Winnemem Wintu Tribe

State of California threatens to destroy sovereign nations captive within it's border, including the Winnemem Wintu, as the State proceeds with a water distribution plan which also threatens the endangered species and ecosystem of the Sacramento inland delta!

2013-07-06 "Request resume, biography and job descriptions for Community and Rural Affairs Advisor Debbie Davis"
message from John E. Colby to Ken Alex, Director for the California's Governor's Office of Planning and Research (OPR) [1400 Tenth Street, Sacramento, CA 95814]; via facsimile to: 19163249936@nextivafax.com; cc: caleenwintu@gmail.com; cc: winnememwintutribe@gmail.com; cc: U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, via facsimile; cc: U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, via facsimile; cc: Governor Jerry Brown, via facsimile; cc: senator.wolk@senate.ca.gov; cc: senator.pavley@sen.ca.gov; cc: danielbacher@fishsniffer.com; cc: rrosenthal@cironline.org; cc: rsalladay@cironline.org; cc: achance@sacbee.com; cc: mcollier@sfchronicle.com; cc: dbutler@mercurynews.com; cc: marcdadigan@gmail.com; cc: will@moving-image.com; cc: northbayuprising@gmail.com; cc: alex@alexdarocy.com; cc: terry@calaware.org
---
Dear Director Alex:
I am writing on behalf of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, as an interested third party who seeks government intervention on their behalf for their cultural survival in the face of Governor Brown's policies which endanger this. They seek information about a government official whose job performance I don't believe they are satisfied with, an official who does not seem to be working in their best interests. Note these are my beliefs about the Winnemem Wintu's opinions — I do not represent them. Information about the Winnemem Wintu can be found on their website: [www.winnememwintu.us]
To ensure their cultural survival in the face of water projects which threaten it — like the Delta two tunnels diversion plan — I am submitting the following California Public Records Act (CPRA) request. First read the linked to article about Winnemem Wintu Chief and Spiritual Leader Caleen Sisk opposing the Delta two tunnels water diversion plan put forth by the Governor: [www.dailykos.com/story/2013/05/14/1208998/-Barrigan-Parrilla-will-oppose-Delta-tunnels-at-Senate-hearing#]
To quote: Caleen Sisk, Chief and Spiritual Leader of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe exposed the peripheral tunnel plan for the scam that it is. "The common people will pay for the project and a few people will make millions. It will turn a once pristine water way into a sewer pipe. It will be all bad for the fish, the ocean and the people of California," Sisk said.
Please also inspect the following blog by marine news journalist Dan Bacher about the planned peripheral canal: [www.dailykos.com/news/peripheral%20canal]
To understand the Winnemem Wintu's connection to the Salmon and our river ways, please view the following video: [youtu.be/NJGRVW5YWig]
I ask for copies of the following for Community and Rural Affairs Advisor Debbie Davis:
* her resumes
* her biographies
* descriptions of her job duties
I believe these are all non-exempt records. I ask:
* if you determine that any or all or the information qualifies for an exemption from disclosure, to note whether, as is normally the case under the Act, whether the exemption is discretionary, and if so whether it is necessary in this case to exercise your discretion to withhold the information.
* in case you decide that any of the information is exempt, please explain how the interest in not disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in disclosing it.
* if you determine that some but not all of the information is exempt from disclosure and that you intend to withhold it, that you redact it for the time being and make the rest available as requested.
* if there is any information in these records which is private and you decide it is exempt information, yet it is in an otherwise disclosable document, please segregate the private information by redacting it while providing me the rest of the unredacted record.
* if these documents are available in an electronic format such as standard audio and video formats, MS Power Point Presentation (PPT), Apple Keynote format, Portable Document Format (PDF), eXtensible Style Language (XLS), MS Word Document (DOC), Hypertext Markup (HTM), Rich Text Format (RTF), plain electronic text (TXT), or as hyperlinks to the Internet that they be provided to me in one of those forms, preferably in their native form.
I am willing to pay a fee of up to $10 for this request. If you estimate the cost of completing this request will exceed that amount, please contact me first before completing it with a fee estimate. If this request would entail special searches which would incur search fees to me, please contact me first with a fee estimate.
Thank you for fulfilling this CPRA request to help me assist the Winnemem Wintu survive as a distinct cultural group in the face of water planning policies by the Governor which threaten their very cultural survival. Please confirm receipt of this email via email or telephone voicemail.
Respectfully yours, [signed] John E. Colby, Ph.D.

"Dravidia"

This page is a work in progress.

