Indigenous Voices
Description
- Media Type
- Group
- Image
- Text
- Item Type
- Documents
- Description
- The digitized materials presented here form part of a project on “Indigenous, Black, and Women’s Voices” from Latin America and the Caribbean that was funded by the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) program of the Office of the President of York University. The original documents are all located in the Resource Centre of the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) and the Latin American Working Group (LAWG) Collection, a separate space in the Resource Centre.
Founded at York University in 1978, CERLAC and its Resource Centre were inspired by the exiled students and scholars who arrived in Canada from the military dictatorships of the time in Latin America. LAWG functioned as an independent civic organization that engaged in research, publication, and activism; it maintained a unique library that included a large collection of documents on Canadian solidarity and cooperation with Latin American and Caribbean churches, labour unions, peasant and Indigenous movements, women’s organizations, progressive scholars’ networks, and the like.
The digitized Indigenous Voices present documents (in Spanish or English) from a large number of Latin American countries and a few from the Caribbean. They were published by a broad range of sources that included: indigenous organizations in specific countries, human rights agencies that monitored land grabs and repression of indigenous movements (e.g., Survival International), international campaigns (e.g., “500 years of Resistance – 1492-1992” ), movement journals (e.g., Lucha Indígena, published in Peru but dealing with the entire Southern hemisphere as well as Central America and Mexico), and specialized research centres (e.g., Mundo Shuar in Ecuador).
The digitized material is presented to provide a “sample” of the thousands of documents (short and long) available in the CERLAC and LAWG collections. Therefore, some items and documents may be extracted from longer publications, such as Mundo Shuar and Mapuches People of the Land, the 1979 fact-finding report of Canada’s Inter-Church Committee on Human Rights in Latin America (ICCHRLA).
In other cases, only the cover pages and tables of contents of a publication have been digitized to signal that the work is available in the Resource Centre, such as the International Justice Fund’s Report on the Relocation of Miskito Indians by the Nicaraguan Government and the Instituto de Estudios Aymaras bulletin from April 1981, which presents articles on Aymara culture in Peru.
The selection of materials and the work of digitization on Indigenous Voices was conducted by Sebastián Oreamuno, a graduate candidate in the Department of Dance at York University, during the fall of 2022 and winter of 2023. Liisa L. North, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Politics, provided supervision for his work. Together, they prepared the digitized collection of materials that represent a broad swath of perspectives on Indigenous struggles across the region. Only documents that are in the “public domain”, that are not encumbered by “copy right restrictions”, are included. - Subject(s)
- Language of Item
- English; Spanish; Castilian
