Issues

This Special Issue brings together a powerful collection of articles that explore the foundations, structure, and transformative potential of the Nations International Criminal Tribunal (NICT).

Emerging from decades of visionary leadership by Dr. Rudolph Rÿser and the Center for World Indigenous Studies, the NICT presents a vision of justice rooted in Indigenous sovereignty, collective memory, and decolonial legal frameworks. These contributions critically interrogate the failures of international law to protect Indigenous peoples, illuminate the development of alternative legal mechanisms, and propose a future of global justice centered on reparative, culturally grounded, and community-driven responses to systemic harms.

Each article reflects the lived experiences of nations long excluded from state-based legal systems and invites a profound reckoning with what true accountability and reparative justice require.

This Special Issue also marks an expansion of our editorial vision. For the first time, we include a poetic piece and a journalistic essay—works that speak through analysis and embodiment, intuition, and image. These contributions underscore our belief that the art of noticing—paying attention deeply and with care—is a form of scholarship. In alignment with this ethos and our continued commitment to accessibility and reciprocity, we are proud to make this and all future issues of FWJ fully open access.

These pieces highlight the depth and scope of Indigenous thought and action. They challenge us to reconsider the foundations of international law and to support systems of accountability that recognize the full humanity and sovereignty of Fourth World nations.

Our mission and most profound concern is to uphold Indigenous knowledge systems as living arts and sciences, creative forces, and ways of being that shape a more just and conscious future.

Understanding the critical role accountability structures play in Indigenous sovereignty and survival, we are honored to dedicate this issue to the ongoing fights for justice surrounding the Nations International Criminal Tribunal. 

In this edition, our remarkable contributors delve into important topics such as land rights, the protection of indigenous resources, and the vital roles that resilience, tradition, art, and activism play in safeguarding Indigenous territories and cultures.

Our authors in this issue offer clear options for organizing and enforcing policies to implement Fourth World self-determination rooted in accepted international principles.

Fourth World nations have themselves on which to depend on defending against the crises—natural and human-made. Each nation must develop its defenses, organize alliances, and create new international mechanisms to establish new rules for the conduct of relations between nations, states, and corporations.
The Fourth World Journal has served nations by offering analysis and information applying traditional knowledge systems to advance traditional healing arts and sciences and formulate strategies and practices to effect constructive results for the present and future of nations.
We continue this tradition in this issue with practical and concrete essays by CWIS Associate Scholars and some of the finest minds of and in support of the Fourth World. We publish several articles in this issue in English and Spanish to benefit of our global audience.

In this issue of the Fourth World Journal, we are pleased to share the insights and analysis of seven authors revealing in considerable detail the challenges and accomplishments of Fourth World nations as they face often systematic state government efforts to eliminate them. Yet there are some nations driven initiatives to turn aside culturcide and other violence in favor of constructive measures for social, economic, and political self-determination.

Publication of this Special Issue focused on extractive industries is intended to inform Fourth World nations directly and provide the basis for direct action by the nations themselves. The working premise of our analysis is that those who have capability must support Fourth World nations wKen invited by sSeci¿c nations in a direct fashion to enhance their capabilities to prevent and regulate harmful extractive industry actions inside their territories. This transfer of technical support becomes essential since states and most corporations are unwilling to act on their own to regulate the consequences of extractive enterprises. We will reach out to non-governmental organizations, responsible states, and responsible corporations, urging their participation in actively supporting nations when those nations request support. Our authors have undertaken deep inquiries to give active meaning to solutions.

The Fourth World Journal issue before you includes insightful essays expanding on the idea of nations and states finding and establishing political equality to truly solve human created problems facing peoples around the world.

In this issue of the Fourth World Journal our contributors describe some of the obstacles preventing the full and complete participation of indigenous nations defining and implementing solutions to the crises facing all of humanity. At the same time, contributors to this issue offer solutions and encourage proactive involvement of indigenous nations as equal participants in the process of defining, organizing and implementing solutions as mature societies.

