Indigenous Peoples and the UN

A New Partnership: indigenous peoples and the United Nations system1 by Judith P. Zinsser Judith P. Zinsser is professor of history at Miami University. A former president of the World History Association, she has focused her research in world history on women and the United Nations, and particularly the impact of the United Nations Decade for Women. Her books include: A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present, co-authored with Bonnie S. Anderson, (2nd ed., 2000); History and Feminism: A Glass Half Full (1993), A New Partnership: Indigenous Peoples and the United Nations System (1994). Her articles on women and gender topics have appeared in the Journal of World History, Rethinking History, French Historical Studies, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, and the Journal of Women’s History. Defining basic principles The history of the world tells many stories of conquest. Only one such tale continues into the twentieth century and perhaps into the twenty- first. Almost 500 years ago European adventurers sailed their caravels and galleons across the Atlantic. They looked for a passage to the Indies, the source of silks, spices and all that defined luxury in their world. In the 1490s and the early decades of the sixteenth century they found instead semi-tropical islands, a vast continent and urban civilizations beyond their experience. They called themselves ‘discoverers’ and named the peoples ‘Indians’. Their cartographers declared this the ‘New World’ and named the lands ‘the Americas’. But the peoples already had names. They called themselves Arawak, Kayapo´, Aztec, Maya, Inca, Aymara, Tlingit, Seminode, Mapuche´, 76 ISSN 1350-0775, No. 224 (Vol. 56, No. 4, 2004) ª UNESCO 2004 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA) Pueblo, Mohawk, Innu. For them the islands and continents were not a ‘new world’ but their ancestral homes. In the next centuries the Europeans conquered, settled and reshaped the land to their needs. They wanted the indigenous nations for their labour, their knowledge of the mountains, forests and plains, and for their goods, their silver, their maize, their cloth, their furs. When ‘the first peoples’ of the Western Hemisphere would not accommodate the conquerors and settlers, or opposed them, they were killed. The ‘discovery of the new world’ has continued in the twentieth century with the same consequences. Encounters between settlers and indigenous people in the Amazon River Basin, in the islands of south-eastern Asia, have meant violence, death form disease, the destruction of the forest and thus the indigenous peoples’ way of life just as they did for the Carib Indians in 1942. State trusteeship in the Americas and in southern Africa has at best meant temporary protection. All over the world, the impact of one culture on another has become more and more acute as differences in values, perspectives, resources and technology have made some more vulnerable than others. In recent decades competition over land and land usage has increased exponentially. As a result, no group can remain isolated and intact. Who are the indigenous peoples? Indigenous peoples number over 300 million and constitute 4 per cent of the world’s population. They live in every part of the world, in the cities of the most technological cultures, along terraced hill-sides in heavily populated agricultural provinces, on the wide prairies and savannahs of sparsely settled regions. They share a tragic common history: invasion of their territories and alteration of their environment, abrogation of treaties, continuing violence against their peoples, discrimination and abuse, poor health care and disadvantaged living conditions, attacks on their beliefs and customs, desecration of their sacred sites, imposition of alien education systems and language, the undermining of their way of governance and rejection of their adherence to community over individual rights. Even when they represent the majority of the country’s population, as they do in parts of the Americas, they lead a marginalized existence, kept away from the main sources of political power, isolated, often exploited economically and relegated to the lowest social strata. Everywhere they are dying. Indigenous peoples ask only what others have asserted for themselves: to continue as distinct and separate cultures. The definition of ‘indigenous peoples’, or ‘nations’, formulated by the United Nations underscores this ability to survive despite centuries of ill-treatment. The United Nations defines them as peoples who have continued to ‘consider themselves distinct; and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal systems’.2 They have resisted for over 500 years, and they have survived as separate cultures ‘despite centuries of deprivation, assimilation and genocide’.3 Now they are once again active on their own behalf. They are claiming what their leaders A New Partnership: indigenous peoples and the United Nations system Judith P. Zinsser ISSN 1350-0775, No. 224 (Vol. 56, No. 4, 2004) 77 refer to as ‘the first rights