Trespassers On Our Own Land

Juan P. Valdez was born May 25, 1938 in Canjilon, New Mexico, the second of Amarante and Philomena Valdez' seven children. Juan's father took him out of school after the third grade to help with the raising of crops and tending of livestock necessary to support the family. After having been continuously denied grazing permits by the U. S. Forest Service it was necessary for Juan to sneak his family's cattle on and off the forest pastures on a daily basis. While in his mid-twenties Juan met Reies Lopez Tijerina, a charismatic former preacher who was traveling from village to village in Northern New Mexico speaking out about how the United States had stolen hundreds of thousands of acres of grant lands that were supposed to have been protected by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Juan was the first of eight members of Tijerina's Alianza to enter the Rio Arriba County courthouse on June 5, 1967 in a failed attempt to arrest the local district attorney, Alfonso Sanchez. Ironically, the judge in the courthouse that day was J. M. Scarborough, the father of Mike Scarborough who would wind up assisting Juan in the telling of his family history. Trespassers On Our Own Land is the history of the Valdez family from the time Spain granted Juan Bautista Valdez, Juan's great, great, great-grandfather an interest in a land grant located around the present village of Canones, New Mexico. Mike Scarborough grew up in Espanola, sixty miles south of where Juan grew up. After having spent eight years in the United States Air Force, Mike returned to New Mexico, attended college and law school, and practiced law in the area for twenty-five years. Some years ago he was asked by his good friend, Juan Valdez, to help write Juan's family history. Mike recently completed a five year study of Juan's family history and the period during the late 1800s and early 1900s when the United States government chose to claim ownership of million of acres of then existing land grants and to deny the settlers who had lived on them for over eighty years their legitimate right to use the land. Trespassers on Our Own Land is the result of his research."

In 1954, the Hai||om people were evicted from Etosha by the South African-controlled South West African Administration. In 2015, the Hai||om filed the case of Tsumib v Government of the Republic of Namibia in the High Court of Namibia. “Beggars on our own land …” unravels the historical and contemporary socio-legal complexities that led to the Tsumib case. At the core of the case lies the legal question, how can the Hai||om people approach the Namibian Courts in order to claim compensation for the loss of their ancestral lands?Odendaal goes into detail how the Tsumib case materialised under the post-independence Namibian constitutional discourse. He assesses the Namibian land reform programme and its oversight in dealing with historical land dispossessions. He inspects Hai||om “identity” and how it was used to strengthen their case. He concludes with an examination of Namibia’s outdated and restrictive legal framework, which ultimately denied the Hai||om people their constitutional right to be heard in the Namibian Court. While the future of ancestral land claims in Namibia depends on the political will of the Namibian government, Odendaal argues that the Namibian courts have a duty to comply with the rights giving nature of the Namibian Constitution that lays the foundation for the Hai||om people’s ancestral claims.

The present volume contains the texts of the speeches and papers presented at the World Forum as well as of the "Plan of Action". The Forum was organized by UNESCO and WIPO in cooperation with Ministry of Commerce, Thailand.

Ute Land Religion in the American West, 1879-2009 is a narrative of American religion and how it intersected with land in the American West. Prior to 1881, Utes lived on the largest reservation in North America--twelve million acres of western Colorado. Brandi Denison takes a broad look at the Ute land dispossession and resistance to disenfranchisement by tracing the shifting cultural meaning of dirt, a physical thing, into land, an abstract idea. This shift was made possible through the development and deployment of an idealized American religion based on Enlightenment ideals of individualism, Victorian sensibilities about the female body, and an emerging respect for diversity and commitment to religious pluralism that was wholly dependent on a separation of economics from religion. As the narrative unfolds, Denison shows how Utes and their Anglo-American allies worked together to systematize a religion out of existing ceremonial practices, anthropological observations, and Euro-American ideals of nature. A variety of societies then used religious beliefs and practices to give meaning to the land, which in turn shaped inhabitants' perception of an exclusive American religion. Ultimately, this movement from the tangible to the abstract demonstrates the development of a normative American religion, one that excludes minorities even as they are the source of the idealized expression.