Indigenous internationalism: native rights and the UN

Abstract

Since 1982, with the creation of the Working Group on Indigenous Populations, the UN has taken steps toward addressing the violations of indigenous human rights around the globe that have characterized the colonization of indigenous peoples by western nations since the 15th century. This article explores the question of whether actions taken by the WGIP and other UN bodies promise to relieve this legacy; or whether the UN, as the proper overseer of international law concerning human rights today, continues that legacy in revised form, as some analysts have claimed. A brief overview of positions taken by key figures in the history of international law concerning indigenous peoples since the early 16th century provides a background against which to compare the work of the UN. My conclusion is that while the UN has in some ways sustained the inherited order of neglect of indigenous rights, it has, more importantly, created openings which make it possible for indigenous peoples to assert their claims. While this is not a story of continuous progress, it does suggest that there is reason to respect the UN's efforts in this relentlessly neglected area of human rights.     

Politics of Identity and Identity Policies in Europe: The Case of Peruvian Immigrants in Spain

The indigenous quest for self-determination is an attempt to give voice to local injustice in a universal language, and to make claims to difference via a right that applies equally to all peoples. This article explores recent developments in the transnational indigenous movement's struggle for the right of self-determination by pointing out that this polyvalence-like the indeterminacies of the concepts of "peoples" and "indigenous"-is a productive one that enables indigenous activists to make a unique intervention in international law. Their work aims at creating a new international legal personality based on collective rather than individual rights, and on an understanding of "peoples" as self-determining entities not necessarily aspiring to statehood. This new understanding hinges, in turn, on an emerging perception of the capacity to culture as a general human right. This article addresses recent anthropological texts critical of the transnational indigenous movement to show that the "self" in self-determination as articulated by indigenous activists is not only not accounted for and not protected under current international legal regimes, but is also "a self" through which radical claims to culture and territory are being made.     

Including Indigenous Knowledge in Web-Based Learning

SUMMARY

This paper explores differences between Indigenous knowledge and Western/European ways of knowing, and considers the pedagogical implications for Web-based learning. Moving beyond a simple examination of the nature of Indigenous knowledge, this paper explores ways that “education” has been used by colonizers to subjugate Aboriginal peoples. Outlining ways to avoid colonization, this paper contends that rather than simply being sensitive to the nature of Indigenous knowledge when designing Web-based education, instructors need to be sensitive to ways Western/European knowledge subjugates other forms of knowledge by situating itself as “the” way of knowing rather than “a” way of knowing.     

Indigenous persons with disability in remote Australia: research methodology and Indigenous community control

Abstract

Decolonisation aims to deconstruct the hegemonic traditional Western academic practices and values that oppress Indigenous peoples. Decolonising research methodologies is a relatively new practice in disability research in colonised nations. This paper details the Indigenous community-controlled research methodology that underpinned a disability research project with the Anangu and Yarnangu of Central Australia, ‘Walykumunu Nyinaratjaku: To Live a Good Life’. The project aimed to identify and explore how to support Indigenous people with a disability in the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (NPY) Lands to live a good life. The research was structured on a decolonising methodology to situate the control and governance of the research with the Indigenous peoples. Our experience could assist other disability researchers working with Indigenous peoples in remote communities.     

Indigenous perspectives for strengthening social responses to global environmental changes: A response to the social work grand challenge on environmental change

ABSTRACT

The “Grand Challenges for Social Work,” is a call to action for innovative responses to society’s most pressing social problems. In this article, we respond to the “Grand Challenge” of Creating Social Responses to a Changing Environment from our perspective as Indigenous scholars. Over the last several decades, diminishing natural resources, pollution, over-consumption, and the exploitation of the natural environment have led to climate change events that disproportionately affect Indigenous peoples. We present how environmental changes impact Indigenous peoples and suggest culturally relevant responses for working with Indigenous communities. We propose a decolonizing cyclical, iterative process grounded in Indigenous Ways of Knowing.     

The morning after Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission report: decolonisation through hybridity,ambivalence and alliance

Abstract

In Canada, 2015 will be remembered for the publication of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report which related to all Canadians the impacts of the Indian residential school system. The Commission invokes the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and uses the term reconciliation as a national strategy for moving forward. This paper employs an autoethnographic methodology and proposes that reconciliation might benefit by finding ways of confronting the Other within; I describe my reflections on a trip to the 2015 conference Learning at Intercultural Intersections at Thompson Rivers University. My social and cultural experiences as a Korean Canadian academic and administrator are challenged in order to consciously shift my own colonising mindset. Reconciliation in Canada will require significant personal, professional, institutional and sociocultural inquiry. What does it mean to discover the Other within? How do we walk with Indigenous peoples? How do educators come to be called ally by Indigenous peoples?     

