One Laptop Per Child Project in Peru

ARAHUAY, Peru (AP) -- Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago.

These offspring of peasant families whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the $188 laptops -- people who can ill afford pencil and paper much less books -- can't get enough of their "XO" laptops.


At breakfast, they're already powering up the combination library/videocam/audio recorder/music maker/drawing kits. At night, they're dozing off in front of them -- if they've managed to keep older siblings from waylaying the coveted machines. "It's really the kind of conditions that we designed for," Walter Bender, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff, said of this agrarian backwater up a precarious dirt road.


Founded in 2005 by former MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte, the One Laptop program has retreated from early boasts that developing-world governments would snap up millions of the pint-sized laptops at $100 each.

In a backhanded tribute, One Laptop now faces homegrown competitors everywhere from Brazil to India -- and a full-court press from Intel Corp.'s more power-hungry Classmate.

But no competitor approaches the XO in innovation. It is hard drive-free, runs on the Linux operating system and stretches wireless networks with "mesh" technology that lets each computer in a village relay data to the others.

Mass production began last month and Negroponte, brother of U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, says he expects at least 1.5 million machines to be sold by next November. Even that would be far less than Negroponte originally envisioned. The higher-than-initially-advertised price and a lack of the Windows operating system, still being tested for the XO, have dissuaded many potential government buyers.

Peru made the single biggest order to date -- more than 272,000 machines -- in its quest to turn around a primary education system that the World Economic Forum recently ranked last among 131 countries surveyed. Uruguay was the No. 2 buyers of the laptops, inking a contract for 100,000.

Negroponte said 150,000 more laptops will get shipped to countries including Rwanda, Mongolia, Haiti, and Afghanistan in early 2008 through "Give One, Get One," a U.S.-based promotion ending December 31 in which you buy a pair of laptops for $399 and donate one or both.

The children of Arahuay prove One Laptop's transformative conceit: that you can revolutionize education and democratize the Internet by giving a simple, durable, power-stingy but feature-packed laptop to the worlds' poorest kids.

"Some tell me that they don't want to be like their parents, working in the fields," first-grade teacher Erica Velasco says of her pupils. She had just sent them to the Internet to seek out photos of invertebrates -- animals without backbones.
Antony, 12, wants to become an accountant.

Alex, 7, aspires to be a lawyer.

Kevin, 9, wants to play trumpet.


Saida, 10, is already a promising videographer, judging from her artful recording of the town's recent Fiesta de la Virgen.



"What they work with most is the (built-in) camera. They love to record," says Maria Antonieta Mendoza, an Education Ministry psychologist studying the Arahuay pilot to devise strategies for the big rollout when the new school year begins in March.

Before the laptops, the only cameras the kids at Santiago Apostol school saw in this population-800 hamlet arrived with tourists who visit for festivals or to see local Inca ruins. Arahuay's lone industry is agriculture. Surrounding fields yield avocados, mangoes, potatoes, corn, alfalfa and cherimoya.

Many adults share only weekends with their children, spending the work week in fields many hours' walk from town and relying on charities to help keep their families nourished.
When they finish school, young people tend to abandon the village.

Peru's head of educational technology, Oscar Becerra, is betting the One Laptop program can reverse this rural exodus to the squalor of Lima's shantytowns four hours away.

It's the best answer yet to "a global crisis of education" in which curricula have no relevance, he said. "If we make education pertinent, something the student enjoys, then it won't matter if the classroom's walls are straw or the students are sitting on fruit boxes."

Indeed, Arahuay's elementary school population rose by 10 when families learned the laptop pilot was coming, said Guillermo Lazo, the school's director. The XOs that Peru is buying will be distributed to pupils in 9,000 elementary schools from the Pacific to the Amazon basin where a single teacher serves all grades, Becerra said. Although Peru boasts thousands of rural satellite downlinks that provide Internet access, only about 4,000 of the schools getting XOs will be connected, said Becerra.

Negroponte says One Laptop is committed to helping Peru overcome that hurdle. Without Internet access, he believes, the program is incomplete. Teachers will get 2½ days of training on the laptops, Becerra said. Each machine will initially be loaded with about 100 copyright-free books. Where applicable, texts in native languages will be included, he added. The machines will also have a chat function that will let kids make faraway friends over the Internet.
Critics of the rollout have two key concerns.

The first is the ability of teachers -- poorly trained and equipped to begin with -- to cope with profoundly disruptive technology. Eduardo Villanueva, a communications professor at Lima's Catholic University, fears "a general disruption of the educational system that will manifest itself in the students overwhelming the teachers."

To counter that fear, Becerra said the government is offering $150 grants to qualifying teachers toward the purchase of conventional laptops, for which it is also arranging low-interest loans.
The second big concern is maintenance.

For every 100 units it will distribute to students, Peru is buying one extra for parts. But there is no tech support program. Students and teachers will have to do it. "What you want is for the kids to do the repairs," said Negroponte, who believes such tinkering is itself a valuable lesson. "I think the kids can repair 95 percent of the laptops."

