It’s Time to Rethink the Idea of the “Indigenous” Many groups who identify as Indigenous don’t claim to be first peoples; many who did come first don’t claim to be Indigenous. Can the concept escape its colonial past? By a News Article in the New Yorker  Author Manvir Singh February 20th 2023

IDENTITY: Identity evolves. Social categories shrink or expand, become stiffer or more elastic, more specific or more abstract. What it means to be white or Black, Indian or American, able-bodied or not shifts as we tussle over language, as new groups take on those labels and others strip them away. On August 3, 1989, the Indigenous identity evolved. Moringe ole Parkipuny, a Maasai activist and a former member of the Tanzanian Parliament, spoke before the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations, in Geneva—the first African ever to do so. “Our cultures and way of life are viewed as outmoded, inimical to national pride, and a hindrance to progress,” he said. As a result, pastoralists like the Maasai, along with hunter-gatherers, “suffer from common problems which characterize the plight of indigenous peoples throughout the world. The most fundamental rights to maintain our specific cultural identity and the land that constitutes the foundation of our existence as a people are not respected by the state and fellow citizens who belong to the mainstream population.”

THE MAASAI TRIBE TANZANIA: Parkipuny’s speech was the culmination of an astonishing ascent. Born in a remote village near Tanzania’s Rift Valley, he attended school after British authorities demanded that each family “contribute” a son to be educated. His grandfather urged him to flunk out, but he refused. “I already had a sense of how Maasai were being treated,” he told the anthropologist Dorothy Hodgson in 2005. “I decided I must go on.” He eventually earned an M.A. in development studies from the University of Dar es Salaam. In his master’s thesis, Parkipuny condemned the Masai Range Project, a twenty-million-dollar scheme funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development to boost livestock productivity. Naturally, then, U.S.A.I.D. was resistant when the Tanzanian government hired him to join the project. In the end, he was sent to the United States to learn about “proper ranches.” He travelled around until, one day, a Navajo man invited him to visit the Navajo Nation, the reservation in the Southwest. “I stayed with them for two weeks, and then with the Hopi for two weeks,” he told Hodgson. “It was my first introduction to the indigenous world. I was struck by the similarities of our problems.” The disrepair of the roads reminded him of the poor condition of cattle trails in Maasailand.

VOCAL ACTIVIST: Parkipuny had always thrived on confrontations with authority. Once, as a high schooler, he was nearly expelled when he burned grass (the Maasai method of bush clearing) instead of cutting it, as instructed. He later recalled that, when the headmaster threatened to hit him, he replied, “If you beat me with a stick I will get mine, because my traditions do not allow this. I ask you to give me another punishment.” This outspokenness propelled his activism. Following his American sojourn, he started to publicize the Maasai’s plight in international circles, linking it with other struggles. He met members of tribal nations in New Mexico and Canada to sharpen his understanding of Indigenous issues, and allied with the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, headquartered in Copenhagen.

PARKIPUNY’S COINED PHRASE ‘INDIGENOUS PEOPLE: By the time Parkipuny showed up in Geneva, the concept of “indigenous” had already undergone major transformations. The word—from the Latin indigena, meaning “native” or “sprung from the land”—has been used in English since at least 1588, when a diplomat referred to Samoyed peoples in Siberia as “Indigenæ, or people bred upon that very soil.” Like “native,” “indigenous” was used not just for people but for flora and fauna as well, suffusing the term with an air of wildness and detaching it from history and civilization. The racial flavor intensified during the colonial period until, again like “native,” “indigenous” served as a partition, distinguishing white settlers—and, in many cases, their slaves—from the non-Europeans who occupied lands before them.

INDIGENOUS PEOPLE BECAME A GLOBAL MOVEMENT: Then came the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Liberation movements flourished. In New Zealand, the Polynesian Panthers worked with the group Ngā Tamatoa to rally for Maori rights. In the United States, the Red Power movement spawned groups like the American Indian Movement and the International Indian Treaty Council. Inspired by decolonization, activists from these groups coalesced, turning indigeneity into a global identity. What linked its members was firstness. Peoples like the Maori and the Sioux are not just marginalized minorities, activists stressed; they are aboriginal nations whose land and sovereignty have been usurped. With time, however, the identity was stretched further. When Parkipuny showed up in Geneva, activists were consciously remodeling indigeneity to encompass marginalized peoples worldwide, including, with Parkipuny’s help, in Africa.

