ONWARD Page 2 April 2005

continued from page 1... Land and resources. We don’t want to lose them like what happened in the U.S. with the parceling and privatizing in Indian land. “In Central and South America, up until the ‘90s, we were still fighting like cowboys and Indians,” Wiggins continued. Now, he said, the fight has moved to new terrain. “The jungle we can handle. But how do you defend yourself when democracy starts growing, when technology comes in?”

Wiggins urged that Native people be trained in technology management, that they study law at the national and international level and that they learn all they can about sustainable development. There is much the North has to teach about these things, he said, even if its people are forced to recall, somewhat wistfully, that “what they had a long, long time ago still exists in South America. Concepts north and south may be similar, if not always the same. Given the oppressive memory of dictatorships”, Wiggins said, “many Central Americans prefer ‘self-determination’ to ‘sovereignty’ as a political watchword. While some Miskito leaders still talk about independence, Wiggins personally wonders what good it would do. At the same time, radical positions advanced by elders help the Miskitos negotiate with Managua, he admitted, which has granted Indian people a form of limited self-rule.

Across the Americas, indigenous people grapple with the courts to enforce the claims of tradition. People like Armstrong Wiggins, Rennard Strickland, Robert Porter, and Lorene Ferguson both challenge and enforce written and unwritten codes from the past. They know the law can be flexible, even fickle; that international forums can be useful platforms for change, that writing the law anew is as important as learning to read it. And that the law, in one way or another, is always about the land. “Without land rights, our self-determination cannot survive,” Wiggins said.

APPEAL FOR SUMMER JOB

Thsespal Kundan is the pastor in charge of the important work at the Rajpur Moravian Institute in Dehra Dun, India. He and his wife Susan have two children, a daughter, Charisma, age 14 in 8^th grade and a son, Shalomel, age 19, who is in his second year at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, majoring in mechanical engineering. He is on the Dean’s list and a very bright young man. He hopes to go into the automotive industry. He is on scholarship but like all students far from home he needs to find work for the summer. They will be very grateful for contacts. If you have any leads on possible summer work, please call me and I will put you in touch with Shalomel. Thank you for your interest in this gifted and sincere young man.

John H. Giesler 336.922.5858

NOTE FROM CELESTE HANDY

Sr. Celeste Handy is a Salem College graduate and a Cherokee who works with Intervarsity at the Univ. of New Mexico. The Society provides support for her work.

“I must tell you about a trip I went on thus summer with about 40 other staff from all over the country. It was called the Pilgrimage for Reconciliation, and it focused on something called Shalom Theology. Shalom is the Hebrew word for peace or well-being. We spent six weeks learning about how God wants Shalom in our world, how Shalom has historically been broken in this country, and how He wants us to participate in restoring Shalom again. We went to so many amazing places that I had heard about ever since I was a child. I will tell you of just a few of them: Etowah Mounds, the 2,000 year old remains of an intricate Native American civilization; Chief Vann House, the home of one of the Cherokee chiefs during the Trail of Tears period; (The Cherokee chief who invited the Moravians to begin their mission on his land which he gave so that his children could be educated);the Cherokee Phoenix building, the original home of the first native-owned and run printing press; the Eternal Flame, a memorial set up for all those who died on the Trail of Tears and which has a long history with our tribe; the Woodley family, a Cherokee family that led the first half of our trip; a statue of Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute, a historical black university; Little Rock Central High School, the first high school that was racially integrated; Mt. Zion United Methodist Church, the church in Philadelphia, Mississippi which was burned to the ground by racists and which has now been rebuilt; Edmund Pettus Bridge, where many people tried three times to cross in a march for voting rights in the 60’s (the first time, people were tear-gassed); Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed; and lastly, Martin Luther King Jr’s tomb in Atlanta Georgia.

(Thanks, Celeste, for putting our mission in such illustrious company.)