Tech support is nevertheless a serious issue in many countries, Negroponte acknowledged in a phone interview. One Laptop is currently bidding on a contract with Brazil's government that Negroponte says demanded unrealistically onerous support requirements.

The XO machines are water resistant, rugged and designed to last five years. They have no fan so they won't suck up dust, are built to withstand drops from a meter and a half and can absorb power spikes typical of places with irregular electricity. Mendoza, the psychologist, is overjoyed that the program stipulates that kids get ownership of the laptops. Take Kevin, the aspiring trumpet player.

Sitting in his dirt-floor kitchen as his mother cooks lunch, he draws a soccer field on his XO, then erases it. Kevin plays a song by "Caliente," his favorite combo, that he recorded off Arahuay's single TV channel. He shows a reporter photos he took of him with his 3-year-old brother.
A bare light bulb hangs by a wire from the ceiling. A hen bobs around the floor. There are no books in this two-room house. Kevin's parents didn't get past the sixth grade.
Indeed, the laptop project also has adults in its sights.

Parents in Arahuay are asking Mendoza, the visiting psychologist, what the Internet can do for them. Among them is Charito Arrendondo, 39, who sheds brief tears of joy when a reporter asks what the laptop belonging to ruddy-cheeked Miluska -- the youngest of her six children -- has meant to her. Miluska's father, it turns out, abandoned the family when she was 1.

"We never imagined having a computer," said Arrendondo, a cook. Is she afraid to use the laptop, as is typical of many Arahuay parents, about half of whom are illiterate? "No, I like it. Sometimes when I'm alone and the kids are not around I turn it on and poke around." Arrendondo likes to play checkers on the laptop. "It's also got chess, which I sort of know," she said, pausing briefly. "I'm going to learn."

Amazon Could Lose More Than Half Its Forest

Amazon Could Lose More Than Half Its Forest, Group Says

Michael Casey in Bali, Indonesia

Associated Press
December 7, 2007

The impact of climate change and deforestation could wipe out or severely damage more than half of the Amazon forest by 2030—making it impossible to keep global temperatures from reaching catastrophic levels, an environmental group said this week.

Several recent studies have suggested similar findings, but other scientists say the size and complexity of the Amazon leaves many questions about the rain forest's future open to debate. Brazil's Environment Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

"The importance of the Amazon forest for the globe's climate cannot be underplayed," said Daniel Nepstad, author of a new report by the World Wide Fund (WWF) For Nature released at the United Nations' climate change conference in Bali, Indonesia.

"It's not only essential for cooling the world's temperature, but also such a large source of fresh water that it may be enough to influence some of the great ocean currents, and on top of that, it's a massive store of carbon."

Sprawling over 1.6 million square miles (4 million square kilometers), the Amazon covers nearly 60 percent of Brazil.

Largely unexplored, it contains one-fifth of the world's fresh water and about 30 percent of the world's plant and animal species—many still undiscovered.

Large swaths of forest like the Amazon are also valuable "carbon sinks," or absorbers of carbon dioxide. Deforestation pours carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and at the same time kills off carbon-absorbing vegetation.

Tipping Point

The WWF said logging, livestock expansion, and worsening drought are projected to rise in the coming years and could result in the clearing of 55 percent of the rain forest. If rainfall declines by ten percent in the Amazon, as predicted, an additional four percent could be wiped out.

Scientists say if global temperatures rise more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels, the risks to the environment and to people will be enormous. It is essentially the "tipping point" for catastrophic floods and droughts, rising sea levels, and heat wave deaths and diseases.

"It will be very difficult to keep the temperatures at 3.6 degrees (Fahrenheit) if we don't conserve the Amazon," said Nepstad, who is also a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts.

According to the WWF, deforestation in the Amazon could result in 55.5 billion to 96.9 billion tons of carbon dioxide being released into the environment by 2030, an amount roughly equivalent to two years of global carbon emissions, by some estimations.


Earl Saxon, a climate change expert with the World Conservation Union, said the report was consistent with "all the best science" on the issue and recognizes there are "opportunities the delegation in Bali can take to protect the Amazon basin."

However, Milton Nogueira, a Brazilian government consultant on climate change who is also part of his country's Bali delegation, said such predictions on the Amazon's future should be taken lightly given its "size and complexity."

"It is such a big, complex system that no one can predict what will happen," he said. "It is like you are looking at a blond and blue-eyed boy and saying he will be an Olympic champion."

In its report the WWF said saving the Amazon requires a shift to sustainable logging practices, implementation of land-use polices that are already on the books in the country, and the provision of money to developing countries including Brazil to reduce deforestation.

"We can still stop the destruction of the Amazon, but we need the support of the rich countries," said Karen Suassuna, a climate change analyst with WWF-Brazil. "Our success in protecting the Amazon depends on how fast rich countries reduce their climate-damaging emissions to slow down global warming."


Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

No Protection for Unusual Tribe

ASUNCION, Paraguay (Reuters) -- Paraguay's Congress rejected on Thursday a proposal to protect an Indian tribe that has avoided contact with outsiders.

Indian rights organizations warned that the nomadic Ayoreos are doomed to die or be run off their land by ranchers, unless their territory is turned into a reserve.

The group lives deep in the untouched forest of the northwest, known as the Chaco, growing subsistence crops and hunting wild pigs and anteaters with spears.

But the land they roam is owned by businessmen who have been encroaching steadily to raise cattle or log its valuable hardwood forests.

After a year of debate, lawmakers rejected a bill that sought to expropriate 114,000 hectares (281,700 acres) of the privately-owned land and turn it into a reserve for the Ayoreo.
"It's very bad news for the the Ayoreo and for Paraguay. Their survival is now seriously at risk," said Jonathan Mazower, research coordinator at the London-based group Survival International, which campaigns to protect tribal peoples.

Mazower called the bill the "first serious attempt" to protect the tribe, which has an estimated 5,000 members.

Since the 1960s, some of the Ayoreos have been either coaxed out of their seclusion by Mennonite missionaries who settled the area -- or forced by bulldozers to flee their small gardens.

Many died in violent clashes with settlers or from disease. But an unknown number has resisted all contact with the outside world and their existence was confirmed last year when 17 of them appeared at the edge of the scrub in search of water. They told outsiders that their relatives in the forest did not want to come out but needed help to resist encroachers.

"A very rapid and violent cultural change will be forced on these people," said Jose Zanardini, an Italian anthropologist who has worked with the Ayoreo for several years. Nobody knows exactly how many Ayoreos there are, but Zanardini estimates six or seven extended families with no history of outside contact remain.

"They will be forced to undo thousand of years of history in one or two years and go from being hunters and gatherers to working as day laborers," he said. The Ayoreo is the last tribe of its kind in South America outside the Amazon basin, where there are some 50 Indian groups that have avoided outside contact.

Paraguay's constitution recognizes the right of its estimated 90,000 Indians, or 2 percent of the population, to preserve their land, but in practice little is done. Activists say the center-right government has always sided with the powerful landowners who bought the land at bargain prices.

Deputy Francisco Rivas, who voted against the bill, said the landowners could commit to protecting the Ayoreo lifestyle, but critics were skeptical. "They feel they've lost the war against the white man," Zandarini said.

News - Brazil Busts Illegal Logging Ring in Amazon Reserve

Source - Planet Ark/Reuters

CUIABA, Brazil - Brazilian police on Wednesday broke up a suspected illegal logging ring involving Indians, environmental officials, ranchers and businessmen believed to have felled and sold around 2,000 truckloads of logs from an Indian reserve in the Amazon.

A police statement said 17 people had been arrested and dozens more suspects were being hunted in four states.

Those detained included three leaders of the Trumai Indian tribe who lived in the Xingu National Park and four officials of the environmental protection agency IBAMA who had issued permits authorizing logging in prohibited areas of the reserve.

About 1.4 million cubic feet (40,000 cubic metres) of wood, equivalent to 2,000 truckloads, were extracted from Xingu over an unspecified period of time and transported and sold to lumber businesses, the police said.

The Xingu National Park covers 11,000 square miles (28,000 sq km) in Mato Grosso state in the southern Amazon basin and is home to about 4,000 Indians from 14 tribes.

Officials tracking the destruction of the world's largest rain forest estimated that about 6,500 square miles (16,700 sq km) of forest -- an area about the size of Hawaii -- could have been lost legally or illegally in the year to July 2006.

Corruption inside IBAMA, which was reorganized last month, has been part of the problem. Dozens of IBAMA officials have been arrested in recent years for similar schemes.

Story Date: 18/5/2007

News - Brazilian Rancher Guilty in American Nun's Murder

POSTED: 3:20 p.m. EDT, May 16, 2007

Story Highlights

• Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura guilty in murder of American nun Dorothy Stang
• Moura, a Brazilian rancher, sentenced to 30 years as mastermind behind shooting
• Stang had attempted to halt rampant jungle clearing by loggers and ranchers
• Trial a key measure of making masterminds of land-related killings accountable

BELEM, Brazil (AP) -- A Brazilian rancher was convicted Tuesday of ordering the killing of an American nun and rain forest defender in a case seen as an important test of justice in the largely lawless Amazon region. A judge sentenced him to 30 years in prison.

A jury voted 5-2 to convict Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura of masterminding the shooting of 73-year-old Dorothy Stang on February 12, 2005, deep in the rain forest that she had been working decades to defend.

Judge Raymond Moises Alves Flexa said Moura "showed a violent personality unsuited to living in society," adding that the "killing was carried out in violent and cowardly manner." The sentence is the maximum in Brazil, which does not have the death penalty.

