Conversations About Indigenous Rights

The UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People and Aotearoa New Zealand

Selwyn Katene, Rawiri Taonui, Selwyn Katene, Rawiri Taonui

• Publisher: Massey University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780995102910
• eBook ISBN: 9780995109551
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Social Sciences

The UN declaration on the Rights of Indigenous peoples is a deeply significant document. In 2007, then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described its signing as an 'historic moment when UN Member States and indigenous peoples reconciled with their painful histories and resolved to move forward together on the path of human rights, justice and development for all'.

This book reflects on the tenth anniversary of the UN General Assembly's adoption of the Declaration and examines its relevance in New Zealand. It shows the strong alignment between the Treaty of Waitangi and the Declaration, and examines how the Declaration assists the interpretation and application of Treaty principles of partnership, protection and participation. Starting from a range of viewpoints and disciplines, the authors agree that in Aotearoa New Zealand the journey to full implementation is now well underway, but warn that greater political leadership, willpower, resources and a stronger government commitment is needed.

Drawing on both scholarship and lived experience, Conversations About Indigenous Rights features chapters by Moana Jackson, Dame Naida Glavish, Sir Pita Sharples, Rawiri Taonui, Selwyn Katene, Sheryl Lightfoot, Steve Larkin, Anaru Erueti, Jessica Ngatai, Fleur Te Aho, Tracey Whare, Pushpa Wood and Jason Mika.

PART 1: ADOPTING THE DECLARATION

1. The rise of Indigenous peoples:
The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Rawiri Taonui

2. A personal reflection on the drafting of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Moana Jackson

3. At the table

Pita Sharples

1. The rise of Indigenous peoples:
The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples¹

Rawiri Taonui

Independent writer, researcher and adviser

This chapter examines the rise of Indigenous peoples and the cultural politics of the drafting and the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP, 2007).

Indigenous peoples matter. Numbering 350 to 500 million people in up to 90 countries,² they are most often the descendants of the first arrivals in their territory, land or region. In Africa and Asia, indigeneity extends beyond anteriority to include specific lifeways, such as nomadic pastoralism, dry land horticulture and forest dwelling.³ In countries like Bolivia, they are the demographic majority; usually, they are not.

Comprising 5000 distinct cultural groups speaking 4000 of the world’s 7000 languages,⁴ Indigenous nations encompass up to 90 per cent of the world’s cultural diversity.⁵ As the oldest cultural autochthonies in world societies, they have unique cultural characteristics and epistemologies connected to ancestors, oral tradition and land.

Once belittled, their epistemic beliefs, philosophies and spiritual values are increasingly regarded as vital to the survival of the planet. Indigenous first nations live on a quarter of the Mother Earth, safeguarding 80 per cent of the planet’s remaining biodiversity. Indigenous peoples own one-half to one-third of the world’s collectively owned lands. Their forests harbour 24 per cent of the world’s above-ground carbon. Many of the most biologically important lands and waters are intact as a result of Indigenous stewardship. Deforestation in first people timberlands is two to three times lower than in other lands.⁶

Indigenous peoples are vulnerable. Most live under the yoke of the cumulative transgenerational impacts of colonisation. They suffer ongoing political, economic, social and cultural marginalisation. The artificial geographical borders arbitrarily imposed by nation states divide many Indigenous peoples. First peoples face extreme forms of historically embedded racism and prejudice, often because they are Indigenous. Prejudice and violence confront Indigenous people in all aspects of life — employment, health, education, housing, justice, identity and culture. Too often they are the first victims of gross systematic human rights violations. Few peoples have been subjected to greater neglect or oppression.⁷

Many states deny Indigenous peoples exist outside of the situation of white settler colonisation. Fearful that granting equality to the oppressed will threaten established privilege, many governments argue that the recognition of Indigenous rights constitutes reverse discrimination. States therefore regularly deny the rights of first nations to avoid implementing the targeted measures and legal protections that would dismantle structural discrimination and secure the human rights and fundamental freedoms Indigenous peoples should enjoy alongside all other citizens.⁸

