 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community matters here. Happy Aloha Friday and welcome to Perspectives on Global Justice, Think Tech Hawaii program. This is your host, Beatrice Cantelmo. Today, we have a very special guest, Renaldo Morales, joining us via Skype from Wisconsin. Renaldo and I invite you, our viewers, to examine how individual and collective civic engagement can influence government's responsibility and obligations to ensure that social justice for Indigenous peoples and nations take place. We will discuss an example of how public health laws and Indigenous women's rights were revised in Peru in the 90s after thousands of Indigenous women underwent forced sterilization and the elements that made these changes possible. Renaldo is a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an academic research of education and environmental studies department. He's also a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, where he teaches history of the US-American Indian nations. On that note, thank you so much for joining us right here from Hawaii, connection with Wisconsin. Thank you so much for having me. Oh, absolutely. What a pleasure. So, Renaldo, to those of our viewers who have never heard of you, would you mind giving a little bit of information about your background? Where do you come from? How did you get to the United States? What are you up to these days? Well, I had a long professional academic life in Peru before coming to US. I worked as a journalist and also as a filmmaker, also researching lots of different projects. I worked for public television and commercial television channels. I worked also for a major NGO working on strategic educational education, where we started serving different communities around projects of development, economic, social, cultural, human rights, education, health, etc. One of the main or strongest areas that we developed work is in the areas of public health. I moved to the United States in 2001. I joined the University of Wisconsin around 2008 or 2009 and worked there, yes, 2007 actually, and worked at the University and became part of the academia. For the last seven years, I completed a master's in education and started working in science education with the Department of Biochemistry and a science education program oriented to serve indigenous communities, tribal communities in the state of Wisconsin, where we have 11 tribes here. So, it was a very fortunate coincidence for me because I had a long experience working with indigenous peoples in Peru and in the South American region, especially from the coast and from the Andes regions and mountains chains, and also from the Amazonian rainforests in many towns in the Indian basins. Now, I'm doing a research in part of my doctoral research related to environmental education that is especially responsive and culturally relevant for indigenous peoples. My interest is on issues of indigenous peoples, of course, from multiple and multidisciplinary perspectives, some of them education, but also public health, but also science education, the integration of knowledge systems, and issues of social justice are transversal to our academic interests. So, I'm very involved with many different groups and I'm teaching, also doing workshops and writing now part of my dissertation. So, it's a very busy and crazy time while teaching and doing different kinds of things. I'm filming a documentary right now because I'm a filmmaker. I developed this career in U.S. as well, serving indigenous nations but filming as part of the university as well. So, now I'm filming a documentary for the Indian community school and today I have been busy interviewing key people, key indigenous people who are telling us the story of the emergence of these schools in the late 1960s at the time of school desegregation and racial desegregation in the United States. I was instructed when I was told that if I was born here in the United States and in the Milwaukee area, when I was a kid at five, six years old, I would have to walk in a different sidewalk, different side of the street because people of color had to walk at that time when I was a kid in the United States, in different street, different side of the street. You could not join the bus, you could not drink in the same fountains, etc. So, it was a very amazing experience to hear that and make it a parallel with my own life. But here I am. So, thank you for the invitation again. Oh, absolutely. So, I cannot think of a more well-prepared person professionally, spiritually and also academically to be able to bring up issues related to social justice and indigenous peoples. So, as you know, our program really embraces perspectives on global justice from many angles and indigenous peoples, you know, is definitely one area that we pay particular attention, not only because of the issues that, you know, unfortunately is very similar, you know, across the globe. And also a big part of our program's mission is to not only examine the barriers, but also to explore micro-perspectives on solutions. And today I think we will be talking a little bit about how public health and women's rights, indigenous women's rights in Peru were changed and how you actually have, you know, a big dent in that process with your work, with investigational journalism. But if you can give our viewers our perspective of what was happening with our Peruvian indigenous women and youth before, you know, you started doing your investigation so that people can have a little context on how changes occur. So, before doing the investigation about forced socialization practices, we worked for a year in a project about medical malpractice among the most disadvantaged groups and women in poverty, which is, well, you know, Peru is a place where you have extreme poverty. You have actually classifications, economic classifications from A to E and F in so many times. So you have the equivalence of social classes goes like five or seven different stratifications until you have extreme poverty. So for these people, the public health and medical practice has been very unfair and at the time we even had to smuggle into some public hospitals and maternity hospitals cameras. So to interview people inside and know many terrible, horrible cases where people were really, in many cases, women were forced to have the C-section without needing it only because doctors who were part of the medical system were bad paid and they had to make their living, the surgeon and anesthetist specialists. And they had to just perform these C-sections without the women needing. And for them, they didn't have any money to get a bed. In many cases, they had to rent a bed for hours. We followed the case of a woman who was already declared, you know, but she couldn't go because she had to pay an equivalent of 130, 140 bucks and she couldn't, she didn't have the money. So she was kind of kidnapped and she had to sleep even outside in patios and halls with her baby, her newborn baby. And with that that was the system. And so we followed many of these cases and after that we served a women organization group, a feminist organization group who was doing