By Rodrigo Medina
By Rodrigo Medina
By Jhonatan Marlon Noé Sotz
By Phillippa Pitts
In 1852, abolitionist and formerly enslaved American Frederick Douglass posed a question to the audience who gathered to hear him celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence. “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is constant victim… This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
For the past 40 years, after the eviction of around 6,000 Batwa people from Kahuzi Biega National Park (PNKB), the Batwa people have suffered extreme poverty and wrongful treatment at the hands of PNKB. Since, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has made no attempt to find the community similar lands, and when the Batwa do try to regain lands in the park or access to traditional resources, park officials have responded with undue force, arresting and even killing those who would not back down.
Land Acknowledgement
We acknowledge that we are headquartered on Massachusett land, in Cambridge, MA, and we thank the past, current, and future Indigenous stewards of this territory.