of their people’. A Torres Strait Islander from the western Pacific described his peoples to the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations as the ‘original owners of the land’. He continued: ‘We have not lost our islands. We do not ask for them back. They have always been ours. We have right on our side, we now seek justice.’4 Beginning in the 1960s indigenous nations, bands and tribes organized their own advocacy groups and began to use existing international organizations to gain recognition and support. To achieve their goals they adopted some of the protest methods and tactics of their adversaries. A Mescalera Apache activist explained that she, like others, ‘learned your language … learned American culture to gain access to the academy’.5 Academic credentials gave other access: to the media, to the courts, to legislatures. Marches, demonstrations and collective gestures of passive resistance have been used to bring indigenous demands to the attention of the governments and the world community? In just a little over a decade they made the world aware of their past history. They have brought attention to their present circumstances. They have gained international acknowledgement of the wrongs done to them and approval from the United Nations Commission on Human Rights for the drafting of a separate declaration of the rights of indigenous peoples. There must be a specific statement of their rights because existing human rights declarations and covenants have not included them. Nowhere in the many international human rights instruments are all aspects of their history and current circumstances addressed and protected. They are distinct peoples and nations with unique origins and special needs? It is important that they gain their rights. For their past history and present reality raise profound human rights issues for all peoples. On the broadest level this concerns the rights of distinct ethnic and racial groups to exist within the modern technological state. It concerns the rights of cultures to continue. It challenges the dominant settler cultures to collaborate in new ways, to visualize ‘a society within which they are merely a part rather than in … control’.6 Most significantly it concerns an alternate view of humanity’s relationship to the environment. In order for all peoples to survive, it is the indigenous view that must prevail. Indigenous peoples and the United Nations system Indigenous peoples have been active in their own countries. They have formed regional associations. They have allied with international humanitarian groups. They have formed their own international councils and federations. Each type of action has brought them into contact with the United Nations system in one way or another. Now it is the United Nations that has recognized their special circumstances and their unique needs and has called for a Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. From the perspective of indigenous peoples the process has been slow, especially given the urgency of their situation, given the numbers who have died and will continue to die because of the destruction of their environment, their ways of life, their customs and beliefs. It demonstrates, however, how issues come to the attention of the United Nations, how the concerns are defined, validated and acted upon. The story of indigenous peoples and the Unites Nations shows the A PARADIGM IN A PERIOD OF CULTURAL TRANSITION 78 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA) interaction between the international community and national governments on human rights violation. Most important, it shows the ways in which humanitarian groups and the various parts of the United Nations work to redress grievances and to guarantee fundamental freedoms for all peoples. The role of non-governmental organizations Non-governmental organizations have played a key role in bringing the concerns of indigenous peoples to the attention of the United Nations and its agencies. Groups of anthropologists first in Denmark, then in the United Kingdom and finally in the United States founded three of the earliest and most effective advocacy groups. The International Working Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA, founded in 1968) responded to the situation of indigenous peoples in the Amazon River Basin. It gathers information, speaks and lobbies at international meetings and publishes a newsletter and yearbook that bring current issues to the attention of the world community. Survival International, a British non-governmental organization founded in 1969 also to aid Amazonian peoples, advised the groups of experts convened by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in the 1980s and contributed to the ILO’s decision to revise its Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention (Convention No. 107, 1957). On the basis of reports from Survival International, the ILO cited a South Asian country for violations of indigenous peoples’ rights. Cultural Survival, founded in 1972, takes pride in supporting a wide range of activities across the globe, from