User:Campaigner8/Land grabbing

Displacement
A specific instance of how land grabbing has displaced people is what happened to the Garifuna people of the Caribbean. Author K.V. Brondo has published a book on the relation between land grab and the Garifuna resistance. A specific excerpt from the book “Land Grab” starts by mentioning how indigenous rights are so important to the Garifuna and their dispute over territory. One of the main points of this excerpt that Brondo makes is the relationship between being indigenous and the right to territory. An issue that arises is how to classify a group of people as indigenous. Traditionally when thinking about indigenous peoples, it is usually those who have been on the land since the beginning, before colonization. Brondo quotes an article written by José Martínez Cobo, he states that indigenous peoples are those who have been on territories before the invasion and are considered different from other societies that have existed there. This was then taken and ran with by numerous international organizations looking to advocate rights for indigenous peoples. A conclusion was also reached: these indigenous people need the land they came from and use of the resources found there in order to survive. The United Nations then drafted a declaration of rights for indigenous peoples living in the world, and many organizations for the indigenous formed subsequently. In addition, it was declared that the taking away of one’s territory and  control of resources was considered to be cultural ethnocide and a violation of human rights. Cultural ethnocide was likened to genocide, which was found to be interesting because many people don’t realize that how wiping out the culture of an area is the same as killing people of a certain type. A turning point in the way of thinking of the indigenous was the revision of ILO 107, which was considered quite racist, according to Brondo. It was made into ILO 169, which acknowledged the fact that indigenous societies were permanent parts of society and deserved to have the same rights as every other part of society. This was in 1989 and by 2007, the United Nations had evolved to create universal standards for indigenous people and they decided to leave indigenous up for interpretation. There was no longer a concrete definition for what is an indigenous group, it could be any group with ties to pre-colonial land.