THE INDIGENOUS WORLD YEAR BOOK: Today, nearly half a billion people qualify as Indigenous. If they were a single country, it would be the world’s third most populous, behind China and India. Exactly who counts as Indigenous, however, is far from clear. A video for the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues begins, “They were always here—the original inhabitants.” Yet many peoples who are now considered Indigenous don’t claim to be aboriginal—the Maasai among them. According to Maasai oral histories, their ancestors arrived in Tanzania several hundred years ago from a homeland they call Kerio, likely situated near South Sudan.  Conversely, being first doesn’t seem to make you Indigenous. A handful of Gaelic monks and then the Vikings were the first people to arrive in Iceland (they settled there earlier than the Maori arrived in New Zealand), yet their descendants, the Icelanders, are rarely touted as Indigenous. Farther east, modern-day Scandinavians can trace most of their ancestry to migrations occurring in 4000 and in 2500 B.C., but it’s the Sami reindeer herders, whose Siberian ancestors arrived in Scandinavia closer to 1500 B.C., who get an annual entry in the “Indigenous World” yearbook.

THE RESTORY TELLING OF INDIGENOUS CULTURES: In place of firstness, a U.N. fact sheet lists self-identification as the key criterion. This doesn’t quite work, either. It is true that some surprising candidates have gained recognition through activist self-designation, such as the Mincéirs of Ireland. (The Mincéirs, sometimes mistakenly called “Irish gypsies,” may have separated from the settled Irish population only several hundred years ago.) Other such groups have been denied recognition. In 1999, when Basters, mixed-race descendants of Khoi pastoralists and Afrikaners, read a statement at a U.N. forum about Indigenous affairs, hundreds of delegates walked out in protest. At the same time, many people are called Indigenous without their knowledge or consent. If it is neither necessary nor sufficient for the Indigenous to be indigenous, what fills the conceptual space? A natural candidate, worryingly, is primitiveness. As several recent books show, centuries of colonialism have entangled indigeneity with outdated images of simple, timeless peoples unsullied by history. In “Beyond Settler Time,” Mark Rifkin observes that popular representations freeze Indigenous peoples in “a simulacrum of pastness.” In “Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology,” Samuel J. Redman describes how efforts to document dying Indigenous cultures often centered on a search for “an idyllic, heavily romanticized, and apparently already bygone era of uncorrupted primitive societies.”

INDIGENOUS INTELLECTUALS: The conflation of indigeneity with primitiveness can be stifling. Indigenous intellectuals—including the Lenape scholar Joanne Barker and the Maori scholar Evan Poata-Smith—write about the pressure to adopt identities that are “primordial,” “naturalistic,” and “unchanging.” Fail to do so, they say, and you risk looking inauthentic. Rather than being harmless, Barker notes in “Native Acts” (2011), such standards make it “impossible for Native peoples to narrate the historical and social complexities of cultural exchange, change, and transformation—to claim cultures and identities that are conflicted, messy, uneven, modern, technological, mixed.” Indigeneity is powerful. It can give a platform to the oppressed. It can turn local David-vs.-Goliath struggles into international campaigns. Yet there’s also something troubling about categorizing a wildly diverse array of peoples around the world within a single identity—particularly one born of an ideology of social evolutionism, crafted in white-settler states, and burdened with colonialist baggage. Can the status of “Indigenous” really be globalized without harming the people it is supposed to protect?

THE CANADIAN INDIAN BROTHERHOOD: VISIT NEW ZEALAND: Peoples in Australia, New Zealand, and North America have long sent petitions to British royalty. Two Indigenous leaders—the Haudenosaunee chief Deskaheh and the Maori prophet T. W. Rātana—even appealed to the League of Nations for recognition, in 1923 and 1924, respectively. But before the Second World War Indigenous people appealed to international audiences only as representatives of local groups. To understand the origins of a global Indigenous identity, we need to turn to the activist networks that formed in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. And this means turning to George Manuel. Born in 1921 in the Shuswap territory of British Columbia, Manuel started to think seriously about a global Indigenous identity in 1971. He was then the president of the National Indian Brotherhood, a young organization representing Canada’s two hundred and fifty thousand officially recognized “status Indians.” When the Canadian government arranged for a delegation to go to the South Pacific to learn about the Maoris’ place in New Zealand, Manuel was invited along as the representative of Canada’s Indigenous peoples.

