CULTURE PEARLS : When ‘Progress’ Isn’t: U.N. Day at the Bowers

Progress is usually defined as an improvement, an advance toward perfection or a better state. In the case of indigenous peoples, however, progress for others has most often meant poverty, disease, despair, and in many cases, cultural extinction for them.

“In the past, development meant focusing on growth,” said Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who will speak Sunday at Bowers Museum in Santa Ana as part of United Nations Day celebrations. Sirleaf is assistant administrator of U.N. development programs and the organization’s regional bureau director for Africa. “It meant production, productivity, whatever enabled us to show indicators of growth. We focused on prices, exchange rates and development of infrastructure.

“In many cases, nations experienced high rates of growth yet remained undeveloped because the indigenous capacity to respond to change was not there.”

Speakers at “United Nations Day: The Year of Indigenous Peoples” will also include demographic consultant Adrian Dove and Bowers curator of Native American art Paul Apodaca. Interspersed will be music, dance and pageantry by ethnomusicologist Elisabeth Waldo’s Multi-Ethnic Musicians and Dancers.

The event, sponsored by the Coastline and Orange County chapters of the United Nations Assn., will take place in the museum courtyard, and admission is free.

According to Sirleaf, most African countries have been hurt by growth-focused programs, and those nations’ efforts to compensate for such programs--by importing expertise and by massive programs of national assistance--were doomed to failure.

“Development must focus on the strengthening, utilization and maintenance of indigenous talents,” Sirleaf said. “If that is lacking, sustainability will not be achieved.”