At this writing, the world is flooded by the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic disrupting lives, forcing a reorganization of social, economic, political, and cultural practices. Globalization was thought by entrepreneurs and settled corporations to be a great boon to the accumulation of wealth and connecting enterprises for mutual advantage. With the breakup of service and product chains, economies are quickly falling apart. Fourth World nations worldwide are now experiencing enormous pressure from corporations and communities, turning their attention to exploit resources inside Fourth World territories. This trend is exposing peoples to COVID-19 and inundates and destroys forests, mountains for mining, and spoiling waterways with new pollution. Dramatic changes are afoot as we begin the 21st century marked by the global COVID-19 pandemic promising to wreak havoc on the world’s most vulnerable for months into 2022. The global economy is in free fall, breaking down structures created since the 1980s’ move toward globalization. Social unrest in countries around the world reflects the failures of states’ governments to serve the public interest, ensure the common defense and maintenance of society under common law. Many states have, in their fearful state, reached out to autocrats and dictators to replace popular decision-making and the promotion of human and civil rights. Indeed, this is the opening of the 21st century.

Are we beginning the 21st century in 2020? I hear you cry! Yes! History reflects how great events affecting the world’s peoples bring profound change. Human society is frequently subjected to physical, social, psychological, and spiritual stress. When it is so stressed, the event that gave rise to the stress can fundamentally shift the society’s trajectory. Fourth World nations throughout the world have too frequently known these “ground shifting” stresses that cause cultural norms to be abandoned and replaced by new norms that seem best suited to a world that has fundamentally changed. The agricultural system of the peoples located in and around what is now called Lake Patzcuaro dramatically shifted generations ago before Spain invaded. A mountain exploded as volcanoes do and caused two tremendously momentous changes in human society: The peoples known as Otomi and the peoples known as Uacusecha joined, as they say, the “Sun and the Moon” to form the Purépecha. This nation remains influential in Michoacén, Mexico, to this day. The second significant change was the shift of peoples in what is now Michoacén to a hillside system of agriculture that proved enormously successful.

‘When shocks to the social and cultural fabric of societies rip away the conventional wisdom, the opening is made for profound change. That is the time we live in now. What happens in the years to come must rely on recapturing the truth, confidence, and imagination. The Fourth World began that task, and the rest of the world must now join in. Our splendid authors in this issue of the Fourth World Journal masterfully point to recapturing the truth with confidence and imagination. They await your attention!

Fourth World peoples occupy a unique role in the human family. The more than 5000 nations, ranging in population size from a few families to more than 25 million people, demonstrate their immense cultural diversity on virtually every continent. While corporate societies (organized to demand unrestrained development in socially complex states) become more standardized, Fourth World peoples continue, as they have for thousands of years, to diversify and evolve cultural ways influenced by their social, economic, and ecological environments. Fourth World nations, no matter the size, tend to be egalitarian and operate on consensus. Do some nations adjust to corporate society and adopt some patterns of corporate society conduct? Yes, they do. Such social patterns are often disruptive of Fourth World societies. Such disruption of cultural continuity can and does break up a nation and cause it to disappear.

Resilience is a term frequently used to describe Fourth World societies that have been disrupted by corporate societal forces that recover their former way of existing—demonstrating human flexibility to adjust and restore. What is it about these societies, born from ancient beginnings, that permit them to recover and continue cultural evolution? The answer is self-evident. The culture, the relationship between the people, the land, and the Cosmos provides the means for restoration and continuity. Organic and dynamic relationships between people for social wellbeing engage the physical environment to support life, balancing need versus the capacity of the earth to restore. The Cosmos is the source of wonder that actualizes and affirms human and environmental relationships. In this issue of Fourth World Journal, our contributors elevate our awareness and understanding as a result of careful research and compelling narratives. In this volume of the Fourth World Journal, our contributors give narrative reinforcement to the resilience of Fourth World peoples. We are pleased to have such contributors doing work in Kashmir (Gilgit-Baltistan) between Pakistan, China, and India; and studies from Nigeria, the Philippines, and a comparison study between the United States and the Israelis and Palestinians.

