INDIAN COUNTRY TODAY

A group of 15 Seneca Salamanca High School students traveled to the Eleventh Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York City (UNPFII) to present a statement on Papal Bulls and the Doctrine of Discovery they had worked through the year to prepare.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) is scrutinizing the disappearance of more than 600 aboriginal women in Canada, only months after the United Nations announced its own investigation.

The following is a statement given by Suzan Shown Harjo, president of the Morning Star Institute, on the Significance of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in the areas of language, culture and sacred sites, for the conference and consultation with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, James Anaya, at the University of Arizona Rogers College of Law, Tucson, Arizona on April 27

Tonya Gonnella Frichner, a citizen of the Onondaga Nation, Snipe Clan, will receive an honorary degree from Colby College during its 191^st Commencement on May 20.

“If a phantom has at some time traveled this earth, it is racism. I understand this as a phenomenon that is supported by the belief of superiority in the face of difference, in the belief that one’s own culture possesses values superior to those of other cultures. It has not been stated often enough that racism has historically been a banner to justify the enterprises of expansion, conquest, colonization and domination and has walked hand in hand with intolerance, injustice and violence.” – Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Guatemalan Indigenous Leader and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, at the Sixth Lascasianas Symposium in Mexico, 1996.

Rigoberta Menchu Tum’s eloquent words on the history and ongoing effects of racism resonant each year on March 21, the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.