Meet Author Julian Kunnie 'Cost of Globalization'

Meet the Author

Julian E Kunnie

at

Barnes & Noble – Foothills Mall

May 30th, 1-5pm

TUCSON, ARIZONA

.

Dr. Julian Kunnie (on far right) at the Indigenous Peoples Border Summit

on Tohono O'odham land, standing on the imaginary border line

with Mohawks, Acoma Pueblo, Dineh, Oneida and Lakota.

Photo Brenda Norrell

Meet the author in Tucson: Dr. Julian Kunnie, who many of you met at the Indigenous Border Summits in Arizona, is the author of 'The Cost of Globalization.' Along with traveling the world from South Africa to China and beyond, Dr. Kunnie has hosted Ofelia Rivas, Tohono O'odham, to speak on the brutality of Border Patrol agents at his classes at the University of Arizona. 

-- Brenda, Censored News

Julian Kunnie is Professor of Religious Studies/Classics at the University of Arizona. He is the author of four books (listed below). His most recent publication is The Cost of Globalization: Dangers to the Earth and Its People(McFarland, April 2015). In addition, he has produced two educational DVDs - Umoya: The Spirit in Africa (2000), which illustrates the dynamic growth of Indigenous Churches in Africa; and Black and Brown: An Afro-Latino Journey (2006), which explores the ancient African presence in Mexico. He produced two DVDs in 2011, aided by Veronica Martinez - We Belong to Mother Earth: Dineh Elder and Hataali Jones Benally Speaks and The Global Indigenous Peoples Performing Arts Festival, from Pingtung, Taiwan, following his research visit to Taiwan and China in August 2011.

He has delivered papers and lectures at colleges, universities, and communities on six continents. Kunnie is currently working on a prison research project that interrogates issues of race, class, and gender and is geared toward preventing the incarceration of youth, particularly those of color. He has visited Napierville Correctional Facility in South Africa and San Quentin Correctional Facility in California for his research. He recently launched the Nyakweri Ecological Restoration and Preservation Project with Samwel Naikada from Transmara, Kenya, that is concerned with studying the impact of global warming and climate change on the Nyakweri Forest Preserve. The project trains students in areas of ecological sustainability through practical immersion and living in the Nyakweri forest.

Over the years and during his tenure as Professor and Director of Africana Studies at the UA, Kunnie pioneered/taught courses in Africana Philosophy, History, Political Economy, Geography, Psychology, History of Religions, Racism and Social Change, and Aesthetics of Dance. He currently teaches courses in African/Indigenous Religions, African American Religion, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., and is planning to teach a new course on Indigenous Religions, Buddhism, and Christianity in 2012.

Recent Publications:

• The Cost of Globalization: Dangers to the Earth and Its People (McFarland, April 2015)
• Indigenous Wisdom and Power: Affirming our Knowledge Through Narratives (2006) - with Nomalungelo Goduka
• Is Apartheid Really Dead? Pan Africanist Working Class Cultural Critical Perspectives (2000)
• Models of Black Theology: Issues of Class, Culture, and Gender (1994)

Ecuador's Indigenous to confront Chevron in shareholder meeting for rainforest damage and lies

By 350 Bay Area Censored News Protest at Chevron Annual Shareholders Meeting, Wednesday 7:00 am With evidence mounting that Chevron falsified evidence to evade paying a $9.5 billion pollution liability in Ecuador, Chevron CEO John Watson faces an embarrassing public reprimand this week from an Ecuadorian indigenous leader who has traveled from the rainforest to the company's annual meeting to confront top management with proof that it has gone rogue in the long-running litigation. Humberto Piaguaje, a leader of Ecuador's Secoya indigenous tribe, will enter the company's annual meeting Wednesday as a shareholder with a proxy. He'll raise the issue of a new forensic report that proves Chevron's star witness lied under oath and explosive internal company videos that suggest Chevron scientists tried to defraud Ecuador's courts to evade a court-mandated clean-up of oil contamination that has afflicted Ecuador's rainforest for decades. Join us on May 27th at Chevron's Annual Shareholder meeting as we take our demands to Chevron's doorstep and stand in solidarity with shareholders calling for a change in Chevron’s culture of deception, corruption and destruction. RSVP for Chevron Shareholders Protest, 7:00 am Wedneday, May 27 at 350 Bay Area or on Facebook

Words of Compañera Selena, Zapatista Listener

2015

Words of Compañera Selena, Listener

Words of Compañera Selena, Listener,i

Good evening compañeros and compañeras of the Sixth.

Good evening brothers and sisters.

Good evening to everyone in general.

The topic that I will be explaining to you, actually I will read it to you, is the same topic the other compañera presented on, but with more information about the youth, both Zapatistas and non-Zapatistas.

We as Zapatista youth are facing a low intensity war that the bad government and the bad capitalists wage against us. They put ideas into our heads about modern life, like cellphones, clothes, and shoes; they put these bad ideas into our heads through TV, through soap operas, soccer games, and commercials, so that we as youth will be distracted and not think about how to organize our struggle.