Indian Country (Captive Nations held by the USA Federal Government)

U.S. Federally Non-Recognized Indian Tribes -- Index by State [http://www.kstrom.net/isk/maps/tribesnonrec.html]

Demand Sovereignty for the Captive Nations of the "Indian Country" [link]
In 1823, the Christian Doctrine of Discovery was quietly adopted into U.S. law by the Supreme Court in the celebrated case, Johnson v. McIntosh (8 Wheat., 543). Writing for a unanimous court, Chief Justice John Marshall observed that Christian European nations had assumed "ultimate dominion" over the lands of America during the Age of Discovery, and that - upon "discovery" - the Indians had lost "their rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations," and only retained a right of "occupancy" in their lands. In other words, Indians nations were subject to the ultimate authority of the first nation of Christendom to claim possession of a given region of Indian lands. [Johnson: 574; Wheaton: 270-1]

The "USA Federal Department of the Interior - Bureau of Indian Affairs" administers the 563 jurisdictions held as concentration points for the hundreds of nations captive within the USA Federal jurisdiction of North America which are classified as "Indian" as according to historical English definitions used by the English speaking settlers of North America.
There are a number of types of "Indian country" recognized by US law: reservations, informal reservations, dependent Indian communities, allotments, and special designations.
To be recognized as "Indian country", usually, the land must either be within an Indian reservation or it must be federal trust land (land technically owned by the federal government but held in trust for a tribe or tribal member). For most purposes, the types of Indian country are as follows:

1. Reservations (18 USC 1151(a)). Historically, Indian reservations were created when particular tribes signed treaties with the United States. Among other things (treaties often included provisions for tribal members to receive law enforcement, education, health care benefits, and to retain hunting/fishing rights) the tribes typically transferred their traditional lands to the United States government but "reserved" part of their lands for tribal purposes. These "reserved" lands became known as "reservations". Later, many "reservations" were created by presidential executive orders or by congressional enactments. As defined by 18 USC 1151(a), "Indian country" consists of all land within a reservation including land that is privately owned and land that is subject to a right-of-way (for example, a publicly accessible road).  However, some reservations have been "disestablished" or nullified by such things as federal court decisions or later congressional enactments.

2.  Informal Reservations - if a reservation has been disestablished or if the legal existence of a reservation is not clear, remaining trust lands that have been set aside for Indian use are still Indian country (Oklahoma Tax Commission v. Chickasaw Nation, 515 US 450 and Oklahoma Tax Commission v. Sac & Fox Nation, 508 US 114).

3. Dependent Indian communities (18 USC 1151(b)). In US v. Sandoval (231 US 28) the US Supreme Court ruled that pueblo tribal lands in New Mexico are "Indian country" and in US v. McGowan (302 US 535) the Court ruled that Indian colonies in Nevada are also "Indian country". The results of these decisions were later codified at 18 USC 1151(b) as "dependent Indian communities". The Court has interpreted "dependent Indian communities" to be land which is federally supervised and which has been set aside for the use of Indians, Alaska v. Native Village of Venetie (522 US 520).

4. Allotments (18 USC 1151(c)). Primarily from 1887 until 1934, the federal government ran programs where some parcels of tribal trust land were allotted or assigned to particular Indian persons or particular Indian families (but further transfers were to be temporarily restricted by the federal government). Some of these allotments were later converted to private ownership. However, when the allotment programs were frozen by Congressional enactment in 1934, many parcels of land were still in restricted or trust status - these remaining parcels are "Indian country" even if they are no longer within a reservation.

5.  Special Designations - Congress can specially designate that certain lands are Indian country for jurisdictional purposes even if those lands might not fall within one of the categories mentioned above.  An example of this is Santa Fe Indian School in Santa Fe, New Mexico (Public Law 106-568, section 824(c)).

Collasuyo

The People are called "Qullana", and since 2000, the Collasuyo extends into the jurisdictions of Republic of Ecuador,  Republic of Peru, Plurinatinoal State of Bolivia,  Republic of Chile and Republic of Argentina
Since 2006-01-21, the Collasuyo Apu Mallku [Supreme King] is Evo Morales   

Republic of Peru President Ollanta Humala -


Plurinational State of Bolivia
"Indigenous Autonomies in Bolivia; Part I: Legal Guidelines and Gaps"
[http://ain-bolivia.org/2012/02/indigenous-autonomies-in-bolivia-part-i-legal-guidelines-and-gaps]

Information:
Andean Information Network
[http://ain-bolivia.org]


Grassroots Community Movement / Movimiento Comunidades de Base
[http://www.pusinsuyu.com]