Living on lands harbouring high value and untapped natural resources in the Arctic, Latin America, Asia, Near Oceania, Siberia and Africa, Indigenous peoples suffer predatory assaults from foreign transnationals working with weakened states through hybrid companies flying the flag of a false neoliberal global nirvana over their lives and territories.⁹

Indigenous peoples have come a long way. From separate national and regional struggles extending over many decades or centuries, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the first appeals in the international arena. King Tāwhiao of the Waikato in New Zealand took a petition to Queen Victoria of England in 1884.¹⁰ Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy leader Levi General Deskaheh¹¹ and the Rātana movement of New Zealand¹² petitioned the League of Nations in the 1920s. In 1948, a Bolivian delegation to the United Nations requested that the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) create a subcommission to consider the challenges confronting first nations in the Americas.¹³ These were unsuccessful but important first footsteps on the world stage.

Taking longer strides in the 1970s, several interwoven influences shaped the movement we know today. In a paradox of subalternity and resistance, the imposed education systems of post-colonial states, intended to assimilate Indigenous peoples by eradicating culture and identity, instead produced new generations of counter-skilled Indigenous leaders. Embedded within their communities and familiar with both dominant and subordinate cultures, they rose to lead their people in new versions of old struggles. As movements grew, Indigenous organisations broke free from the constraints of state-sponsored institutions to forge new reciprocally beneficial cross-border commonalities.¹⁴

With the cumulative impacts of colonisation bringing deepening crises for Indigenous peoples in post-settler states, and predatory neoliberal economics penetrating into the last pristine resource-rich environments to decimate Indigenous communities, post-colonialism and globalisation provided bitter incentives for the nascent international movement building strength through suffering.¹⁵

Indigenous peoples took inspiration from other struggles. The 1960s advent of television birthed greater awareness of human rights. The decolonisation of the Third World, where millions gained independence, motivated Indigenous others to strive for freedom and equality.¹⁶ The antiracist American civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War protests, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and the rise of feminism taught the success of organised action and international solidarity.

Indigenous peoples inspired each other. The widely covered Aboriginal Tent Embassy (1972), Oglala Lakota and American Indian Movement occupation of Wounded Knee (1973), and the Māori Land March (1975) and the occupation of Bastion Point (1978) in New Zealand painted stark parallels between dark experiences, strengthening campaigns at home and galvanising solidarities abroad.

The arrival of the internet and the proliferation of social media fostered pan-Indigenous dialogues. In 1992, the Center for World Indigenous Studies in Toronto, Canada, established the Fourth World Documentation Project, one of the earliest online Indigenous archives. NativeWeb, launched in 1994, was broadcasting information worldwide from 50 Indigenous sites by 2000. In 1996, the Zapatista movement in Mexico employed the internet to mobilise an anti-neoliberal conference of 3000 activists from 40 countries.¹⁷

Specialist Indigenous advocacy groups emerged: the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA) in Copenhagen (1968), the Londonbased Survival International (1969), and Harvard University staff-initiated Cultural Survival (1972) assisted the international Indigenous mobilisation. A liberation-theology informed World Council of Churches also supported the emergent first peoples movement.¹⁸

Beginning in 1971, George Manuel, the chair of the National Indian Brotherhood in Canada, forged links with Indigenous peoples in Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, the United States and Latin America.¹⁹ At a conference in 1975, Indigenous representatives from 16 countries inaugurated the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (WCIP), issuing a Solemn Declaration (1975) honouring ancestral culture, decrying colonisation as a ‘thirsting for blood, for gold, for land and all its wealth, carrying the cross and the sword’, and pronouncing an intention to reclaim the destiny, humanity and pride of Indigenous peoples.²⁰

