I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Indigenous people are the world’s poorest, and “suffer alarming conditions in all countries,” according to a United Nations report released yesterday. Indigenous people make up 5 percent of the world population, but constitute 15 percent of the world’s poor and are about one-third of the world’s 900 million extremely poor rural people. There has been improvement in the socioeconomic conditions of Native Americans in the United States over the last couple decades, but the gap between Native Americans and the rest of the population when it comes to the U.N.’s Human Development Index scores is still—to be blunt—abysmal.
“…Predominantly English-speaking settler cultures have supplanted indigenous peoples to a large extent, leading to enormous indigenous resource losses, the eventual destruction of indigenous economies and a good deal of social organization, precipitous population declines and subjection to tutelary and assimilationist policies antagonistic to indigenous cultures,” the report states about the U.S., Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
Conditions have improved in the U.S. in large part due to an increase in self-determination, which has allowed tribes to have greater decision making power in their own lands. Still, Native Americans face significant challenges to achieving equity with non-Native communities:
The average income of Native Americans is still less than half the average for the United States overall. Almost a quarter of Native Americans and Alaska Natives live under the poverty line in the United States, compared to about 12.5 percent of the total population.
Native American life expectancy is on average 2.4 years lower than that of the general population. Moreover, Native Americans and Alaska Natives have higher death rates than other Americans from tuberculosis (600 per cent higher), alcoholism (510 per cent higher), motor vehicle crashes (229 per cent higher), diabetes (189 per cent higher), unintentional injuries (152 per cent higher), homicide (61 per cent higher) and suicide (62 per cent higher).
There’s more in the report, which drives home the point that these trends affect indigenous communities worldwide, with serious ramifications for the rest of mankind:
Indigenous peoples are custodians of some of the most biologically diverse territories in the world. They are also responsible for a great deal of the world’s linguistic and cultural diversity, and their traditional knowledge has been and continues to be an invaluable resource that benefits all of mankind.
Yet, indigenous peoples continue to suffer discrimination, marginalization, extreme poverty and conflict. Some are being dispossessed of their traditional lands as their livelihoods are being undermined. Meanwhile, their belief systems, cultures, languages and ways of life continue to be threatened, sometimes even by extinction.
The report documents the threat to culture, with striking data on language. About 97 percent of the world population speaks 4 percent of existing languages, which means 3 percent—mostly Indigenous people—speaks 96 of the world’s languages, most of which are in danger of becoming extinct.