these research and they wanted us to make a documentary. I work with the Association TV Culture, TV Cultura in Spanish in Lima. And they followed these research based on witness accounts from people who were actually on the field at the time where lots of people in rural towns, indigenous women were gathered by force, putting in trucks and locked in medical posts for one or two days. And one by one they were subject to two by ligation, forced to by ligation without their consent, without anesthesia, without any medicine, not even painkillers or antibiotics to prevent any possible infection. So the result of the investigation by many different people who participated, who gathered documents from the government, from the congress who was receiving the quotes from the health department, the health ministry. They were reporting the cases region by region, town by town because the medical force, the corpse, had a quote to fill. It was a pressure for doctors and nurses to perform that. So at the end of, from the period of 1993 to 1999, there are more than 370,000 cases of forced sterilization, forced compulsory sterilization. Primarily with indigenous women? Yes, indigenous women in territories that are under contestation because they wanted for mining, they want the water, they also, I don't, some of the motifs were, were to build, to break the family structure because in the formal agriculture, indigenous agriculture really owns large extensions of fields and they don't hire any workers. They, the family really is the one who supports the, and also members of the community. But if the family doesn't have kids and they, you reduce the number of kids, of children in that family, you are really affecting the main socioeconomic activity for the people who live in that area for millennia and you are breaking the economic sustainability of that region. So I think that was another motive and now the president who did that is in jail right now. People, people, for many really different reasons but also for violation of human rights of course in many other instances and some people went to jail and the case went to international court at Hague and it was reopened in 2011. So it's still in court, the Peruvian government was in trial and our documentary served as a court document actually and it was a result of community mobilization, individual mobilization, also women organization, human rights organizations and the contribution of different researchers who gather this material. Without the participation of many different people on the field and the commitment to put the information out and risk giving their jobs, we wouldn't even know because we still lack of these similar reports on the whole South American region. There are many reports that say that same things happen on the whole South American, Central American, North American region especially in the South American region. You have lots of people who have similar issues of poverty, extreme poverty in Bolivia and Ecuador and Colombia and in border areas in Brazil as well so in Venezuela. So it's, in those cases were not probably documented because of the lack of articulation between the different forces on the field that it was fortunate in the case of Peru. So we have only the documentation for six years. We don't know what happened before or a couple, two, three years after until the situation exploded but the reference of this case is important to bring because basically the mobilization of people, advocates, activists in human rights organizations, women rights organizations was key on revealing this stuff. So in my own experience I see now that mobilization, participation, advocacy and articulation of different different expertise and voices is key on advancing issues of rights, human rights all across the globe. We have so many examples all across the world right? Absolutely. We're going to take a quick break and get back into a little bit more of the feelings behind the scenes as you were doing your work and working with all the social justice advocates to bring light to all of these injustices in Peru. We all play a role in keeping our community safe. Every day we move in and out of each other's busy lives. It's easy to take for granted all the little moments that make up our every day. Some are good, others not so much. But that's life. It's when something doesn't seem quite right, that it's time to pay attention. Because only you know what's not supposed to be in your every day. So protect your every day. If you see something suspicious, say something to local authorities. Hello everyone. I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture which is seen on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. And with the show's host, Martin Desbang, we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live, but other aspects of our life, not only here in Hawaii, but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. Welcome back to Perspectives on Global Justice Think Tech Hawaii program. This is your host, Beatriz Contelmo, and we are talking with Reynaldo Morales about Kuliana on behalf of Indigenous people's social justice. And in Hawaii most people understand the word Kuliana means which is a very special word, which means the responsibilities that comes with privileges. And on the first segment of our program, we got to get, you know, that view from what was happening in Peru and with public health and the forced sterilization of poor, mostly Indigenous women and how important it was to be able to document these injustices and how to move forward in a coalition form to be able to bring justice and light to these issues and to make changes happen. So Reynaldo, here we are. I asked you before I break. As you were talking to people and women who just learned that they had the necessary sections and had forced sterilizations, what was going through your mind and your heart as you were doing this work? Very hard to hear. We were, we know for a long time there were lots of injustices and affecting Indigenous peoples. And we, as you remember, Peru was one of the countries that had a very violent political violence process during 12 years. Two guerrilla groups confronted the government. There were lots of people to die. We have a heavy issue of political violence in the country. Lots of protests, lots of political mobilizations. So hearing once again was something that was, and I think I've been through all these processes as a journalist. I saw so much things. And especially television. I was a third television journalist, not in paper, but always in television. So after seeing so much, seeing this last episode of violence committed against women who were really weak and people who could not defend themselves, who were really trying to escape and didn't not participate in the political violence at all, they really tried to be part of their own land and just live among their communities and that they were taken by force. We even had one video of one witness. It was really, really a time of desperation, but we had to really keep calm. And I remember that for me it was really horrible to see how much injustice and how much evil can be committed against