Félix Tiouka was the President of the Association des Amérindiens de Guyane française (AAGF). This speech was delivered on 9 December 1984 at the first Congress of the Amerindians of French Guiana/Lagwyann in Awala in the presence of local administrative authorities and the State. Speech published by Survival International (France), in its quarterly magazine Ethnies, droit de l'homme et peuples autochtones, Volume 1 (double issue, June-September 1985).
Translation note: much of the terms to talk about the people indigenous to French Guiana/Lagwyann has changed since the 80s. For one, the term “amérindiens” (ameridian) was replaced by “peuples autochtones” (indigenous people). The names of these nations has also changed, the acronym EPWWAG composed together the nations previously named ÉMERILLONS — PALIKUR — WAYÃPI — WAYANA — ARAWAK — GALIBI, they are now better named (in the same order) TEKO — PALIKUR — WAYÃPI — WAYANA — LOKONO — KA’LINA. Since 2017, a renewal of indigenous politics has led to new coalition building represented, amongst many clubs and organisations, in the fundation of the Grand Conseil Coutumier des populations amérindiennes et bushinenges (Great Customary Council of the Amerindian populations and bushinenges) signing the beginning of the representation of Maroon nations. This text is translated to celebrate the meeting of customary leadership 12 April 2024 in Macouria to elect the new traditional representation of each nation for the next 6 years.
NANA IÑONOLI
NANA KINIPINANON
IYOMBO NANA ISHEMAN
Address to the government and people of France
We, the EPWWAG people, once again agree to play the game of the dominant society and its decision-makers by presenting you today with this declaration of principles concerning all our territorial, economic, social and cultural claims.
We are well aware of the consequences of our actions, because we know what has happened to other aboriginal groups who have initiated this process before us. However, after a long period of reflection and examination of our current territorial, economic, political, social and cultural situation from various angles, we have concluded that we cannot allow it to deteriorate any further as a result of the centuries-old neglect of our legal guardian, the French government, in defending our rights in the face of (elected) sharks monopolising our territories and their resources for the benefit of private companies. For the future of our people, our culture and our children, we have a duty to do everything we can to obtain recognition of our rights as first occupants, so that we can build on this basis an acceptable future for future generations.
We know that we no longer have a choice; we must act now or accept to wither away within the dominant society.
We find it curious that, as the group whose rights have been continually flouted by the interests and activities of the dominant group, we still have the burden of proof and are obliged to demonstrate the nature of our rights and the extent of the damage caused to our territories and our culture. We find this all the more astonishing given that we are well aware that the government you represent is both judge and judged in this case, since it represents first and foremost the interests of the white majority. We would also like our cultural traditions to be taken into account when these rules are drawn up. Among other things, we do not understand why your jurists and legislators want to take into account in their arguments and decisions only the written law of European origin, totally ignoring the principles of the unwritten law of the indigenous peoples of America.
Nor do we understand why your notion of private ownership of land should take precedence over our notion of collective ownership. Private appropriation of the land and its resources seems to us to be at the root of a system based on the exploitation of man by man that our ancestors have always traditionally rejected.
We are representatives of community societies in which the exploitation of resources has always been based on equality, and we want to preserve this principle. Contrary to your system of values, we don’t want to build a society where the collective interests must always take precedence over the private interests of capitalist entrepreneurs.
Indeed, it is well recognised that the territories we have occupied since time immemorial have not been the subject of any treaty or agreement and are therefore subject to what you call “global claims”.
Who are we?
What do we want?
The Association des Amérindiens de Guyane française ÉMERILLONS — PALIKUR — WAYÃPI — WAYANA — ARAWAK — GALIBI (AAGF-EPWWAG) is a legally registered association representing the interests of six ethnic groups in French Guiana.
We represent nearly 4075 Amerindians.
Due to their geographical proximity and very close linguistic and cultural kinship, we decided to unite at the beginning of 1982, to study a better economic, social and cultural future.
