Spanish NHS Bulletin Board: Struggles of Indigenous People

By: Louisa Warlitz
This week's Spanish Honor Society bulletin board focuses on the struggles of indigenous peoples around the world. Indigenous people are classified primarily as people who have strong cultural ties to their surrounding region and identify indigenous people. They have their own distinct practices, languages as well as social, economic and political beliefs. Indigenous people have a common goal to maintain their ancestral environments which often clashes with modern corporations and governments. They are marginalized and discriminated against and must navigate through this in order to survive. Private governments as well as governments have forced Natives off of their land, many times through brutal and violent means when the native tribes try to fight back. These tribes are then forced into industrial societies and risk the entirety of their culture becoming extinct; plagued by disease, poverty, and discrimination. However, modern society has also made steps in the right direction to protect indigenous people; for example, under international law, states are not permitted to relocate tribes without their rightful consent and compensation to follow. Although this does not always happen. This week we focused on three case studies from around the world. The first was about forced sterilization of Peruvian women, who were sterilized without their consent in order to help with overpopulation in Peru. The second case study took place in Kenya in Africa, where the Sengwer people were being forced off of their land for decades. They soon gathered together to form a petition to rally against the government and to finally gain protection; their petition ended up gaining 270,000 signatures. The final case study took place in Bolivia in which the government wanted to build hydroelectric dams, regarded as a national priority by the president, Luis Arce. However, the dams would cause massive flooding in certain areas as well as leave almost a dozen tribes along the Beni River Basin in danger of immense resource restriction. Through this week’s research, we learned much more about certain struggles of the people in Peru, Bolivia and Kenya for example. However, this is still only a fraction of the problems indigenous tribes face when compared to the rest of the world making it imperative that we continue to educate ourselves about how discrimination and violence affects Native people.