2013-05-04 "Peru deputy minister resigns as Humala rolls back indigenous law"
by Mitra Taj from Reuters [http://www.trust.org/item/20130504183910-lvy3n]:
LIMA, May 4 (Reuters) - A key Peruvian official tasked with implementing a law to give indigenous groups more rights has resigned to protest efforts by President Ollanta Humala's cabinet to roll back the law to protect mining investments.
Deputy Culture Minister Ivan Lanegra, who confirmed his resignation on Saturday on Twitter, was upset the government decided to exclude Quechua-speaking communities in the mineral-rich Andes from being covered by Peru's "prior consultation law," a number of sources told Reuters.
That law gives indigenous communities the right to shape natural resource developments that affect them, but does not allow them to veto projects.
Still, mining companies in one of the world's top minerals exporters were worried the law would slow new projects by making community approvals more difficult.
Reuters reported in an exclusive on May 1 that Mines and Energy Minister Jorge Merino had persuaded Humala to keep Quechua communities from being covered by the law, because Merino feared its broad application in the Andes would hold up a $50 billion pipeline of mining investments.
Foreign investment in mining has traditionally powered Peru's fast-growing economy.
Merino has argued that Quechua communities in the Andes are not "indigenous" but instead "peasant" because they mixed with Spanish colonizers centuries ago, often have formal town assemblies, and are less isolated than Amazon tribes.
Humala has made comments echoing Merino's position.
It is unclear whether Lanegra's resignation will further delay the application of the law in the Amazon, where it is still expected to cover tribes near Peru's oil and gas reserves.
"I am grateful for the honor to have served my country and led such a challenging process that has only seen its first chapter," Lanegra said on Twitter.
Humala had touted the prior consultation law as a salve to widespread and sometimes violent conflicts over mining and energy projects in Peru. Many communities have organized to hold up projects that they say could reduce scarce water supplies, cause pollution or fail to generate sufficient jobs and tax revenues.
When he signed the law in 2011, Humala listed the Quechua as one of the indigenous groups that would be covered by the law to "build a great republic that respects all its nationalities."

Mayangna

Nacion Mayangna / Region Autonoma del Atlantica Norte


Mayangna knowledge deep in the heart of Mesoamerica
By Paule Gros1 and Douglas Nakashima2
A World of Science, Volume 6, No. 3, October-December 2008
[http://portal.unesco.org/science/en/ev.php-URL_ID=6684&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html]:
One of the last extensive areas of Central American tropical rainforest lies along the border of Nicaragua with Honduras. This transboundary area, which includes the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve in Nicaragua and the Rio Plátano Biosphere Reserve on the Honduran side, has come to be known as the Heart of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor. The second-largest rainforest in the Americas after the Amazon, it is of utmost importance for the conservation of Central American biodiversity. The area is also home to the indigenous Mayangna and Miskito peoples who have occupied these lands for centuries.
Unfortunately, the sweeping advance of the agricultural frontier, illegal logging and the organized illegal trade in plant and animal species are threatening the area’s biological and cultural diversity. The Mayangna and Miskito communities in the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve refuse to be passive bystanders.
In their struggle to defend their homeland, they first embarked on a landmark claims process that culminated in May 2005 in the Nicaraguan government’s recognition of land titles for 86 Mayangna and Miskito communities. This land settlement provides the communities with full rights over lands used for agriculture, hunting and gathering, as well as co-dominion with the State over remote conservation areas located in the highlands of the Isabelia Mountain Range. Together, the indigenous territories and the co-management areas cover the greater part of the Bosawas core zone.
Recent studies reveal that the Mayangna and Miskito have succeeded in containing the deforestation of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve by marking and peacefully patrolling the boundaries of their territories. This outcome, documented using satellite imagery, is all the more remarkable in that the agricultural frontier has swept across vast areas and penetrated unhindered into the core zone of the reserve, only to be halted by the vigilance and determination of the indigenous communities.3

We are a people both humble and proud -
Who better to introduce the Mayangna than themselves:
"We are an indigenous group that lives along the banks of the small rivers that constitute the headwaters of the Prinzapolka, Coco and Wawa rivers. We are a humble people yet, at the same time, very proud. … Our culture is very different from that of other indigenous groups and that of the mestizos. We conserve nature and continue to live surrounded by living beings, both plants and animals. "
In Nicaragua, the Mayangna population is estimated at 20 000, one-third of whom live in the indigenous territories of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve. Agriculture centred primarily on the production of rice, beans, bananas and yucca is the mainstay of the contemporary Mayangna way of life but the original pursuits of hunting, fishing and gathering are still of great importance. Indeed, for many Mayangna communities, fishing remains the primary source of protein.
Following meetings in late 2003 with assemblies of Mayangna leaders and members of the Amak, Arangdak and Santo Tomas de Umra communities, UNESCO’s Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (LINKS) programme launched a project to record the collective knowledge and worldviews of the Mayangna people. The following year, a close-knit team of Mayangna led by Nacilio Miguel of Arangdak began fieldwork in the community of Arangdak on the Lakus River, under the scientific direction of conservation biologist Paule Gros and the guidance of ethnobiologist Douglas Nakashima, the authors of the present article.
The project focused on the communities of Lakus River, in order to ensure an in-depth understanding of Mayangna knowledge at one particular location. However, since 2005, numerous consultations have been held with representatives from all other Mayangna communities, to guarantee that the work and resulting publication would belong to all the Mayangna of Bosawas, as the indigenous leaders themselves had requested.
For the Mayangna, this book, Conocimientos del pueblo Mayangna sobre la convivencia del hombre y la naturaleza: peces y tortugas,4 has a dual purpose. On the one hand, it responds to the desire expressed by the Mayangna peoples to safeguard their intangible heritage, notably their knowledge of nature and the Universe, and to this end to create a pedagogical resource for schools in Mayangna and Spanish. The volume also serves to demonstrate to the scientific community the depth and breadth of local knowledge of the natural milieu and, as a result, the key role that the Mayangna must play in the sustainable use and management of the extensive territories from which they derive their livelihood, which include the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve.