Other conferences extended, deepened and consolidated the ascendant pan-Indigenous movement. An American Indian Movement (AIM) conference in 1974, hosting 5000 Indigenous persons from the Americas and the South Pacific, formed the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC).²¹ In 1977, the International Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) Conference on Discrimination against Indigenous Populations in the Americas, assembling more than 100 Indigenous representatives from 38 countries and 50 NGOs, produced a Draft Declaration of Principles for the Defense of the Indigenous Nations and Peoples of the Western Hemisphere, requesting that the UN establish a working party to investigate the plight of Indigenous peoples.²² The following year, the World Conference to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination called for the protection of Indigenous languages, cultures, economies, lands and natural resources. In 1980, the International NGO Conference on Indigenous Peoples and the Land, hosting a record number of Indigenous, government and UN representatives, requested action to protect Indigenous peoples from the activities of nation states.²³ One year later, a Meeting of Experts on Ethnocide and Ethno-development in Costa Rica adopted the San Jose Declaration, adding a further call for the creation of a working group on Indigenous peoples.²⁴ A WCIP conference in Panama in 1984 issued another Declaration of Principles championing indigenous rights.²⁵

These calls would prove important fulcrums for sustaining impetus over the next three decades, pinnacling with the adoption of the Declaration in 2007.

As early as 1971, the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) had approved the idea of a study on discrimination against Indigenous populations.²⁶ Jose Martinez Cobo was appointed as a Special Rapporteur of the UN Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (the Sub-Commission), submitting his report, A Study of the Problem of Discrimination against Indigenous Peoples, in three parts between 1981 and 1984.

Among the report’s many contributions was a definition of Indigenous peoples based on anteriority, continuity with pre-colonial societies, cultural distinctiveness, disempowerment and discrimination. To counter the state practice of defining culture and identity in ways that dismantled and dispersed group uniqueness, solidarity and autonomy, the report iterated the importance of Indigenous ‘self-identification’. By outlining the determination of Indigenous peoples to ‘preserve, develop and transmit’ their territories, identity, institutions and culture to future generations, the report prepared the ground for the drafting of the Declaration.²⁷

The parallel work of the International Labour Organization (ILO) was an important influence during this genesis period of the Declaration. Historically, states had granted Indigenous rights a facile recognition, if at all. States chose whether there would be treaties with Indigenous peoples or not. Where treaties were signed, states wrote the terms, sometimes before the signing, sometimes afterwards. States defined what the treaty meant. Indigenous views were of secondary or no importance. States largely regarded treaties as domestic matters. Such treaties had standing at international law only insofar as from time to time states would signal areas of strategic interest to each other. Indigenous views counted for little.²⁸ During the early and mid-twentieth century, the League of Nations and the UN had little specific regard for Indigenous rights.

As a first statement on Indigenous rights, the ILO Convention No. 107 — Concerning the Protection and Integration of Indigenous and Other Tribal and Semi-Tribal Populations in Independent Countries (1957) was the exception to this rule.²⁹ Re-drafted as Convention No. 169 (1989),³⁰ the updated document, while not as far-reaching as the later UN Declaration, was nonetheless as visionary as the Cobo report in the way it recognised the cultural distinctiveness of Indigenous and tribal nations, valued Indigenous belief systems as critical to wellbeing, acknowledged the connection between colonisation and the erosion of Indigenous rights, sought to ensure that first peoples enjoyed the same human rights as other members of society without discrimination, emphasised the right of Indigenous peoples to exercise control over their economic, social and cultural development, including participating fully in decision-making processes on matters affecting their lives, accentuated the role of selfidentification over state-enacted definitions of indigeneity, promoted protective measures to safeguard Indigenous personal rights, institutions, property, cultures and environmental interests, and outlined rights to land, the restoration of lost lands or equivalence in compensation.

The ILO Conv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword—Margaret Mutu
• Preface—David Rutherford
• Introduction—Selwyn Katene and Rawiri Taonui
• Part 1: Adopting the Declaration
• Part 2: National contexts in Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada and Australia
• Part 3: Case studies
• Part 4: The international context
• Acknowledgements
• About the contributors
• Copyright