Dr. Wati Longchar, Dean, SCEPTRE, Kolkata, was one of the facilitators during the recently concluded WCC pre-Assembly gathering of indigenous peoples in October/November in Busan, Korea, and he reported that the participants of indigenous peoples from 27 countries attended the pre-assembly event on the theme, “God of Life: Renew the People of the Land”.
The participants noted that besides spiritual and theological colonialization, indigenous people continued to experience various forms of oppression, exploitation, marginalization and suffering of a vast number of peoples and nations.
The ancestral lands and sacred forest, grounds of indigenous people were being commercialized, desecrated and abused through un-mindful extractive developmental activities and many indigenous communities have been displaced, dispossessed, uprooted, evicted and even annihilated in genocidal scale.
Indigenous peoples cultures, practices, customary laws have been abused, misused and misrepresented and commercialized without respect for which he said today, indigenous peoples constitute the poorest section of the society, many of them were poor, landless, homeless and hungry.
The participants also challenged the global Christian community that churches must admit and confess that, for many, the goal of ministry with indigenous peoples was their disappearance.
Though the participants have spoken with alarming terms of the many threats to indigenous life, they also recognized that God’s presence and grace among them and the resilience of indigenous peoples in the face of a massive development aggression, of unbridled globalization, and formidable racism and dehumanization.
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