Stang's brother David, who flew to Brazil for the two-day trial, trembled and wept after the verdict. "Justice was done," he said. He expressed hope that another rancher accused of ordering his sister's killing, Regivaldo Galvao, might soon be tried. Galvao is free on bail while his lawyers file motions to avoid prosecution.

Stang, a naturalized Brazilian originally from Dayton, Ohio, helped build schools and was among the activists who worked to defend the rights of impoverished farmers in the Amazon region. She also attempted to halt the rampant jungle clearing by loggers and ranchers that has destroyed some 20 percent of the forest cover.

Tuesday's verdict came even though three other men convicted in connection with the killing -- a gunman, his accomplice and a go-between -- recanted earlier testimony that Moura had offered them $25,000 to kill Stang in a conflict over land he wanted to log and develop.

Human rights defenders said the trial was a key measure of whether the powerful masterminds behind land-related killings can be held accountable in the Amazon state of Para. Of nearly 800 such killings during the past 30 years, only four masterminds have been convicted and none are behind bars.

Shortly after Stang's killing, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva ordered the army into the region, suspended logging permits and ordered large swathes of rain forest off-limits to development.

"The sisters are thrilled because it means it's possible to find justice and we want to make it possible for the many more people who were killed to find justice," said Betsy Flynn, a member of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, the same order as Stang.

About 200 settlers from the jungle town of Anapu, in the region where Stang worked, celebrated the verdict at their makeshift encampment across from the court.

"I'm happy because she was a great woman and didn't deserve to be killed," said Eliete Prado, an elderly woman who made an 18-hour bus trip over dirt roads from Anapu to attend the trial.

Moura denied ordering the killing during the trial, and his lawyer mounted a lengthy anti-American tirade in his closing arguments, calling Stang "the fruit of a poisoned tree."

Accusing the United States of crimes ranging from atom bombs dropped on Japan during World War II to the treatment of prisoners at its Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, defense attorney Americo Leal said Stang "shares this DNA of violence, the DNA to kill."

David Stang expressed dismay.

"The trial's about Bida, Dorothy was the victim," Stang said, referring to Moura by his nickname. "So this fantasy world the defense lawyers are trying to create only maintains this cycle of killings."

On Monday, Moura said he did not even know the nun, who had been organizing poor settlers around the jungle town of Anapu for 23 years.

"This thing about money isn't true. This thing about me and Bida talking isn't true," Clodoaldo Carlos Batista said Monday, in recanting his earlier testimony implicating Moura.

Batista, who was sentenced to 17 years in prison as an accomplice to gunman Rayfran Neves Sales, claimed he had been coerced into implicating Moura by two American FBI agents who traveled to Brazil shortly after the murder to monitor the police investigation.

Both Batista and Sales, who was sentenced to 27 years in prison, claimed the agents threatened to send them to the United States, where they could face the death penalty if they did not cooperate. Brazil does not have the death penalty and the most a convict can serve at a single stretch is 30 years.

The judge said Moura must remain imprisoned pending appeal.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

News - "Oil Chief - Do Uncontacted Tribes Really Exist?"

Tuesday, 24 April 2007, 9:28 am
Press Release: Survival International Peru:





The president of Perupetro, the government body responsible for granting oil exploration licences, has caused outrage after calling into doubt the existence of uncontacted Indian tribes in the Peruvian Amazon.

The comments come after the Peruvian government recently opened up 70% of its rainforest to oil exploration. Some of this territory is inhabited by uncontacted tribes. A vast amount of evidence for their existence has been collected by Survival, local indigenous organisations and other researchers going back decades, ranging from the testimonies of other Indians to sightings, encounters, photographs, and even reports of violent clashes with loggers and oil workers. Yet Perupetro's president, Daniel Saba, said during an interview on Peruvian TV, 'It's absurd to say there are uncontacted peoples when no one has seen them. So, who are these uncontacted tribes people are talking about?'

The uncontacted Indians have no immunity to outsiders' diseases because of their isolation from the rest of society and any form of contact, no matter how brief, can be fatal. Following oil exploration on their land in the 1980s, more than 50% of the Nahua tribe died.

Survival's director, Stephen Corry, said today, 'Doubtless Mr Saba would much rather there were no uncontacted Indians in the areas where he wants to explore for oil. Declaring they don't exist at all, however, is a shameful self-fulfilling prophecy. If Perupetro allows companies to go in, it's likely to destroy the Indians completely and then they really won't exist.'

News - "Drug Wars Threaten to Wipe Out Amazon Nomads"

Kelly Hearnfor
National Geographic News
April 27, 2007






Civil strife and wars over the plant source of cocaine are pushing one of Colombia's last hunter-gather cultures into ruinous contact with modernity, rights groups say. For millennia the Nukak Maku have lived a nomadic existence in the tropical forests of southern Colombia in a small swath of land below the Guaviare River. Tribe members still hunt game with blowguns, fish with bows and arrows, and gather berries.