people who are in the weak part of the society. People who were in disadvantage all the time and once again they were affected in their own bodies and the sanctity of their own bodies. When we talk about women, their reproductive rights, right? Unthinkable, really. Very much so. So as a result of such atrocity against indigenous people, but also women's reproductive rights and their sanctity, one of the most beautiful gifts of being a woman, which is the ability to conceive and generate life. Good things happened. There were changes in public health and also in women's rights in Peru. So do you mind giving our viewers a little perspective on what happened, what kinds of changes were put in place as a result of this exposure? Well, the case is particularly important because it came after the same president who is now in jail went to the Beijing Women's Summit, Women's Rights Summit. And it happened after. He went to present Peru as one of the countries who was really the pioneer on women's rights. And at the end it was the place where one of these atrocities, one of the highest atrocities against indigenous women were committed. And at the time, what happened is basically it allowed a full revision of the medical system, of the medical services and the role of the state and in the role of protecting indigenous women and the role of nurses, because believe me, the nurses and the personnel who were also on the field were also indigenous. And we see these, at the time, there are wars against countries. They used the indigenous peoples as the soldiers, as the scouts. They put them in front. And Peru happened, women were really victimized in such a heavy way that they really gave their lives in the lives of many generations that were unborn in order for us to see again and expose these issues and promote a whole reform of the medical system. So now you have the Peru, they still have an imperfect system. They have strikes all the time, but especially this issue of sterilization, that it has a long history, not only in Peru, but around the world, has stopped. Apparently it has stopped. The women already know their rights. There has been a change in the discourse. And much of the justification from the health department was that the plan was to reduce poverty. Apparently, this was amended from the World Bank that in order to lend more money to Peru, to increase the debt, they had to reduce poverty. But they reduced the poor, not the poverty. And it was just a case of eugenics. Exactly. So really, at the school, it was hidden on the economic reasons, but it was bigotry and xenophobia against indigenous people. And in my heart, just eggs, as I hear this account, I am so grateful for the courage and the diligence and the perseverance that you and so many older professionals had during this very difficult time in order to collect the documentation that could be used as evidence to bring light justice and a different reality for Peruvian women, but also Peruvian culture and indigenous culture in Peru. We were talking about the importance of keeping clarity of mind and spirit and also not allow the outrage and the anger to dominate our minds and our hearts in times of deep needs of change when there are social injustice happening. So do you mind living as we're almost at the end of our program, but a couple of pros of wisdoms that you might have learned along the way as a professional and as somebody who's deeply connected with indigenous culture on how can we continue to work to promote social justice, not only for indigenous peoples all over the globe, but on any kind of social justice from that frame, from that place of clarity, transparency, and peace? I think one of the most important opportunities to form our new generations and also a present generation is to be aware of what changes the world is experiencing today. So not to isolate ourselves and not to try to just hide from what is happening, but be very aware and try to connect with discussions among the communities, among our neighbors and continue the path of dialogue with community organizations, human rights organizations, women rights organizations, indigenous rights organizations, schools, etc. So now is the time when parents and members of communities have to come out and participate in the dialogue in schools and every public space and continue this dialogue and try to influence the best ideas. In terms of indigenous peoples, we see a renaissance in the indigenous identity all across the world. Today I was just making this interview where people told us how ashamed they were to tell the others and let other people know that they were indigenous. That gentrity, that people with lots of pride are telling others and revealing that they are indigenous, that they have an indigenous tribal affiliation or that they have indigenous ancestry. It's because not because of the government or the corporations recognizing it, it's because indigenous peoples themselves came up front, continued entirely their advocacy and the rebuilding of their world and their knowledge systems and their organizations. Through these continuous and arduous processes, that is what we have now, that the indigenous peoples are rebuilding their own political, economic, educational systems and they're now moving into environmental laws and affecting changes in international law through the United Nations Permanent Forum of Indigenous Issues and after the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2015. So we see these changes and now we need the people to participate in this dialogue and not just isolate the politicians, the academics or the researchers or the advocates, but we need that these processes are continued from the base and that's what I hope that these new times, especially with so much divisive climate, indigenous peoples can learn the lessons from history and go back to the roots and create coalitions that will last longer for our seven generations ahead. Right and that is a beautiful message to share with our viewers and to government officials from all over the globe and also the community in general as far as not just the challenges but the amazing invitations that we have ahead of us now and moving forward to make a more socially just and equitable also for indigenous peoples and indigenous peoples also need to be a part of this conversation and of this process and decision making process right. So on that note I want to thank you so much for joining us today for sharing your wisdom and your experience with us and I hope that this may be the first of many programs that we do together on indigenous peoples issues in a very different lenses so that we can continue to collaborate and appreciate each other and want to know that. It will be my pleasure Bea and I really salute the effort of the the producers and organizers of these wonderful program and I hope that they continue and and you you can invite me and judge you on and I will be always pleased to participate. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Gracias. Well this concludes today's Perspectives on Global Justice program thank you so much for watching us and I hope to see you again next Friday at Who We Hope.