The UN Declaration of Rights for Indigenous Peoples has been used widely in policies, globally, regionally worldwide. The UN Declaration was widely known as a ‘Declaration of Aspiration with no legal intent intended. It is non binding, majority UN Declarations are Non-binding. Non-Binding does not mean that a government whom agrees to an UN Declaration is not committed to it. The UN declaration can be used as a reference in the judicial system. When a UN Nation State agrees to sign a non-binding  The UN Declaration it then sits in a place called ‘Soft Law’, this is a great advantageous to the Govt as this can be quickly, quietly be legislated, or used for reference in the judicial system  at anytime without public interference, this is a place of non-transparency. This also applies to the agreed upon UNDRIP which John Key and Pita Sharples of the Māori Party secretly arranged to be signed, as Pita Sharples attended the UN in 2010 to sign the UNDRIP without public scrutiny in complete secretary. However it was a different story on 13^th September  2007 when the UN first adopted the UNDRIP in the UN Assembly. It was who a Labour led Government at the time what rejected the UNDRIP. Rosemary Banks was the representative of NZ who explained to the UN Assembly why NZ was rejecting this UN Declaration. She announced that the UNDRIP a number of reasons why NZ would not agree with the UN Declaration they were included in four provisions of the UN Declaration. Australia, Canada, US and NZ rejected the UNDRIP in 2007

NZ’s reasons for rejection of the UN Declaration included there were four provisions in the declaration fundamentally incompatible with NZ’s Constitutional and legal arrangements. The Treaty Of Waitangi, the Principle of Governing for the good of ALL NZ Citizens (Art 26)..

Article 28 Lands & resources redress (compensation) Article’s 19 and 32 the right of Veto over the State

(Art 26) stated that Indigenous Peoples has a right to own, use, develop, control lands and territories that had been traditionally owned, occupies or used. For NZ this meant the entire country was potentially caught up in this scope of Artic 26.

Thus this required recognition of rights to land lawfully owned by other citizens. This article implies that Indigenous Peoples have rights that others do not have. (Art 28)  again the entire country would fall within this scope on redress (compensation). The text of the UN Declaration did not take into consideration the fact that land might now be occupies or owned legitimately by others, or subject to numerous different, or overlapping indigenous claims. The UN Declaration implies that Indigenous Peoples have a right of Veto over a Democratic Legislature and over Natural Resource Management. The UNDRIP is incompatible with democratic processes, legislation and constitutional arrangements, and also implied different classes of citizenship, where Indigenous People have the right to veto over that of other groups or individuals. Other groups, individuals did not have the same rights. The Declaration does not reflect, recognize the general principles of NZ Law. The States that voted in favour of the UNDRIP viewed the UN Declaration as being an aspirational document, intended to inspire rather than have a legal effect. The term ‘Indigenous Peoples’ is now used majorly and in various ways worldwide. ‘Indigenous People and Agenda 2030 ‘, Indigenous Biodiversity, Better Indigenous Policies, The Constitutional Korero- Indigenous Futures Aotearoa, International Indigenous Council, NZ Human Rights Commission’s commitment to Indigenous Rights

In 2019 the NZ Govt and the National Iwi Chairs Forum plus the Human Rights Commission set about developing NZ’s National Action Plan to implement the UNDRIP in 2019. This was paused, postponed would be completed at another time. There is external international  and internal oversight pressure for the govt to implement the UNDRIP in NZ. However the UN have highlighted concerns over the actions of NZ Parliament as in December 2022, it passed legislation to remove Wairarapa Moana Incorporations right to seek return of their lands, territories and resources. The UNDRIP has been referenced as being contravened as a constitutional agreement, naming Te Tiriti on Waitangi and the UNDRIP rights of Indigenous Peoples.  As I have said, a Non-Binding UN Declaration referenced to that sits in the place of advantage ‘Soft Law’. As they highlight human rights breaches that are not included in higher law. Te Titiriti o Waitangi is the 1840 Maori Version of the Founding document of NZ. It never created Principles not a Partnership. It was Legislation and the Judicial that created these at a much later date in the 1980’s. The original Maori Treaty has been corrupted by the collaboration of the Iwi Elite and State Policies.