We, the EPWWAG peoples, were sovereign at the time of the arrival of the first Europeans and their settlement on our lands. We enjoyed all the attributes of full sovereignty: control and exploitation of our territory and its resources, economic self-sufficiency and political autonomy. We had our institutions, our language, our culture, elaborated over millennia in perfect symbiosis with the laws of nature. Even if, in the eyes of the whites, we could be considered as primitive, backward and miserable populations, we were so aware of the quality of our social and cultural system based on equality for all, that we always refused to radically transform it to the delight of missionaries, administrators and other entrepreneurs. It was, moreover, our refusal to assimilate with the invaders and the latter’s refusal to understand our own value system and institutions that led us into a situation that has, today, become intolerable to us.
Later on, we will outline the history of our progressive domination, which was in fact that of the penetration of mercantile capitalism and industrial capitalism ever deeper into our lands.
Our recent history is that of a long struggle to defend our sovereign rights, whether against the sport hunters, the agricultural settlers, the industrialists, or the various elected representatives, whether on the left or the right, who have always supported them in their designs on our lands and resources.
Despite all the difficulties we have experienced, despite the fact that we have been pushed back and confined to narrow territories, which to this day continue to weigh heavily on our people (the ZEP project — Portal Island), we have never given up our sovereignty and our territories, which our ancestors have occupied and exploited since time immemorial.
Today, we believe that the recognition of this sovereignty must form the basis of the urgent and necessary redefinition of our relationship with the dominant society. This redefinition must be an opportunity for us to establish our control over the institutions and decision-making processes that affect us most directly in the fields of economic development, education, health and social services, as well as local and regional political organisation, and so on. In short, we want to re-establish and strengthen our own cultural values in the institutional areas that affect us, drawing on traditions that go back thousands of years.
The reference to our traditional values clearly indicates that we refuse to consider as valid the option of progressive assimilation into the dominant society which is insidiously underway and which is directly or indirectly encouraged by all the political, administrative and economic agents dealing with us.
We want to remain Amerindians and retain our own language, culture and institutions.
We believe that our rights as the first occupants of a large part of the territory of French Guyana entitle us to make this choice. We also believe that the members of the dominant society must accept this choice. It seems to us that your acceptance of our choice is one of the essential conditions for the establishment of lasting relations between our different peoples. If multiculturalism is truly to be one of the fundamental characteristics of Guyanese or French society, recognition of the specificity of Amerindian culture is certainly an important element on the periphery.
Our ancestral lands
The territories that our ancestors travelled through from time immemorial, exploiting their natural resources and naming rivers and forests, cover a huge area of French Guiana (America). We are not currently in a position to examine this area very precisely. We are requesting an in-depth study of the territories, as the history of the Amerindians in this country is very poorly known.
From the earliest times, our ancestors used these lands and their resources to ensure their subsistence and that of their families through hunting, fishing and gathering. They were nomads and travelled great distances. They knew their land, their source of life, as well as most of us still do. We have always been first and foremost hunters, living in close dependence on nature and respecting it as our mother, the provider of all the goods we need to survive.
Everywhere, subsistence hunting and fishing remain major economic activities and provide a significant proportion of our families’ food requirements. We continue to rely heavily on game and fish for our livelihood, according to the traditions handed down by our ancestors. We cannot conceive of our future life as anything other than closely dependent on the game and fish that the land has provided for us. We also want you to know that we have not, to date, given away a single parcel of this land. Not a single parcel of land, not a single forest, has been ceded by us to any government or company whatsoever. Until now, the political and economic agents of the dominant society have always turned a deaf ear. We now demand that they listen to us carefully and study our demands seriously.
The nature of our rights
Our territorial rights are based on our title as descendants of the original occupants of the lands whose extent, boundaries and traditional use we have just briefly described. We believe that these aboriginal rights are equivalent to rights of sovereignty. We do not accept that these rights should be limited to the narrow notion of residual hunting and fishing rights currently applied to us by the government.
We assert loud and clear that our aboriginal rights are rights of sovereignty, because how could it have been otherwise in our pre-Columbian situation of complete economic, social, political, cultural and religious autonomy? We were absolute masters of the land and its resources, of the rivers and forests that ensured our subsistence in total interdependence with nature. We don’t believe that the arrival of European foreigners on our lands, even if they were accepted to a certain extent by our ancestors, changed our position as sovereign people over our territories. Only armed conquest, or our tacit consent to alienate our rights to the benefit of the dominant society, could have caused us to lose this sovereignty. But nothing of the sort has happened. We know, in fact, that the position of the dominant society and its denial of our rights are based solely on power relations.
