About Intercontinental Cry
Intercontinental Cry is dedicated to keeping you informed of the most pressing and under-reported indigenous struggles
Intercontinental Cry (IC), founded in 2004, is an independent online journal that provides news, videos, and action alerts on the struggles of Indigenous Peoples to reclaim their lands, defend their cultures, enact their rights, and to quite literally survive.
There are literally thousands of these struggles taking place around the world today. Unfortunately, the vast majority of them get little coverage by the mainstream and alternative press. IC is attempting to fill this gap.
The Journal is updated every couple days, with original content that you won't find anywhere else. New Videos, including lectures, interviews, and full documentaries, are also added each Saturday; and a monthly news round-up called Underreported Struggles is put together at the end of each month.
Who's behind IC?
The journal is maintained and authored by John Ahniwanika Schertow.
A Two-Spirit of Haudenosaunee and European descent, Ahni is a self-taught writer, painter, musician, poet and web-designer.
Based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Ahni's had his paintings, articles, and poetry featured in Serendipity, the Adagio Review, Swerve Magazine, Upside Down World, Activist Magazine, Toward Freedom, the Dominion, and Poets against the War.
He is also the webmaster for The Oneidas for Democracy.
Why "Intercontinental Cry?"
It's a bit of a mouthful, but the idea, Intercontinental Cry is too strong to ignore. Indigenous Peoples maintain that they come from the land. In effect, they are the land just like any stone or blade of grass that so many of us take for granted. There is no line separating Indigenous People from any other life on Earth.
At the same time, Indigenous People and their territories are actively targeted by governments and corporations. In a highly disturbing twist of logic, they too, see no difference between indigenous people and the land. They are both similarly held as objects---either to be discarded or used to justify abhorrent behaviour, including modern development practices (which aim to fulfil the needs of the corporate state and assuage or conceal the social, economic, cultural and political conflicts implicit in modern colonized society.)
The "Cry", then, is threefold. First, it is the historical trauma that manifests today through the destruction of the environment, the intentional erasure of land-based cultures, and the voluntary abandonment of traditional identities. A cry of loss, fear, and desperation.
Second, it is the world-wide effort to defend the land, empower ourselves, and reclaim our cultures and identities before they are gone forever. A cry of hope and necessity.
Third, it is natural sense of deprivation coming from the culture of the colonized---this isolated, broken and faceless way of life that supplants the natural order to survive for another fiscal year. A cry for life and death.
While the Journal itself is little more than a catalog of indigenous struggles, it is infused with these notions; and the idea that we are in the middle of a process that has been undermined for generations by our avoidance of taking responsibility for ourselves and acting responsibly in every day life.
Perhaps it is naive and over-simplistic, but we are more than we are... and now it is time for us to prove it.
