United Nations
Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues
Third Session - May 14, 2004
The Foundation for Indigenous Americans of Anisazi Heritage
Agenda Item 4(d) Human Rights
Aquechewa, Honorable and distinguished members of the Permanent Forum, Member States, Indigenous brothers and sisters.
My name is Rev. RaDine Amen-ra of the Foundation for Indigenous Americans of Anisazi Heritage.
The Anisazi people or Amerindians of North America comprised of woodland people with over 500 nation/states, a population of over 150 million people, and over 8000 years developed a tremendous matriarchal civilization and culture, represented by the Statue of Liberty, which is the foundation for the wealth the United States enjoys today.
It is an ignored, but undeniable fact the racial identity for the largest population of Indigenous American Heritage was represented by brown skin with wavy to extremely bushy hair. The original name for the race of Amerindian people is Anisazi. The name Anisazi was replaced by the termed Negro by the colonizers invading to exploit their heritage culture, and lands.
Since the discovery of the wealth, including material and knowledge resources, within the Americas. Over the last 500 years to the present, Anisazi descendants have been surviving through a holocaust of magnanimous proportions from systematic and institutionalized systems of racism directed towards them.
Today, I take this opportunity to be a voice for millions of Amerindians representing the population of Anisazi heritage, and let their unspoken expression of spiritual, emotional, and physical suffering from generations of dehumanizing violations. These violations ranging from being deprived the human right to human dignity towards the respect of our humanity as a race of people; the right to live to sustain our race in our homeland, ethnic and racial identity theft, cultural exploitation, poverty, police brutality, intellectual property theft, including genetic harvesting of DNA from Anisazi children, compounded with forced assimilation into a false identity to integrate into the U.S; which maintains our invisibility.
It is through this tremendous rape of the Amerindian heritage by immigrating people, and the enormous impact of colonization over generations against the humanity of people belonging to the women of the Anisazi people, the tremendous oppression from the severe abuse to our humanity by the implementation of patriarchal culture to destroy their families,. Anisazi women struggle to continue the bloodlines in their land.
The grandmothers, still continued to tell their stories of the truth of their ancestry to the children, to combat against the miss- education of their children into a very distorted western view of their ancestry.
However, if truth be known, enslavement is an experience of a people; it is not the identity of heritage for a people.
Today, because of the mis- education of the Anisazi children, the essential knowledge needed for self preservation to sustain the viability of the original heritage belonging to the Amerindian race in our homeland called America, has been ignored. If action is not taken to connect the people back to their indigenous heritage culture and international action taken to stop environmental ethnocide of America by the United States, it will result in the complete extermination of the descendants from the Anisazi women or Amerindians in the next 50 years. The effects of environmental ethnocide are evident through the CDC statistics revealing the increase of diseases that reduce the life expectancy of Anisazi people. Anisazi descendants have the highest morbidity rates for communicable and non-communicable diseases in the United States.
We recommend that the Permanent Forum urge the committee on the Convention for the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), to pay special attention to issues related to the destruction of families belonging to indigenous women living under colonization.
2. We urge the adoption of the draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.
3. We support the Commission on Human Rights draft principles and guidelines for the Protection of the Heritage of Indigenous people.
4. We urge the forum to recognize the factual representation of racial identity for tribal connections belonging to Anisazi heritage. This will stop the ethnic identity theft by non- indigenous heritage descendants against the original heritage descendants to the ancestral birth right to heritage humanity developed by their ancestral grandmothers of Anisazi women.
5. We recommend the working group on Indigenous populations to extend its principles and guidelines to rectify the effects on the morbidity of Anisazi people from the destruction of the indigenous Forest (tree's) environment belonging to North America.
In conclusion, the Anisazi People request the Commission on Human Rights to support the efforts for the promotion and protection of Human Rights belonging to the Anisazi people.