Malaysia to Venezuela, from Tibet to Namibia.7 For example, the SNA Jtz’ibajom Project funds a writers’ co-operative working to recover and preserve the Mayan oral traditions. The Regional Indian Council of Cauca (CRIC) receives support for its reforestation project in the Colombian Amazon. Contributions to the Black Women’s Education Fund of Australia give a student graduate school tuition at a United States university. Through its newsletter and its position papers, Cultural Survival has played a key role in informing the international community and groups within the United Nations of the needs of indigenous peoples. In the late 1980s and the 1990s Cultural Survival’s budgets also provided funding for transportation and translating so that indigenous peoples could meet and make their own case at international forums. Each year more of the first peoples acquire the techniques of modern-day advocacy. They have created their own organizations and federations. They have learned the value of newsletters, position papers, conferences and ‘networking’ with their ‘brothers and sisters’ in all parts of the world. They have learned to use the United Nations as a forum for their grievances. The first international non-governmental organization Conference on Discrimination against Indian Populations of the Americas met in Geneva in 1977. The participants issued the first draft declaration for the defence of the indigenous nations and peoples, and suggested the creation of a United Nations Working Group to study their situation and make recommendations. The Declaration approved by the Conference voiced many of the peoples’ major concerns: their right to A New Partnership: indigenous peoples and the United Nations system Judith P. Zinsser ISSN 1350-0775, No. 224 (Vol. 56, No. 4, 2004) 79 ‘recognition as nations’ with jurisdiction over their own peoples and protection for their own cultures; their title to, and special relationship with, their lands; their need for enough good land to live according to their own traditions and to develop ‘at their own pace’; acknowledgement by governments of their organizations, their land claims and their right to negotiate.8 Subsequent meetings convened by non-governmental organizations such as the World Council of Churches or indigenous non-governmental organizations themselves (such as the International Indian Treaty Council, the World Council of Indigenous Peoples and the Inuit Circumpolar Conference) listed other principles and defined the separate and unique character of the peoples; they are the original inhabitants, sometimes the majority rather than the minority, groups kept subordinate and dependent as a result of ‘invasions, colonization, brutal subjugation, and genocidal practices’.9 Through the efforts of these non-governmental organizations, other internationally active indigenous groups and sympathetic members of the United Nations human rights commissions, the Working Group on Indigenous Populations was established ion 1981 with a mandate to draft a declaration. By 1993 the leaders of many indigenous organizations with and without non-governmental organization status had become active and more knowledgeable of the workings of international human rights organizations. They described their attendance and their sponsorship of meetings around the world as the way of ‘opening spaces’, of pressing their demands. In addition, their own organizations had come to represent even more constituencies, not only tribal and regional interests, but also those united across age and gender. For example, international conferences and indigenous women began to meet in 1989 and brought attention to patterns of inadequate health care, states’ violence against women, ‘sexual trafficking’ in women and forced prostitution, and the need for greater representation of women throughout the movement for the peoples’ rights. Indigenous young people have held two conferences. At the Working Group in July of 1993 they spoke in particular of their right to learn about their heritage and to acquire traditional knowledge in the traditional ways ‘to help us reclaim our past, so we may claim our future’.10 Indigenous peoples and the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) UNCED, held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, demonstrated more dramatically than any other international gathering the impact of indigenous peoples on the world community and the way that non-governmental organizations have helped them to gain a hearing. In Agenda 21, the programme of action from the Earth Summit or Rio Conference, representatives of the settler governments acknowledged many of the concerns first raised by indigenous elders at non-governmental organization-sponsored meetings in the early 1970s; in particular, that the world’s leaders consider the consequences of unregulated industrial expansion and exploitation of natural resources. More than other regions, the image of a devastated Amazonia has captured the imagination of the industrialized world. A PARADIGM IN A PERIOD OF CULTURAL TRANSITION 80 