APA: 28 years of fighting for Indigenous People’s rights

Mar 04, 2019 News

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Formed in 1991, the Amerindian People’s Association started out in response to rights violations against Indigenous people. Jean La Rose, Executive Director of the APA, said that it was a time when the country was beginning to open up to foreign companies interested in participating in the logging and mining sectors.
She said that, “immediately, it had implications for Indigenous People and their land rights,” because there were people encroaching on their lands. She said that people felt threatened and uncertain, in some cases, about what their position was in relation to their land. This was because, though there were some efforts to title lands at the time, there was hardly any effort to demarcate Indigenous lands.

“It was a period when there was deregulation of indigenous lands to increase mining lands. So it was a whole period of uncertainty about what life would be like for Indigenous people.”
Also bothering Indigenous communities at the time was a need for sustenance which they sought to satisfy with commodities from across the border. Some persons were prosecuted for taking part in those activities.
Some of the founders of the APA were Penny Atkinson, who was the first chair of the steering committee, Sharon Atkinson, Lawrence Anselmo, Matthew Charlie and Edgar Casimero.
La Rose, herself, began working formally with the organisation in 1994 and has a long institutional memory of its workings. She said that, in the beginning, the organisation worked in an office shared with the Guyana Human Rights Association . At the time, they worked with typewriters and she recalled having to teach herself to transition from those machines, when computers began to phase into the country.
There wasn’t any regular funding available to the APA, so it was operated on a voluntary basis. However, there was some amount of concern for Indigenous rights in the international community, so there were some opportunities to tap into funds for work related to Indigenous rights.
She had sought to reach out to funders who would support the work the APA intended to do. Charities like Oxfam Novib (Netherlands) as well as Oxfam GB and Oxfam Canada, were generous at times.
The APA pursued issues relating to Indigenous rights violations, primarily of multinational logging and mining. More recently, the challenge of medium and small miners has exacerbated, so the APA has had to contend with those pressures too.
In the almost three decades the APA has existed, La Rose said that it has been fighting at different levels and fora. The secretariat grew and built a good track record in terms of spending and accounting, and telling the stories of Indigenous people.
Because of that track record, they were able to improve their human resources and infrastructure necessary to do their work. They have also been given the chance to support community members who primarily work on a voluntary basis. La Rose said that those individuals do sterling work in terms of keeping abreast with occurrences at the grassroots level, and bringing information to the national level.
She said that legislative changes related to Indigenous rights have been happening very slowly. Even then, some laws are not synchronised with others.
“[Indigenous] people need to be a lot more visible in national decision-making,” instead of being treated as tokens, La Rose said.
She waxed about the need for the wider Guyanese community to be sensitised on the role Indigenous people play in Guyana, and the role they can play if given more agency and respect.
“We may not have the fanciest of homes. We are not technologically advanced but, for many people, that’s not what we want. People have to understand that, in our simplistic way, we want to preserve the environment in a wholesome way. We want to do our farming yes, We want to preserve our cultural sites. We want to preserve our languages. We can still preserve many of these things if legislation and policy protects us.”
More recently, the APA has been focusing on working with Indigenous women and youth. This is because, traditionally, men have been the mainstay of decision-making, and have been the ones at the top.
“We know women and youth have a very valuable role to play. We have contributions to make toward the development of Indigenous people in Guyana, and the wider society. I am happy that the organisation has been going from strength to strength. We have been able to keep Indigenous issues alive and on the front burner, irrespective of who is elected to leadership positions. We have held firm to the values, principles and objectives of the organisations.”
Today, delegates have gathered from across the country for the APA’s 10th General Assembly, arriving by boat, bus and air. The 10th General Assembly is being hosted under the theme, “Our land, Our languages, Our Way of life”, at Camp Kayuka on the Soesdyke Linden Highway.

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