When the advantage of your numbers, your weapons and your technology was not as marked as it has become over the last century, your attitude was quite different: we were allied nations enjoying their autonomy. Today, your position of strength and your fear of not having access to our lands and their immense resources mean that you are backing away from recognising our sovereign rights. Why should white governments alone have all the rights to the land and its resources, as well as economic and political control? If we, the Amerindian people, are as equal as you are before the Creator of all things, we must be able to enjoy the same rights as you.
The French government authorises tens of thousands of so-called ‘sport’ hunters and fishermen to catch game and fish on our land. At the same time, the same government authorises forestry companies to clear the forests. What are we left with after all these white operators have come onto our land and taken priority? We are now left to pick up the crumbs that fall from our well-stocked table for the benefit of others.
From the perspective of respecting ecological balances, which has always been our approach, recognition of usufruct rights requires respect for the interdependence of the main elements of ecosystems: soil, water, vegetation and wildlife. Our traditional upbringing has taught us to preserve the habitats of the land animals and fish on which we depend for our food. Despite the impressive knowledge accumulated by your biologists, it seems to me that you have not yet realised that industrial forestry activities, as well as cygenetic and halieutic recreation, are incompatible with respect for the usufruct rights of the Amerindian peoples.
We do not want usufruct rights of this kind, any more than we want our aboriginal rights to be defined as slightly more extensive usufruct rights. We recognise that this notion of usufruct rights is a trap that inevitably leads to private companies taking control of the resources on our lands that appear to them to be the most profitable at any given time: forest cover, mineral subsoil, wildlife resources.
We believe that the transposition in the current context of our rights of sovereignty concerns all the resources of our territories and not just game and fish. Once again, this is an abuse of power that is incompatible with the notion of the equality of human beings and human groups, which is the basis of our unwritten law.
The nature of our relationship with the land and its resources, which underpins our Amerindian law, is fundamentally different from yours. Our legal principles are based first and foremost on the needs of the community and aim to ensure that everyone has equal access to the land and its resources.
Hence the concern to preserve nature and ensure the constant renewal of its resources, for the benefit of our brothers and sisters and for the well-being of future generations. We note that your law is based on completely opposite principles: it must ensure that individual or corporate interests enjoy exclusive use of the land and its resources to the detriment of other members of the same group, of the same society. It is not difficult to see that such a system leads, on the one hand, to the abuse and waste of renewable and non-renewable resources and, on the other, to a highly unequal distribution of collective wealth. We do not wish to accept this model of society and remain faithful to our model of community society in which collective rights take precedence over individual rights.
Furthermore, we will not accept the fact that the non-use of certain parts of our ancestral lands for more or less long periods is used as an argument to limit their nature or geographical extension. If we have been evacuated from certain areas, the responsibility for this must be laid at the door of the political and economic agents who have encouraged the invasion of our lands through agricultural colonisation, logging etc.
We cannot honestly be reproached for no longer using land that was taken from us without our consent. Furthermore, the industrial penetration of our territories has inevitably brought about major changes to our traditional subsistence activities. Because of our value system, which is totally different from yours, we have been the unconscious victims of these often brutal and rapid transformations. Our destiny has eluded us for a long time and, to a large extent, we have been the victims of all kinds of manipulation. Today we are asserting our desire to put an end to this situation and take our destiny into our own hands. Finally, we refuse to allow the extinguishment of our territorial rights to be the basic principle of any agreement between the government of the dominant society and our six peoples.
In the immediate future, therefore, we want to work to have our (aboriginal) rights recognised by the dominant society, not to have them abolished.
Denial and violation of these rights
Ever since the Europeans first set foot on our lands, our fundamental rights have ėt been constantly violated by them. The very expression “discovery of new lands”, represents an insult to all the aboriginal peoples of America who knew these lands inside out and had been exploiting them for millennia. The denial of the Other, of his specificity and of his rights, has always ėté one of the characteristics of the self-importance of European peoples who see themselves as the torchbearers of the only true civilisation and the only true faith. From this ethnocentric perspective, our lands were to be conquered, our peoples to be civilised according to your system of values. Despite all your efforts to assimilate us into your civilisation, we were able to resist victoriously.
