Dear Editor,
The voice of the First Nations of Guyana must be heard in 2023. They want full control of their lands which were wrested from their control over 400 years ago. They have never ceased claiming them.
Guyana as it comes into its huge wealth must distinguish itself as understanding the extent of the dispossession the nine First Nations suffered. Guyana must join those countries which are returning possessions which were stolen when they, the owners, were too weak to resist and retain ownership. The Benin bronzes have been returned to their homeland; the USA is returning artefacts to Italy; stolen art is being returned to the survivors of the Holocaust.
What is unusual about Guyana is that it is a nation of victims formed from those who survived slavery and indentureship. The survivors carry bitterness from the historical experience but that bitterness should not blind them to the fact that all that Guyana now celebrates as owning, what each person now claims as property, once belonged only to the First Nations. In a sense this generation of Guyanese is being asked to be big enough to right a wrong which they did not create simply because it is an acknowledged and proven wrong.
It would be unbecoming of a powerful nation, as Guyana is fast becoming, which was built on suffering to ignore the ongoing suffering of the First Nations in having chains on their lands. To have them enjoy all mineral and all other rights of ownership is a small return for more than 400 hundred years of dispossession.
I have thought that justification by law to retain control over mineral rights on First Nations lands is ludicrous. The law itself is an inherited system which ex-slaves and the indentured suffered under and which they were made to squeeze themselves into and uphold for fear of punishment. If this law upholds an old injustice as it does if it ‘gives’ lands which were already owned to the owners and then removes power of full control then what is produced is a parody of the law. It is a continuation of the colonial attitude that the native people never mattered in Guyana, in Africa, in India and wherever European flags were raised.
History begins to repeat itself. If the First Nations resist they are ‘breaking’ the law. If they do not resist the impression is given that they have accepted the sham which says the land is both theirs and not theirs. Of course, the mineral steal fits very well into this scenario and it is a scenario that First Nations have lived before. The marauding Europeans stole their mineral wealth, their valuable crops where possible, and their women whenever they could. European culture has been a barefaced one: all they found necessary to claim any property at all was sight. They saw, they wanted, they took. And their countries celebrated their cruel and inhumane thieves. That is what the written record says. When, for example, will the royal family have the humility to admit to theft of fabulous jewels from India. Not only do they claim full possession but they flaunt the loot on the brow of their most renowned person. Where is shame?
Because this matter of full right to lands of First nations has reached the courts, as it has for the Chinese Landing matter, the courts themselves must acknowledge that the plight of the First Nations Nations is an unusual one. It was generated in colonial times and it is left to this generation of Guyanese to avoid perpetuating colonial attitudes of disregard for humanity. The colonial jumbie must be put to rest.
I understand 15 % of Guyana is ‘owned’ by the First Nations. If this is so, then full land rights are in order for the economic and social losses over many generations since 1616, I believe.
I have written to honour the memory of Stephen Campbell whom I knew personally. I knew of his courage and efforts. He called the First Nations ‘my people’. May his spirit rest in knowing that the cause of land ownership has not died and that there are many persons in the nine nations who will not rest until justice is served.
I am not advocating lawlessness. I am speaking for justice and the end of destructive colonial attitudes perpetuated in the matter of denial of full land ownership to the First Nations.
So I say!
Gabriella Rodriguez
