An Incan “aryballo” pot discovered at Machu Picchu

Yale Daily News

May 13, 2010

 With the 100th anniversary of Hiram Bingham’s discovery of the Inca archeological treasure Machu Picchu approaching, Peru’s Chamber of Tourism is preparing to celebrate — but without many of the site’s most precious artifacts, which remain in Yale’s collection…

  (more…)

(Note: updates follow the article below)

Peru to expel British ‘Tarzan agitator’ Paul McAuley

Missionary told to leave after helping Amazon tribes resist incursion of oil, gas and mining firms into the rainforest
By Rory Carroll

The Guardian

July 2, 2010

Peru has ordered the expulsion of a British missionary who was dubbed a “Tarzan agitator” for helping Amazon tribes to resist the incursion of oil, gas and mining companies into the rainforest.

(more…)

A pool of oil in Lago Agrio, an Ecuadorean town in the Amazon where Texaco is accused of having dumped millions of gallons of contamination in local rivers and lakes in order to save the company money. Chevron later purchased Texaco, and has inherited Texaco’s legal troubles

Disaster in the Amazon

By Bob Herbert

June 4, 2010

BP’s calamitous behavior in the Gulf of Mexico is the big oil story of the moment. But for many years, indigenous people from a formerly pristine region of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador have been trying to get relief from an American company, Texaco (which later merged with Chevron), for what has been described as the largest oil-related environmental catastrophe ever…

(more…)

A group of Waorani Indians in Ecuador with blow pipes

( Note: At a time when oil is gushing unchecked into the Gulf of Mexico, despoiling one of the richest ecosystems in the Americas, another oil company, Perenco, moves closer to building an oil pipeline through one of the remotest areas of the Amazon, in northern Peru, with the risk of oil workers making a potentially deadly contact with one or more uncontacted Amazonian tribes.  Oil workers and illegal loggers have been invading indigenous territories–with often deadly consequences for native peoples–for the last one hundred years–Kim MacQuarrie)

(more…)

Global Ad Campaign For Peru’s Uncontacted Tribes

Survival International

May 5, 2010

An ad supporting Peru’s last uncontacted tribes is appearing in publications around the world in a bid to stop Peru’s government allowing an oil pipeline to be built through the Indians’ territory…

(more…)

Evidence of Spanish bullet holes in 500-year-old Inca skulls, found at a burial site on the outskirts of Lima, Peru

Inca Skeletons Show Evidence of Spanish Brutality

Science News

April 2, 2010
If bones could scream, a bloodcurdling din would be reverberating through a 500-year-old cemetery in Peru. Human skeletons unearthed there have yielded the first direct evidence of Inca fatalities caused by Spanish conquerors…

(more…)

An aerial view of some of the pyramids at Caral, the most ancient city in the New World and located about 160 miles north of Lima, Peru

Authorities to Inspect Archaeological Site of Caral to Verify Alleged Attack

Farmers Have Apparently Invaded one of the Pyramids in the Area of “Era de Pando” to build a Water Reservoir

March 23, 2010

El Comercio (Peru)  (translated by Kim MacQuarrie)

Representatives of the Barranca Provincial Prosecutor’s office will carry out an investigation tomorrow at the archaeological site known as “Era of Pando,” a city consisting of 26 buildings belonging to the Caral culture, where farmers are apparently destroying this cultural heritage…

(more…)

The Bolivian ski resort of Chacaltaya, stranded like a beached whale once its 18,000-year-old glacier disappeared permanently in 2009

(Note: Since the early 20th century, glaciers around the world have been retreating, presumably as a result of humans burning greater and greater quantities of oil and coal, rampant deforestation, and the raising of livestock, which create greenhouse gases that absorb more sunlight and thus heat the atmosphere. Mt Kilamanjaro’s glacier in Tanzania, for example, which has been around for 12,000 years, is expected to completely disappear by 2020… (more…)

You’re invited to an Evening with author and filmmaker Kim MacQuarrie & Writer/Editor Don George

Tuesday February 23rd, 7pm
Herbst Theatre
401 Van Ness Avenue at McAllister Street, San Francisco

Please be our guest as Don George and Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and author Kim MacQuarrie take the stage for a globe-roaming conversation about indigenous peoples around the world, balancing contradictory creative passions and the allure of Inca history and culture…

(more…)

Police arrest a woman who was demonstrating against the arrest of Mapuche Indians involved in a land dispute in Valparaiso, Chile, about 75 miles northwest of Santiago. Dozens of protestors marched through downtown Valparaiso on Dec 13, 2007 to pressure the government to release five Mapuche Indians. The Mapuche had been holding a hunger strike in the south of Chile after being arrested for starting forest fires on land belonging to a logging company whose land they are claiming by legacy.

Prosperous Chile’s Troubling Indigenous Uprising

Dec. 12, 2009

Time Magazine 

Compared to high-profile groups like the Quechua of Peru and the Yanomami of the Amazon rain forest, Chile’s Mapuche are a relatively obscure indigenous cohort in South America. But that has changed dramatically in recent months as a growing number of armed and masked Mapuche activists, pursuing a centuries-old claim to land they say was taken from them by the Spaniards and then the Chilean government, have engaged in a wave of arson attacks… (more…)