In the spring of 1979, during a session of the Conference of Tribal Governments in Tumwater, Washington, Muckleshoot Tribal Chairman Clifford Keline proposed establishing a documentation center to facilitate information sharing among tribal governments. He emphasized the need to share successes and failures in social, economic, and cultural developments to benefit each "nation." With the agreement of other prominent tribal officials, including Quinault's President Joe DeLaCruz and Yakama Nation Councilman Russell Jim, the Center for World Indigenous Studies was authorized. The Editor in Chief was tasked with setting up this center and collecting documents, initially leading to the informal "beer-box collection" due to how materials were delivered.

The concept of "sharing" information was, from the beginning and remains to this day, a central operating principle of the Center for World Indigenous Studies 40 years later. Sharing and giving opens the door to new knowledge and beneficial changes in how we think and respond to the world and environment around us.

We are proud of this issue, as it reflects the sharing tradition of the Center's founding. While we have roots in the "beer-box collection," our view has stretched the world over. Since Chief George Manuel asked that the Center serve as a documentary secretariat for the World Council of Indigenous Peoples, we have extended the tradition of our progenitors to the peoples in Uyghuristan, the Tuareg, Amazigh, and the rule of law as it relates to Fourth World peoples. We also include Founding Board member, Dr. David Hyndman’s exposé on the role of anthropology in counter insurgency and the security state (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) as these states seek to understand culture and cultural factors of Fourth World nations’ behavior in conflict situations. In this issue, Fourth World activists, scholars, and researchers open our eyes to relevant and powerful subjects affecting the lives and cultures of Fourth World peoples and, indeed, the peoples of the world.

In this CWIS 40th Anniversary Celebration edition of the Fourth World Journal, we have the benefit of scholarly and activist works in the study areas of biocultural/biodiversity understanding of permaculture, play among the children of the Amazigh, a perspective on the rule of law in the international arena in relation to Fourth World peoples, the dimensions of standards for contemporary ethnographies, as well as the horrors of cultural genocide now perpetrated on the peoples in western China.

This Special Issue of the Fourth World Journal focuses on Traditional Foods and Medicines, stemming from research conducted by scholars at the Center for World Indigenous Studies. These articles contribute to the global dialogue on applying traditional knowledge systems to critical problems faced by Fourth World peoples. The journal posits that without recognizing and systematically applying these diverse knowledge systems to the social, economic, political, cultural, and strategic issues of Fourth World communities, the general recognition of traditional knowledge will lack true meaning. As Activist Scholars, the contributors are dedicated to conducting research and analysis rooted in Fourth World Research Theory that offers near-term benefits to these communities. This Special Issue is a testament to that commitment.

In the autumn of 1985, Wilson Manyfingers, Joseph E. Fallon, Dr. Ramendu S. Dewan, and the Editor in Chief inaugurated the Fourth World Journal with the publication of their five articles. These articles introduced Fourth World Scholarship, offering unique perspectives and analyses on governance, wars, forced assimilation, genocide, and the hopeful pursuit of political independence. The authors provided rich "inside-out" analyses, a style not commonly found elsewhere, thus beginning a tradition of specific, targeted scholarship from Fourth World peoples.

Historically, such articles and analyses rarely saw publication or became available for critical review by scholars, political leaders, activists, and grassroots communities. The Fourth World Journal has continued this tradition, publishing over eighty-eight insightful, information-filled essays, investigative pieces, and peer-reviewed research articles across 17 volumes. The journal has featured authors from all six continents, examining the cultural, historical, social, economic, and political lives of Fourth World nations, some widely recognized and many lesser-known. What unites these contributions is a steadfast commitment to understanding and appreciating the diverse knowledge systems and customs as they apply to the realities of Fourth World peoples.