Until then, we had been able to retain the use of most of our land, as well as our traditional activities and culture. By integrating us into religious circuits, these certainly had harmful effects on our populations. Amongst other things, certain diseases that we were unfamiliar with and against which we had no natural immunity, such as smallpox, wreaked considerable havoc among ethnic groups. Demographically decimated in this way, we were hardly able to put up effective resistance to the penetration of our lands by colonisation, or to the violation of our rights by the governments of the dominant society, concerned solely with promoting the economic and social development of the white majority. We have been forced to go further and further afield to take refuge and practise our ancestral activities, squeezed into smaller territories.
We have yet to fully assess the combined effects of all your activities as part of the dominant society, on our territorial rights, our economy and our culture, but it is already clear that we are the victims of what you proudly call your “civilisation” and your “development”.
You have crushed us under the steamroller of your technological progress. You have ignored us as peoples and as individuals with rights equal to your own. You have invaded our territories and plundered our resources, ignoring our most fundamental right to continue to live off the land. In return for our resources, you have shown us nothing but ignorance and contempt.
We are no longer so easily fooled by fine words and we recognise, underneath this seemingly progressive proposal, the denial of our ancestral rights and our desire to remain what we have never ceased to be, Amerindians. How can we have confidence in a government that denies other peoples what it is demanding on behalf of the French Guyanese people, namely recognition of the right to sovereignty as a different people?
Faced with the French government’s profound ignorance of our most fundamental rights and the denial of our desire to exist as Amerindians descended from the first occupants of this department, we are once again appealing to our legal guardian, the French government, to take the necessary steps to ensure that our rights are recognised. We do not want to become just another French citizen, or even “full French citizens”. We want recognition of our aboriginal rights, that is to say, recognition of our territorial rights, of our right to remain Amerindians and to develop our own institutions and culture.
Our demands
Having welcomed the white man to our land and suffered all the vexations we have just described in return, the time has now come for us to demand justice and recognition of our fundamental rights as a people distinct from the dominant white society, as Amerindian peoples and as the first occupants of this country. The essence of our demands is the recognition of our territorial rights as sovereign peoples, and our right to take charge of our own economic, social and cultural development. With this in mind, our basic positions can be summarised in the following 9 proposals:
1. As culturally autonomous peoples before the arrival of the Europeans, we want to be recognised as peoples with the right to self-determination.
2. As indigenous peoples, descendants of the first inhabitants of the territories of this part of America, which is French Guyana, we also demand that our rights of sovereignty over these lands be recognised.
3. We refuse to allow the definitive extinction of these rights to become a precondition for any agreement with the government of the dominant society.
4. We oppose any new project for the exploitation of the resources of our territories by the members of the dominant society and as long as our rights have not been recognised.
5. We want to control the exploitation of our lands and their resources in the future.
6. We want the economic base provided by control of our land to ensure our economic, social and cultural well-being for generations to come, as it ėt was before we were invaded by traders, settlers and industrialists.
7. We want to take charge. Our development in every respect and no longer leave it in the hands of members of the dominant society.
8. We want to base our development on the values and traditions bequeathed to us by our ancestors and developed over thousands of years in harmony with our natural and social environment.
9. In the future, we want to deal as equals with the governments of the dominant society and no longer be considered as inferior peoples.
Over the next two or three years, we want to analyse in greater depth the nature of our territorial rights, the past and present use of our lands by both our peoples and the dominant society, and begin to define a socio-economic development programme aimed at gradually ensuring our economic, social, educational, cultural and other autonomy.
Following the example of several other indigenous associations before us, we are asking the French government, the protector of our rights and interests, to provide us with the financial means to carry out such studies.
And to conclude this brief, we ask you to consider the meaning of the words on the title page: NANA IÑONOLI. NANA KINIPINANON. IYOMBO NANA ISHEMAN” (We love and cherish our land).
Félix Tiouka
