>> From the Library of Congress is Washington, DC. ^E00:00:04 ^B00:00:23 >> Guha Shankar: Good afternoon. How are you all doing? >> Just good. >> Guha Shankar: Good. Great to see you all here. I'm Guha Shankar, folklorist and staff member of the American Folklife Center here at the Library of Congress and on behalf of my colleagues at the Center, I want to welcome you all to this afternoon's presentation by Dr. Ken Bilby. It promises to be a really thought-provoking one. Betsy Peterson, our AFC director could not be here today but she extends her greetings to you as well. And also, I want to take the opportunity to thank our colleagues and co-sponsors of the program, the Library's Hispanic Division, in particular, Dr. Georgette Dorn, the chief and Tracy North, whom her many other duties is editor of the ^IT Handbook of Latin American Studies ^NO, a great resource for the field. As well, I want to acknowledge the support and co-sponsorship of our external partners, the National Anthropological Archives of The Smithsonian Institution, also as well the Interpretative Program's Office here at the Library who is helping us out co-sponsor and get the word out about the series. As you know, and if you don't know, you should make yourself know that there is a terrific exhibit on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 over in the Jefferson Building and I'd urge you all to take advantage of the presentation today to go over there and take a look at it if you haven't already done so. And here, I also want to thank especially my colleagues Thea Austin; our events coordinator Jon Gold, our intrepid sound engineer, Steve Winick; our writer editor and also the sexy film crew from the ITS who recorded this program for future webcast. All of our programs that we do here at the Center and indeed in many divisions of the Library are available as webcasts for you know, desktops, laptops, iPads and a variety of mobile devices so a great educational resource that we're very happy to provide for you. This afternoon's presentation by Dr. Bilby launches a 2015 edition of the Public Program Series, Many Paths to Freedom, Looking Back, Looking Ahead at the Long Civil Rights Movement. This year, as we did last year at the American Folklife Center, other divisions and service units in the Library and on occasion, external partners like the ones I've named before, will produce several programs that will focus on various aspects of the classic Civil Rights Movement for equality and justice for African-Americans in the U.S., perhaps more accurately, we should say -- or more precisely we should say the Long Black Freedom Struggle in America. In that vein, we have three programs the next couple of months that focus on events in the national sphere. On July 7th, Dr. Gary May will be speaking about the story behind the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That anniversary is coming up in August and Dr. May's book ^IT Bending Towards Justice ^NO has been highly praised for his portrayal of the events, not just sort of the surface stories of Dr. King and John Lewis and those kinds of things. But the behind the scenes, the on the ground struggles that took place, lead to the passage of that monumental act. On August 5th, we have a very special film screening by the filmmaker Robin Hamilton on the life of Fannie Lou Hamer. How many of you know who Fannie Lou Hamer was? Yes well, Fannie Lou Hamer was the Mississippi sharecropper who helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, one of the most important grassroots movements in the United States in the last 50 or 60 years. It essentially changed the way that political representation became enforced at the state and national conventions. That program will take place in the evening at the Hill Center. That's a very special appearance -- thing for us because we're trying to branch out and bringing the American Folklife Center to the neighborhood, as it were. And so the Hill Center is up at 900 East Pennsylvania Avenue, right past the Eastern Market Metro so please make plans to come and join us there for that particular program. And on August 6th, Emilye Crosby, professor at SUNY Geneseo will be speaking about African-American civil rights, teaching African-American Civil Rights history from the bottom up and that's in conjunction with our colleagues Summer Teachers, the Summer Teacher Institute which is sponsored by the Office of Education. And finally, to bring you back home to the kind -- of the programs that we're doing today. This one and a future program in September which we're doing in conjunction with the Association of Tribal Archives Libraries and Museums, will be talking about Native American perspectives, about their perspectives on structural historical inequalities that many racial and ethnic groups have faced and still face in this country. That program and this one today expands our understanding of civil rights from just the domestic sphere in African-American struggles to human rights, social justice in this hemisphere and across the globe. So, now on to our presentation. Ken Bilby, he's a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology of the Smithsonian Institution. He has taught at Bard College, Regis University and the University of Colorado. He's an anthropologist, ethnomusicologist and cultural historian. He's carried out field work in various parts of the Caribbean and West Africa and in estimation of some of his friends and colleagues who work in the Caribbean; he may be the finest ethnographer of the Caribbean since the great Sid Mintz was doing his work there. His most recent book, ^IT Words of Our Mouth, Meditations of Our Heart, Originators of Jamaican Popular Music ^NO, traces the birth and development of one of the world's most influential contemporary musical traditions in the words of its original creators. Lots of oral histories, it's a terrific book. And his earlier book, ^IT True-Born Maroons ^NO, a study of Jamaican Maroon oral narratives and historical consciousness was based on fieldwork spanning nearly three decades. He's gone on to write other books and produced many CD's, recordings. He has won -- and with particular reference to the talk today, he was one of the first to interview survivors of the Moiwana Massacre in Suriname, South America on November 29th. The event took place on November 29, 1986. In 2004, when some of these survivors finally succeeded in having their cases against the state of Suriname heard, he was one of the expert witnesses who testified for the plaintiffs. His talk today is an examination but not only, of the role of orally transmitted ancestral memory and struggles to overcome past injustices. Memories at the base level, as you may know, are foundation for a community's understanding of its past and its present. That is to say, shared memories and their transmission across generations provide the focal point for fostering a sense of identity. In the cases that Ken will be discussing, such memories are also proven critical in the struggle for human and civil rights and justice. In this context, the presentation reflects on two path-breaking cases of recent public memorialization, the Moiwana Massacres which took place in the Republic of Suriname in 1986 and separated in time and space, the Sand Creek Massacre which occurred in the U.S. Territory of Colorado in 1864. And Ken's going to tell us how those points connect. And so, I welcome Ken Bilby and one last final thing, please turn off cellphones. We have wireless here and it's going to interfere and if you have some transmission going on, it might interfere with our audio. So thank you and please make Dr. Bilby welcome. ^M00:07:28 [ Applause ] ^M00:07:35 >> Ken Bilby: I'm obeying you [laughter]. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm very glad you could all come and I want to thank Guha Shankar for that introduction and for the invitation, and I want to thank the American Folklife Center and the other units of the Library of Congress for the invitation to this very important program to participate in this. I want to begin with a -- to do impromptu remarks. This topic that we're going to be talking about today is a very somber one. It's full of gravity and so I would like to begin by doing what traditional Ndyuka spokespeople do when making a public speech or talking in public. Basically, they excuse themselves. They ask, they apologize to the elders for any mistakes, any missteps they might make in advance because the elders are particularly aware that everyone makes mistakes. And particularly when talking about such a grave subject, it's -- there are a lot of sensitivities involved. So one has to be very aware of that and I need to stress that also because unfortunately, I haven't had the opportunity to talk to any of the Sand Creek Massacre descendants myself although I will be talking about some things that they have said so I want to point that out. And in that regard, I'd like to quote, I'd like to repeat a quote of something said by Gail Ridgely who is a Northern Arapaho Sand Creek descendant and that is, "To even speak of the Sand Creek Massacre is a sacred act. It's not easy and it's not to be taken lightly. It's a huge responsibility to speak of Sand Creek. But it must be done because people must know." So in that spirit, I'm going to say some of the things that are very sensitive to repeat but I do want to stress that everything I say or show is a part of the public record. Nonetheless, it's important to be very respectful and sensitive to that. ^M00:10:00 In November of 1986, I happened to be living and working as an anthropologist in the French Overseas Department of French Guiana on the northeastern coast of South America. French Guiana and the neighboring country of Suriname which you see here, Suriname being a former Dutch colony that attained independence in 1975, were and still are home to the largest populations of Maroon peoples in the Americas. Descendants of enslaved Africans who centuries ago escaped from coastal plantations and succeeded in establishing their own societies and cultures, in regions inaccessible to the colonial powers that had enslaved them. The six Maroon ethnic groups living in this part of the world today, the Saramaka, Ndyuka, Aluku, Paramaka, Matawai and Kwinti are an integral and important part of the present-day societies of Suriname and French Guiana. I had spent most of the previous two years living in an Aluku Maroon village in the interior rainforest but had since relocated to the coastal town of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni right on the border of French Guiana and Suriname. I was trying to get a sense of what life was like for Maroons who had migrated to the coast and were adjusting to new lives in rapidly urbanizing multiethnic contexts. By now, I was conversant in the Aluku language. While working in Saint-Laurent, I came to know a great many Aluku and Ndyuka individuals. Since Aluku and Ndyuka are mutually intelligible dialects of a single language, I was able to converse with Nduykas in their own language almost as easily as with Alukus. And during my daily rounds, I spent at least as much time with Ndyuka acquaintances as with Alukus. It was not a favorable time for Maroons in this part of the world. Not only had the long history of discrimination and poor treatment of Maroons by the coastal society continued into recent times, but the situation was rapidly worsening. Some months earlier, a civil war had broken out in Suriname pitting an insurgent Maroon force made up mostly of Ndyuka Maroons against the Surinamese National Army led by military dictator Desi Bouterse. The tenor of the experience of doing ethnography changed entirely as this new reality began to cast a pall over all the Maroon communities living in Saint-Laurent. Rumors of human rights abuses were rampant. People returning from visits to the Surinamese capital of Paramaribo, some of them claiming to be eyewitnesses began to pull me aside to narrate nauseating accounts of torture and extrajudicial killings of Maroons on the other side of the border. Here's a typical example from my field notes dated November 3, 1986. While I was walking on the main road in Saint-Laurent, two women called me over, recognizing me from descriptions they had had from others in Saint-Laurent as the foreigner who speaks Ndyuka. One of them, an older woman, a Paramaka from Langa Tabiki, told me that she had been living in Europe, in Amsterdam but that she had come back here because she had received news that her son had been killed in Paramaribo in connection with the current disturbances. She said she wants to go to Paramaribo to claim his body but she has to be very careful. He had been tortured, his jaw smashed and his chest torn open. Such horrifying accounts were only the beginning. Some three weeks later, the worst fears of many Maroons were realized. These fears have been passed on from their ancestors who had warned each generation that the coastal society from which they had escaped would one day attempt to annihilate them once again, just as in the days of slavery. The true scale of the atrocities taking place across the border in Suriname soon becomes fully apparent in my field notes. Here's part of an entry from the opening days of December. In the early afternoon, I went over to Papa [Inaudible] and family to see the family. On the way, I noticed that there was a huge crowd of people gathered in the area. When I got there, they all explained to me that a few hundred Ndyuka refugees had just arrived from the other side of the river chased by Bouterse's soldiers. They eventually -- they excitedly related stories about atrocities committed by the soldiers. I immediately went and alerted some Dutch journalists who happened to be visiting Saint-Laurent about the massive influx of Ndyukas today and offered to act as an interpreter if they wanted to interview some of the refugees. They were eager to do this so they joined me when I arranged a meeting with two of the refugees who arrived today, eyewitnesses to some of the atrocities. There follows a summary of some of the information learned during the course of the interview, all of which was also recorded by the journalists. They estimated that about 300 refugees arrived today, all of them Cottica River Ndyukas from either Mungo Tapu, mungo, or a village called Moiwana. On Saturday, at least 16 people were killed at Moiwana. One of the men we interviewed witnessed the killings from a hiding place in the bush. Among those killed was his 12-year-old son who was pulled from the house and shot. A woman, obviously pregnant, pleaded with the soldiers not to kill her, pointing to the baby she was carrying. As she ran away, she was shot in the back. She was among the 16 dead. Another soldier took a six-month-old baby and put the barrel of his gun in its mouth. The baby accepted it eagerly as it would have a nipple or a baby bottle. The soldier pulled the trigger blasting the baby out of existence. The soldiers rounded up another group of seven people, six children and one adult woman. They lined them up in the middle of the village and placed a guard around them on both sides so that they wouldn't escape. Shortly after this, in spite of their pleading, they were all shot to death. Some of the murdered villagers' bodies were taken away by Bouterse's soldiers while others were dragged into houses which were then doused with diesel oil and set afire. Before the soldiers left, they burned down the whole village. The wife of one of the men we interviewed who had been shot in the foot, managed to run away into the bush and to join her husband and some others. They went from there to the town of Mungo where her foot was treated by a doctor. From here, they began their trek through the forest to the Maroni River. It took them almost three days. They slept two nights in the forest. The man carried his wounded wife on his back the whole time. Those who accompanied them weren't able to help for they had their own burdens to carry. They arrived at [inaudible] on the Suriname side of the river this morning from where they were transported by boat to Saint-Georges on the French side. Hundreds of people from the Cottica River area have fled into the forest, seeking refuge on the French side. Some of them are probably lost, say the interviewees. They expect people to come trickling in for several days. Among those killed at Moiwana were [speaking in foreign language]. The next few weeks were frenetic and I barely had time for keeping field notes. Thousands of new refugees came streaming in to Saint-Laurent and soon, some 10,000 Surinamese Maroons were living in refugee camps hastily set up by the French military. A representative of the U.S. Committee for Refugees arrived and I acted as his interpreter, collecting many more eyewitness accounts. Only later was it firmly documented that at least 39 Maroon civilians had been killed at what became known as the Moiwana Massacre on November 26, 1986. But Moiwana stood for many more atrocities than this. In fact, more than 150 Maroon civilians from different communities, many of them also women and children. Were killed, or wounded, in military operations that swept over portions of the Cottica River region during this period and I should remember all -- I should mention that there were also other parts of Suriname such as in the Saramaka territory where people were massacred as well. I would like to show a little bit of a video which helps to make this point. It's a woman being interviewed and she, I believe, is one of the earlier victims of the depredations that led up to the Moiwana Massacre. So her name is Tina Kastil and she's not from Moiwana. She actually talks about a killing that took place in another village called [Inaudible] three months before Moiwana. So it's just to make the point really that there are many people such as her who, in fact, were not covered by the justice that I'll be talking about rendered by the Inter-American Court for Human Rights for the victims of Moiwana. They're