THE COINED PHRASE ‘INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ BECOMES A TRIBAL INFLUENCER : The start of the trip was frustrating. Like a tourist visiting North Korea, Manuel was whisked from one exhibition to another, presented with a Shangri-La fantasy of the Maori experience. Yet he was determined to escape the spectacle and, when given a chance, he invited Maori politicians and a troupe of Maori entertainers to his hotel room for an honest chat. By this point, Manuel was fluent in the politics of Canada’s First Nations. As he told the Yukon newspaper the Whitehorse Daily later that year, “We want to maintain our special status, our special rights, and we want to go deeper and find evidence to prove we have special rights as the original inhabitants.” What struck him about his unofficial tour was that the Maori were engaged in the same struggle. They, too, were an Indigenous people fighting a white Commonwealth nation for land, representation, and cultural survival: “What we are doing here in Canada is a part of a world wide movement for cultural autonomy and aboriginal rights of native people.”

FROM NEW ZEALAND TO AUSTRALIA EXPANDING WORLDWIDE:” From New Zealand, Manuel travelled to northern Australia, where he encountered even fiercer assimilation campaigns. When invited to talk to an assembly of Aboriginal students, he condemned Australian paternalism and told the students to “be proud you are dark. We have every reason to be as proud as the white man. And maybe more.” He pointed to their shared persecution: “Just as much as the Māori’s and Aborigines, the Indian people in Canada are dark people in a White Commonwealth.” The trip stirred up dreams of a conference that would set the stage for “some more lasting institution.” In October, 1975, the vision materialized. Delegates from nineteen countries—almost all in the Americas or Oceania; none from Africa or Asia—met on the Tseshaht reservation, on Vancouver Island, where they founded the World Council of Indigenous Peoples. Manuel was elected the first president. In the lead-up to the conference, attendees decided not to call themselves “Aboriginal people” and went instead with “Indigenous people,” defined partly as people “who are descendants of the earliest populations living in the area and who do not, as a group, control the national government of the countries within which they live.” The expansion of indigeneity is visible in the history of the World Council, and then in the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations, which was founded in 1982, and—in part because it benefitted from more regular meetings, the resources of the U.N., and the promise of drafting international law—effectively supplanted the council. Across two decades, the working group metamorphosed from an overwhelmingly American assemblage into an international one. At its first meeting, all but one of the ten Indigenous groups represented were from the Americas; in 1984, Asians started showing up, and in 1989 Parkipuny opened the floor for Africans.

A TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY: The process had its hiccups. The Cuban diplomat who served as a Special Rapporteur for the group in the nineteen-nineties, Miguel Alfonso Martínez, insisted that Asians and Africans could not qualify as Indigenous. Delegates felt otherwise; they sought a truly transnational identity. But, after years of debate, they decided that no objective definition was possible. Even the World Council’s stipulation that an Indigenous people didn’t control the national government wasn’t quite on target. On the one hand, the Icelanders, who haven’t been considered Indigenous, were for a period under the absolute rule of a Danish king. On the other hand, the U.N. deems the Samoans to be Indigenous, and yet they are the dominant social, cultural, and political group of Samoa.

THE UN GLOBAL INDIGENOUS PEOPLE: In a 2021 report on the “State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples,” determined that eighty-six per cent of them live in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. Who’s entitled to the status remains a subject of contention. Among people living in Minnesota send delegates to the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, in New York; Dalits in India, the Roma in Eastern Europe, and Christians in Saudi Arabia remain, for the most part, outside the circle of indigeneity. Identifying which criteria are at play is tricky, but anthropologists and social theorists like Adam Kuper and André Béteille argue that our concept of indigeneity is bound up with outdated ideas about so-called primitive peoples. The tropes persist; we have merely replaced one set of terms for another. Even if you are not aboriginal, you can count as Indigenous if you come across as simple, egalitarian, culturally encapsulated, spiritually attuned to nature, and somehow isolated from history and civilization. When Parkipuny appeared in Geneva, the Maasai were well established as emblems of “primitive” Africa. With spears, shields, and stretched earlobes, they adorned postcards, documentaries, travelogues, and coffee-table books. You’d see a stoic, ochre-coated man wearing an ostrich-feather headdress like a lion’s mane, or a woman with a shaved head staring at the camera, her neck lost amid beaded necklaces. Almost always, the Maasai were pictured draped in bold red fabric, a shocking burst of fire in landscapes of brown and green. (Photographers relieve them of their sunglasses and watches.)