Homeless and Indigenous in Minneapolis

SUMMARY

Indigenous peoples are overrepresented in the homeless population. This paper examines the extent to which homelessness and some of its possible antecedents and consequences differ for indigenous peoples and majority whites residing in the city of Minneapolis. We conclude that being homeless and indigenous in Minneapolis is a significantly different experience for this group than it is for majority whites. The cultural context of indigenous homelessness reflects higher poverty and inconsistent patterns of employment. It also reflects higher support in family and friend relationships. Higher misuse of alcohol reflects personal disability while lower use of mental health services reflects a structural disability. Discrimination is reflected in previous childhood out-of-home placements.     

What is to be done? The importance of Samir Amin’s answer

ABSTRACT

We consider Samir Amin’s last political will and testament as a commission to the international left. From the perspective of geopolitical economy, which has much in common with what Samir called the world-wide law of value and delinking, accepting this commission requires the left to correct course from that on which much of the western left, at least, has been set over the past many decades, losing its way on questions of imperialism and productive organization. We discuss the questions of imperialism and anti-imperialist resistance, contradiction, reform and revolution and political organization as they arise from Samir’s text.     

In search of unity: a new politics of solidarity and action for confronting the crisis of global capitalism

ABSTRACT

This essay is an introduction to a Special Forum by critical scholar-activists responding to the late Samir Amin’s call for the establishment of a new political vehicle that would be capable of uniting diverse progressive and revolutionary movements consisting of the workers and peoples of the whole world. The purpose of this vehicle would be to confront and radically transform a global capitalist order in deep crisis. The authors of these essays tend to agree that Amin was a profound contributor to the global justice movement, and to the reformulation of Marxism to address the evolution of global capitalism and imperialism that took place in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. However, some are critical of Amin’s stance. The essayists differ about whether they see Samir Amin’s proposal for the establishment of a global party as a good or bad idea. Among those who think it is a good idea there are differences regarding the organizational nature and issue focus of the proposed organization. There are also different attitudes toward the institution of the nation-state and regarding the sources of progressive revolutionary political forces in the contemporary world. We briefly review the main issues under contention.     

Rethinking law from below: experiences from the Kuna people and Rojava

ABSTRACT

This article presents a modest summary of the vivid discussions around the role of law and human rights that took place during the workshop ‘Seeking answers from below to the contemporary crisis of democracy’ in Siena in October 2018. Representatives from social movements, CSOs and academic considered law as one of the central issues to be discussed in order to better grasp and counter the global power structures. Law historically serves national and global elites’ interests, being applied to maintain the status quo of social injustice and inequalities. Therefore, this article presents some ideas and provokes some fundamental questions on how law and human rights can be part of an emancipatory project. Based on concrete experiences of the participants, from Rojava to the Kuna people, we critically discuss how legal instruments can be used to strategically defend people’s rights, strengthening the use of law from below.     

‘A Direct Act of Resurgence,a Direct Act of Sovereignty’: Reflections on Idle No More,Indigenous Activism,and Canadian Settler Colonialism

Abstract

In the winter of 2012, the Canadian political scene was shaken by the emergence of ‘Idle No More', a collection of protests directed by and largely comprised of Indigenous peoples. Originally, a response to a variety of legislation that was being passed through the Canadian government at the time, Idle No More spread across the country and around the world. In this paper, I argue that, drawing from Indigenous nationhood movements that extend back through five centuries, Idle No More represents a renewed assertion of Indigenous sovereignty in opposition to settler colonisation. Through transgressive actions, Idle No More has brought online activism into alignment with embodied defences of land and place, challenging Canadian sovereignty and Settler identity in multiple and creative ways. However, settler colonial tendencies in Canadian politics have sought to reinscribe Idle No More within established, generic political binaries. This paper positions Idle No More as a ‘movement moment’ that reveals significant insights about Indigenous activism, conservative politics, leftist resistance, and persistent settler colonialism in Canada.     

