Tupak Huehuecoyotl
Colonization matters, it is illegal. The codification of
colonization as an international crime against World Peace and Humanity was realized
for the first time in international law in 1960 by UN General Assembly resolution 1514, which proclaimed: "All peoples have the right of self
determination."
Today, the right of self-determination of peoples is a
fundamental principle in international law. It is embodied in the Charter of
the United Nations and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
Common Article 1, paragraph 1 of these Covenants provides
that:
"All peoples have
the rights of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine
their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural
development."
The above are references in the international instruments of
the Westphalian System (1648) of State Sovereignty [AKA the United Nations] which now dominates
international affairs of the so-called “civilized world”. These are today the primary
legal instruments under which the Right of Self Determination is expressed,
invoked, and defended. With the adoption in 2007 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the right of self determination of Indigenous Peoples, equal to all other peoples..." is proclaimed for the first time in the history of international law.
Yet to approach the concept of self determination today from
the perspective of the Nican Tlacah
Cemanahuac (Original Nations of Indigenous Peoples of Mother Earth), the collective
nature of the responsibility self determination must be re-contextualized in
terms of climate justice principles and the climate chaos scenario now upon us
all.
As the most ancient of Human Societies on the planet who
predate by tens of thousands of years the formation of the “state” structures
globally, the Indigenous Peoples are not merely ethnic groups within the more
recent “Nation State” schema of global society in mal-adaptive position of alienation
from the reality of the natural world in which we are embedded and with which we
share equally with all other Earth Beings.
As Nican Tlacah
Cemanahuac, collectively we represent an unbroken continuity in the historical
ecological experience of human beings on earth since time immortal. Our cultures
present daily the memory and vision of the roots and destiny of the Human Spirit in kindred relations with
all our other relatives of the natural world.
The right of self determination is a universal inherent
human right, with a vision of responsibility globally to the Human Rights of the
Future Generations and the decolonization of Mother Earth as essential for any
hope of sustainability or homeostasis for Human Society with the Natural World. We can not aspire to peace on earth if we are
not at peace with Mother Earth. The combined GDP of all of the nation state economies
of the planet cannot begin to pay back the ecological debt being heaped at the door of
the Age of Climate Chaos which we
are now experiencing and where our children will bear the greatest burden.
THE BAGUIO DECLARATION
CONFERENCE ON INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’
SELF-DETERMINATION AND THE NATION STATE
IN ASIA Baguio City, Philippines, 18-21
April 1999
We, representatives of indigenous
peoples of Asia gathered in Baguio City came together to share our experiences
and aspirations in the face of our concrete situations. We have come to find
out that our peoples are faced with problems such as denial of our right of
self-determination, militarization and State sponsored violence, governmental transmigration
policies, cultural oppression, development oppression and denial
of our identities as indigenous peoples.
We have also come to find hope in the
various struggles being waged by indigenous peoples in Asia and we affirm and
assert the following:
1. Assert that the right of self-determination
of all peoples, including indigenous peoples,
is an inherent and universal human right, as exercised by them throughout history;
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| Abya Yala |
The institutionalization of White Supremacy as an instrument of European American colonization
within the 522-year-old settler state constructs of Christendom known continentally
as AMERICA is ongoing, pervasive and intellectually insidious. The root of this
dehumanizing psychological social pathogen is the racist Doctrine of Discovery 1492 established and normalized under the DOGMA
OF DOMINION of Christendom, which
can be compared to the same psychology of religious zealots that is today condemned
globally under the ideology of ISIS,
and the illegal and genocidal policies of Israel
towards the Palestinian peoples. In
historical reality and present geo-political terms, these three religions as
Sons of the Books of Abraham, are not three separate religions: They share the
same root, and suffer from the same fundamentalist rot.
“Thus a completely new mythology
arose, and instead of the ancient Sumero-Babylonian contemplation of the
disappearances and reappearances of planets as revelatory of an order of nature
with which society was to be held in accord, an idea of good and evil, light
and dark, even of life and death as separable took hold, and the prophecy was
announced of a progressive restoration to righteousness of the order of nature.
Where formerly there had been the planetary cycles, marking days and nights,
the months, years, and eons of unending time, there was now to be a straight
line of progressive world history with a beginning, a middle, and a prophesied
end—Gayomart, Zarathustra, and Soshyant: Adam, Jesus, and the Second Coming.
Where formerly there had been, as the ideal, harmony with the whole, there was
now discrimination, a decision to be made, “not peace, but a sword” (Matthew
10:34), effort, struggle, and zeal, in the name of a universal reform”.
Joseph
Campbell in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion.
1986.
Colonization matters,
it is not only illegal but if the future of Humanity is to be realized within a
collective and life affirming culture of mutual
respect for the natural world which we share equally in responsibility, the
DOGMA of DOMINION which gave birth to
the concept as a norm of “civilized man” aka the “White Man’s Burden” must be challenged and dismantled. Regurgitated
by the institutionalized racism of the settler states of America and sanctified
by the dogma of cultural supremacy of European American Christendom, the “chosen
people” of the “City on the Hill” are called to continue to play out their role
as minions of nefarious Doctrine of Discovery.
The insidious nature of the pogrom extends to the point
where even the colonizing construct of “Latin
America” has subverted the self determination and Nationhood
of Original Nations Abya Yala by the Genizaro
Republics of the Americas and their radical ideologues of both the right
and left of the Game of Thrones: The
concept of State Sovereignty via Westphalia 1648.
Under this diabolical matrix of religious orthodoxy, racial
supremacy, and anthropocentric worldview, the genocide of the Original Nations of Indigenous Peoples of
the Great Turtle Island Abya Yala [Americas] continues unabated and
accelerates as the cresting Asian economic power structures of capitalism reach in to grab their
piece of the promised land: the American Pie.
Now when CLIMATE
CHAOS is the term of the day, of the night, and of the Age, we are called
to the defense not only of our rights, but to our responsibilities to the future
generations.
The Westphalian system of
state sovereignty is incompetent to address the global climate issues, it simply
functions as an instrument of the economic and military (actually these are
both the same) power players of the global elites and their supra-national
corporations of capitalism.
Similar to the way Genocide was first codified in 1948 by
the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 260, as “Indigenous Peoples
equal to all other peoples…” we are called now to move towards a global convention
on TERRACIDE: The willful and premeditated Crime against Humanity and the Rights of Mother
Earth that results in the destruction of the capacity of EARTH to be a Mother
to the Future Generations.
The global climate chaos horizon upon us now is only a reflection
of the global cultural climate which would hold us all captive, colonizer and
colonized alike, under the regimes of state terror that began their history only some
5,000 years ago as bastard breeds of the Doctrines of Marduk, cloaked with ideologies of exploitation and expropriation disguised as economic development in denial of the Sacredness of Mother Earth.
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We declare
our INTERDEPENDENCE and Solidarity
as Peoples of Mother Earth and call
for the recognition, respect, and protection for the particular and integral constituencies of our
Peoples of Mother Earth as represented in our responsibilities to the Watersheds,
the Earth:Waters and Single Sea (hydrosphere) of the planet,
beyond the disjointed and corrupt constraints of the Westphalian System of State Sovereignty represented in the UN
system and the present international architectures of personality and
procedures of negotiation and agreements;