A tale of two turtles -
One legend that the Mayangna continue to share with their children concerns two turtles that, in their language, are named kuah and ahsa: the Mesoamerican slider (Trachemys venusta venusta) and the black wood turtle (Rhinoclemmys funereal) respectively. In earlier times, so the story goes, the slider and black turtle lived together in the depths of a large river pool. However, yapu, the American crocodile (Crocodylus acutus), devoured many turtles, showing a marked preference for black turtles, as it seems it was a friend of the slider. The black turtle reluctantly decided that it would have to flee to survive. It escaped to the headwaters of the river where no crocodiles resided. This is why, today, the slider lives in the lower reaches of the river alongside the crocodile, whereas the black turtle frequents the streams of the headwaters, where it has befriended was nawahni, the water tiger, with whom it shares caves along the banks of the streams.
The story of kuah and ahsa weaves Mayangna ecological understandings, with their unique cosmovision of the world in which they live. On the one hand, it spells out differences in the distribution and preferred habitats of the two turtle species, as well as their ecological relationship with key predators or ‘partners’ with whom they co-exist: the crocodile and the water tiger. The latter creature, on the other hand, is a mysterious being, unknown to science, which may in fact trace its roots to cosmologies shared widely among Amerindian cultures, in which the terrestrial world is mirrored by a watery underworld populated by water beings.
The story of the slider and the black turtle is but one of the innumerable gems that the Mayangna are recording and preparing to publish next year in Conocimientos del pueblo Mayangna sobre la convivencia del hombre y la naturaleza. This richly-illustrated volume focuses on was dini balna, living things of the aquatic milieu, particularly fishes and turtles.

Piercing the secrets of the fish and turtles of Bosawas -
While some scientific research has been done, no systematic survey of the fishes and turtles of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve has ever been completed. As a result, scientific understanding remains approximate and is primarily based upon extrapolations from research done elsewhere in Central America or even farther afield. Mayangna knowledge therefore offers information and interpretations that complement current scientific data and which can fill this knowledge gap, at least in part.
The information provided by the Mayangna within this LINKS project attests to their extensive, detailed knowledge of the fish and turtle species of Bosawas. They describe river habitats far inland for angh angh, the burro grunt (Pomadasys crocro), a species that scientists generally associate with coastal environments.
Mayangna descriptions of mulalah, the guapote (Parachromis dovii), reveal that the females of local populations are often yellow in colour. While commonplace in Bosawas, this colouration is of rare occurrence elsewhere. In addition, the Mayangna describe massive upstream migrations in winter of susum, the Guatemalan chulín (Rhamdia guatemalensis). At certain well-known places along this migration route, susum can be captured easily and in large quantities. No record of such a phenomenon appears in the scientific literature.
The kikilwi (migration) of susum happens only in a few specific places. It takes place only in winter. When it is on migration, it is easy to capture in large quantities, as the fish are very docile. You can catch up to 30 pounds (14 kg) in one go.
In another vein, certain species serve as indicators of the change of season or of exceptional events. For example, when musiwa, a snook fish (Centropomus spp), is seen jumping out of the water, this is a sure sign of winter. Ahsa, the black wood turtle, is another important indicator but of a very different phenomenon. The Mayangna know that the black turtle is not strong enough to resist a strong current. When they see black turtles adrift, one after another, this forewarns them of a coming flood.
When I see that the river carries ahsa adrift and thisis seen a second time, it is certain that there will be a major flood.
A final example of the breadth of Mayangna knowledge, as well as its application in resource management, is their knowledge of the introduction of fish species. For example, pahwa, the blackbelt cichlid (Vieja maculicauda), is not native to the Waspuk River. Some generations ago, the large quantities of this important food fish were intentionally transported by the Mayangna from the Wawa River to the Waspuk River. The introduction was a success and today the abundant pahwa are fished in large numbers. The etymology of the current fish’s name in Mayngna, pahwa, relates to this event, as it derives from the term pah Wawa meaning ‘from Wawa’.
But the Mayangna also have knowledge of another more recent introduction that is a source of much concern. This is the invasive species for which the Mayangna have not yet coined a name, the tilapia (Oreochromis spp). They refer to it by the Miskito name of krahna. Krahna is said to have escaped from fish farms located either in the Apanas reservoir or along the upper course of the Coco River. It invaded the Coco River system during floods caused by Hurricane Juana in 1988. Year after year, the Mayangna have stood by helplessly as this species has invaded one river basin after another along the Coco River. They have documented this phenomenon, which has been accompanied by declines in native fish species due to competition from, and predation, by krahna.