But we Zapatista youth have not often fallen for this, because despite these attempts when we do buy clothes they are not the stylish ones; we buy the kind of clothes the poor wear, which as you can see is how we are dressed right now. We also buy shoes, but they are just a whatever kind of shoe, like the poor use; we don’t buy the kind with the pointy heels. If we were to use that kind of shoe, well where we live there is a lot of mud, and if we young women wear these shoes we’re going to get stuck, and we’re going to have to use our hand to get the shoe out. We also don’t buy those leather boots because the same thing can happen, they can come unglued in the mud because they are not strong enough; yes, of course we buy boots, but they are work boots, the kind that resist the mud, we don’t buy shoes that don’t resist.

And we also buy cellphones, but we know how to use them like Zapatistas, for something useful. We also have TV, but we use it to listen to the news, not to distract ourselves.

We did buy these things, but first we had to sweat and work the mother earth to be able to buy what we wanted.

On the other hand, youth who are not Zapatistas are those who most often fall for the tricks of the bad government, because believe it or not, those poor-poor youth abandon their families, their community, and they go to work in the United States, to Playa del Carmen, or to other countries, just to be able to buy that cellphone, that pair of pants, shirt, or stylish shoe. They leave because they don’t want to work the earth, because they are lazy. Why do we say they are poor-poor? Because they are poor like us; but they are also poor thinkers because they leave their communities and when they come back they bring bad ideas with them, other ways of living. They come back with ideas to assault or rob others, to consume and plant marijuana; and when they get back to their houses they say they do not want to work with the machete because they’re no longer used to it; that it would be better to go back again to where they were, that they no longer want to drink pozol,ii they say they don’t even know what pozol is anymore, even though they grew up with pozol, with beans. They pretend, in those places where they go, that they aren’t familiar with the food of the poor; they pretend to be children of rich folk, but this is a lie; they are poor like us.

On the other hand, we Zapatistas are poor, but rich in thinking. Why? Because even though we have shoes and clothes and cellphones, we don’t change our thinking or our way of life, because to us as Zapatista youth it doesn’t matter to us how we are dressed, or what kinds of things we have. What’s important to us is that the work we do is for the good of the community. That is what we Zapatistas want, and it’s what we want for the whole world: that there not be rulers, that there not be exploiters, that we as indigenous people are not exploited.

I’m not sure if you understood what I read.

Well, that was all the words I wanted to share with you, hopefully they are useful to you.

i The Zapatistas use the Spanish “Escucha,” meaning listener, to refer to an assigned position or responsibility, often given to young people, to go and listen at a meeting, gathering, or event and report back to others in the Zapatista communities who were not in attendance.

ii A drink made from ground maize mixed with water and often consumed in the Mexican countryside as a midmorning or midday meal

Words of Compañera Lizbeth, Zapatista base of support

Words of Compañera Lizbeth, Zapatista base of support

"We have the courage to struggle'

Good evening compañeros and compañeras, brothers and sisters.

We are going to explain a little bit of how we have been living and doing our autonomous work after the 1994 armed uprising.

We as Zapatista youth today, we are no longer familiar with the overseer, with the landowner, with the hacienda boss, much less with El Amate [a prison in Chiapas]; we do not know what it is to go to the official municipal presidents so that they can resolve our problems. Thanks to the EZLN organization, we now have our own authorities in each community, we have our municipal authorities, and our Juntas de Buen Gobierno [Good Government Councils], and they resolve whatever type of problem that might arise for a compañera or compañero, for both Zapatistas and non-Zapatistas.

We now have freedom and rights as women, to have opinions, discuss, and analyze, which is not how it was before, as the other compañera said.

The problem we still have is that we are shy about participating or explaining how we are working, but we compañerasare in fact doing the work.

Also, we women are already participating in all types of work, such as in the area of health, doing ultrasounds, laboratory work, pap smears, colposcopies, dentistry, and clinic work. We also participate in what we call the three areas, which includes midwifery, bone-setting, and medicinal plants.

We are also working in education as formadoras [teacher trainers] and coordinators, and education promotoras [like a teacher, literally “promoter”].

We have women broadcasters and members of the Tercios Compas [Zapatista media team].

We participate in compañera collectives, in women’s gatherings, and youth gatherings.

We are also participating as municipal authorities, which includes many different kinds of work, and we women do these tasks. We are also working in the Juntas de Buen Gobierno as local authorities, and as board members for thecompañeras’ businesses.

In different autonomous work areas, we are already participating alongside our compañeros. Although we as young women don’t know how to govern yet, we are named to be community authorities because they see that we know how to read and write a little bit, and then we learn the rest through doing the work.

In the majority of the work that we carry out we are all young women, and we can tell you clearly that this work is hard, it is not easy. But if we have the courage to struggle, we can do these tasks where the people rule and the government obeys.

Now, men and women practice this form of struggle and of government every single day. We now see this as our culture.

That is all I wanted to say, compañeros and compañeras.