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA) By the late 1980s United Nations agencies had created a whole vocabulary of words and phrases to describe the new awareness of the tropical forest environment and its indigenous inhabitants. Publications now spoke of ‘sustainable development’ and of the lessons to be learned from indigenous peoples skilled ‘in managing complex ecological systems’ through ‘agro-forestry’ and ‘shifting cultivation’.11 Indigenous leaders and their non-governmental organizations also learned to speak in these new phrases when articulating their demands at their own and at United Nations sponsored meetings. Hunting and fishing became ‘wildlife management and harvesting’. Their way of life became ‘sustainable and harmonious relationships with their lands and environments’. They agreed that their willingness and ability ‘to share this knowledge with others, is vital for overcoming environmental degradation throughout the world’. The alterindigenous, they explained, led to ‘ecocide’.12 A 1989 Co-ordinating Body for Indigenous Peoples’ Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA) declaration summarized this new political awareness. The declaration described indigenous peoples as ‘the keys to guaranteeing the future of the Amazon Basin, not only for our peoples, but also for all of humanity’. Protecting this fragile environment, so essential to all peoples, meant development ‘compatible with Indigenous People’s principles of respect and care for the world around them [and] their concern for the survival and well-being of their future generations’. In the end, ‘The most effective defence of the Amazon Biosphere is the recognition and defence of the territories of the region’s Indigenous Peoples and the promotion of their models for living within the Biosphere and for managing its resources in a sustainable way’.13 The Rio Conference made such language part of the international development ‘dialogue’. The Secretary-General of the Conference underlined the urgency expressed by COICA in the foreword to Agenda 21. He refereed to ‘global environmental degradation’ and to ‘the movement to turn the world from its self-consumptive course to one of renewal and sustenance’. The document used now-familiar phrases to describe ‘the efficiency of indigenous people’s resource management systems’, the role that they can play in the ‘conservation and management of ecosystems’ and the value of their ‘traditional knowledge’ for the sustainable utilization of biological resources and conservation of biological diversity’.14 UNESCO UNESCO and other organs and intergovernmental agencies have acted to affirm other rights of indigenous peoples. In 1981 UNESCO sponsored a meeting of experts to consider the destruction of cultures and charges of ethnocide in Latin America. The San Jose´ Declaration15 issued as a result of the deliberations affirmed indigenous peoples’ cultural and especially language rights. It gave support to education in mother tongues and proposed a declaration of linguistic rights. International conventions drafted under the auspices of UNESCO in the early 1970s against the theft of ‘cultural property’ and for the protection of the ‘World’s Cultural and Natural Heritage’ have sometimes proved useful in indigenous efforts to reclaim objects taken over the centuries. A New Partnership: indigenous peoples and the United Nations system Judith P. Zinsser ISSN 1350-0775, No. 224 (Vol. 56, No. 4, 2004) 81 UNESCO’s actions in the mid-1980s have proved of direct relevance to the situation of indigenous peoples. UNESCO co-authored ‘model provisions’ for laws to protect the oral traditions and knowledge of peoples from ‘illicit exploitation and other prejudicial actions’.16 The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) was established, in theory, to monitor violations. UNESCO’s 1986 meeting of the International Council of Museums favoured the return of stolen artefacts to indigenous groups and the peoples’ involvement in museums established to preserve and display their cultural traditions. The United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations The Charter of the United Nations specifically states that one of the Organization’s obligations is to protect and promote the ‘human rights and fundamental freedoms’ of the world’s peoples. In 1946 the Economic and Social Council, one of the United Nations’ main organs, established the Commission on Human Rights to take on this task. At its first meeting in 1947 it created the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities to study and make recommendations on cases of racial, religious or linguistic discrimination throughout the world. Concern for indigenous peoples began in this sub-commission. In 1971 the group authorized an international study of the situation of indigenous peoples. Ten years later four volumes of description, analysis, documents and recommendations were formally presented by Special Rapporteur Jose´ R. Martinez Cobo.17 The study surveys all previous United Nations actions that might relate to indigenous peoples: work of committees, specialized