Cultural Survival 40 Years

Module 3: Blog #2

Website: http://www.culturalsurvival.org/about

The Cultural Survival website (CSW), is basically a mechanism that promote advocacy of Indigenous voice on a global scale centered on the  United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. The CSW promotes itself as an organization that is partnered with, and acts as a consultative organization to the United Nations.  The various programs found within the site, include links to a quarterly magazine, advocacy links and help with abuse of Native rights, and environmental destruction of Native lands. The Cultural Survival Foundation is a charitable organization that is run through donations and is center in in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and satellite offices are located in Guatemala and Colorado.

The main reason I examined this site is it represents how the internet can be used to empower Indigenous people to protect their cultural heritage from the negative impact of colonialism as represent in the modern Nation State. Furthermore, I wanted to examine Indigenous rights on a global scale by expanded my resources outside of Canada.  This site use more of a proactive global approach, with ties to international organization, such as the UN, which contrast the site I base my research project on, the Nisga’a Government site. The Nisga’a site, is more about anchor the community to a cultural heritage and bringing together a community and reconnecting them to the past so they can move forward in the future.

One major problem I found with the site is that not all the links worked, even though the site was updated in 2013.

Here are two links to UN sites dealing with Indigenous rights on a global scale.

http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IPeoples/IPeoplesFund/Pages/IPeoplesFundIndex.aspx

http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IPeoples/EMRIP/Pages/EMRIPIndex.aspx