in fact more than a hundred others who in fact have never received any sort of justice or relief for this. And so here she is relating the actual event that happened to her and it was, she's relating it 20 years after it happened. ^M00:19:59 So another thing to keep in mind about this is that the power of these memories, it's a pretty grueling sequence here but the power of these memories are obviously of such strength that we can be certain they're being passed on to future generations, through her children, probably her children's children and for a very long time to come. Also, this is -- this segment is in the Ndyuka language and there are subtitles in Dutch which probably won't help much [laughter] so I actually am going to just read a fairly literal translation before I show the segment of what she's saying so that you can keep in mind. You can see by the gestures, they'll relate to a lot of what I'm reading you in translation here. So she says, "For the rest of my life, I'll never forget that day, August 1, 1986. It was Friday afternoon, 3:00 o'clock in the village of Mudar Kondre where we are right now. Suddenly we heard the sound of a group of cars coming into the village. My little boy, his name was Juan Sergio, was two-and-a-half years old. He and the other little boys were playing then he ran over to me. He already knew something was happening. He said, "Mama, Mama, look at the cars." Then I saw one of the soldiers' car stop. A bunch of soldiers got out. We didn't know what was happening because we never experienced anything like this in this village. So we went inside my niece's house. She was there with her three children. I was there with mine. We went in the house and closed the door. So we were standing there completely still. While we were going into the house, the soldiers spread out and surrounded the village so I held my boy like this at my side. The boy put his head next to mine like this. Then he said, "Mama, I'm afraid. I'm afraid." I put my finger to my mouth like this going ssshhh. He held onto me tightly like this. Suddenly, when I went into a room, I heard a voice outside say in Dutch, "There are people inside. There are people inside!" That's what I heard the voice say. It was one of the soldiers. I didn't know exactly where he was but we heard the voice outside. So we stayed perfectly still. My boy held onto me tightly like this. Just as I heard the voice, a shot came through the house. As I was standing there, just as I realized that a shot had been fired, my whole body felt hot. Some kind of hot liquid was streaming down my body. Then I was immediately blinded. I was deaf. My boy's head was pressed against my shoulder like this. The bullet passed right next to my cheek and caught the boy in the side of his face, piercing his head and going right through to the other side. His legs were cramped around me like this and his arms trembled. That's how he died like a passing wind in my arms. See if you can understand what I'm saying. A mother is holding a child in her arms, her child in her arms. The child feels at home, thinking, "Ah, I'm safe. My mama is holding me." But it happened while he was in his mother's arms, in his mother's arms. ^E00:23:29 ^B00:23:38 [ Music ] ^M00:23:46 [ Speaking in Foreign Language ] ^M00:26:47 The bloodshed received little coverage in the United States or most other parts of the world. Over the years, I began to wonder whether these traumatic events would be forgotten except among the affected communities and among a handful of onlookers from other parts of the world such as myself who had heard accounts directly from the mouths of victims themselves. These horrifying events loom large in my own private memories, leaving a permanent mark on my psyche. But I was well aware that the Moiwana village massacre and the larger carnage in Suriname for which it had become a symbol were hardly isolated incidences. Injustices of this kind are, of course, rife. As we all know, there are still occurring in various parts of the world and the better known examples of massive genocidal violence that have left painful scars in the presence, the Armenian massacres during the early 20th century, the World War II Holocaust, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur overshadow hundreds of lesser known and smaller-scale cases of rationalized mass violence. But for me personally, Moiwana would always be different. It was a case in which I had looked into the faces of victim's days after the tragedy occurred. Moiwana would not be forgotten by the rest of the world, thanks to the survivors of the massacre and their supporters. Some of the surviving family members were relentless in their quest for justice. During the 1990's with help from an activist organization in the capital of Paramaribo known as Moiwana '86, they filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. In 2004, some 18 years after the massacre, their case was finally brought before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica. Together with another anthropologist named Thomas Polime, himself a Ndyuka Maroon, I served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs. I will say more about my role as an expert witness shortly. In what many legal scholars consider a landmark case, Moiwana Village versus Suriname, the justices of the Inter-American Court decided overwhelmingly in favor of the victims and their families. Part of what made this case stand out was that the reparations ordered by the court were not solely material or monetary, but included nonmaterial moral damages including what might be called spiritual damages. Setting a new legal precedent, the court recognized spiritual integrity as a fundamental part of cultural integrity and cultural integrity is a basic human right that had been violated along with the larger right to due process that had been denied the victims and their families since the perpetrators of the violence have never been apprehended and tried. The court also recognized memory as an important component of justice, ordering the government of Suriname to pay for a monument to the victims to be designed according to the wishes of the survivors. I will return to some of the broader implications of this case in a moment. ^M00:30:03 But first, let us make the rather large leap to the other case I would like to consider now. A couple of years ago, after moving to the State of Colorado, I became acutely aware of the role of memory in the quest for justice in another important case, that of the Sand Creek Massacre which occurred in the Territory of Colorado, not yet a state, in 1864. During this traumatic event, more than 150 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, many of them women and children, were slaughtered by Colorado volunteer regimens of the U.S. Cavalry. Accepting the good faith of the U.S. officials with whom they had previously negotiated a fragile peace, the Indians had put down their arms and placed themselves under the protection of the United States flag, temporarily camping near a U.S. military fort until the peace could be finalized. The U.S. officer provisionally in command of the fort, who was among those who had early encouraged the Indians to take refuge there, had then taken advantage of their vulnerable position to carry out a wholesale massacre. Many readers around the world first learned of the Sand Creek Massacre through author D. Brown's bestseller, ^IT Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee ^NO published in 1970. But through the years, powerful local memories of this tragic event had remained alive in Colorado as well as especially in Oklahoma, Wyoming and Montana where many Cheyenne and Arapaho descendants of the victims and the survivors now live. Sand Creek was in the news when I arrived in Colorado as the 150th anniversary of the massacre soon to be observed with a number of commemorative events was rapidly approaching. The Sand Creek and Moiwana Massacres are separated by a large span of time. To be precise, exactly 122 years and I say exactly because by an eerie coincidence, the two events actually share the same date, November 29th. But despite the large temporal gulf between them, I could not help but be struck by certain parallels in the processes leading to their official recognition and memorialization. First, both events have come to stand for larger histories of injustice. Just as Moiwana symbolizes other episodes of unjustified violence against Maroons both during and before the Surinamese civil war, the Sand Creek Massacre is but one of the more egregious of several massacres committed by U.S. soldiers against Native American peoples as part of the westward expansion of the United States during the 19th century. And it is sometimes used to represent this larger picture. Second, perhaps because of their prominence in this regard, both are the first such cases of massacres of indigenous or tribal peoples by national military forces to receive official acknowledgment at the national level in their respective