agencies, intergovernmental organizations. It comments on the relevance and application of existing conventions protecting human rights – economic, social, cultural, civil and political – and on conventions against such specific practices as racial discrimination, enslavement and genocide. It gives the recommendations of the non-governmental organization-sponsored international conferences. It presents a definitive study of indigenous peoples’ circumstances as of the late 1970s: government policies, administration and social service programmes; disadvantaged living conditions; discriminatory education and the gradual death of traditional languages and cultures; and exploitative training and employment practices. The last volume contains recommendations for protecting the peoples’ access to the land and its resources, and for safeguarding their political and religious rights. The report, in conjunction with the efforts of indigenous and philanthropic non-governmental organizations, led to the creation of the Working Group on Indigenous Populations in 198118 and recognition of these nations and tribes as unique. The United Nations has accepted that they are separate peoples, unlike other national populations, defined by unique criteria, that they live in unique circumstances and have been denied their rights in ways others have been spared. More significantly, the United Nations agreed that, unlike other groups, such as racial or ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples need more than just protection against loss of rights; they need active promotion of the enjoyment of those rights. With A PARADIGM IN A PERIOD OF CULTURAL TRANSITION 82 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA) their cultures and their environments under attack, not only their rights but also their traditional ways of life, and in some cases their survival, are in danger. Having accepted these views, the United Nations sees a specific role for itself: to formulate in consultation with the indigenous peoples and with governments the basic principles that should underlie all of their relations; and to define the fundamental rights that must be guaranteed to all indigenous peoples both collectively for each nation and individually for each member of that nation. Once completed these principles and freedoms will become another human-rights declaration. The Working Group was proposed and authorized to carry out this role. It has met annually since 1982 (except in 1986 due to United Nations ‘economy’ measures) and reports to the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. Five members chosen from the major regions of the world meet for one week in Geneva, at the Palais des Nations (originally built for the League of Nations, the United Nations’ predecessor). Initially they gathered information and heard presentations on indigenous concerns and circumstances, on government perspectives and actions. Beginning in 1985 they started to discuss how to turn these concerns and perspectives into the language of international law, into specific paragraphs and articles that could be used as a standard for evaluating relations between indigenous peoples and national governments. When completed these paragraphs and articles will have become the underlying principles and basic freedoms of the Universal Declaration of Indigenous Rights. The chair, Erica-Irene Daens, presented the first draft declaration in 1988. In 1993 the group finished and authorized the dissemination of the final version to indigenous nations for comment and recommended that the Declaration be presented to the Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities at its next session in 1994. Accomplishments of the Working Group In the first years of the international meetings on indigenous concerns, participants came primarily from the Americas with one representative of the Aboriginals of western Oceania. In 1993 they travelled from Africa, Asia, the Arctic Circle and the Pacific: the Southern Sudan Group, the Karen National Union (Union of Myanmar), the Daliit Youth Movement (India), the Alliance of Taiwan Aborigines, the Finno-Ugrik Peoples’ Consultative Committee (Arctic Circle), the Cordillera Peoples Alliance (Philippines) and the Chamorro Organization of People for Indigenous Rights (Guam); groups of elders from the Pacific and North America; and women’s groups from three corners of the world, Peru, New Zealand and Tibet. The Working Group has become, in fact, the third largest human-rights meeting in the United Nations. Typically, as many as fifty to seventy governments send observers. In the course of its meetings between 1982 and 1993 all the major issues and concerns of indigenous peoples have been raised and discussed. The Working Group has become their ‘gateway to the United Nations system’.19 The Working Group members A New Partnership: indigenous peoples and the United Nations system Judith P. Zinsser ISSN 1350-0775, No. 224 (Vol. 56, No. 4, 2004) 83 accept the special nature of indigenous peoples’ relationship to the land. They generally agree when indigenous peoples speak of the