Intertwining biological, cultural and linguistic diversity -
Mayangna knowledge is more than simply a collection of empirical observations, as useful as these may be for complementing scientific knowledge and building State– indigenous co-management. As illustrated by the legend of the Mesoamerican slider and the black wood turtle, Mayangna knowledge is a complex tapestry that interweaves the empirical and the symbolic, nature and culture into a unified and unique indigenous vision of the world.
The LINKS project documents a full range of information about the 30 fish and six turtles known to the Mayangna communities of Bosawas. This encompasses both new and old techniques employed to locate, entice and capture these animals, as well as the manner in which they are prepared for human consumption and other purposes.
 This project also considers the worldview in which Mayangna knowledge and knowhow of the aquatic world is anchored. This includes important prescriptions and proscriptions concerning liwa, the master spirit of the aquatic world, with whom certain fish and turtles are closely affiliated. They must be treated with particular respect or the transgressor may suffer illness and hardship as a result. Respect includes taking only as many fish as one can use.
In this, the United Nations International Year of Languages, the significance of this project cannot be overestimated. Conocimientos del pueblo Mayangna sobre la convivencia del hombre y la naturaleza will provide the Mayangna communities with a unique, valuable reference work in their mother tongue and Spanish. The volume will also contribute to quality education within the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, which recognizes the values of both indigenous language and indigenous knowledge.
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1. Prior to joining UNESCO as a consultant, Dr Gros worked with the Mayangna of Bosawas from 2000 to 2003, as Field Director of the Biodiversity project of the Saint Louis Zoo (USA)
2. Chief of UNESCO’s Section for Science and Society and head of the LINKS programme
3. Stocks, A., McMahan, B and P. Taber (2007) Indigenous, colonist and government impacts on Nicaragua’s Bosawas Reserve. Conservation Biology 21:1495-1505
4. Mayangna Knowledge on the Co-existence of People and Nature: Fish and Turtles


2013-05-03 "Violence hits Nicaraguan rainforest as land invasions mount"
by Laurie Goering from "Reuters" [http://www.trust.org/item/20130503143717-fz36w/]:
LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Leaders of Nicaragua's indigenous Mayangna community are battling an invasion of land speculators and small farmers into the Biosawas Biosphere Reserve, the second largest rainforest in the Americas, they said this week.
Conflict between the Mayangnas, who have formal land title to the cloud forest, and the invaders has led to the death of several indigenous people, said Aricio Genero, president of the Mayangna nation. The dead included one leader killed in a shoot-out in late April, after a Mayangna scouting party came across outsiders who had cleared 20 hectares of the forest, he said.
Since 2010, invaders into the forest, which lies on both sides of the Nicaraguan-Honduran border, have destroyed around 150,000 hectares of the biodiversity-rich forest, turning much of it into pasture to meet growing demand for beef and dairy products.
Mayanga leaders say they will march on Managua, the capital, next week to demand that Nicaragua's government responds to their calls for help to expel the "colonos" or "colonists". The forest, a UNESCO-recognised biosphere reserve, is jointly managed by indigenous communities and the government.
"The government has a responsibility to protect property rights," Genero said in a telephone interview. "We are simply asking that our rights be respected. We’re willing to work together with the government."
Many "colonos" are believed to be landless peasants from the north of the country and former Contra rebels, said Taymond Robins, a technical adviser to the Mayangna nation. He said the forest, where the Mayanga people have lived for centuries, was turning into "a sort of Wild West, marked by land invasions, armed conflict, social instability, illegal land sales, illegal logging and illegal extraction of mineral wealth. And the government is failing to act".
Genero, the Mayangna leader, said he believed most of the invaders were land speculators. "These are people who have gotten land from the government elsewhere but sold it and then they have moved into our land," he said.
Around 40,000 Mayangna people live in 72 communities within the forest, which covers 8,100 square kilometers, Genero said.

WIDESPREAD FOREST CONFLICT -
Such conflicts, already well known from the Amazon region, are becoming more frequent around the world as demand for food, timber and land to support a growing population runs up against efforts to protect rainforests, which absorb carbon emissions and help stabilize weather. The world’s dwindling rainforests are also home to some of the world’s richest biodiversity, and to indigenous groups who have lived in and managed them for centuries.
A range of studies show that preserving forests is the cheapest and most effective way to slow climate change.
Efforts to slow forest losses to agriculture and logging have had a few successes, particularly in countries such as Brazil and Costa Rica, but forest loss is widespread or accelerating in many other parts of the world, from Central and West Africa to Asian and Pacific nations such as Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.
Nicaragua’s government recognizes the rights of the Mayangna people to the Biosawas Biosphere Reserve, and "our president has always talked of his interest in defending (the environment)," Genero said. But local officials have not acted to stop the land invasions, he said, so "our communities are organizing now to try to stop the 'colonos' ourselves," in part by pressing national and international political leaders to enforce the law.
The issue is important for more than just Nicaragua, Genero said, as "the forest we own is of interest to humanity as a whole".
"We, the Mayangna people, never protested in the past," he added. "It's not our style. But every year, every day, our forest is more and more invaded."