You may well ask ‘how did this terminology ‘Indigenous Peoples’ come about, where did it originate from? It certainly was not a term used in 1840 at the signing of the Maori Version of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Its is said that ‘many groups’ whom identify as ‘Indigenous’ do not claim to be ‘First People’. Many who did claim to be ‘First People’ do not claim to be Indigenous Peoples. 1989 Indigenous identity evolved by a man named Moringe ole Parkipuny he was a Maasai Radical Activist, a former member of the Tanzanian Parliament. He travelled around the US and met up with the Navajo Nation in South West America, he was invited to stay with them for a short visit on their reservation. Parkipuny at this time introduced them to the term ‘Indigenous People’. He was very outspoken, propelling his radical activism. He also became linked with international circles of other tribal nations, Mexico and Canada etc., to sharpen their understanding of the term ‘Indigenous Peoples’. Parkipuny allied himself with International workgroups for ‘Indigenous Affairs’ this was established in Copenhagen.

He later visited Geneva, by this time the ‘Indigenous’ groundwork had been done and had started its journey of transformation and the racial flavour of the term ‘Indigenous Peoples’ had intensified. Thus serving as a partition distinguishing that of white settlers and non European owned lands. In the 1960’s- 1970’s Liberation movements were flourishing. In NZ the Polynesian Panthers worked with Nga Tamatoa to rally for Indigenous/Māori Rights. In the US it was Red Power, the American Indian Movement and the International Indian Treaty Council. All aspired, were promoting pushing the ‘de-colonization agenda, eventually ‘Indigenous Peoples’ become a term that became globalized. Parkipuny had successful remodeled the old Latin noun ‘Indigena’ which was originally formed by combining ‘Indu’ (meaning ‘in’ or ‘within’ with the verb gignere (meaning to ‘beget’). To Beget is to ‘bring a child into existence by the process of reproduction. Is also reference as to ‘procreate, generate (Offspring), to cause, produce as an effect. The definition is too difficult to describe

Therefore the UN has no official definition for ‘Indigenous Peoples’ they have left this up to other to self determine themselves as ‘Indigenous Peoples’. Through the conclusion of the UN ‘Indigenous Peoples’ became one Global Identity of various peoples. Today over ½ billion people have claimed they are ‘Indigenous Peoples’. Being ‘first’ does not necessarily make people ‘Indifenous People’ A handful of Gaelic Monks and back then, the Vikings were the first to arrive in Iceland, yet Icelanders are touted as ‘Indigenous Peoples’ by the UN. Scandinavians can trace most of their ancestry to Siberian Reindeer herders, yet Scandinavians are listed in the UN Indigenous Peoples World Book. There has been protest at the UN Assembly when a mixed race of Afrikaners and Khoi Pastoralists read a speech at a UN Forum about ‘Indigenous AFFAIRS’. Hundreds of delegates walked out in protest, as people had been identifies as Indigenous people, without their knowledge or consent. Much is to do with reimagining’s, re-story telling, the idyllic  romanticism of history of a bygone era. Māori Scholar Evan Poata-Smith wrote about the pressure to adopt identities that are primordial, naturalistic and unchanging. If you fail to follow this path, you risk being looked at as inauthentic”.  The ideology of establishing a one world identity of ‘Indigenous Peoples’ for a widely diverse array of peoples worldwide. Includes that of widely, aggressively promoting ‘decolonization as a social revolution.

One of an imprisonment of oppression and victimization. Globalized, regionalized, nationalized identity politics. Legislated to cause civil unrest in Nations States, which is a political globalized agenda. This hurts ALL people, it’s a Human Rights Tyranny. People in Australia, NZ and North America have even sent petitions to British Royalty, one of these was T W Ratana, who appealed to the League of Nations in 1923 and 1924. With no references to the term ‘Indigenous Peoples’. George Manuel was the President of the Canadian Indian Brotherhood, he also established the International Indigenous Peoples Council at the UN belonged to Activist networks he expanded and entrenched the term ‘Indigenous Peoples as an identity in 1971.

