Michelle Francis, a Ngarigo elder and CEO of the Ngarigo nations Indigenous corporation.
The United States originally granted the patent in 1997, touching a nerve in India, leading to a challenge by the Indian government and igniting demonstrations against what was termed a piracy of emerging nations' indigenous products.
Non-industrialized, first-nation, indigenous societies around the world have very different worldviews from common Western assumptions about human superiority and separation from Nature.
Beyond places such as Bolivia and Ecuador -- which two years ago incorporated the rights of nature into its new constitution -- and other Third and Fourth World nations, indigenous people have little or no political power and their way of life and the consciousness behind it are part of natural history museums, not present-day reality.
However, as we all know, this link between nationhood and liberal-democracy creates endemic risks for all those who are not seen as belonging to the nation, including indigenous peoples, substate national groups and immigrants.
Born and raised in Vancouver, Callison is a member of the Tahltan Nation, an Indigenous people located in northwestern British Columbia, Canada.
The county executive, Michael P. Hein, has compared the city's actions on the Esopus to those of "an occupying nation" toward "indigenous people".
Eleven-year-old Ta'Kaiya Blaney of the Sliammon nation, an indigenous group from British Columbia, sang to the gathering and appealed for action.
In The Browning of America, 2000, artist Jaune Smith-to-See Smith, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, reasserts the nation's indigenous presence.
The policy rendered most of the nation's indigenous groups, including even its Muslim Cham minority, inheritors of the ancient imperial lineage.
Michael P. Hein, the county executive, has threatened to file suit if the discharges are not stopped, comparing the city's treatment of his county to that of "an occupying nation" toward "indigenous people".