The challenges faced by over 5,000 Fourth World nations are often overshadowed by conventional scholarly journals, which are largely founded on 19th-century European disciplines like psychology, allopathic medicine, history, economics, politics and diplomacy, commerce, and various sciences. When the Fourth World Journal began publishing, many conventional scholars criticized its content and conclusions for not conforming to "conventional wisdom." Indeed, many authors sought publication with the Fourth World Journal because academic and other commercial journals were unwilling to publish their work. One author, for instance, recounted how a conventional journal rejected his article because it exposed a cover-up by academics concerning the Philippine government staging "cave dwelling" peoples in the jungle. This investigation, proving accurate, challenged the academic careers built on this fabricated discovery, yet institutional momentum allowed those involved to continue to prosper.

Today, students and faculty at over 300 universities and colleges worldwide, alongside community leaders, grassroots people, and political activists, read the Fourth World Journal, setting a new pace for 21st-century scholarship. The journal takes pride in knowing that its Fourth World analysis is now an integral part of global and local dialogue. It is with great pleasure that the Editor in Chief offers the 17th volume, 1st issue of the Fourth World Journal for the Summer of 2018

Activist scholarship offers the world careful and systematic thought and analysis with a conscious understanding that knowledge has applications in the lives of human beings and all other life. The knowledge from Fourth World scholars benefits specific communities by capturing the essence and details of cultures in all their aspects. As I have pointed out in previous editions of the Fourth World Journal, conducting research and preparing analyses is crucial, but facilitating the actual testing of ideas or implementing studied proposals in Fourth World nations is essential. Once again, scholars offer deeply informative scholarship that explains, describes, analyzes, and proposes valuable insights touching on deep cultural realities and knowledge, obstacles, and opportunities before Fourth World nations, and in this issue in particular, hopeful analyses pointing to new solutions to long-standing problems. Please feast on these remarkable exhibits of activist scholarship.

In this issue of the Fourth World Journal we exhibit the fruits of Fourth World knowledge practitioners whose different methods of inquiry as well as “mixed methods” of inquiry reveal new knowledge.

In this issue of the Fourth World Journal we stretch across the globe examining patterns of Ainu culture, Lakota language in context, indigenous women’s health disparities in Canada, the Uyghur Meshrep (Moral School), United Nations efforts to enable indigenous peoples participation in that organization, structural repression of indigenous peoples in Canadian schools, and the role of non-governmental organization advocacy of issues concerning indigenous peoples in the international arena. Our authors are from Canada, India, Uyghuristan (Xinjang China), and the United States. As these scholars deliver their observations and analysis of cultural renewal, international politics, institutional bigotry, and techniques for restoring knowledge from the past it is noteworthy to recognize that their work is presented in a global vacuum. By this I mean that much of the urbanized and industrial world is completely ignorant of the scholarship represented by authors such as these. The global political, cultural, strategic, and environmental context
is rapidly changing—demanding a keen eye to the past, present, and future simultaneously. Without such a perspective it is impossible to comprehend the significance of these scholarly observations.

Development is the byword of “progress” in the world that has been swept over by starry claims of neo-liberal economics. In this issue we focus on the governments of Nicaragua and China pushing forward the development of a new canal across Central America cutting through the Miskitu and Rama territories in utter disregard of these nations’ consent. This “progressive change” comes more than twenty years after a ten years war against the Miskitu, Sumo and Rama peoples prompted by greed in Nicaragua’s capital Managua headed by Daniel Ortega. We see the influences of economic change in India on Fourth World peoples and the consequences of those changes on the millions of Fourth World peoples’ lives and property in reports appearing in Intercontinental Cry Magazine (https://intercontinentalcry.org/), The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/international), Aljazeera (http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/regions/us-canada.html) and The Ecologist (http://www.theecologist.org/). Rampant forest destruction by “logging” in the Brazilian jungles is not merely an environmental and climate disaster, but the essence of violence against Fourth World peoples who live in those jungles. States and corporations offer “development” with the help of the UN Development Program and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund as if building highways, railroads, canals and cities in the midst of Fourth World territories is a positive good while the peoples and territories of Fourth World peoples are torn asunder. The PR Chinese government has begun plans to build a high-speed railway across Central Asia to Europe through hundreds of Fourth World Territories. The destruction to these peoples and their territories can only be measured by the levels of destruction suffered my many nations as a result of more than 70 years of “development”—expansion beyond the capacity of nature to renew. The life ways, philosophies, sciences and knowledge systems of Fourth World nations are under perpetual stress and violence from state and corporate development energized by neo-liberal economic concepts that are neither workable nor sustainable—for any of the world’s populations. Rolling back the unsustainable “development madness” of states and corporations seeking to expand their power and enrich the 1,810 billionaires (Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/) who have amassed $6.5 trillion from their development investments is a priority agenda item for Fourth World nations. Leadership among Fourth World nations in coalition has become essential to avoid the growing human catastrophe many nations face. In this Issue of the Fourth World Journal our authors offer some perspective as well as answers to the burning question: What can we do?