The ‘Indian Queen’ of the four continents: tracing the ‘undifferentiated Indian’ through Europe’s encounters with Muslims,anti-Blackness,and conquest of the ‘New World’

ABSTRACT

This article places Columbus’s travels to the New World within a much older history of eight centuries of Muslim/Moor presence on the Iberian Peninsula. It argues that the Orientalist logics underlining the creation of the ‘New World Indian’ have a long history interpellated through figures of the Moors and other Africans whom Europeans knew for centuries before they encountered the Indigenous peoples of the ‘New World.’ This article argues for the need to bring together seemingly discrepant figures, spatialities, and temporalities in order to re/examine what we know and have yet to learn about entanglements of colonialism, capitalism, race, caste, gender, sexuality, and other social formations. Such a reading of the figure not only brings to fore unexamined relationalities but also demands that we think critically and concretely about questions of our complicity in upholding different systems of violence.     

Knowledge and education for peoples’ sovereignty

ABSTRACT

Living examples of peoples’ sovereignty can illustrate the path toward positive people-centred alternatives to control by the capitalist State, wealthy private land-owners and corporations. Efforts to undermine Indigenous and other peoples’ sovereignty have been deliberate and continue to take place in industrialized and ‘developing’ countries. Yet peoples’ sovereignty has the capacity to unite and educate people in important ways. Many examples of education to promote peoples’ sovereignty are emerging, building on the knowledge that communities have generated over time. This is a very different educational model than the one most commonly recognized and implemented in industrialized societies. People working in higher education everywhere have the responsibility to educate our students about the history of colonization and destruction of peoples’ sovereignty, so that they understand the real history of their countries, to build alliances with other educators globally, and to form bonds of solidarity with peoples’ movements.     

Aging in the Shadow of the Law

Abstract

Historically, the frail elderly, as well as other vulnerable populations who are unable to care for themselves, have been subject to legal proceedings known as guardianships. Despite changes and reforms, adult guardianship law has survived as a fundamental legal institution aimed at protecting the frail elderly as well as other incompetent adults. However, very little is known on the reality of adult guardianship under Israeli law, and the experience of the adult population under guardianship was never empirically studied in Israel. The empirical void regarding the workings of the Israeli law in this area served as the impetus for this study. The study investigated the issue of adult and elder guardianship in Israel as revealed in Family Law Courts' rulings, while focusing in particular on the profile of the wards, the reasons and motives, the legal procedure, and the outcome of the guardianship process.

The study was a quantitative analysis, based on a random sample that included523 court cases requesting legal guardianship for adults due to impaired legal competence. Rulings on these cases were provided in Family Courts from Haifa, Nazareth, and the Krayot areas in the period of the years 2000-2002.

A clear but somber picture emerges from the findings of this study: Every year thousands of elderly individuals are subjected to the plenary legal authority of guardians appointed by law. This severe legal outcome takes place without providing these elderly the right to express their positions, without the provision of legal representation, and without their being seen or heard by the courts. These findings lead to the conclusion that there is urgent need in Israel to carry out extensive reform in the realm of civil legislation on the issue of guardianship foradults and the elderly.     

White settler death drives: settler statecraft,white possession,and multiple colonialisms under Treaty 6

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes histories of white settler colonial violence in Treaty 6 territory by arguing that the 1870 Hudson’s Bay Company charter and transfer of Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory to the Dominion of Canada helped to make past imperial violence an ongoing settler colonial terror structure into the present. It argues that this transition from imperial to settler colonial control of territory is best understood by using a multiple colonialisms framework, to examine the ways in which heteropatriarchal family structures transitioned from Indigenous-European to white settler kin networks that crystallized whiteness as a racialized means to control land as private property. Following Kanien’kehá:ka feminist scholar Audra Simpson’s work, I suggest that this territory’s multiple and overlapping colonial histories (French, English/British, and Canadian) are a crucial lens through which to understand the historical and ongoing formation of Canada as a white settler state, and that these histories still relationally drive anti-Indigenous violence and the settler killing of Indigenous peoples today. The essay concludes by arguing that the seeming daily placidity of white settler violence against Plains Indigenous peoples under Treaty 6 ultimately supports a relational violence that supports a killing state and its armed citizens in the name of protecting private property for white settlers.     

Indigenous Knowledge in the Social Work Academy

This paper provides a model for including Indigenous knowledge in the social work academy. This model does not hinge on being sensitive to Aboriginal world views and open to including them in the academy, but on being sensitive to the ways Eurocentric world views dominate the academy and open to disrupting this dominance. Disruption is necessary because despite a commitment to diversity and inclusion, social work education continues to be taught from a Eurocentric perspective in a manner that perpetuates the colonization of Indigenous peoples.

