Bloggers Unite for Human Rights - "Burn This CD"

Hi everyone! Through Carver's blog, I found out about this effort to unite bloggers about particular issues. Today, they are uniting for human rights. They ask that you blog about a human rights issue and then call attention to their site.

The URL for the bloggers unite site is as follows:

http://unite.blogcatalog.com/

There are a lot of human rights issues that I'm aware of, ranging from Native American and indigenous rights, to environmental justice issues, to health insurance for uninsured or underinsured people. In fact, I told a former student, Cat, and her husband, Jeremiah, that I just received my new mattress (I slept okay on it last night), which sparked a conversation about environmental contaminants here in the Willamette Valley and how that might be related to rising rates of breast cancer. Cat mentioned that health officials have noted an increase in thyroid problems in women who live downstream (Columbia River) of the disbanded and now EPA Superfund site at Hanford.

But there is one issue in particular that I just became aware of through the Indigenous Literatures and Other Arts symposium that I participated in two weeks ago (already? wow, that was fast!). Alice Te Punga Somerville talked about something that happened in New Zealand on October 15, 2007, in which 16 Maori activists were taken into custody and labeled terrorists. As a result, some other Maori got together for a project they entitled "Burn This CD", in which they spread the word about what happened by giving CD's out for free to people so that the Maori side of the story could be told. I don't know all the details and I don't want to misquote anyone, so here's the link to the project.

Burn This CD

Also, Wikipedia (yes, I resort to it on occasion), has this to say about the whole event.

Wikipedia New Zealand Anti-Terrorist Raids