Indigenous People's Rights and the United Nations: Native American Transnational Activism in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century
Abstract
September 2017 marked two anniversaries linked to transnational activism by Native Americans. The first was the 40th anniversary of the United Nations (UN) Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas, the first UN conference specifically dealing with Indigenous peoples.
The second was the 10th anniversary of the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The conference marked the beginning of a continuous presence of Native Americans and other Indigenous peoples in the UN and on the international political scene.
As a resolution, the Declaration is not a legally binding document, but it sets standards for the treatment of Indigenous peoples by specifying individual and collective rights. Both events are the results of decades-long work by Indigenous peoples in and outside the UN.
This chapter examines the long history of Indigenous transnational activism and the careful political maneuvering and strategizing Native activists had to do in order to bring Indigenous issues onto the agenda of the international body and to introduce Indigenous ideas and understandings of sovereignty, identity, and treaty rights into the discourse of human rights and international law.