Rigoberta Menchu meets with indigenous groups
Representatives of various indigenous groups were today given the opportunity to break bread with visiting Nobel Peace Prize Winner Rigoberta Menchu Tum. As Julietta Burrowes reports, the forum was an informal breakfast in Belize City.
In her breakfast meeting at the Radisson, Rigoberta Menchu Tum met with leaders and representatives of various indigenous groups and organizations. Through the use of personal and very painful experiences, she sensitively offered suggestions about how our local indigenous leaders and communities can overcome obstacles. The most pressing issue at hand is the ongoing land rights controversy in the Toledo District.
Roy Cayetano, President, National Garifuna Council
“There’s also the matter of subtle violence, the disregard for language and cultures. Our languages and our cultures are dying like we’re being forced to take on the language and culture of our colonial, our former colonial masters long after he has given up control to us and to my mind that kind of violence is insidious. It is not as blatant as the physical violence that might have been experienced in Guatemala. But it is just as real in its consequences because we have to ask ourselves what are we.”
That answer can only come through a revision of our educational system says Menchu. Education, she believes, is the key to bringing about change especially in the attitudes taken against indigenous peoples and the injustices that they experience. This process begins with our children.
Roy Cayetano
“They are aping the ways of other people of other parts of the world because they do not know what they are. They don’t know their history. I think that this is the direct result of the violence, the subtle violence that is experienced at the hands of the education system which continues to be a colonial tool even in independent Belize.”
Menchu may have very well stirred-up a can of worms where human rights and the promotion of indigenous peoples are concerned. It is now left to our local leaders to continue the struggle to ascertain that which they believe are theirs.
Julian Cho, Chairman, Toledo Maya Cultural Council
“She said that every country has to deal with its own problem independently. She said that she cannot take one measuring rod or one rule and apply it to all indigenous communities, because they live in different countries and they have to comply with their constitution.
For me her visit today is the bridge that we are looking for with other people in Guatemala. It’s been very difficult for us to dialogue to show solidarity with our brothers and sisters there in Guatemala. We speak the same language, but because of either remoteness, because we have been ignorant of some of the organizations in Guatemala we have not done much, but through her today she has given out her hand and we will definitely extend that hand of friendship to them.”
Menchu left the country today to return to her home in Guatemala. Julietta Burrowes for News Five.
The historic two-day visit of Rigoberta Menchu Tum to Belize was at the invitation of U.C.B.’s Alumni Association.