Maasai

Stand with the Maasai!
2013-04-05 message from "Avaaz.org" [http://www.avaaz.org/en/maasai_sto_control/?bKWQIab&v=23811]:
Within hours, Tanzania's President Kikwete could start evicting tens of thousands of the Maasai from our land so hunters can come and kill leopards and lions. Last time Avaaz raised the alarm, the President shelved the plan. Global pressure can stop him again. Click to help us urgently: [http://www.avaaz.org/en/maasai_sto_control/?bKWQIab&v=23811]
sign the petition to President Jakaya Kikwete: "As citizens from around the world, we call on you to oppose any attempt to evict Maasai from their traditional land or require them to relocate to make way for foreign hunters. We are counting on you to be a champion for your people and stop any attempt to change their land rights against their will."

"They’re kicking us off our land to hunt lions"
2013-04-05 message from The Maasai community with "Avaaz.org" [avaaz@avaaz.org]:
We are elders of the Maasai from Tanzania, one of Africa’s oldest tribes. The government has just announced that it plans to kick thousands of our families off our lands so that wealthy tourists can use them to shoot lions and leopards. The evictions are to begin immediately.    
Last year, when word first leaked about this plan, almost one million Avaaz members rallied to our aid. Your attention and the storm it created forced the government to deny the plan, and set them back months. But the President has waited for international attention to die down, and now he’s revived his plan to take our land. We need your help again, urgently.    
President Kikwete may not care about us, but he has shown he’ll respond to global media and public pressure -- to all of you! We may only have hours. Please stand with us to protect our land, our people and our world’s most majestic animals, and tell everyone before it is too late.
This is our last hope: [http://www.avaaz.org/en/maasai_sto_control/?bKWQIab&v=23811]    
Our people have lived off the land in Tanzania and Kenya for centuries. Our communities respect our fellow animals and protect and preserve the delicate ecosystem. But the government has for years sought to profit by giving rich princes and kings from the Middle East access to our land to kill. In 2009, when they tried to clear our land to make way for these hunting sprees, we resisted, and hundreds of us were arrested and beaten. Last year, rich princes shot at birds in trees from helicopters. This killing goes against everything in our culture.    
Now the government has announced it will clear a huge swath of our land to make way for what it claims will be a wildlife corridor, but many suspect it’s just a ruse to give a foreign hunting corporation and the rich tourists it caters to easier access to shoot at majestic animals. The government claims this new arrangement is some sort of accommodation, but its effect on our people’s way of life will be disastrous. There are thousands of us who could have our lives uprooted, losing our homes, the land on which our animals graze, or both.    
President Kikwete knows this deal would be controversial with Tanzania’s tourists - a critical source of national income - and does not want a big PR disaster. If we can urgently generate even more global outrage than we did before, and get the media writing about it, we know it can make him think twice. Stand with us now to call on Kikwete to stop the sell off: [http://www.avaaz.org/en/maasai_sto_control/?bKWQIab&v=23811]
This land grab could spell the end for the Maasai in this part of Tanzania and many of our community have said they would rather die than be forced from their homes. On behalf of our people and the animals who graze in these lands, please stand with us to change the mind of our President.    
With hope and determination, [signed] The Maasai elders of Ngorongoro District      

SOURCES    
The Guardian: Maasai fury as plan to lure Arabian Gulf tourists threatens their ancestral land
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/30/maasai-game-hunting-tanzania]

allAfrica: Land Grab Could Spell 'The End of the Maasai'
[http://allafrica.com/stories/201303290873.html]

IPP Media: Maasai villagers frustrate efforts to vacate for Ortelo
[http://www.ippmedia.com/frontend/?l=52669]

The Guardian: Tanzania denies plan to evict Maasai for royal hunting ground
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/15/tanzania-evict-maasai-uae-royals]

The Guardian: “Tourism is a curse to us”
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/06/masai-tribesman-tanzania-tourism]

New Internationalist Magazine: “Hunted down”
[http://www.newint.org/columns/currents/2009/12/01/tanzania/]

Society for Threatened People: Briefing on the eviction of the Loliondo Maasai
[http://lib.ohchr.org/HRBodies/UPR/Documents/session12/TZ/STP-SocietyThreatenedPeople-eng.pdf]

FEMACT: Report by 16 human rights investigators & media on violence in Loliondo
[http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/58956/print]

New African Vernacular English

New Africa [link] 

"Ain’t No Reason: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect"
2013-03-14 by Lex Friedman [http://the-magazine.org/12/aint-no-reason]:

(Illustration by Shannon Wheeler)
The Oakland, California, school board officially recognized the legitimacy of Ebonics in 1996. Controversy erupted when it issued its decree, but its action was almost entirely misunderstood. No modern linguist embraces the term Ebonics. The more accurate — and less politically charged — label is African American Vernacular English (AAVE).
Linguistics professor Rebecca Wheeler notes, “When the public uses the term Ebonics, it pulls with it all the societal negative connotations — the ridicule, the jokes, the sneering, all of that — so linguists don’t use the term. It’s not a technical term, and we seek to avoid negative associations.”
The educators in California had no plans to teach kids to speak and write AAVE; this wasn’t an attempt to get “ain’t” in their grammar books. Rather, the Oakland school board’s ruling was meant to stop unfairly punishing kids whose first instinct was to speak at school the way they spoke at home.
Oakland wanted to recognize the language’s existence. Others were opposed. The battle still simmers.