significances of the land and of the group’s right to collective access to its resources. The Working Group favours compensation for lands lost, negotiation over claims and consultation about uses. There is acknowledgement of centuries of injustice and disadvantage which must in some way be addressed. The members of the Working Group endorse the separate and unique status of indigenous groups as distinct peoples whose needs are not met by guarantees of rights for minorities. In particular, these peoples and nations must have autonomy in their own affairs and the right to decide how, when and in what ways they want to change. At the same time they must have rights to guarantee the preservation of all that they do not want to change. The Working Group members condemn what has been described as the ‘systematic destruction’ of indigenous peoples’ culture, of their language, their customs and their religious beliefs and practices. Members favour ‘affirmative action’ by states to remedy the wrongs of the past, to guarantee rights in the present and to improve indigenous peoples’ disadvantaged circumstances for the future. The Working Group has been authorized to conduct two studies: one on ‘treaties, agreements and other constructive arrangements between states and indigenous peoples’ and one on (the cultural and intellectual property of indigenous peoples’, both of which could become useful precedents in the establishment of international and national law on these subjects.20 The study of treaties is intended to define and clarify official agreements between states and indigenous peoples, and to suggest how such formal arrangements may contribute to amicable relationships in the future. In much the same way the study on ‘cultural and intellectual property’, describes the ‘heritage’ of indigenous knowledge and practice – both spiritual and practical – and the ways it has been appropriated by settler cultures. Most important, for the future, the study explains the inadequacy of current legislation to protect or ensure compensation for use of this knowledge or its products. The draft declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples The draft declaration21 completed by the Working Group at its eleventh session in 1993 represented a hard-won compromise between the views of indigenous nations and the settler states, between the precedents set in previous United Nations declarations and covenants and the new human rights concepts formulated to meet the unique needs of the ‘first peoples’. As the spokeswoman for the Lubicon Cree from north-western America explained to the Working Group at the 1993 meeting, the principal disagreement have always centred on four interrelated issues. First, the indigenous peoples insist on the recognition of indigenous nations as having a prior claim to the lands they occupy and use, and to the validity of the treaties negotiated with their forbears. Prior claim to land means prior consent to, not just A PARADIGM IN A PERIOD OF CULTURAL TRANSITION 84 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA) consultation about, use of resources of those lands, whether it be the minerals under the earth or the medicinal properties of a tree’s bark. Secondly, the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples must make clear that there are many different peoples, not just minorities to be subsumed under some general designation such as ‘populations’. To be separate peoples means acceptance of many different customs and beliefs. From the indigenous perspective one of the most important differences – and part of their uniqueness as peoples – stems from their belief in ‘collective’ as well as ‘individual’ rights. Acknowledgements of this principle that groups as well as individuals may hold and exercise rights – has become the third of their demands. The fourth principle, and the one indigenous peoples consider the most basic to their survival, is ‘self-determination’. For indigenous nations, ‘self-determination’ means autonomy, the right, as they expressed it at the 1992 meeting of the Working Group, ‘to determine their own destiny’. In specific terms they explain that this means: the right to govern their internal affairs according to their own ‘political, economic, cultural and social structures’. They can determine their own membership, negotiate with states, plan, participate in and then benefit from the uses of their territories. They can celebrate their own beliefs on their sacred sites, have the means to preserve their traditions, customs and laws, administer their own health care, teach their children, and reclaim lost artefacts of their culture and the bones of their dead in need of ritual burial.22 To indigenous peoples these concepts represent inherent rights, powers that they never relinquished. Only conquest by alien peoples interrupted their exercise of these rights. The first peoples assert that no state and no international body needs to ‘give’ them these rights. As inherent rights they cannot be ‘given’, they belong to nations by definition. Rather, the world must acknowledge what has always