But the Amazon lands that sustain the tribe are being overrun by Colombia's drug war. The tribe's troubles have even led one leader to commit suicide. Clashes between coca-plant-growing colonists, right-wing paramilitaries, left-wing guerrillas, and Colombian antidrug troops—flush with U.S. military aid—are increasing in the tribe's territory.

The estimated 500 remaining members of the Nukak—who made first contact with modern society only in 1988—are caught in the crossfire. "The guerilla groups think [the Nukak] are collaborators with the government, and the government troops think they are collaborating with the guerillas," said Luis Evelis Andrade of Organización Nacional Indígena de Colombia (ONIC), a Bogotá, Colombia-based indigenous-rights group working with the tribe.

"This has meant murders, threats, kidnappings, and blockades of food and medicine that have nearly destroyed the Nukak."

Protection Sought

Things have gotten so bad that last March some 120 Nukak walked half-naked out of the forest and into the stunned jungle community of San José del Guaviare. A tribal leader named Mao-be was soon asking Colombian officials for protection, pledges to cease armed conflicts in their territories, and money for getting back home. Colombia is widely known for its progressive legal stances on indigenous rights. But ONIC's Andrade said the government told the Nukak that it could not guarantee their security.


On August 11 Colombian officials did relocate the Nukak to a protected area in nearby Puerto Ospina. But David Hill, of the London-based indigenous-culture advocacy group Survival International, said the relocation "backfired" and the Nukak have since moved back to San José del Guaviare.


"Gas on the Fire"


Many critics blame Plan Colombia, the U.S. aid program that funds Colombia's coca-eradication efforts. The program has fallen under intense criticism for its aerial spraying of the herbicide glyphosate, which activists say also kills legal crops and causes health problems for residents of jungle communities.
Echoing human rights and environmental groups, Wade Davis, an explorer-in-residence for the National Geographic Society, says Plan Colombia has been a devastating failure. (National Geographic News is part of the National Geographic Society.)

U.S. military subsidies for Colombia's coca wars have been "gas on the fire" of a drawn-out civil war that would have otherwise "petered out due to sheer national exhaustion," Davis said.
The project has failed to diminish coca production but has managed to empower the Colombian military and "rationalize a continuation of the war. … ," he said.

"It has accomplished little except the idiocy of destroying the environment with herbicides."
The U.S. government's Office of National Drug Control Policy maintains that coca acreage under cultivation in Colombia fell between 2001—the year the program started—and 2005.

In addition to drug wars, the Nukak face other threats due to globalization in the region.
In recent years high world commodities prices have sparked an oil and natural gas boom along the eastern slopes of the Andes and the adjacent Amazon lowlands of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia.

"Whenever the Nukak have stood up to these multinational corporations, it has meant more threats, expulsions, and disappearances," ONIC's Andrade said. "They don't have vaccines, proper food, or security."

Hill, of Survival International, said that many activists suspect "that the government's apparent inability or unwillingness to help the Nukak relocate to their territory is due to the fact that there are oil reserves."

Deep Isolation

The Nukak follow a relatively rare preference for living a nomadic life deep in the Amazon forests rather than along settled riverside villages. As a result, their distance from contemporary ways is immense. When asked if they were concerned about the future, Mao-be—the only member who learned some Spanish—seemed to have no concept of the word, according to a March report by the New York Times.

Some Nukak asked if planes that flew over the jungle canopy traveled along invisible roads.
But the Nukak still seem keenly attuned to the problems caused by outsiders. "We are few now, hardly any Nukak remain," Survival International quoted one Nukak man as saying. "The outsiders are many, and have big houses. They don't care that the Nukak are being wiped out."
For some Nukak, this attitude has led to irrecoverable despair: In October, Mao-be killed himself by drinking poison.

"From what we can tell, he felt the responsibility to get the Nukak back home," Andrade said. "He felt he had failed."

Welcome to LIP - Librarians for the Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples

LIP will be a forum for librarians and others to exchange ideas, news, and information about the human rights of indigenous peoples. LIP's focus at present is the Amazon rainforest, and the diverse tribes that live within it. A good site to begin to explore and meet these incredibly interesting and culturally-rich people is http://www.amazon-indians.org.

In the past fifteen years, the UN has pushed forward with recognition and rights for indigenous people. The UN launched the first of two decades specifically meant to focus on and honor indigenous peoples called "The Decade of the World's Indigenous People." We are currently in the Second Decade, which will end in 2015.

Perhaps the two most important acts by the UN were the establishment of the Draft of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which you can read here -
http://www.unhchr.ch/huridocda/huridoca.nsf/(Symbol)/E.CN.4.SUB.2.RES.1994.45.En
and the Creation of the UN Permanent Forum of Indigenous Peoples, which first met in 2002. Their website is - http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/en/about_us.html

Here are a few facts about indigenous peoples:

There are over 370 million indigenous people in some 70 countries worldwide. (UNPFII).

Indigenous peoples inhabit nearly 20% of the planet, mainly in areas where they have lived for thousands of years. (WWF).

Compared with protected area managers, who control about 6% of the world's land mass, indigenous peoples are the earth's most important stewards. (WWF).