countries. Third, both cases may also be seen as path breaking in that the memories that have prevailed in the process of memorialization are largely those of the victims and their descendants rather than those of the perpetrators or the governments with which they were associated when these atrocities were committed. Scholars are quick to point out that historical memory is perspectival and contingent. And therefore historical truth is never absolute or stable. Rather, it consists of temporary and gradually shifting understandings negotiated between varying, often competing voices. Be that as it may, official records produced by the exercise of unequal power have most often dominated public conversations about the past. In the case of Moiwana, the slaughter of defenseless civilian was at first represented by the Surinamese military government and the press it controlled as a victorious engagement with terrorists. In Colorado, despite congressional hearings shortly after the massacre in Washington in 1865 that determined otherwise, the events at Sand Creek were widely represented through the 19th and 20th centuries as a battle with armed and hostile enemies in which Colorado troops had behaved valiantly. And here is actually a monument that was put up at the Colorado state capital which commemorates several important battles, some of them in the Civil War. And I show this as an example of the sort of ongoing negotiation and change of perspective because this battle was -- this monument was put up in 1909 by Pioneers Association. And originally when the Sand Creek negotiations were going on to have the site memorialized, there was a move in the legislature to wipe out the reference to Sand Creek because Sand Creek is included on this list as if it were just another battle. And it was going to be taken off, sanded out and wiped out but actually the Cheyenne and Arapaho descendants and some others decided at the last moment to change this. They didn't want it to be wiped out. It's part of the larger memory. What they did was they added a plaque underneath it which describes this. I'll just read a bit of this. It says, "Though some civilians and military personnel immediately denounced the attack as a massacre, others claim the village was a legitimate target. This Civil War monument paid for by funds from the Pioneers Association and the state was erected on July 24, 1909 to honor all Colorado soldiers who had fought in battles of the Civil War in Colorado and elsewhere. By designating Sand Creek a battle, the monument's designers mischaracterized the actual events. Protests lead by some Sand Creek descendants and others throughout the 20th century have since led to the widespread recognition of the tragedy as the Sand Creek Massacre. Some will object that as these events recede further into the past and competing narratives proliferate, truth will become increasingly elusive, that we will never really know what happened. From where I stand, there can be no doubt that the killings in Moiwana and the vast majority of the killings of Maroons in the surrounding area during the same period, qualify as massacres. In the case of Sand Creek, the truth about what happened may seem further from our grasp since the events occurred so much longer ago. Yet although there are some who continue a century-and-a-half after the fact to insist that the killings at Sand Creek took place as part of a legitimate battle, their numbers appear to be diminishing. As Gary Roberts, an historian who has been studying the events at Sand Creek and competing representations of them for more than 30 years stated in a recent public presentation and I quote, "There is no doubt that Sand Creek was a massacre. Any interpretation that argues the contrary is rationalization. The violation of plighted faith is unmistakable. The slaughter of women and children is undeniable. The atrocities and mutilations of the dead are beyond dispute." End of quote. The Cheyenne and Arapaho people themselves and especially the survivors of Sand Creek and their descendants have held steadfast to this truth for a century-and-a-half. Only in the last few years, however, have branches of the United States government such as the U.S. Congress and the National Parks Service lent their authority to this perspective. Let us take a closer look at how and why the process of publicly remembering such traumatic events has in recent times tilted in this new direction, both in the case of Sand Creek and that of Moiwana. In the interest of time, I can present here only the briefest sketch of processes that have been complex and highly convoluted but perhaps further details can be brought to light in the discussion period that follows. I can speak most confidently to the Moiwana case as I took part alongside the Ndyuka plaintiffs in the case they brought before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2004. This court case was centered on the ongoing denial of justice to the victims and survivors of Moiwana. In order to understand what this really meant, one would have to know something about the specific ongoing repercussions of the massacre within a particular cultural context. My role as an anthropological witness was to try with the help of the plaintiff's attorneys and the survivors themselves to make this distinctive cultural reality comprehensible within a court of international law. In a series of poignant meetings before the hearing, the Moiwana witnesses discussed with me in their own language what they wished to accomplish in this case and what was most important to them about it. In short, for them, justice was an ancestral imperative that could not be escaped. Even if they had wanted to put the past behind them, they could not so long as the spirits of those who had been murdered were not at rest. This should not be taken as a figurative statement. The spirits of the victims of Moiwana have yet to be fully appeased. The injustices they and their families suffered could not be reduced to torture, unexplained killings of innocent people and destruction of property as terrible as these realities were. ^M00:39:58 For these atrocities had created a complex chain of very real spiritual consequences that spiraled out in many directions. In order to grasp this, one must understand that in Ndyuka society, the transition from death to the world of ancestors is an essential rite of life and one of the most important expressions of the dignity of the human being. Every Ndyuka who is deemed to have lived a good life is entitled to proper death rites. The body must be prepared with great care and respect and given a decent burial. The deceased must then be honored with an elaborate series of material exchanges and music and dance performances that can span more than a year. Only then will he or she progress into the world of ancestors. To be denied proper death rites is a grave sin against one's spirit, one for which the family of the deceased is held partly accountable. The spirit of one wronged in this way will take vengeance even on his or her own kinsmen causing illness and misfortune until the latter fulfill their obligations to make things right. The system of spiritual vengeance and appeasement triggered by the commission of great wrongs is tightly woven into the structure of Ndyuka society. The massacre at Moiwana left the survivors without the possibility of fulfilling the most fundamental spiritual obligations to their loved ones. The community was scattered by the sudden attack. The bodies of the dead were taken away by the attackers, left for the vultures or burned. Such a calamity especially on so large a scale is almost unimaginable in Ndyuka society. Soon the survivors began to fall ill, both physically and psychically. First those closest to the victims, then others within the effective lineages. The suffering ping-pong back and forth passing an incurable malaise over the relatives of those spirits have been denied justice. In the final decision, the judges at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights recognized the special nature of the damages inflicted on the people of Moiwana, acknowledging in effect that the social and cultural fabrics of the community, one might say the spiritual tissue had been grievously assaulted along with the bodies of those who had been killed or wounded. They ordered the government of Suriname to find and return the remains of the victims to their families so that all could be repatriated to the lands from which they had been driven. In effect, while ordering the public memorialization of the victims through the building of a prominent public monument at the site of the massacre, the court also attempted to provide the community with the means to honor and memorialize its own wronged ancestors in private in its own fashion. This is but one aspect of the court's ruling but in my view, it is one of the most important. Turning once again to the case of Sand Creek, what most impressed me as I began to learn more about the recent efforts of memorialization