The authors triangulate their interrogation of Eurocentrism from the vantage of their own social locations: Jacquie is a female Indigenous professor from the Haisla Nation of the upper part of Turtle Island (known as Canada to non‐Indigenous people) and Gary is a White male Canadian professor originally from London, England. Adopting a critical anti‐racist approach and drawing on Whiteness theory, Indigenous storytelling and the Medicine Wheel, the authors present a pedagogical framework that enables Indigenous knowledge to be included in the academy in ways that ensure that it is not colonized in the process.     

Indigenous and gendered persons and peoples in business ethics education: Intersections of Indigenous wisdoms and de Beauvoirian existentialism

The purpose of this paper is to explore how business ethics textbooks include Indigenous and gendered persons and peoples and whether they acknowledge Indigenous philosophies and theories. We explore 363 cases from eighteen (18) business ethics textbooks. A form and theme based content analysis was employed to help us better understand the inclusion, obfuscation and omission of Indigenous and gendered persons. A purpose of business ethics education is to disrupt injustice and oppressive practices in business. We find that business ethics education can provide more inclusive and respectful cases as it relates to Indigenous and gendered characters. There are cases that marginalize, obfuscate and omit Indigenous peoples, females, and gender diverse persons. This study contributes to diversity scholarship by identifying ways in which Indigenous and gendered persons and peoples can be included in management and business ethics education.     

The multiplicity of Hawaiian sovereignty claims and the struggle for meaningful autonomy

Abstract

There are multiple Hawaiian political claims and entitlements. Is independence appropriate for Hawai'i? Is it appropriate for Hawaiians? These two questions are not one and the same. In the movement today, there are multiple levels of ambiguity about these two claims – the right to indigenous self-determination under US domestic law and Hawai'i's right to self-determination under international law – as evidenced in the strategic invocation of both. The persistent maintenance of the dual claim reveals a particular sort of political ambivalence having to do with the dilemmas over the exercise of sovereignty in the 21st century. This article examines two different claims – one which is specific to Hawaiians as an indigenous people subjugated by US colonialism, and the other which is not limited to the indigenous and focuses on the broader national claims to Hawai'i's independence. Within this latter arena, there are two distinct lines of political activism and legal claims – one that calls for de-colonization protocols and the other that calls for de-occupation.     

Decolonial Hip Hop: Indigenous Hip Hop and the disruption of settler colonialism

ABSTRACT

Contemporary Detroit has gone through many changes – or so it appears. From streets lined with vehicles made by Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors and driven by the nearly 2 million people who called the city home in 1950 to certain parts of the city looking like ghost towns; from a population that dwindled to 670,000 to the revival of downtown. Yet, what has been remarkably consistent is the invisibility of the Motor City’s Indigenous population. Indeed, Indigenous erasure, combined with rhetoric and policies that continue to marginalize and subjugate African Americans in Detroit, create a place rooted in multiple colonialisms. This essay examines how Detroit’s Indigenous Hip Hop artists resist settler colonialism through art, creativity, and culture as well as the practices of Detroit 2.0, a rhetoric and policy used by Detroit elites to reimagine it as a place of opportunity. By making visible the connections between blackness and indigeneity, as well as by linking the struggle of colonized peoples in Detroit to those in Palestine, Indigenous artists are not only asserting their humanity and challenging the longstanding idea of their erasure, but also constructing pathways for artists and activists to disrupt the effects of multiple colonialisms that continue to marginalize people of colour in urban areas. Detroit’s Indigenous Hip Hop artists make socially conscious music and also participate as activists in the city of Detroit. They serve as a window onto contemporary Indigenous identity, represent an exemplar of the urban Indigenous experience, and combine activism with art in a variety of ways.     

“Time Immemorial” and Indigenous Rights: A Genealogy and Three Case Studies (Calder,Van der Peet,Tsilhqot'in) from British Columbia

“Time immemorial” has operated as a legal fiction in the discourse of colonization, performing a genealogical function in the construction of “antiquity” and “legal memory” in English law, and repurposed in Indigenous rights cases in Canada. Beginning with a genealogical outline, this paper analyzes “time immemorial” in relation to Settler and Indigenous discourses of time, memory and the land in Calder, Van der Peet, and Tsilhqot'in.