been: that the first peoples are separate, autonomous nations able to decide their own present and their own future. The Member States’ perspective To governments all four of these demands appear potentially dangerous. In the eyes of some governments, self-determination threatens not only the unity of the state, but also its very survival. Any mention of special status and autonomy seems by definition a prelude to secession, or at the least to authorization for a group to legislate its own status ‘without regard to the laws of the surrounding state’. Such powers therefore must not be considered inherent. They cannot be granted without qualification. Otherwise governments believe that they would be giving up their authority to rule all of their citizens and would be compromising their territorial integrity. All questions of collective rights, land title, treaties and prior consent to development also can be seen as challenges to state authority and the Member State’s ability to provide for all of its people not just one specific group. For example, both East Asian and North American governments are concerned that the granting of collective rights may jeopardize the individual liberties their constitutions have enshrined. A New Partnership: indigenous peoples and the United Nations system Judith P. Zinsser ISSN 1350-0775, No. 224 (Vol. 56, No. 4, 2004) 85 The Working Group’s perspective Since 1988 the five members of the Working Group have listened to these positions. The draft declaration that they drew up and which has been submitted to the Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities in 1994, and ultimately to the Economic and Social Council and the General Assembly, attempts to reflect what the chair calls ‘the consensus of the majority’.23 A careful reader can find amendments made by settler governments, phrases and articles proposed by indigenous leaders. It is a compromise document. From the earliest meetings on the declaration the Working Group has tried to find language that would resolve the conflict over ‘selfdetermination’. In the end the members decided to use the phrase but to give it a new meaning. They have assumed that indigenous peoples are not agitating to establish new states, but rather to be allowed to live as they wish, to be left alone, as the African member of the Working Group, explained.24 Thus, ‘self-determination’ in this declaration can be conceived of as ‘a new contemporary category of the right’ without ‘any implications which might encourage the formation of independent states’. In this declaration it means indigenous peoples’ control over ‘internal’ not ‘external’ affairs, and the ability to negotiate ‘their status and representation’ with the state claiming sovereignty over them.25 Thus, from the perspective of the Working Group the right defined in this way can be given unqualifiedly.26 Between the first meeting of indigenous peoples in 1977 and the presentaiotn of a draft declaration in 1993 the process may seem slow by ordinary measurements of time. In the context of international negotiations, however, and given the complexity of the issues and the extraordinary economic and political implications of indigenous peoples’ demands, the progress has been rapid. Indigenous nations have created their own organizations and international networks and learned the language and politics of international meetings. The United Nations has acknowledged and validated their concerns. It has created a forum for them to voice their opinions, and accepted their right to participate in the setting of international standards. With the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples the United Nations will have again proved its effectiveness in the area of human rights. The Working Group has continued its work after the writing of the publication and in April 2000, the Commission on Human Rights adopted a resolution to establish the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues during the International Decade of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. Three months later, the Economic and Social Council endorsed the resolution, and the Permanent Forum came into formal existence. The Permanent Forum is now an advisory body to the Economic and Social Council with a mandate to discuss indigenous issues related to economic and social development, culture, the environment, education, health and human rights. For further information consult the very informative web site at http://www.un.org/ A PARADIGM IN A PERIOD OF CULTURAL TRANSITION 86 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA) partners/civil_society/ngo/n-indig.htm. Most of links mentioned in endnote in the text can be accessed through this site. NOTES 1. This text is an excerpt from the publication A new partnership: indigenous peoples and the United Nations system, Educational studies and documents 62, Paris, UNESCO Publishing, 1994. MUSEUM International has wished to reprint the text in agreement with the author, Judith P. Zinsser, as a tribute to the launching of the International Decade of Indigenous Peoples in 1994 and its closing year. See http://www.unesco.org/culture/indigenous. 