in Colorado was the critical role played by descendants of the victims and survivors of the massacre and their insistence on foregrounding their own historical memories, perspectives and interpretations and how powerful these were. Well over a century had passed and the events of 1864 were far from the minds of present-day Coloradans, with the exception of a handful of historians and history buffs and those resident Native Americans from various groups for whom memories of the Sand Creek Massacre spoke to larger histories of decimation, displacement, and cultural domination. And I don't mention the descendants themselves because although this was part of their original territory, now there are no longer any recognized, governmentally recognized territories in Colorado belonging to the Cheyenne and the Arapaho. They're in their territories now. They were displaced to Oklahoma, and Wyoming, and Montana. ^E00:44:09 ^B00:44:16 If not for the active intervention of Colorado Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Sand Creek might have remained all but forgotten to the general public living in Colorado. In 1998, Senator Campbell, himself a Northern Cheyenne, introduced legislation aimed at the eventual creation of a National Park unit at the massacre site to memorialize and honor the victims. In 2007, following years of study, debate, negotiation and intense politicking, the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site became the United States' 391st official park unit. While many outsiders certainly played an important role in the process including professional historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, National Park Service officials and local landowners. It was because of the determination and perseverance of the Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples themselves that the creation of a National Historic Site commemorating those ancestors who had perished in the massacre 142 years earlier became a reality. Ever since 1864, the site of the bloodshed had remained sacred ground for both peoples. For more than a century, descendants have periodically traveled hundreds of miles from their latter-day homes in Oklahoma, Wyoming and Montana to return to the massacre site and commune with those ancestors who had been lost there. Oral histories vividly detailing events and experiences suffered by particular ancestors were passed down along family lines, keeping memories of this catastrophic historical episode very much alive. Some of these family memories became an important part of the Sand Creek Massacre Project Site Location Study created by the National Parks Service. So I want to play just a few minutes of testimony by some of the descendants, massacre descendants from a very recent PBS documentary about the massacre. ^E00:46:19 ^B00:46:36 [ Music ] ^M00:46:40 >> To me, that's really -- that's really atrocious evil and universally a white flag meant either surrender or that you were at peace. And he killed a lot of old people and babies and women. And there was not that much opposition. I mean, there was but the surprise and how well they were, how well the cavalry was armed was still overwhelming for that. >> My grandfather had just got with his wife and she was pregnant. And so there was a horse herd. They were trying to cut off a horse herd. And the -- my grandfather whistled for his horse and the horse come and he threw that buffalo on the horse and he put her on there in that little horse and then took off and rode. She rode off with those horses. And he took off and he seen a little boy. The little boy -- when he taught the kids, you know, they don't cry but he was shot. So he [inaudible] that little boy then he ran with him and there was this woman walking. She was -- her scalp was gone and she was holding her face up. ^M00:48:25 [ Sighing Sound ] ^M00:48:31 >> There was a lady [inaudible] that had survived Sand Creek. Her name was Yellow Woman and she had a bullet hole in her thigh that the soldiers had shot her when she was six years old at Sand Creek. And she grew up. She got very old. And she showed everybody that black bullet hole and that the bullet went straight through. >> We had an ancestor at Sand Creek. Her name was [Inaudible] Woman. Her mother had her run and dig a place in the sand -- in the sand, the banks of the river. They dug a hole and there was growth, overgrowth that kind of went over the banks. So they went in there and they dug. And that's where she hid, where this woman hid during the massacre. Her mother had instructed her to stay in there no matter what she heard, what happened. She told her not to come out. >> The people that were fleeing, tried to hide their children in the -- burrow them in the dirt or the sand and also tried to hide them in like any hollow trees they came across. But it was a futile attempt to save their lives. >> An elderly woman running and she -- as she was running, she knew she wasn't able to keep up and, you know, the one thing she said was, "You don't ever forget us. ^M00:50:04 [ Music ] ^M00:50:09 And that's what she [inaudible] before she passed, before they killed her, you know. >> Ken Bilby: So as we can see very clearly from these testimonies for the descendants of Sand Creek, as for the Moiwana families, these memories were and are living realities entailing strong spiritual obligations that have not diminished with the passage of time. Returning descendants could often sense and feel the presence of the spirits of their ancestors in various ways when visiting the site. Some could hear children playing or the voices of women running and crying. The spiritual suffering that lingered in the vicinity required measures that only Arapaho and Cheyenne or other authorized individuals knowledgeable in traditional ways could perform. Different parts of the site would have to be consecrated with ceremonial blessings, offerings and prayers. Descendants would have to seek and find justice for their wronged ancestors in their own ways. Among the required remedies was the repatriation and burial of remains of massacred victims that ended up in museum collections, a process that is ongoing. By regaining substantial control of this sacred site which they had finally achieved through a cooperative arrangement with the National Parks Service, the Cheyenne and Arapaho descendants stand a better chance of regaining peace for their ancestors and themselves. Much is made of the importance of officially sanctioned memorialization as a method of healing. The concept of healing is often given a primary role in the quest for what has become known as transitional justice. The healing potential of such memory work is certainly not to be underestimated particularly when memorialization is undertaken in a genuinely collaborative manner. But in most cases, symbolic gestures of healing through remembering are at best only a step in the right direction. In 2006, barely meeting the deadline set by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Suriname finally issued a formal apology for the Moiwana Massacre through its president at the time, Ronald Venetiaan who's to the far right in this picture. Just last year, surrounded by members of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes on the steps of the State Capitol in Denver, Governor John Hickenlooper similarly offered an official apology on behalf of the State of Colorado for the atrocities committed a century-and-a-half ago at Sand Creek. Such public acts of contrition represent important victories for massacred descendants who understand justice as an ancestral imperative. Yet, I am reminded here of the closing remarks made by Otis Halfmoon of the National Parks Service during a symposium on the Sand Creek Massacre held at the National Museum of the American Indian last fall. It was a very important part of these commemorative proceedings a couple of days of talks including many testimonies by massacre descendants. It happened at NMAI right near here. "Let this be a healing process for our Indian people," he said. "You heard that word quite a bit today and I'm glad to hear that word heal," he continued. "Well, many of the tribes, many of us, we do not use the word reconciliation. If you dissect that word, that means in accounting terms that the books are balanced. As far as many of the Indian people believe, the books will never be balanced but we can heal." In a similar vein, Dr. Richard Little Bear who we saw giving testimony a short while ago, president of Chief Dull Knife College and himself a Northern Cheyenne, made the following eloquent statement at the same symposium, "I'm not a psychologist or even an authority on cultural trauma or intergenerational hurt. I only know what I see and feel. I see a Cheyenne people suffering from centuries of trauma inflicted on us and no one seems to understand why this is happening. I see the trauma working on my people. I see the effects of forcible deprivation by a supposedly superior people and their systems. And when they are inflicted on us, the