INDIGENOUS PEOPLES BECAME A LUCRATIVE BUSINESS: For decades, the Tanzanian government exploited this imagery. As tourism and big-game hunting flourished, photographs of the Maasai decorated brochures and guidebooks: human scenery garnishing Africa’s untamed wilderness. At the same time, government officials sought to justify the expropriation of Maasai land for more lucrative projects, like wildlife tourism. Pastoralism and conservation were incompatible, the party line suggested; maintaining one image of wildness (the pristine, wildebeest-filled grassland) justified an attack on the other (the Stone Age cattle herder). Parkipuny reclaimed the imagery of primitivism using the language of indigeneity. Soon after returning from Geneva, he co-founded the first Maasai N.G.O., calling it Korongoro Integrated People Oriented to Conservation, or kipoc, which means “we will recover” in the Maasai language. In a document for donors, the organization explained that the “indigenous minority nationalities” in Tanzania had “maintained the fabric of their culture.” Rather than being respected, however, they were “looked down at, as backward and evolutionary relics,” and denied access to services like education. The Maasai crusade was thus “part of the global struggle of indigenous peoples to restore respect to their rights, cultural identity and to the land of their birth.”

INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND INTERNATIONAL GROUPS: The rhetoric was effective. Two Dutch organizations promptly sent money for facilities, salaries, and operating expenses. In 1994, Parkipuny helped establish an umbrella organization, pingos (Pastoralists and Indigenous Peoples N.G.O.s) Forum, that advocated for Tanzania’s pastoralists and hunter-gatherers as Indigenous Africans. Yet, even as international groups rallied behind him, Parkipuny found growing resistance, sometimes violent, from his fellow-Tanzanians. The reason was not just his role as an advocate of Maasai interests. In the book “Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous” (2011), Hodgson showed that another Maasai organization, Inyuat e Maa, aroused far less resistance. The domestic opposition that Parkipuny encountered partly reflected his style, which many Maasai found combative. But it also likely stemmed from his insistence on indigeneity, which was seen as promoting “tribalism”—something Tanzania wanted to avoid. Aware of events in neighboring countries like Kenya, the government feared that ethnic mobilization could invite insurgent violence and economic instability. Organizing on the basis of indigeneity hindered interethnic coalition-building, too. Other ethnic groups saw indigeneity as something the Maasai exploited to funnel money and attention toward themselves. At a pingos meeting in 2000, there were impassioned complaints that pingos, supposedly acting for all of Tanzania’s pastoralists and hunter-gatherers, was really a Maasai oligarchy. As a Maasai activist and lawyer admitted to Hodgson half a decade later, “One problem with ‘indigenous’ is that everyone who hears it thinks ‘Maasai.’ So it worked at the national level to limit rather than expand our possible alliances and collaborations.” By the time he spoke to Hodgson, he and many other Maasai activists had largely dropped the rhetoric of indigeneity: “Now we focus on building alliances with the nation, not with international actors.” Moringe Ole Parkipuny died in July 2013.

In 1971 George Manuel President of the Canadian Indian Brotherhood introduced Parkipunny’s coined phrase ‘Indigenous People’ to several Maori Politicians during his visit to New Zealand arranged by Pierre Trudeau, Justin Trudeau’s father.

LINK: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/27/its-time-to-rethink-the-idea-of-the-indigenous#:~:text=On%20August%203%2C%201989%2C%20the,African%20ever%20to%20do%20so.