In this Issue of the Fourth World Journal we benefit from explanations, descriptions, and applications of Fourth World scholarship in evolving law and ecocide, an elaboration of an alternative view of the sociology of colonialism; the intersection of community health and “indigenous media;” the evolving character of Fourth World participation in international dialogue through autonomous self-government as a strategy for securing land and culture; and the application of Fourth World knowledge to sustainability.
In this issue alone we cross the spectrum of law development, research, political change, and ecological sustainability.

In this issue of the Fourth World Journal we offer several concrete discussions of the epistemological and ontological character of Fourth World knowledge systems—one of which has been the specific focus of the Center’s work for the last twenty-three years: the Anáhuac Knowledge System. Applications of this and other Fourth World knowledge systems are reflected in story and history, the healing arts and sciences, community nutrition, plant foods, medicines, and aesthetics.

Contributors to this issue of the Fourth World Journal touch on the modern era of colonization from a variety of perspectives and intellectual angles. Of critical importance, each of the authors offers alternatives and processes for reversing the colonial impulse of the “Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

In this issue we spotlight the writings of CWIS researchers working on several different studies as demonstrations of applied scholarship. Fourth World research is extraordinarily demanding, in part because researchers must conduct their study taking into consideration historical contexts, the meaning of language, contemporary opinions, and the political environment, perhaps the most important elements of “movement” or change and space. Change is essentially “time,” and “space” is the physical and metaphysical location within which the research itself is being conducted.

This edition of FWJ is unusual in that by virtue of the material included we experience the thought processes of the authors as they question, evaluate, explore, and apply their discipline to the scholar/practitioner project. Fourth World research is far more relevant now than conventional researchers recognize since there are global communications on a scale never before experienced and at such a pace only known by the medicine people of each nation. The medicine people have easy access to both the physical and metaphysical realms and can thus experience the relationships and have direct knowledge of events, people, and things anywhere in and about the world. While our research does not claim the powers of medicine people, we recognize that no topic, no event, no problem, or question of inquiry can be approached without taking into consideration the dynamic and evolving relationships between people, the earth, and the cosmos. Relationships between what appear to be unrelated things are drawn to create new understandings and new insights. It is therefore a practical matter for a researcher employing such a perspective to have access to past, present, and future knowledge as occurring simultaneously.

In this issue of the Fourth World Journal we have compiled the most influential essays and documents that have developed shortly before the announcement of the World Conference on Indigenous Peoples in 2010 and since. The dynamics of states’ government officials attempting to find language that accommodates the entrance of new international players, and the challenging results of efforts by indigenous peoples from all regions of the world to formulate themes and topics considered appropriate for initial discussions at the World Conference are presented in this issue.
It is our hope that merely seeing the raw versions of documents and ideas when read together will provide a strong sense of where the global dialogue is now focused in matters concerning the Fourth World. It is our hope that this issue of the Journal will remain in your collection to remind you of the ideas and actions that started the 21st century phase of indigenous peoples moving toward the negotiating table as members of the human family.