devastating effects it has on us. I see people self-sedating and self-medicating with drugs and alcohol because of these depravations. We lost a lot of land, a lot of culture, a lot of our languages, a lot of our spirituality, a lot of our own educational systems. And we lost it forcibly. And because we now self-medicate, we are blamed for these losses. I believe that once we get through these self-medications, the Cheyenne people will be the self-sufficient and the reliable people they once were." Rather than focusing exclusively on what happened a century-and-a-half ago, this statement bridges past, present, and future. And also suggests the larger context of which the struggles for justice at both Sand Creek and Moiwana may be seen as a part. Both cases point to a worldwide form of social injustice that remains rampant and that indeed, poses one of the greatest challenges for the development of international jurisprudence concerned with human rights. In short, what can be done from a legal standpoint effectively to protect the collective rights of indigenous peoples? And here I use the term broadly to refer to the first or long-established prior inhabitants of a given territory who are facing forcible incorporation or involuntary assimilation into expanding states. As different as they are, massacres such as those at Sand Creek and Moiwana may be seen in large part as horrendous outcomes of such processes, outcomes that threaten to multiply today at an alarming rate as expanding states join forces with resource-hungry transnational corporations to assert claims to lands, that have long been inhabited and owned by others. Thereby increasing the likelihood of state-sanctioned acts of mass violence against first peoples as they resist the depravations to which they are subjected. One reason Moiwana Village versus Suriname may be seen as a landmark case is that the final ruling of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights was not limited to reparations for the massacre itself. Rather, taking a broader view of the implications of the massacre, the court made the leap to recognizing the interdependence of land rights and cultural rights as fundamental aspects of human rights violated in context such as these. In its presentation and its final arguments, the legal team that worked with the Moiwana survivors had made a bold move. It had argued that, "The victims continue to suffer because they have been forcibly deprived of their traditional lands and the cultural and spiritual congress that can only be found in those traditional lands." End of quote. As part of their larger strategy, the attorneys for the plaintiffs had set out to prove that the members of Moiwana Village both at the time they were forcibly driven from their traditional lands and at present, were and still are regarded as the legal owners of the traditional lands under Ndyuka customary law. In view of this, the attorneys requested that "the court order that Suriname adopt legislative and other mechanisms that provide for effective titling and guarantees for the community's lands in accordance with their customary law and in a manner that is consistent with the American convention on human rights and indigenous people's rights and other instruments." In its final statement, final judgment of June 2005, the court fully supported this argument, ordering that the state provide one, restitution and legal recognition of the community's ownership rights to their traditional lands and resources in accordance with their customary laws, values and usage. Two, collective title to these traditional lands and resources that confirms, and effectively secures their ownership rights in accordance with their customary law. Three, physical demarcation of their lands. Four, guarantees of safety for those who choose to return. And five, an opportunity for the full participation and informed consent of both the victims and other neighboring, this is very important, other neighboring Cottica and Ndyuka communities regarding the proceeding measures. The court ordered furthermore that, "The State must adopt legislative and other measures in order to identify and effectively title the community's traditional lands in a manner that is consistent with the American Convention on Indigenous People's Rights and other human rights instruments. This decision created a far-reaching legal precedent for future cases. Soon after, one of the most important uses of this precedent was made by the Saramaka people of Suriname. Like the Ndyuka, a Maroon people born of the resistance to plantation slavery. In 2000, a Saramaka organization, the Association of Saramaka Authorities, had filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, challenging recent actions by the Surinamese state. ^M01:00:00 Over the previous several years, without consulting the Saramaka people, the Surinamese government had granted major concessions within the traditional Saramaka territory to Indonesian and Chinese timber companies as well as concessions to other companies for future mining of gold. Predictably, this led to rising tensions as Saramakas in affected areas were ordered off their lands with threats of violence and as environmental degradation resulting from large-scale logging created widespread hardship for those living in the area. The ensuing legal case, Saramaka people versus Suriname described in detail in Richard Price's book, ^IT Rainforest Warriors ^NO, culminated in November of 2007 in a truly momentous judgment in favor of the Saramaka plaintiffs. In essence, the sweeping final determination of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in this case, meant that as Price puts it, "Suriname would have to rewrite its laws including the constitution, if necessary, both to recognize indigenous and Maroon groups as legal personalities and to permit such groups to own and effectively control property communally. The decision represented a major victory for the cause of legally protected human rights at the collective level for indigenous and tribal peoples in the Americas. Whether the state of Suriname will ever fully comply with the court's orders in either of these cases, Moiwana Village versus Suriname or Saramaka people versus Suriname is of course, another matter and there are ongoing cases. There's one actually. It started just a few months ago by two of the indigenous peoples, the Kalina and Lokono, you know, otherwise known as Galibi Karab people and the Arawak peoples of Suriname. They're about land disputes again. The current situation, 10 years after the Moiwana judgment and almost eight years after the Saramaka decision is far from encouraging but these cases nonetheless point to one way in which official memorialization can play an invaluable role in the ongoing pursuit of elusive justice. The impressive physical monument to the massacre victims that now stands at Moiwana is not easily erased. Likewise, the now officially recognized site of the Sand Creek Massacre consisting of approximately 50 square kilometers of sacred land that will continue to be administered by the U.S. National Parks Services as a National Historic Site is there for good. These imposing sites of memory for all their healing potential will help to ensure that unfulfilled promises made in the quest for ancestral justice are not forgotten so long as they're not addressed. But they won't be forgotten in any case but there's a need to address them still. Like the great stories and sites of memory associated with the epic struggle for civil rights in the United States, they will continue to remind those in the present that there is important work still to be done and I'll stop there. I just wanted to end with that invoking of the civil rights struggle in the United States because in fact, as many of those participating in that struggle and still involved were quite aware, these are all parts of larger struggles. And I think what I'm trying to say about monuments and memorialization as something which keeps the pressure on, in a sense keeps things from being forgotten until they finally are addressed is part of, as we all know, part of that history as well and all the oral traditions that are a part of it. So I'll stop there and one thing I haven't done obviously is bring things up to date. I can do that if you like but I wanted to at least leave a little time and open things up for any discussion. >> I have a question. >> Ken Bilby: Yes. >> Why are the memorials really not say Sand Creek Massacre Site? >> Ken Bilby: That's, you know, that's a great question. This memorial here -- >> Guha Shankar: Can you repeat the question please, Ken, just for the -- >> Ken Bilby: Yes, very good question was why do some of the memorials we've seen such as this one not say Sand Creek Massacre Site? And this site which is right there at the -- an important part which the descendants say is very near where some of the massacre took place was actually, this was erected in 1950 and again, the descendants themselves decided not to do away with this