RESEARCHER: Carol Sakey

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Exactly who  are  ‘Indigenous Peoples’ well here’s a hint –

It’s an International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs emerged, headquartered in Copenhagen.1 Although exactly what counts as Indigenous is unclear, it seems like there is somewhere around a half billion worldwide. In the United States, although scores of Indigenous tribes and perhaps 10 million people existed when the Europeans came, the population dipped to the hundreds of thousands, but has increased once again into the millions, depending on whether and how those with mixed backgrounds are counted. Moreover, various strategies have emerged for their resilience and recovery. There was a Red Power movement in the United States at the same times as Black Power. Legal gambling casinos came to be thought of as the Natives financial revenge. There have been some restorative justice processes. Respect for using the prior Indigenous lands became routine, though little has been given back.

Recognition is emerging that the values and knowledge of the Indigenous may be a key to the future well-being of the world. Goodness knows, that may be the collective key to their resurgence. So many of our social psychiatric problems lend themselves to Indigenous expertise: sustainability of the land; cooperation for collective well-being; their value of transgender identification and vision; and therapeutic use of sweat lodges and the permissible religious ceremonial use of the psychedelic peyote.

There is even an increase in Indigenous psychiatrists and those who serve in our federal government.

The Indigenous could be thought of as the original discoverers of our world; they can also become its saviors.

Another article in my research reported by New Yorker Magazine ‘Identity evolves and social categories shrink or expand, become stiffer and sometimes more elastic, more specific or more abstract. There are shifts as there are tussles over language, new groups take on new labels and new languages.. I guess like the LGBTQ  +++ pronouns and ideological identities. And the teaching of science where physics has become abstract.. just subtract physics, And why not just subtract heterosexuality too… it’s a crazy world.

Eeem I have to wonder when is the school curriculum going to teach the history of ‘Indigenous Peoples’. Hey people, try find the term ‘Indigenous Peoples’ in the Te Tiriti o Waitangi. I tried to find Partnership and Principles in the original Maori Version of the Treaty- eem must have gone abstract.. perhaps they used invisible writing.. bugger can’t find that either.

Eeem when is the Minister of Education going to enter into the school curriculum how the Tanzanian Politician became so much a part of NZ’s very, very ,very recent history? Or once again do we leave it up to the Ministry Of Truth, the real truth tellers not those that publicize and promote legalized fiction. Mind you, it’s amazing how people have been sucked into and blown out in bubbles with this legalized fiction… it got so much worse when people became so imprisoned in their freedom restrictive pandemic bubbles that locked people down and isolated them.  Time to pop those bubbles if you haven’t already and set yourself free.

 

Wake Up New Zealand

Carol Sakey

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The global Indigenous rights movement, born in the mid-1970s, found its primary inspiration in the Third-Worldism espoused by anti-colonial leaders over the previous decades. The leadership of both the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (wcip) and the International Indian Treaty Council (iitc), the two flagship organizations of the movement, drew on Pan-Africanism and decolonization in order to promote the rights of Indigenous peoples to self-determination. The two organizations, however, applied the logic of decolonization in different ways. The iitc consciously adopted the discourse of decolonization in order to seek leverage from the Third World voting bloc and gain recognition for new and independent nations at the United Nations. The wcip wished to adapt the decolonization movement, not only by extending it geographically, but also by shifting it conceptually, in order to challenge the use of the nation state as the basic structure of global politics. n the years following this first political experience, George Manuel became involved in regional political organizations, social associations and sport groups. Several factors pushed him to the forefront.

Among other entities, he joined the Aboriginal Native Rights Committee of the Interior Tribes of British Columbia. This organization united the interior Indigenous communities of the province and was founded in 1959, the year of Andrew Paull’s death. Paull had been leading the North American Indian Brotherhood. The Brotherhood was losing influence, but Indigenous activists called a conference to renew it by adopting a new constitution and a multinational vision. George Manuel joined this revived organization which took a stance on the issues of land rights and the right to vote on a federal level.

John Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservative government reviewed Canada’s policy on Indigenous Peoples and, in 1961, granted them the right to vote in federal elections. This encouraged regional Indigenous organizations across the country to speak up publicly. From 1965 to 1968, George Manuel was one of the first Indigenous people hired to implement a new community development policy established by the Department of Indian Affairs. After three months of training at the Université Laval in Quebec, he was sent to the Cowichan valley in British Columbia as a community development agent. From 1959 to 1966, he also sat on a consulting committee for the construction of the Indian pavilion at the Universal and International Exhibition held in Montreal in 1967

In 1968, the National Indian Brotherhood (NIB) was founded to represent all citizens registered as Indians in Canada. After a campaign led by Indigenous Peoples against the 1969 White Paper (see Citizens Plus (The Red Paper)), the federal government came to recognize the NIB, presided by Walter Dieter, as a potential representative of Indigenous Peoples in Canada. George Manuel replaced Walter Dieter and became the organization’s second president at the end of 1970.

Under Manuel’s presidency, the NIB became a predominant player in Canadian politics. The organization communicated directly with the federal government representatives and together they addressed, among other issues, land and treaty rights.

In addition to his role within the country, George Manuel innovated by creating the World Council of Indigenous Peoples, the first international Indigenous organization. The Council was founded in 1975 in Port Alberni, British Columbia, during a conference attended by 52 delegates from American, European and Oceanian Indigenous nations. Manuel sat as its president from its establishment until 1981.

The idea of such an organization was inspired by a conversation with Tanzanian president Julius Kambarage Nyerere in 1971. Nyerere advised Manuel to organize Indigenous Peoples in Canada following his own methods: convincing his country’s communities to adopt the project of a sovereign state. In 1971 and 1972, George Manuel met Indigenous Peoples in New Zealand, Australia and Scandinavia. The discussions that ensued led him to feel that Indigenous Peoples around the world shared a common history with colonialism and that they should unite to counter its effects.

In his essay The Fourth World: An Indian Reality, published in 1974 and coauthored by Michael Posluns, George Manuel elucidated, for the first time, the concept of a “fourth world” which would unite the peoples colonized within states. This notion was born from his conversations with Mbutu Milando, high commissioner of Tanzania in Canada.

At the end of his mandate as president of the National Indian Brotherhood of Canada in 1976, George Manuel returned to British Columbia and became involved in the provincial scene. From 1979 to 1981, he was president of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs (UBCIC).

As president of the UBCIC, he participated in the constitutional talks of 1980 and 1981. He led the Constitution Express, a movement created to voice concerns of Indigenous Peoples and to advocate for the recognition of the Indigenous land rights in the discussions about the new Canadian constitution. As a result of his efforts and those of hundreds of Indigenous activists across the country, Section 35 was added to the Constitution. This Section recognizes the ancestral rights or the treaty rights of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, namely about land claims.

After this long-winded battle, George Manuel suffered several heart attacks and gradually withdrew from the political scene. He still collaborated with Rudolph C. Rÿser to create the Center for World Indigenous Studies, which was founded in 1979 and incorporated in 1984.

In his later years, George Manuel was scarcely active in the realm of public affairs. He died at the age of 68 in November 1989.

NOTE: George Manuel was supported by Pierre Trudeau, Justin Trudeau’s father in arranging a visit of George Manuel and a Canadian Delegation in 1971 to visit New Zealand. Whilst in NZ George manuel met up with Maori Politicians where they too established the coined phrase of radical activist, parliamentarian of Tanzania ‘Indigenous People’. Manuel then travelled to the Northern Territories of Australia where he gave a speech to Aboriginal student at a University there.

 

LINKS:

Honorary Doctorate, University of British Columbia (1983)

Officer of the Order of Canada (1986)

Commemorative Stamp, Canada Post (2023)

https://utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/cjh.ach.52.3.06?mobileUi=0&journalCode=cjh

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/george-manuel

DECOLONIZATION OF THE NATION STATE VIA INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AGENDA 2030

https://www.straight.com/news/doreen-manuel-and-john-price-george-manuel-in-stockholm-1972

https://www.iwgia.org/images/publications/0188_29orldCouncil.pdf

https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/supporting-un-declaration-restores-nzs-mana Maori Affairs

 

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Many groups who identify as Indigenous don’t claim to be first peoples; many who did come first don’t claim to be Indigenous. Can the concept escape its colonial past? Feb 20^th 2023 Manvir Singh Assistant Professor of Anthropology University of California

In] the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Liberation movements flourished. In New Zealand, the Polynesian Panthers worked with the group Ngā Tamatoa to rally for Māori rights. In the United States, the Red Power movement spawned groups like the American Indian Movement and the International Indian Treaty Council,”