Scholars in the Fourth World engage in a wide range of intellectual and practical pursuits directly benefiting nations throughout the world. Our Associate Scholars Program benefits from the extraordinary efforts of more than forty-five dedicated researchers, social activists, political leaders, healers, writers, and traditional knowledge holders. These scholars carry on the traditions of intellectual inquiry practiced in many different cultures in addition to conventional empirical inquiry. The results are often quite surprising and always informative. The disappearance or declining use of ancient knowledge systems mirrors the destruction of cultural communities throughout the world. This increasingly rapid destruction of cultural communities reflects the damage to societies by the removal of peoples from their territories either as a result of natural disasters or imposed force by outside peoples. When a people is forced to leave a long used territory and the population is subsequently fragmented, culture collapses and the continued use and application of a knowledge system risks decline or complete disappearance. UNESCO and other international institutions as well as individual knowledge holders struggle to preserve these knowledge systems, but it is more apt to suggest that ancient knowledge systems must be maintained with the people and their culture in relation to their lands and territories. These forms of knowledge should be applied as systems of thought existing in parallel with each other with no system of thought dominating another. While knowledge systems may influence each other they tend to inform and prove beneficial if they are understood as discrete systems of thought. The culture embraces the language and the system of thought in relation to the land in the material world as well as phenomena in the immaterial world. We have new samples of scholarship in this issue that reflect aspects of different knowledge systems that have practical applications as well as important contributions to the greater body of human knowledge.

From time-to-time the Fourth World Journal features a Special Issue spotlighting a topic that demands attention, but with out the special focus would probably not receive a great deal of notice. More than two years ago, Dr. Teshia Solomon and I began a colloquy about the possibility of publishing papers produced from the Native Research Network’s annual sessions. This US-based network was founded as an informal group of American Indian researchers (mainly concerned with health matters) in 1997, and has become a non-profit organization located in the State of Oklahoma that now includes American Indians, Native Alaskans, Native Hawaiians and

Aboriginal researchers in Canada. After some discussion, Dr. Solomon and I came to realize that much of the research being conducted by indigenous researchers in North America tended to rely heavily on conventional research methodologies that emphasized reductionism—condensing complicated research questions to rather limited aspects of much broader problems. Learning that Dr. Solomon heads the Native American Research and Training Center at the University Arizona raised the possibility that a collaborative effort between the Center for World Indigenous Studies and the Native American Research and Training Center could create an opportunity for native researchers to publish the results of their work that relied on methodologies that depend on scientific approaches grounded in ancient knowledge systems predating the conventional sciences. Accordingly we agreed on the following: “This issue [of the Fourth World Journal] shall focus on indigenous health and healing research that points to effective approaches for applying traditional knowledge treating and reversing the adverse effects of chronic disease. We are hopeful that researchers will have employed indigenous or “traditional knowledge inspired” research methods and will point their outcomes to the application of traditional healing techniques or methods to the prevention and treatment of chronic disease.” We were pleased to find such studies among the NARTC researchers did exist, and now after a few years we are ready to release the results of our efforts.

This summer 2012 issue of the Fourth World Journal celebrates the 33rd Anniversary of the Founding of the Center for World Indigenous Studies (Founded in 1979), it also celebrates a new Journal design produced by our layout artist and layout editor Liz Rubin and we celebrate the coming of a Special Issue on Indigenous Health Research we have planned for release in October 2012 edited by Dr. Leslie E. Korn. All of these milestones affirm the resilience of the world’s peoples, their knowledge systems and the relevance of indigenous peoples to the capacity of the world to understand and explain solutions to challenges in the human condition. The cover of this issue depicts an Aymara elder being arrested and jailed in violation of his rights as an Aymara living in Bolivia. His crime? Advocating the rights of Aymara to their land, to their
foods and to their way of life. We selected these images to remind our readers that even as indigenous peoples achieve great successes, commercial interests, states’ governments, universities and suburban residents living a fairly vacuous life seek indigenous peoples’ knowledge, the challenges to indigenous peoples remain large and often frightening. We see that there are many leaders and ordinary people suffering the indignities imposed by states’ government societies throughout the world. While it is still largely up to indigenous communities and their leaders to extricate themselves from the vice of subjugation, all peoples must see their own indigenous roots in the knowledge and advocacy of indigenous peoples. In this new format, inaugural issue we benefit from the insights, thoroughness and interesting writing of three important researchers. They each offer a rich and unique perspective on their subject.