My experience with this goes back twenty-six years, including helping to form the World Council of Indigenous Peoples. We started the World Council of Indigenous Peoples to try to form some kind of international organization. One of the things that we learned was that the concept of indigenous peoples is much easier to understand and apply when you're in a situation with a fairly recent colonial history, or a fairly distinct history of invasion and subjugation, or one where the indigenous people have maintained a distinct existence while surrounded by a larger society.
Several other things came up that we found interesting. People assumed from the beginning that indigenous peoples would have a great solidarity with developing countries--so-called "Third World" countries. And of course we discovered that Third World countries not only had very little in common with the indigenous peoples, but they tended to be the enemies of the indigenous peoples within those countries. In most places in the world, the concept of indigenous peoples can get very politicized--the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Japan, Northern Ireland, [etc.].
As we looked at the situation of indigenous peoples around the world, we found that there were few countries that recognized the political existence of their indigenous peoples: mainly the United States and Canada, by recognizing tribal governments, and New Zealand, by having a particular form of Maori participation in the government. We found the other model was governments that saw their indigenous people as social or economic classes but were very reluctant to deal with them politically. So the response would be, "We don't have any indigenous people, we're all El Salvadorians"--or whatever the country might be--"we don't make such distinctions," which we found to be very frustrating. And there was also concern on the part of some countries that recognizing indigenous people politically would pose a threat to social unity. So we spent a great deal of time trying to determine what were reasonable and workable aspects of a definition of the rights of indigenous peoples.
Economic Stereotypes
Land and culture were two very important elements because of the situation of most indigenous peoples, but even those got to be complicated. We found that we were confronting stereotyped expectations, not only from the general public, but also we found that we ourselves had stereotyped expectations. For example, some of the people who were participating in the movement quite naturally assumed because of their political background that all indigenous peoples would have communal economies, and that was then held up in opposition to capitalist economies. And we learned quite quickly that that was a difficult position to take for a couple of reasons. One was that the treatment of indigenous peoples by socialist economies around the world was no better than the treatment of indigenous peoples by capitalist economies--and in some cases much worse. So the idea that indigenous peoples are socialists wasn't going to fly. The other thing was that, in starting an indigenous movement, it dawned on us that we were trying to free people to express whatever their own culture was and to follow wherever that culture led them. And it didn't make much sense to turn around and dictate what kind of economic system they should have in order to be certified as indigenous peoples. So we backed away from that.
Striking a Balance
We looked at cultural rights and we found that we had to [strike a] balance. If we simply took a position that indigenous people were entitled to preserve their cultures, we were running a risk of putting ourselves in the position where indigenous people could be denied such things as education on the ground of preserving their cultures. We couldn't put ourselves in the position of simplistically stating the cultural interests and playing into the hands of people in various countries that might be wanting to suppress indigenous peoples. So every time we found ourselves trying to articulate a general principle, we found we had to back away from the possibility of becoming a clichéd operation. We had to, on the one hand, recognize the indigenous peoples' concerns about what development was doing to the environment and to the land that they either owned or had some claim to, and, on the other hand, not do so in such a way as to cut them out of development that was going to take place anyway or that was possible to do in an environmentally sound manner that they should get some benefits from.
We want to keep our culture, but we don't want to be denied education, so we have to figure out a way to have an educational system that is sensitive to the cultural needs of indigenous communities. We want to preserve the environment--and in many cases we want to preserve a way of life--that depends on our relationship to the land. At the same time we don't want to be completely cut out of economic benefits that may come from development. So it was a matter of trying to break through the clichés about indigenous peoples and come up with a program that we felt was somewhat sensible and realistic in terms of what might be happening in the future in the world.
Geneva: Problem or Solution?
I think that one of the great dangers in the development of concepts of indigenous rights over the years--particularly in terms of Geneva--is that it has tended to become simply another category of victimhood and has been taken over by the same human rights community that turns every horrible situation in the world into platitudes and excuses to have meetings and give receptions. Rather than having this system fit itself into the world and the worldview of indigenous people, it's the other way around.
So indigenous people are brought to Geneva and showed off like [who] Columbus brought Indians back from the Caribbean after his first trip. If they think that finding some tribal leader from the Amazon and bringing him up to Geneva and buying him a laptop is the reality of dealing with indigenous rights, while the Mexican Army slaughters these people in Chiapas and the press is only interested in it from time to time--that's the kind of thing that I'm concerned about.
The peculiarly American way of turning a social problem into show business has been very much evident in what's been going on in Geneva over the last twenty-five years. And that's just trivializing it. It is in danger of becoming just another permanent United Nations group that's going to go around issuing studies, but in the meantime the possibilities of using the international system genuinely to protect the rights and interests of indigenous peoples is maybe slipping away.
Indigenous: A Prize-winning Category
Once the concept of indigenous peoples gets to be a prize-awarding category in the international community, then there're going to be all kinds of definition problems because people are going to want to fit into that category. They'd be stupid not to because it could give them some leverage in international law or public opinion or the World Bank or who knows what reason. So somebody is going to have to sit down in Southeast Asia or in the Middle East and figure out who is indigenous and how far back do you go to determine who is indigenous.
Once you move past the definition of who fits into the category, then you have to confront questions such as if there's some development going on, do the indigenous people stop the development entirely, or is the process of saying "this land is sacred" or "this land is ours" simply the opening gambit in a process that results in their becoming partners in the development enterprise itself and getting economic benefits out of it. Those of us who think about it may have some stereotypes of indigenous people as being people who would rather live out in the forest than live in a bourgeois housing development. Well, what happens if these people get a chance to make some money and build bourgeois housing developments? Are we all going to turn against them? I can tell you the answer is probably yes. We are going to say, "We didn't create this category and put you in it so that you could become like us. You have an obligation to remain indigenous. You have an obligation not to change your culture." So there are all kinds of issues like that that are implicit in the category of indigenous peoples--one of which is the implied contract to remain culturally distinct and economically disadvantaged in exchange for being admitted to the category of indigenous peoples.
Judging the Behavior of Nations
I think the greatest opportunity that the creation of an international convention or the articulation of a concept of indigenous peoples and their rights offers to indigenous peoples is the opportunity to create normative standards by which countries can be judged. Those normative standards are going to be effective regardless of whether they are included in a treaty or international convention or not.
The absence of standards for the treatment of indigenous peoples means that countries cannot be compared with each other. Simply the fact that in the future it will be possible to compare the behavior of countries will inevitably have the result of raising the standard of behavior and raising the actual performance. The question then is going to be: How fast and how far will this performance be raised? That is a question of how good we are at establishing and manipulating the system--if the indigenous peoples are good at establishing and maintaining a competition among nations for who gets the gold star for treating the indigenous people the best. If, on the other hand, they are led to rhetorical positions that are politically unrealistic, such as, "We want to be treated completely as nations, and we don't want to be a part of the nations we are in," it's not the right time to be making those arguments because they run the risk of a backlash.
I think the attention has to be on standards for the behavior of the countries within which indigenous peoples are located. To take American Indians as an example, we could make all the speeches we want about how we want our own membership in the United Nations but, in the meantime, if the Supreme Court of the United States is taking away the real power of tribal governments to govern themselves, then rhetoric about membership in the United Nations doesn't do you much good.