A proposal is put forward to allow for the creation of a new type of corporation under the existing legislative framework for Indigenous entrepreneurs to run their for-profit businesses in a culturally appropriate way .  a result, Indigenous Australians are able to take ownership, develop and administer programs that provide essential services to the community, including in the areas of health, education, employment, training, community services and housing. legislation is also heavily focused on improving ‘governance and capacity’ in the Indigenous corporate sector.² Ensuring and enhancing accountability of Indigenous enterprises registered under its predecessor,

The IPETCA Partnership Council (Indigenous Peoples Economic & Trade Cooperation Arrangement) NZ Govt . Concluded in December 2021, the IPETCA brings together Australian, Canadian, Chinese-Taipei and New Zealand Indigenous peoples. A key feature of the IPETCA is the establishment of the IPETCA Partnership Council which consist of officials and Indigenous representatives that will jointly oversee and implement the IPETCA. (Endorsed by participating economies). NZ chairing the Partnership, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Associate Minister for Māori Development Nanaia Mahuta and Minister of Trade and Export Growth Damien O’Connor announced the conclusion of the IPETCA initiative on 10 December, and invited economies to declare their intention to join.

The Arrangement will help to unlock cooperation across a range of sectors and areas, including responsible business conduct, traditional knowledge, opportunities for Micro, Small and Medium Sized Enterprises, digital trade and e-commerce, and many more. It also reaffirms economies’ commitments to important international instruments such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.. The IPETCA achieves a number of important elements:

• Reaffirms the existing rights of Indigenous Peoples, including under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and other international instruments;
• Contains a definition of “Indigenous trade and investment” that was developed by Indigenous Peoples, including Māori;
• Enables economies to work with Indigenous Peoples to further develop and expand international Indigenous trade and requires economies to promote policies that increase Indigenous Peoples’ participation in trade and investment;
• Enables economies to consider a range of activities and sectors for direct cooperation, as well as underlying principles that should underpin cooperation;
• Specific understandings on Responsible Business Conduct and the protection of Indigenous Traditional Knowledge;
• Establishes an IPETCA Partnership Council comprised of economies’ and Indigenous Peoples’ representatives to oversee the IPETCA’s implementation;
• Review provisions aimed at ensuring that the IPETCA remains fit for purpose; and
• Is open to any APEC Member economy, WTO Member or any other economy to join.

• Indigenous Peoples, including Māori, have played a critical role in developing the text of the IPETCA alongside participating economies.
• What will role of Indigenous Peoples going forward?
• Going forward, through the establishment of the IPETCA Partnership Council, Indigenous Peoples and participating economies will jointly oversee the implementation and operation of the IPETCA.
• Who can join the IPETCA?
• The IPETCA is open to all economies that are committed to strengthening the economic empowerment of Indigenous Peoples and trade and economic collaboration. (Source of information NZ Foreign Affairs & Trase -Govt.)
• In the thirty-year history of indigenous issues at the United Nations, and the longer history in the ILO on this question, considerable thinking and debate have been devoted to the question of definition of “indigenous peoples”, but no such definition has ever been adopted by any UN-system body. One of the most cited descriptions of the concept of the indigenous was given by Jose R. Martinez Cobo, the Special Rapporteur of the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, in his famous Study on the Problem of Discrimination against Indigenous Populations.[i] Significant discussions on the subject have been held within the context of the preparation of a Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples[ii] by the Working Group on Indigenous Populations since 1982. An understanding of the concept of “indigenous and tribal peoples” is contained in article 1 of the 1989 Convention concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries, No. 169, adopted by the International Labour Organization.

[i] UN Doc. E/CN.4/Sub.2/1986/7 and Add. 1-4. The conclusions and recommendations of the study, in Addendum 4, are also available as a United Nations sales publication (U.N. Sales No. E.86.XIV.3). The study was launched in 1972 and was completed in 1986, thus making it the most voluminous study of its kind, based on 37 monographs.

[ii] The Draft Declaration is contained in UN Doc. E/CN.4/Sub.2/1994/2/Add.1 and is currently under consideration by a Working Group of the Commission on Human Rights.

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