Annual Cultural Bazaar Benefits Native Peoples

Cultural Survival, a non-profit organization to benefit the rights of indigenous people around the world, decked Pound Hall at the Law School with gifts and crafts from around the world this weekend at its annual bazaar.

Holiday shoppers replaced stressed out law students as vendors from around the Boston area sold products ranging from Kenyan dolls to Tibetan curry.

The Cultural Survival Bazaar was open all weekend long, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Saturday, and yesterday between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. The event was capped off by a "Music Bazaar" held in Locker Commons on last night which included music and dance performed by artists from Honduras, Peru, Mexico and Columbia.

Cultural Survival was founded in 1972 by Professor of Anthropology David H.P. Maybury-Lewis and his wife Pia Maybury-Lewis after they traveled to Brazil to study its indigenous people to conduct research on David Maybury-Lewis's thesis.

"Everybody uses the Indian. As soon as their thesis is over they go home," Pia Maybury-Lewis said. "No, they don't go home, they forget about it. We saw it was time that somebody tried to give something back from the Indian people after we had gotten a thesis, which is a livelihood."

Cultural Survival, which receives 40 percent of all sales, holds the fundraiser each winter and spring on Harvard's campus. It has been holding the bazaar for over 13 years.

April J. Werner and Ben Bergstein, vendors from the Volga River Trading Company, sold products from Russia, Armenia and other eastern European countries. They had a large display of wooden nestling dolls called matryoshka, meaning "little mother" in Russian. They have been selling their products at the bazaar for four years.

Bergstein said crowds were noticeably smaller than last year.

"There seem to be more and more competing events," Bergstein said.

But other vendors said the event was even more popular this year.

"It went well, better than last," said Bomdon Ngodup from Tibet Arts.

One of the staff members from Cultural Survival decried the lack of awareness about indigenous issues among bazaar goers.

"We got a lot of traffic," said Mark U. Perkins, "but a lot of people were just shoppers. There wasn't a lot of awareness about indigenous problems. A lot of people didn't know what an indigenous person was."

Perkins, a master's student at the Extension School, is writing his thesis about Hawaiian sovereignty, and said that working at Cultural Survival "was right up my alley."

The bazaar topped off a week of Cultural Survival events centered on the topic of the Masaai people of Eastern Africa. They held film nights, lectures and a business dinner in order to highlight the concerns of the Maasai, said Cultural Survival Director Ian S. McIntosh.

In the spring, the bazaar will focus on women in the Zapatista movement of Mexico. "We select events based on the most pressing issues," McIntosh said.

The spring bazaar will be held in a tent outside of the Science Center.