Ingredients in language soup -
Folks who paid strict attention in Linguistics 101 — I majored in the subject — might remember pidgins and creoles. A pidgin is a simplified, ad-hoc language shared by speakers who lack a common tongue. It borrows rules and words from all languages involved, and has its own rules as well. But a pidgin isn’t a full language; it lacks the rich vocabulary and structure.
A creole, on the other hand, develops when children start learning and speaking the pidgin as their primary form of communication. Those who speak a pidgin have a native tongue and may speak several languages, and they are well aware that the pidgin is an amalgam. But a creole is the mother tongue of the speaker, who has likely heard and spoken it from infancy while being raised in a world in which pidgin may be the lingua franca.
There’s debate over whether AAVE is a pidgin or a creole or something else entirely. Some suggest that AAVE is a creole that developed in West Africa, from the descendants of pidgins that developed between African slaves and the Europeans who traded them between the 16th and 19th centuries. The other theory (Rubba 1997) is that AAVE is simply a dialect of English that came about “through a history of social and geographic separation of its speakers from speakers of other varieties of English.”
Critics of AAVE attack strawmen — Jim ScareCrows, if you will. “You can’t teach this stuff!” they fret, though no one wants to teach it. And, just as wrongly, they claim that AAVE is a sloppy, messy, unstructured language. Let’s disprove that falsehood first.

Don’t not be negative, nohow -
AAVE doesn’t follow traditional American English’s rules of grammar; it instead enforces its own. Some of AAVE’s grammatical structures closely mirror those of French. Here are a couple of examples.
A common AAVE construction follows this pattern:
* "I ain’t got none."
* "I ain’t singin’ nothing."
* "I ain’t never eat no sushi."
Teachers of English grammar might cringe at the offensive double negatives on display. They’re ungrammatical in traditional English, but they’re not without precedent. As you can see, AAVE wraps negators on either side of the verbs. Here are those same sentences in French:
* "Je n’en ai pas."
* "Je ne chanterai pas."
* "Je n’ai jamais mangé de sushis."
As you can see, French has precisely the same structure. What in traditional English would qualify as an ungrammatical double negative is in French — and AAVE — the correct and necessary phrasing. Though it obviously differs from English’s rules, the two-part negation in French isn’t wrong, any more than it’s wrong that the word for “annoying” in French is “pénible.” AAVE’s negations follow its own strict grammar.
An interesting element of AAVE’s rules for negatives is that, in negative statements, every possible negation should be used: "I ain’t tell nobody nothing about no sushi."

Imperfectly stated -
Another way that AAVE’s grammar rules mirror those of French: Both employ an imperfect tense. The imperfect (l’imparfait in French) is a kind of past tense that’s used in French for a variety of purposes, most of which are beyond our scope. The French imperfect commonly describes habitual, repeated actions or states of existence. In English, the imperfect tense requires some circumlocation; in French, it’s a verb conjugation.
* "In high school, I used to read a lot."
* "Au lycée, je lisais beaucoup."
The “ais” suffix attached to the verb lire (to read) here indicates the imperfect tense, referring to a regular habit of reading during my high school years. AAVE offers a very similar tense, but instead of suffixes, it leverages the presence of the verb to be.
"He crazy, but he don’t be crazy."
That statement indicates that the individual being described is currently in the act of exhibiting craziness, but isn’t habitually crazy: "He [is] crazy, but he don’t be [in the habit of being] crazy", as it were. The rules in operation: Drop any “to be” verb when describing the present tense (“He crazy”), and use “be” regardless of the subject to identify an imperfect tense verb (“He be crazy”).
AAVE isn’t a perfect parallel to French. Many AAVE grammar rules emulate rules from other languages: Its use of unmarked past tense (for example, omitting the -ed suffix, as in He pass his driver’s test yesterday) is akin to similar structures in Asian and Native American languages; its unmarked plurality in noun phrases (I want three scoop [of] ice cream) hews closely to how Japanese works.
Speakers of it use the same unspoken rules whenever they use the language, and different speakers apply the same rules consistently. If such speakers were just poor at using standard English, you wouldn’t see most AAVE speakers making the same so-called mistakes identically again and again.
It’s easy to label critics of AAVE-as-a-language as racists, and that certainly covers some. But those who criticize without intentional bigotry are likely mis- or uninformed about what constitutes a language. Critics may claim that AAVE is just “made up,” forgetting that American English isn’t exactly codified in our DNA, either.
So AAVE is a language — so what? What the heck was Oakland’s point in the mid-1990s?

