(pensive music)
- If you watch movies
you will see the Cowboys were the good guys
and Indians were the bad guys.
They basically painted us as not 100% humans.
(pensive music)
My name is Armstrong Wiggins.
I'm a Miskito Indian.
The good thing about this center is that
we are indigenous people doing work for our people,
for our leaders.
(pensive music)
Our mission, the center provide legal assistance
to indigenous peoples of the Americas
to combat racism and oppression,
to protect their land and environment,
to protect their culture and ways of life,
to achieve sustainable economic development
and genuine self-government
and to realize their other human rights.
(soft music)
Nobody talk about indigenous people land being taken away,
so they have to abandon their territories.
Sometime lawyers are not good with us.
That's one of the reason we do not charge
when we represent indigenous community.
That's why Indian Law Resource Center work on a law reform
to respect Indian law that existed here,
not the European legal system.
- We know that taking of land is one of the most
fundamental elements of systemic racism.
This project will equip people who should own those lands
with the skillset and the capacity to recover their land.
- Our legal system is listening to our leaders,
our elders, from indigenous point of view,
how we think about environment,
how we think about our water rights, our ocean, our rivers,
our land rights.
(soft music)
When Indian people defend their land
sometimes they put them in prison, they get killed.
I was put in jail because I went to the UN in 1977
to speak about our rights.
When I came back, they put me in jail.
(dramatic music)
That historical experience help us to do this kind of work.
How to protect our land, our self-determination rights,
how to govern our people,
how to manage our natural resources
for the survival of our culture.
(upbeat music)
- This effort seeks to allow indigenous people
greater land rights through training people
in community to understand the law, the titling process,
and actually create an institute,
the first indigenous institute that will title land
back to the indigenous people.
- With this support, 10 years from now,
our younger people will carry on,
get their land and territories demarcated, legalized.
They can have their own bank system if they want to,
protecting the lands sustainably,
and they can have their own protected area
of their territories.
I hope that in the future, non-indigenous police,
non-indigenous judges respect that legal rights
to Indian land so that the rule of law
can work for indigenous people also.
(upbeat music)