UNITED NATIONS – Half-way through the world’s largest gathering of indigenous leaders, delegates and friends gathered in a tribute to one person who helped make it happen, but wasn’t there.
This was Ingrid Washinawatok el-Issa, the philanthropist and member of the Menominee Nation, who was kidnapped and murdered with two other activists in Colombia in 1999 by rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Washinawatok along with Lahe’ena’e Gay of the Pacific Cultural Conservancy International and Terrence Freitas of the Uw’a Defense Working Group had gone to the Arauca District near its Venezuelan border to establish an Indigenous education program for the Uw’a people.
Over 150 friends and attendees at the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues crowded the performance space at the American Indian Community House in lower Manhattan on the night of May 19 to honor the memory of Ingrid and her colleagues. Ingrid was a board member of the Community House, which serves the largest urban Indian population in the country.
In her active career, she was also present at the beginning of the long process that led to the founding of the Permanent Forum, which drew more than 1,700 indigenous representatives to its second annual session at the UN from May 12 to 23. In 1981 she served as a delegate to the first session of the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations and stayed with it as it developed into the Forum.
Her memory, in fact, pervaded the meeting of the Forum. Her widower Ali el-Issa kept a constant presence in the halls and meeting rooms of the UN, representing the Flying Eagle Woman Fund established in her honor. Her son Maeh-Kiw addressed the delegates at a reception early in the Session, as the Youth Council Representative for the Community House.
At another side-event of the forum, two representatives of the Flying Eagle Woman Fund, Steven Cowley and Roslyn Dotson, said that it would soon launch a Web site that among other news would track the extradition and trial of one of the alleged FARC killers, Nelson Vargas Rueda. “We will follow that very closely,” said Dotson.
But the tribute covered all the phases of Ingrid’s very full 44 years. Speaker Alex Ewen recounted her early years from her birth July 31, 1957, on the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin, where her father James Washinawatok was a leader in the successful fight to reverse the U.S. government termination of their tribe.
Ewen traced her youth growing up in Chicago and her education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of Minnesota to her coming to New York “where the international struggle was just beginning in 1977.”
“All of these people were struggling for the same thing, – the right to be people, the right to be who they were,” said Ewen.
“Ingrid was part of it from day one.”
In 1980 she went to Havana, Cuba, to learn Spanish. “She wanted to be able to communicate with the indigenous people of South America,” said Ewen. But she also met Ali el-Issa, a Palestinian, her future husband.
Of and on during the evening, a television played a tape of family pictures from her youth to her work at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, all featuring an incredibly warm and bright smile.
John Trudell brought a poetic tribute from his own history of activism and spoke of the deep personal impact in Ingrid’s murder. “I personally have no use for revolution,” he said. “One thing I’ve learned from Ingrid is the evolutionary solution.” His poems denounced the cycle of violence that led to her killing:
“The oppressor and the revolutionary become one, no coherency in the killing, no prayers for the killed.”
A moving prayer for Ingrid did come, however, from the Nahuatl dance group Cetilizti Nauhcampu (Group of the Four Directions). After ceremonial dances marked by smudging and the sounding of conch shells, members of the group read a traditional Nahautl poem and translated it into Spanish and English.
In the English, it said,
“When I die, bury me close to the fire, and when you make your tortillas, that’s where you may cry. And if someone asks, ‘Senora, Why are you weeping?’ You tell them that the wood is still green, And the smoke of the fire is making you cry.”