Librarians are in an optimal position in the age of computer technology to assist in the preservation and advancement of human rights for indigenous people. Librarians are well-educated, have a community base, and have access to and knowledge of computer technology. We as librarians need to address this issue and create a discourse regarding our roles as librarians and how we can effect progress.

I will continually post news, information, and ideas on this site. All comments, thoughts, and suggestions are welcome.

News - "Amazon Conservation Team Puts Indians on Google Earth to Save the Amazon"

By Rhett A. Butler
November 14, 2006
Mongabay.com

http://news.mongabay.com/2006/1114-google_earth-act.html

Deep in the most remote jungles of South America, Amazon Indians (Amerindians) are using Google Earth, Global Positioning System (GPS) mapping, and other technologies to protect their fast-dwindling home. Tribes in Suriname, Brazil, and Colombia are combining their traditional knowledge of the rainforest with Western technology to conserve forests and maintain ties to their history and cultural traditions, which include profound knowledge of the forest ecosystem and medicinal plants. Helping them is the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), a nonprofit organization working with indigenous people to conserve biodiversity, health, and culture in South American rainforests.

ACT was founded by Mark Plotkin, an accomplished author and renowned ethnobotanist, who has spent much of the past 20 years with some of the most isolated indigenous groups in the world. ACT is active in the Amazon, one of the few places where indigenous populations still live in mostly traditional ways. However, like the Amazon rainforest itself, this is rapidly changing. As forests fall to loggers, miners, and farmers, and the allure of western culture attracts younger generations to cities, extensive knowledge of the forest ecosystem and the secrets of life-saving medicinal plants are forgotten. The combined loss of this knowledge and these forests irreplaceably impoverishes the world of cultural and biological diversity.


Member of the Union of Yagé Healers of the Colombian Amazon (UMIYAC) using GPS to map a section of forest. Photo courtesy of ACT. ACT has pioneered a novel approach to address these problems by enabling Indians to monitor and protect their forest home while passing on their cultural wealth to future generations. ACT is working in partnership with local governments to train Indians in the use of GPS and the Internet to map and catalog their forest home, helping to better manage and protect ancestral rainforests by monitoring deforestation and preventing illegal incursions on their land. At the same time the efforts are strengthening cultural ties between indigenous youths and their parents and grandparents.


Googling for forest conservation

While Indian reservations are nominally protected in parts of Brazil — in fact more than 26 percent of the Brazilian Amazon has been set aside in such reserves — in reality Indian lands in northern South America are suffering from encroachment, especially from illegal miners looking to exploit the region's gold deposits. Since the early 1990s the region that includes parts of French Guiana, Guyana, Venezuela, Suriname, Brazil, and Colombia has witnessed a gold rush that has brought tens of thousands of informal miners across lightly patrolled — and sometimes unpatrolled — borders. These mines have wreaked havoc on the local environment, causing deforestation, mercury pollution, and sedimentation of otherwise pristine rivers. The influx of miners has social consequences as well, ranging from violence between miners and indigenous populations to the introduction and spread of diseases like malaria and AIDS. The situation is so problematic that the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC), the world's largest scientific organization devoted to the study and protection of tropical ecosystems, recently passed a resolution calling upon governments to take action to stop this illegal and destructive mining.


GPS data gathering on a mapping expedition in the Amazon. Image courtesy of ACT. Due to the scale of mining operations and the remoteness of the area, illegal mining has been exceedingly difficult to detect. A clandestine airstrip in cleared forest or a series of riverside sluice boxes can be nearly impossible to pinpoint on the ground, given the vastness of the Amazon. But technology is changing the picture. Google Earth and GPS are proving to be key tools in battling deforestation and helping Indians protect their lands.

Indians, who have access to the Internet at the ACT offices in several locations in northern South America, use Google Earth to remotely monitor their lands by checking for signs of miners. “Google Earth is used primarily for vigilance,” Vasco van Roosmalen, ACT’s Brazil program director, said in an interview with mongabay.com. “Indians log on to Google Earth and study images, inch by inch, looking to see where new gold mines are popping up or where invasions are occurring. With the newly updated, high-resolution images of the region, they can see river discoloration which could be the product of sedimentation and pollution from a nearby mine. They are able to use these images to find the smallest gold mine.”















Vasco van Roosmalen, ACT’s Brazil program director, with a Xingu elder in the southern Amazon. Image courtesy of ACT. GPS mapping of Tumucumaque in Brazil. Image courtesy of ACT. Once the Indians pinpoint suspect areas using Google Earth, they note the coordinates, then go on foot patrol to investigate further or mark the spot for future airplane flyovers, where five to six Indians go up with government officials to scout for illegal incursions. Van Roosmalen says that without the aid of satellite imagery, flyovers can be of limited effectiveness due to the extent of the forest. “The high-resolution images make it a lot easier to actually find these areas,” said Van Roosmalen. “When Google Earth updated these images earlier this year with higher resolution versions, we could find nearly all the disturbances in the forest. Our guys have been finding gold mines we didn't know about at all.”

