Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the United States was celebrated on this Monday, October 11th. This week we offer resources to broaden your students’ understanding of historical and contemporary Indigenous communities in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the diaspora. 

Contemporary resources:

• New Internationalist has a piece about Guatemala’s anti-landlord, Indigenous feminists: ‘healing is political’
• Sojourners has a story highlighting Indigenous women’s agro-ecology that is healing Guatemala’s landscape
• CBC has a piece about an Anishinaabe-Jamaican chef who combines each of her cultures into her cuisine
• The New York Times spotlighted 10 queer Indigenous artists, including one based in Tehuantepec, Mexico
• UNDP has a report on the impact of COVID-19 on Indigenous communities in Latin America
• The World Bank has found that Indigenous communities are disproportionately affected by poverty, and continue to face widespread economic and social exclusion.
• The Milwaukee Public Museum has a resource on the Kickapoo nations, whose lands currently span the US-Mexico border
• A video on the first peoples of Trinidad & Tobago and the Caribbean lets your students hear directly from Indigenous community members.

Historical resources:

• The Smithsonian has a resource on a 2,000 year old Maya water filtration system
• The Seismological Society of America discussed how pictograms were found to be the first written accounts of earthquakes in pre-colonial Mexico.
• Vamos a leer, a blog run by the Latin American & Iberian Institute (LAII) at the University of New Mexico, has resources to use alongside the book Rethinking Columbus, edited by Bill Bigelow and Bob Peterson.
• Lastly, we have a lesson plan in our teaching resources from a local educator on the colonial boom-town of Potosi, Bolivia and the complex society that quickly grew up to support the silver mining, which in turn supported the Spanish Empire.