2. Jose´ R. Martinez Cobo, Study of the Problem of Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations. Vol. V: Conclusions, proposals and Recommendations, p. 29. New York, United Nations, 1986, (Sales No. E.86.XIV.3). 3. See Appendix III, Indigenous Peoples Earth Charter, declaratory paragraph 5. 4. The ideas and quotations in this paragraph come from a variety of sources: Paul Coe, chair of the National Aboriginal and Islander Legal Services Secretariat, statement before the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Peoples, Geneva, Switzerland, August 1988; George Mye, chair of the Torres Strait Islander Advisory Board, statement to the Working Group on Indigenous Populations, Geneva, Switzerland, 28 July 1993; Mgate te Koruo, a Maori teacher, went so far as to suggest the repatriation of Europeans and thus the return of Aeoratoa (New Zealand) to its rightful guardians, as quoted in Indigenous Peoples: A Global Quest for Justice (report for the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian issues), p. 39, New Jersey, Zed Books Ltd, 1987. 5. Ine´ z Talmantez, statement before the World History Association National Conference, Philadelphia, June 1992. 6. ‘Viewpoint’, Waitangi Action Committee presentation to the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations, Geneva, August 1988. 7. See for example, the list of activities supported in 1990, Cultural Survival Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 4, 1990, pp. 86-8. 8. See ‘Declaration of Principles for the Defence of the Indigenous Nations and Peoples of the Western Hemisphere’, in A. Leroy Bennett, International Organizations: Principles and Issues, pp. 86-7, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice hall, 1988. 9. See Lee Swepston and Roger Plant, ‘International Standards and the Protection of the Land Rights’, International Labor Review, Vol. 124, No. 1, 1985, pp. 91–106. For a complete list of indigenous organizations as of 1984, see ‘Organizing to Survive’, Cultural Survival, Vol. 8, No. 4, December 1984. 10. The phrase ‘opening spaces’ comes from the Final Report: First Summit of Indigenous Peoples. Chimatenango, Guatemala, may, 1993. On indigenous women’s activities see, for example, the report of the Asian Indigenous Women’s Conference, January 1992, sponsored by the Cordillera Resource Center. The statement from the Second World Indigenous Youth Conference can be obtained from the Organizing Committee, Second World Indigenous Youth Conference, P.O. Box 40133, Casuarina 0811, Northern Territory, Australia. 11. The United Nations World Commission on the Environment and Development (founded in 1987), as quoted in DPI/1294-93206 November 1992. 12. Report of the United Nations Technical Conference on Practical Experience in the Realization of Sustainable and Environmentally Sound Self-Development of Indigenous Peoples, May 1992, Santiago, Chile, pp.16, 17. (E/CN.4/Sub.2/1992/31.) 13. COICA Statement, Cultural Survival Quartely, Vol. 13, No. 4, 1989, p 75. 14. Agenda 21, New York, United Nations Department of Public Information (Sales No.E.93.1.11). See the Statement of Principles, Chapters 11, 15, 17 and 26 (specifically on indigenous peoples); especially pp. 11, n. 88, 228, 132. 15. See http://unescodoc.unesco.org. 16. For a description of UNESCO’s activities in this area of indigenous rights see Erica-Irene Daes, Working Paper on the Question of Ownership and Control of the Cultural Property of indigenous Peoples, July 1991, pp. 4–8. (E/CN/Sub.2/1991.34.). 17. Although the Ambassador of Ecuador generously sponsored the study, a Guatemalan lawyer, Augusto Willemsen Diaz, did the principal research and drafting. A New Partnership: indigenous peoples and the United Nations system Judith P. Zinsser ISSN 1350-0775, No. 224 (Vol. 56, No. 4, 2004) 87 18. See http://www.unhchr.indigenous/groups.htm. 19. Erica-Irene Daes’ closing statement, Working Group on Indigenous Populations, Geneva, 30 July 1993. 20. For example the draft declaration has already been used successfully in a Canadian court case argued by Michael Jackson for the Gitksan and Wet’sowet’en Nations. 21. See http://www.unhchr.ch/indigenous/groups-01.htm and click on the link to the Draft Declaration. 22. See Sharon Venne, intervention at the Working Group on Indigenous Populations, Geneva, 20 July 1993; and the Report of the Working Group on indigenous Populations (E/CN.4/Sub.2/ 1992/33). 23. Erica-Irene Daes, remarks at the Working Group on Indigenous Populations, Geneva, 26 July 1993. 24. Amb. Judith Tsefi Attah, interview, Geneva, 28 July 1993. 25. Erica-Irene Daes, as quoted in the 1992 Report of the Working Group on Indigenous Populations, p. 17, (E/CN.4/Sub.2/1993/33) and in her explanatory note concerning the draft declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples, 19 July 1993, pp 3–5. (E/CN. 4/Sub.2/1993/26/Add.1.) 26. See Appendix I, preambular paragraph No. 14, and Articles 3 and 3. A PARADIGM IN A PERIOD OF CULTURAL TRANSITION 88 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)