Photojournalist Elaine Briere was travelling the Southeast Asian “hippy trail” in 1974, a trip that brought her among other places to pre-invasion East Timor. She fell in love with the country. After its invasion, she found she had some of the very few high-quality images of pre-invasion East Timor. She shared them with solidarity groups around the world. Especially in Canadian activism, they became iconic. Some have even found their way back to independent Timor-Leste.
When Dalhousie University in Halifax started considering a project in Indonesia, a group of local people formed the Nova Scotia East Timor Group. The group, led by Bill Owen, Audrey Samson and Ross Shotton, undertook a letter-writing campaign to the Canadian government, the first time Ottawa felt compelled to respond to letters from the public. Ten years after the 1975 invasion of East Timor, the NSETG was instrumental in the Canadian component of an Amnesty International to raise awareness about human rights in East Timor. Under Indonesian rule, AI reported, some 200,000 Timorese had died.
Bill Owen (crouching) at NSETG literature table and banner showing, Halifax
Abé ho Aloz in performance. Timorese-Canadian duo Abé Barreto Soares and Aloz MacDonald performed numerous shows across Canada in support of the Timorese cause.
Item consists of a press release, reports, project summaries, handwritten notes, and correspondence. The documents discuss Canada's economic aid projects and economic interest in Indonesia.
Item consists primarily of reports discussing human rights violations in East Timor from about 1986 to 1999. It includes reports of consultations between the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) and Canadian Human Rights Non-Governmental Organizations. It also includes a report from the Canadian Peacebuilding Coordinating Committee, the 1998 annual report of Human Rights Violations in East Timor produced by the East Timor Human Rights Centre, and a presentation given by Canadian Action for Indonesia and East Timor (CAFIET) to the NGO Consultations on Human Rights in East Timor.
Various documents about the Museum for Textiles in Toronto. The Museum of Textiles is a non-profit educational organization incorporated in 1975. This item includes The Legend of the Crocodile Examples of textiles from Timor East-Timor; The Survival of a Vision The Buffalo and the Princess (Timorese folktale) A Swedish magazine: Forintesle i Paradiset A story of a Quail and a Rat
Various documents about the Museum for Textiles in Toronto. The Museum of Textiles is a non-profit educational organization incorporated in 1975. This item includes
