region, strongly condemned the attack on the temple.

Thangaraj, a 23-year old Paliyan man in Tamil Nadu, India, posted some complaints on Facebook about delays by government officials in dealing with problems in his community. His strategy for publicity worked, according to a news report last week.

As the only person in the Alagammalpuram Colony near the city of Madurai to have gotten some education, he was able to lead the protest. Thangaraj publicly asked, via the social medium, the District Collector in the state, Mr. Anshul Mishra, why some basic amenities and housing had not yet been provided to the Paliyans, as required by Indian law. He quickly got attention.

Mr. Mishra saw the Facebook posting and called a meeting at the Paliyan community so he could listen to their problems. One of their issues is their desire to have free access to the forests of the Western Ghats, their traditional mountainous home territory. He quickly responded by telling appropriate Forest Department officials to allow the tribal people to visit the forests without further hassles.

According to G. Dhanraj, a tribal rights activist, the Paliyans also demanded tracts of land that they are supposed to be given under the provisions of the Forest Rights Act of 2006. Provisions of the law, which decree that the tribal people are entitled to concrete dwellings and good drinking water, are not being met. Furthermore, the Paliyans demanded identity cards which will help them avoid being harassed by officials.

The Alagammalpuram Colony was established by the Tamil Nadu state government in 1980 to wean the Paliyans out of their nomadic foraging way of life and settle them into a permanent community. The journalist for The Hindu, the newspaper covering the story, wrote last week that the 17 houses in the colony are now in dilapidated condition.

The residents of the settlement collect nuts, fruits, roots, honey, and twigs from local forests, and they gather grasses which they make into brooms, presumably for sale. They also work for meager wages at nearby farms and mango plantations, where they get paid mostly in rations of rice.

The reporter asked Sadaiammal, a 50-year old Paliyan person, about working under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. The response: “During the last season we worked for a couple of days, but we were [treated badly] and the others did not like our presence. So we stopped going for work.” They work seasonally at best, and rely on rice handouts the rest of the year.

The reporter also spoke with three children, siblings, all of whom were dressed in soiled, threadbare uniforms. Playing around a small temple, they said that they did not have any other clothing to wear. Also, they admitted they didn’t go to school regularly, since the people in the government school are unfriendly toward them.

Recent news in Cavalier County, North Dakota, stirs up memories of major events in American peace history, even though the current developments are relatively mundane. A news report last week indicated that the Cavalier County Jobs Development Authority (CCJDA) is renewing its efforts to buy an abandoned anti-ballistic missile complex in the county.

The back story is important. Six months ago, the U.S. government auctioned off the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, located one mile north northeast of the village of Nekoma, which is 75 miles to the northwest of Grand Forks, in the rolling prairie land of the state. The CCJDA wanted to buy the complex for its development potential, but the winning bid came from a Hutterite colony. The CCJDA is attempting to buy at least the buildings from the Hutterites.

The agency in Cavalier County plans to develop the property into a facility devoted to unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), popularly known as drones. Its plans, under development for nearly 10 years, include a UAS training and education center, a data storage center, a business park for UAS research, and an interpretive center for Cold War history. The 431 acre tract of land includes numerous buildings dedicated to the 1970s-era goal of destroying nuclear missiles coming from the Soviet Union with locally launched, nuclear-tipped, interceptor missiles.

The Spring Creek Hutterite Colony made the winning bid of $530,000 last December after the development group, CCJDA, stopped bidding at $500,000. The journalist writing up the story suggests that the Hutterites may be planning to use the land for agricultural purposes.

However, since the Spring Creek Colony is located in Forbes, N.D., 180 miles south of Nekoma, the Hutterites also may be planning to use the grounds as the nucleus of a new colony some day. Spring Creek is not responding to requests for information.

The Mickelsen Safeguard Complex was designed and built to protect ICBM missile launch silos near Grand Forks from possible nuclear attacks. Though other such anti-missile missile sites were planned, Mickelson was the only such complex actually built. According to the Wikipedia, it was deactivated in 1976, shortly after it had opened, as politics and international rhetoric had moderated.

The federal government stipulated in the sale last December that the purchaser had to maintain the historic character of the facades of the buildings, which occupy about one-third of the 431 acres. One of the buildings, a huge concrete pyramid with four large eyes on its faces for its radar installations, is visible for miles across the prairie.

An article three years ago in a Bismarck paper provided the history of one anti nuclear war protest that focused on the Mickelsen complex. On May 16, 1970, about 1,500 people gathered near the complex, which was still not operational, to protest the folly of nuclear war, of mutually assured destruction, of the insane notion that one side might actually survive such a holocaust.

The Hutterites in the Dakotas of course also have a history of strongly opposing warfare, though they protest in their own way—through not fighting back, through nonresistance rather than active, or even passive, confrontations. In 1918, four young Hutterite men from South Dakota were tortured by the U.S. Army for refusing to participate in any military activities. Their absolute opposition to fighting and war irritated the soldiers so much that they tortured the men relentlessly. Two of them were tortured to death at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

The Hutterites quickly abandoned their United States colonies and moved north to Canada, which at the time was more welcoming to absolute pacifists, though some subsequently moved back to the U.S. and developed colonies again. All of this history, of protests against war and violence stretching back nearly a century in the Dakotas, is brought back to life by the current news about a Hutterite colony purchasing a former anti-missile complex.

The Hutterite interest in the site is, well, interesting. Are they simply planning an expansion of their colony? They must be aware of the symbolism of the Mickelsen site, which suggests that the violence of nuclear missiles can prevent war. Do they plan their own interpretation of its history?

If the Hutterites would develop an interpretive center at Nekoma, would it present a different view of the history of Mickelson than the one planned by the Cavalier County agency that is focusing on drones? Will the Hutterites build a museum or visitors center that celebrates the different ways of peacefully protesting warfare that their regional history suggests? Hopefully, the Spring Creek Colony will provide clues as to its intentions for the historic property at some point.

Back in April, the Piaroa, and other Indian groups of southern Venezuela, issued a statement protesting a recent national mining policy that threatens their forest. News stories in the last few weeks indicated they are getting more insistent—they want to be heard.

According to a report early last week, the group Coordinadora de Organizaciones Indígenas del Estado Amazonas (COIAM), which was fostering the protests three months ago, spent the week in Caracas searching for answers to their questions about their lands. They approached the ministry on indigenous rights, called the Ministerio del Poder Popular para Asuntos Indígenas, but they were ignored.

The Piaroa and their allies expressed their appreciation for the efforts that the government has made for indigenous rights, but they are apprehensive about a convention signed with China that provides for mineral exploitation. The agreements, and the mining that they imply will be coming, could destroy their ancestral lands and the natural environment of the upper Orinoco region.

The indigenous people held a press conference in the Plaza Armando Reverón in Caracas on Friday, June 21, where they spoke about their frustration with the lack of openness of the government. They also called attention to other problems they face, such as education, social planning, and health.

According to one news report, Guillermo Arana, a Piaroa, urged the Venezuelan government to begin a dialog with the Indian groups in order to review the proposed projects. The goal would be to maintain as much normalcy as possible in the indigenous communities if mining does take place. He emphasized that the indigenous people are generally in favor of development, but they want to be part of the review process for proposed projects to make sure they will not harm their cultural patterns.

He emphasized that the development of extractive mining has been discussed in 20 different indigenous communities in the region, and the people are concerned about preserving the natural environment. They also expressed alarm about the climate of violence that can develop in communities where prospecting is going on. They asked the government to take action to prevent this from happening.

Mr. Arana reiterated that the people are not in opposition to the state of Venezuela. They just want an effective dialog about land issues.

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