monument which has been there all this time. It's something that they've been aware of for generations and it's part of the history of misrepresentation so it has not been removed and whether it's going to be -- you know, there are lots of other things around. You see in the background there, there's a text panel that the Park Service puts up that talks about the fact that this was a massacre and it talks about some of that history. So again, I think there's an awareness that memory is something that's not simply in the past. It continues to be over time, accumulated and part of the struggles is to address later memories that were invented or that were overlaid which are seen as misrepresentations, so. And then the case of the monument at the State Capitol, this was very clear that people wanted that to be there still, that people had said for all this time and had said in a monument that this was a battle and that they wanted to put their own marker, you know, permanent marker saying this was a misrepresentation and this is what actually happened. >> Okay. >> Can you talk a little bit about the ethnic makeup of the Surinamese army? I mean, are they mostly Dutch descendants, or are they a minority in the country? >> Ken Bilby: That's a very good question. The National Army was made up of a mixture of people. Suriname is ethnically very, very complex but the segment of the population that hold most power were the people known as Creoles who are descendants of the enslaved Africans who did not escape into the forest unlike the Maroons and who remained in the coastal area until the abolition of slavery in the 1860's in Suriname. But there are also, there were people who were from other ethnic groups, part of the National Army such as there's a very large Asian-Indian population from various parts of India who came, whose ancestors came as indentured laborers there. There were also some native people in the army, indigenous Indian people. There were even -- there were a few Maroons who were in this quandary, who were in this situation. So it's a mixture but it was really -- the dictator, Desi Bouterse, who's widely believed to have given the direct commands for these massacres, he is a mixed Creole person with primarily African descent with some Dutch, European, some native descent as well. By the way, I should mention that he's President of Suriname now. He was elected. He was just re-elected actually. It's a parliamentary democracy and so his party, the NDP, won and then the parliament appointed him as president. And he still has not been brought to justice for this. >> In light of the Sand Creek question of battle or massacre, I wonder if you could speak about those words a little bit and how they're used. Because today happens to be the 149th anniversary of the Little Big Horn which at the time was called a massacre even though obviously every white person there was a legitimate target for the Arapaho and Cheyenne and Lakota who were there. And I suspect that some Sand Creek survivors were probably there. It was only 12 years later and it was not so far away, and some of the same tribes were involved. So how did those words, the battle and massacre words been negotiated at these memorializations? >> Ken Bilby: I think that's a very good point. The -- I think, what you mentioned the legitimacy, what is seen as sort of the moral legitimacy of a military maneuver whether, this is actual combat between forces, military forces that are engaged and whether there is the opportunity for defense, whether these are combative agents who are being attacked. Normally it would not be seen as a massacre if there was ongoing combat among armed forces on both sides. In this case, it was very clear that the people who were attacked and over the course of an entire day, they were -- I mean, a few people did try to defend themselves, of course, but they had been deprived of most of their weapons plus they have been prepared for peace. ^M01:09:59 And so most of them, the people who were victims of this or who were targets and who lost their lives were women and children and elderly people, not warriors, not combatants. So whether in fact the people were really combatants just like the woman, Tina [Inaudible] whose testimony I gave there, she was somebody who really knew virtually nothing about what was going on in the very early days of this insurgency and they just showed up at her village. They didn't even ask questions. They started shooting up houses. That's a massacre. I mean, it's hard to fit that within anybody's definition of a battle. So the case of Little Big Horn is a great case to bring up, I think, too as well because clearly Custer and his troops were not defenseless noncombatants. I mean, I think that's essentially the matter right there. And thank you for bringing up also that some of the people who did survive Sand Creek were at later massacres. There's a very important one, Washita in Oklahoma which actually cost the lives of some of those who survived. They were still, after this, trying to make peace with the U.S. government. ^E01:11:16 ^B01:11:24 >>Any questions? >> Ken Bilby: Any questions? I mean, one thing I wanted to find out is that these memories are constantly being passed on through methods that are not part of official records, that are not parts of what is heard by outside parties. They get passed on through all kinds of channels including popular culture. So yes? >> I [inaudible] again, I was just going to ask you, what was the reaction of or the explanation, if there was any, by the Surinamese government when these atrocities started coming up because it took a long time for any kind of claim to be pressed but what was the government doing at any time? Did they even acknowledge that something had happened in Moiwana? >> Ken Bilby: Well, at the very beginning, because there were photos that were in the press of bodies in the backs of trucks and things like that and they explained it by saying that these were terrorists who had been captured and routed -- rooted out and killed because they prevented a threat to the security of the state. But after that, it was pretty much ignored and it was only, as I said, it was really only because of the descendants or not descendants, the actual victims and survivors of the massacre, that this was finally brought. They petitioned in the 1990's to bring this case before the Inter-American Commission and the case wasn't actually accepted. It didn't come to trial until 2004 so this entire time, although there were people who were trying to keep the focus on this such as this group in the capital, Moiwana '86 which is people from various backgrounds. It wasn't just -- I mean, a lot of the people in Suriname were disgusted by this and a lot of people on the coast too found this to be a traumatic event that required some kind of justice. But essentially, the war went on for six years, first of all. So the massacre started at the beginning of the civil war which was in 1986 and there wasn't a treaty ending it until 1992. So during that time, the whole thing couldn't even really be dwelt with and then after that, people have been trying in their own ways to keep attention on it but not very successfully before the court date. I think it was really the victims themselves who carried through with that. And right now, there are many, many outstanding issues. What I did not get into at all is that these decisions of the Inter-American Court for Human Rights, the decisions, the easiest ones to enforce, to enact, I mean some of them have been performed such as the building of the monument, public apologies in the case of Moiwana. But the really difficult issues such as land rights, such as continuing encroachments on land, such as the selling of concessions specifically against the ruling of the Inter-American Court for Human Rights, those are going on right now up until 2000 -- up until this year. I have just a very brief letter from one of the attorneys who worked on both the Moiwana case and the Saramaka case. And he writes, "The state," this is from a letter from just a few weeks ago, "The state has failed to draft even one word of the legislation ordered by the court and has ceased even meeting with the Saramaka to discuss implementation of the judgment." And then as far as Moiwana goes, I received an update that Richard Price has not actually published in English, but in the update, he says, "In November of 2010, the court issued a new set of orders regarding the implementation of the village at Moiwana case. Harshly calling Suriname to task for not investigating the original crime and bringing the perpetrators to justice as well as various other omissions." And in fact, there was legislation in 2012 giving amnesty to all of what had happened, what had been perpetrated by the military during the period of the dictatorship starting in 1980. That right there is a violation of international law because violations, extreme violations of human rights are exempted from amnesties that are actually passed by the