Van Roosmalen said that ACT has spoken with Google Earth about the project. “We made a presentation earlier this year explaining how we use the images,” Van Roosmalen recounted. “We offered the Google Earth team a list of coordinates where it would be helpful to have sharper images. We also discussed the possibility of finding ways to include the Indians’ nonproprietary data, as a layer with Indian names, on Google Earth.”

Beyond the forest-monitoring capabilities, Google Earth and more generally the Internet, is also helping to strengthen bonds between indigenous children, hungry for technology, and their parents, who are interested in protecting their homeland.

“We have three Indians working in Macapá, the state capital,” Van Roosmalen explained. “The kids are spending time on the computer now and learning very quickly. They are helping their parents use Google Earth to find gold mines near the borders of the indigenous reserve. Not only are the kids having fun with it but they are helping preserve the forest.” "This is the perfect combo of western technology and indigenous custom and know-how," said Plotkin, president of ACT. "We've got guys painted red and nothing else, walking through the jungle with GPS units mapping their land. That's the sweet spot, the best of both worlds."

Two headed invisible jaguars here "Westerners maps in three dimensions: longitude, latitude, and altitude," explained Plotkin. "Indians think in six: longitude, latitude, altitude, historical context, sacred sites, and spiritual or mythological sites, where invisible creatures mark watersheds and areas of high biodiversity as off-limits to exploitation."


A model map created by Indians in Brazil. Image courtesy of ACT. Their maps are also meticulously detailed, including virtually everything associated with a place. "Indians mark where they get materials for houses, bamboo, specific vines, places where they find honey and wood for canoes, anything they eat in terms of palm nuts, brazil nuts, Açaí -- rich palm fruit. For example we're working with the Wayana, a warrior tribe. They have marked two specific parts of the forest where they can find wood hard enough for arrow points. They've marked another point on the other side of the reserve where they get hollow wood to craft the arrow shaft," added van Roosmalen.

The Indians also chart the distribution of medicinal plants -- they use hundreds -- but for security reasons, some highly coveted medicinal plants are not published. In the past there have been problems with biopiracy where outsiders trespass on lands to illegally collect these plants for export. The Indians saw nothing in return.

In addition to plants, the Indians mark all the places they see animals, including game animals and mythological animals that have deep spiritual meaning. "On one of the maps the Kamayura had drawn a two-headed animal, so I asked the shaman what it was," recalls Plotkin. "'A two-headed invisible jaguar' he told me. So I asked if he'd ever seen one. 'No they are invisible and dangerous so we don't go there,' he said. Later I learned that the area marked with the invisible jaguar was a strict no-hunting zone, which was preserved to ensure a breeding refuge for forest wildlife. This was his way of saying that it was a protected area where hunting was not allowed."


There are good reasons that Indians say certain sites are sacred. Watersheds, which ensure clean drinking water, are off-limits to disturbance as are areas of high biodiversity and places with sacred plants. Indians don't want these places over-exploited.

Besides indicating the location of resources, villages, and geographical features like rivers and creeks, the mapping process has helped reestablish bonds between generations in a society where culture is at risk of extinction.

"The Tumucumaque map has over 2000 Indian names that never before had been registered," said van Roosmalen. "This is extremely important because behind each name is a story that can serve as a tie to the land."

"For example when we did one of the first mapping projects, Indians went out into villages and forests to get the names of the places. When they returned, they said it was taking longer than expected because the elders spent half an hour telling them the story behind the name, before they revealed the name. Well, some of these guys thought this through and asked us for tape recorders so they could record these stories, transcribe them into their language, and make a book with the stories behind the names on the map. Now, for the first time, they have educational material about their culture."

"Look, you want to map your land so you head into the forest with GPS and mark your waypoints and your routes, but the monkey at the end of the creek isn't going to tell you the name and history of a place. All the technology in the world is not going to explain to you the spiritual significance of a spot. No, it's the old guy sitting at the back of the hut, the one you've ignored since you were a kid. He's the one with the knowledge. All of a sudden these old guys are being appreciated as tremendous sources of knowledge by the younger generation, conservation organizations like ACT, and government agencies. Now they see the value of these elders when before no one cared."

In Brazil, Van Roosmalen says that the maps themselves are helping younger generations better understand the struggles of their parents and grandparents in the 1970s and 1980s to acquire rights to the land.
"The elders are dying. The younger generation hadn't been learning about the stories of their ancestors or their ties to the land. There were no materials for the school. The main reason the elders asked for these maps was the huge responsibility to hold on to their lands. Their forefathers fought so very hard for these territories -- not having ways to learn about this history, the younger generation is not interested in the land."

"Just last month a researcher told me, 'I thought this land has always been ours. I didn't know we fought so hard for it. Now I need to do a better job of managing it and protecting it.'"