AAVE, education, and code-switching -
Ray Jackendoff, currently the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University (and formerly chair of the linguistics program at Brandeis University while I attended the school), studied linguistics under Chomsky at MIT. Jackendoff points me to a passage in his 2002 book, Foundations of Language, wherein he makes this point: "An important part of learning to read is appreciating how orthography reflects pronunciation. If one is teaching reading of Standard English to a child who does not speak it, it is difficult to establish this crucial link."
Speakers who arrive at school without constant experience with Standard English thus start at a disadvantage that is compounded by the rejection of their native mode of speech. And that’s where Oakland’s school board tried to help. Its ruling aimed to encourage teachers to recognize that students growing up with AAVE spoke it as its own distinct language; judging their first language as lousy English, instead of accepting it on its own merits, did those students a serious disservice.
AAVE isn’t the first language to spur such a debate. Some educators in Hawaii have long bemoaned Hawaiian Creole English (HCE), which is spoken by many — probably most — Hawaiians. (It’s often referred to as a pidgin, even though it’s been spoken for generations.) HCE combines English and Hawaiian words and grammar; since its rules are distinct from each, some teachers are inclined to tell students that they’re speaking or writing incorrectly whenever those kids use HCE.
With AAVE, however, it’s 17 years after the school board decision, and the state of the discussion has hardly advanced at all.

What the doctor prescribed -
The debate over HCE and AAVE is really the same ages-old linguistic debate between prescriptivists and descriptivists played out another way. Prescriptivists want to freeze the language as they believe it either is or should be spoken — for instance, they object to the increasing use of “they” as a singular pronoun — while descriptivists aim to document how people actually speak.
Rebecca Wheeler, the professor at Christopher Newport University mentioned at the outset, is a descriptivist, like all linguists. She says that these kids are speaking AAVE because that’s what they know; it’s not wrong — it’s their language. She thus advocates teaching students who speak AAVE at home the concept of code-switching. The general idea is simply the notion of switching between two different languages as needed.
Rather than labeling their language use as incorrect when students speak or write in AAVE, Wheeler says, teachers should instead coach those students: “In formal writing, we say, ‘I’m not doing anything,’ not ‘I ain’t doing nothing.’”
Schools should recognize the legitimacy of AAVE as a language for their students, and teach those students to recognize when and how to switch between AAVE and American English as appropriate. But most schools don’t do that. They simply teach students that the way they speak is wrong. Don’t talk this way; talk our way.
Wheeler says we’re still not doing right by children who grow up with AAVE. “The consequences are that students are being terribly misassessed in our schools. Teachers think that black kids are making mistakes, when really they’re re-creating what they hear and learn at home,” Wheeler says. “They’re counting as mistakes things that are patterns and rule-based, so [the students are] being placed in lower reading groups.”
Many of us unfairly judge others based on how they speak. Kenneth the page, on the late, great 30 Rock, spoke with a southern accent meant to exemplify his yokel-ness. Maybe you think that British accents sound dignified, or that the Minnesota accent on display in Fargo betrays its speakers’ intellectual inferiority.
“People don’t always realize that dialect prejudice still exists,” Wheeler says. “Reminding them, and explaining notions like the grammatical rules that govern AAVE — that’s a true ‘aha!’ experience. That alone is important, and people can grasp it — and grasping it, that’s actually a big thing.” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who famously rarely speaks in public proceedings, grew up speaking Gullah, a creole spoken around the southern Atlantic coast. Justice Thomas told high school students in 2000 about Gullah, “People praise it now, but they used to make fun of us back then.”
Wheeler says that most teachers and school systems are ill-equipped to sort this out. She says, “The testing system remains entrenched in proper grammar, bad grammar, right and wrong. There’s no room for anything else. It’s appalling.”

The future soon -
You might assume — I did — that AAVE is a blip in the move toward the homogenization of language over time due to television, movies, the Internet, and our increasing connectedness. But we’d both be wrong. Wheeler notes that recent work by William Labov at the University of Pennsylvania shows that dialects are diverging in the United States.
“We change and become similar in language only when we’re in true contact, in authentic linguistic contact, with our interlocutor,” Wheeler says. This requires proximity and true two-way conversations by speakers of different dialects. But media isn’t “linguistic engagement,” she notes, and thus doesn’t influence people’s modes of speaking as much as one would intuit.
Couple the failure of the Internet and mass media to assimilate AAVE with the reality that African American populations are increasingly separated from white populations by socioeconomics, and the only reasonable expectation is, Wheeler says, “the divergence of the language.”
This sounds a bit grim and emphasizes the continued disparity between how schools view language and how language actually works for these AAVE speakers and other populations. And if our language is going to diverge despite the Internet, perhaps our educational philosophies can improve because of it.