governments of the states in which they occur. So that in itself, is an indication that so much still remains to be done in terms of finding justice. And -- so these oral histories, these memories are very -- and the monuments, of course, I see as being very much a part of the counter voice keeping those memories alive. Because if some of the press were to be, to be believed like the Surinamese press, you occasionally read an article in which these things are treated as things entirely in the past, things that really have no significance today and which younger people in general don't know about and don't care about. But it's obviously much more complex than that and these memorials are there. A lot of people visit the Moiwana Memorial, you know including tourists going to Suriname. Yes. >> How did the long-term involvement especially in Suriname, the amount of time that you spent there, the ongoing [inaudible] all of the places and then your involvement with [inaudible] at the court. To what degree with you as an individual experience any kind of pushback or being an outsider coming in and being a witness [inaudible]. What kind of response [inaudible] involvement. >> Ken Bilby: I actually had not been back to Suriname since doing, since testifying. The last time I was in Suriname was in the 1990's although I've been back several times to French Guiana which is right across the border. So I've had really my contacts, my ongoing contacts with people have been through people who live on that side of the border. So no, there has been no pushback at all. Also, I think that in the case of the trial itself, it's right now Moiwana is not seen as being particularly pressing and these other things like the Saramaka case, because it's a massive case of land rights so the land has been surveyed. It's been well documented and there's a very clear unmistakable order by the court for the government to bring its legislation into line with the rights of the Saramaka people to their traditional territories that have already been surveyed and demarcated by themselves the sacred sites. And not all the resources on those territories are not to be exploited without, not just consultation but active permission on the part of the Saramaka people and their duly constituted authorities. So that's, I think, right now the more pressing issue as well as the, all of the Maroon peoples and the indigenous peoples, what's happening now is that new cases are being brought and it's going to keep happening. These monuments are going to, of course, keep alive the fact that these are parts of ongoing processes that haven't really been addressed. ^M01:19:56 And the whole question of justice for in terms of making sure that due process takes place and that the perpetrators are brought to justice, at least brought to trial. Right now, that's an issue that is very hard to deal with because the most powerful and wealthiest person in the country is seen, is held by many to be the one who gave the orders for this. And as a matter of fact, he has been convicted by the International Criminal Court of crimes and technically, he cannot actually leave the country without the possibility of being arrested and tried. >> You do not -- >> Ken Bilby: Yes? >> -- sort of bond a little [inaudible]? >> Ken Bilby: I'm sorry? >> [Inaudible] Washington. >> Guha Shankar: I think that's the wrong lecture, I'm sorry. >> Ken Bilby: Yeah, I -- that's something that it is exactly, I mean, I can't go into that. >> My apologies. >> I want to ask about the question of [inaudible] you were talking about current issues like encroachment. Obviously the idea of proprietary ownership is kind of a more modern kind of liberal based notion of how [inaudible] divide up land and yet, it seems like what you're saying is that the judgment from the Inter-American Court largely hinged on the idea of this land having spiritual basis. So what extent do you think it's possible for like this kind of spiritual concern to even be translated into this sort of modern legal [inaudible]? >> Ken Bilby: Well, I would say that in fact, the concept of ownership of land and particularly collective ownership of land is not at all a very recent product, a very recent history. It's not a modern concept. It's a very traditional concept in these societies, these Maroon societies. Ownership of land in the sense of usufruct and right to use land is invested in the basic social units in society, lineages and clans which are corporate bodies. And so there's what people refer to in their own language as law about this. They have their own customary law about land ownership and rights. Who has the right to use it? It's not like any Saramaka person can go into any piece of land and do whatever they want on it or exploit it or use the products of it the way they want to. All of this is carefully regulated so that and all these other societies, Ndyuka, the Maroon societies. So in fact, there is a pre-existing body of traditional or customary law which is exactly what the court, the Inter-American Court was recognizing and has started to recognize. Really one of the first decisions by the Inter-American Court recognizing this was in 2001 but it was barely recognized and I think a case, I think in Ecuador. So the Moiwana case was, I think, the first really explicit recognition of this. And it's something which, I think, has potentially world-wide implications. But the other question you raised is important, the spiritual aspect of it because the legal concepts, the customary law that people regulate land with and other possessions, collective possessions, they are intertwined with these spiritual concepts and they cannot be separated out. And so the court is also recognizing that the legitimacy and the authority that stands behind customary law rests in the spiritual concepts which themselves are grounded in precedents and history. So all of this, you know, you can fill a book, of course, with and it's been done, discussing customary law in these societies and many others. >> I have one question. Is there a particular symbolic sort of set of references to the Moiwana monuments that were put up by the artist so we can [inaudible]. >> Ken Bilby: Yes, for instance, the names of -- in these monuments, individual monuments, there are names of each victim in the individual monuments but there's also a system of symbols underneath it. They're inscribed using a system of writing and it has a spiritual component itself, a system of writing devised by an Ndyuka elder in the late 19th, I think, century, early 20th century. It's called the Afaka script and it's a syllabary actually that they invented themselves to write their own language. So under each name, there's also a set of symbols in that system of writing. And this is actually stated on the plaque as you enter the site explaining that this language is used as well. ^E01:25:09 ^B01:25:16 >> Everything okay? >> Ken Bilby: I think we've got that. Should I play a minute or two of? >> Sure. >> Ken Bilby: Just as a closing note, to show that these matters are very much alive, contrary to what some of the newspapers say that young people don't care about this anymore. Well certainly, young Maroon people care about this a great deal, not just in Suriname but in French Guiana. So I was just going to play one example of a -- I don't have time to play -- I had a few that show how this has continued over time to be expressed in popular culture. There's one example here from just a year or two after the massacre, a song about the massacre done in the neo-traditional style called [Inaudible] but now in styles such as reggae and [inaudible] popular urban styles. People are continuing to sing about these issues. So for instance, once again, I'll just give you a little, a brief translation of some of the key lyrics here. So this is a group. This was recorded around 2007 by a group called [Inaudible] in French Guiana. It's a group made up of mostly young Ndyuka Maroons. And the words can be translated just part of them is something like, "It's not just yesterday they began treating us like this. It's been like that since the time of Moiwana." And these are people who weren't born or were tiny babies at the time of Moiwana. "It's been like that since the time of Moiwana. I'm going to sing a song. I'm going to say something so you must lend me an ear. How we walk with guns, how we walk with knives. Well, it's because I think of the things that they done to us. But you mustn't focus on that. Everyone must find a way to live. Live in the way God wants. Then we'll see that God Himself will give us a way to heal." So this is a reggae song. >> By -- ^M01:27:22 [ Music ] ^M01:27:24 >> But I'm going to advance it. ^M01:27:26 [ Music ] ^M01:28:11 So that's just to give a sense of how these memories are very much still a part of the culture of young people even people living in urban areas away from the massacre site. So thank you very much. ^M01:28:28 [ Applause ] ^M01:28:32 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^E01:28:39