The maps change all this -- they make culture relevant to the new generation and present an easy way for the old generation to pass on their knowledge. Most importantly, the decision to make the maps was that of the Indians. Van Roosmalen says that ACT just comes in with the methodology, but doesn't tell the Indians what to map.

"They know they are making these maps for themselves. They decide what goes into these maps," he says. "The maps empower them and make them more self-reliant."

The maps also have important legal implications for Indians. Maps can be used to establish land rights. For example, says van Roosmalen, in Suriname where there are no indigenous land rights, the maps serve as a very basic tool to help them get rights to their land. In Brazil, vast quantities of land are set aside for Indians but don't have title, meaning that if there is a change to the constitution, they could lose their land.

"A common question from politicians and developers is 'Why do so few Indians need so much land?'" said van Roosmalen. "When you can illustrate it with these detailed maps -- showing that they are using it for all their various purposes -- it's a much more powerful argument than just having a blank map with a green rectangles drawn on it."

Eyes and ears for the government

The maps and Indian involvement also pay dividends for the Brazilian government, concerned about illegal activities and border security. Van Roosmalen says the government has taken an active interest in training Indians in GPS so they can monitor forest areas.

"Brazilian security agencies are very interested in information from indigenous park guards. These guys know these areas better than anyone -- they are the eyes and ear on the ground. With GPS and the Internet, Indians now have the means to pass on information in a form that is useful to the government. Before this technology was available, an Indian might come upon a new airstrip or hear a plane overhead, but he would have no way to communicate with officials. He might know the traditional name for that place but there was no map to identify its location. Now he's able to plot the point on the GPS and look it up on Google Earth. Today he can hand in an entire report with all the supporting information. The government has even linked a database updated by indigenous park guards to national security databases."

Indigenous people can save rainforests and biodiversity

The involvement of Indians in monitoring could play a key role in rainforest conservation efforts. Research has found that indigenous reserves have lower deforestation rates than unprotected regions and observations cited by Plotkin, suggests that indigenous reserves may preserve biodiversity and forest cover better than traditional protected areas.
Plotkin points to Tumucumaque indigenous reserve on the Suriname border as an example.

"Tumucumaque indigenous reserve is inhabited by 2000 Indians and has one gold mine," he said. "Tumucumaque national park is about the same size, maybe a little smaller, on the border of French Guiana. It's officially inhabited by no one has between 10 and 25 gold mines, depending on who you believe. The fact is where you have people with poison-tipped arrows it's a lot less attractive a proposition to destroy that territory and the one next door."

Plotkin says that Brazil's extensive indigenous reserves - which cover more than a quarter of the Brazilian Amazon -- have more conservation potential than the country's poorly patrolled national parks which cover less than 7 percent of the territory.

"If we can help Indians look after their lands as well as watch over after neighboring nature preserves, we'll have tremendous conservation leverage," said Plotkin. "It's our strong belief that the people who best know, use, and protect biodiversity are the indigenous people who live in these forests," said Plotkin.

Plotkin adds that conservation initiatives would be better-served by having more integration between indigenous populations and other forest preservation efforts since "you can't have rainforest Indians without the rainforest. The best way to protect ancestral rainforests is to help the Indians hold on to their culture, and the best way to help them hold onto their culture is to help them protect the rainforest. "

News - "Brazil to Offer Free Internet Access to Amazon Tribes"

"Brazil to offer free Internet access to Amazon tribes"

CNN.COM

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/americas/03/30/amazon.internet.ap/index.html

POSTED: 8:28 a.m. EDT, March 30, 2007

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) -- Brazil's government said it will provide free Internet access to native Indian tribes in the Amazon in an effort to help protect the world's biggest rain forest.
The environment and communications ministers signed an agreement Thursday with the Forest People's Network to provide an Internet signal by satellite to 150 communities, including many reachable only by riverboat, allowing them to report illegal logging and ranching, request help and coordinate efforts to preserve the forest.
The goal is to "encourage those peoples to join the public powers in the environmental management of the country," Francisco Costa of the Environment Ministry said in a statement. "The government intends to strengthen the Forest People's Network, a digital web for monitoring, protection and education."
The ministry said city and state governments must first install telecenters with computers in selected areas, including indigenous lands. The federal government then will provide the satellite connection.
The areas in 13 states, including the Pantanal wetlands and the poor northeast, were chosen by the Environment Ministry, the National Indian Foundation, or Funai, and the government environmental protection agency Ibama, the ministry said.
Francisco Ashaninka, a native Indian from the Ashaninka tribe who works for the western Acre state government, said the arrival of the Internet was a success for the Forest People's Network, created in 2003.
He said there are currently a few telecenters on the outskirts of cities, but that the new ones will be built deep in the forest and will allow Indians easy access to public officials so that they can alert them of illegal miners, loggers and ranchers.
"It will be a real chance for the indigenous communities to acquire, share and provide information to public officials," Ashaninka said. He added the Internet would "strengthen indigenous culture by linking them and providing environmental education."
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