A Canadian delegation visited the South Pacific to learn about the place of the Māori in NZ, Manuel was part of the delegation that represented Canadian Indigenous Peoples. When in NZ Manuel was whished away from one exhibition to another, so he could experience the Māori entertainment. He also took the opportunity to invite Māori Politicians and a troupe of Māori entertainers to his hotel room for a somewhat serious chat about ‘Indigenous Peoples’. Manuel was fluent in the politics of Canada’s First Nations. He was interviewed by a Yukon newspaper called The Whitehorse Daily, he spoke about ‘Indigenous Peoples’ saying “We want to maintain our special status, our special rights as the original inhabitants. Indigenous Peoples fighting a White Commonwealth Nation for Land. A worldwide movement for cultural autonomy and the rights of native people, aboriginal rights. From NZ Manuel travelled to Australia, he talked with an assembly of Aboriginal students and told them to be ‘proud you are dark” and “maybe we have a reason to be prouder than the white man.” October 1975 Manuels dream materialized, the stage had been set as delegates from 19 countries founded the World Council of Indigenous Peoples. Manuel was elected President. In the lead up to the conference, attendees decided no to call themselves ‘Aboriginal people and instead named themselves ‘Indigenous Peoples’

The World Council and the UN Working Group of Indigenous Population was founded in 1982, and had regular meetings with the promise of drafting an International law. In the UN 2021 report on the ‘State of the Worlds Indigenous Peoples’ referred to the status of Indigenous Peoples remains a subject of contention. When Parkipuny the original Tanzanian voice for ‘Indigenous Peoples, appeared in Geneva the Maasai wore emblems of a primitive Africa. With spears, shields, stretched earlobes, they adorned postcards, doco’s and travelogues, books, magazines on coffee tables. Pictures of men in ostrich feathers, feathered headdresses and beaded necklaces that was after the photographers, journalists relieved them of their very expensive sunglasses and watches. Parkipuny promoted tribalism, neighboring countries like Kenya feared that this ethnic mobilization would invite insurgent violence and economic instability.

It was also said that the Masai exploited ‘Indigenous’ identity to exploit, funnel money and attention towards themselves.  Politics built around  the term ‘Indigenous Peoples’ is said to weaken domestic ties. A Hindu Rights Propaganda Website in 2020, a columnist observed “In the game of WOKE, we Hindu’s actually hold all possible cards. We are people of colour. We come from Indigenous culture that is different from the organized religions..  ”HOW CAN WE NOT BE WINNING EVERY ARGUMENT?

The United Nations and the International Labour Organization have embraced the term ‘Indigenous Peoples. But this term ‘Indigenous can also trap communities its suppose to liberate” into a globalist Eco-incarnation. Used for the Globalist Agenda as the term ‘Indigenous Peoples’ is being used to expand and promote the UN One World Globalist Agenda. NGO’s, politicians, academics, environmental activists, the UN/ WEF, and all their cohorts that collaborate with them globally, regionally and nationally. Namely Indigenous Sovereignty Mirrors. Two classes of citizenship in one nation, civil unrest the hastening the journey to destroy nation states whom are reported to be the  enemy of globalization

As the professors, academics in Harvard refer to Indifenous World Building. Indigenous lands to transform Food Sovereignty worldwide. As the Food and Agriculture Organization a UN Agency has an Alliance of Biodiversity Internal -Indigenous Food Systems. Insights on Sustainability UN Agenda 2030 Global Development Goals, to leave no-one behind, everyone, everywhere at every age. The Indigenous Iwi Elite voice they are speaking for ‘Our People’. Who are ‘Our People. That they call ‘Our People’ Do they have consent from those that are namely ‘Our People’ to be identified as ‘Indigenous Peoples’?  I think not. I am of the opinion this is about Self Interests of the Iwi Elite.. that are conforming and collaborating with the UN/WEF Agenda’s and their puppets in Parliament, and Local Government.

RESEARCHER: Carol Sakey

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/27/its-time-to-rethink-the-idea-of-the-indigenous#:~:text=Many%20groups%20who%20identify%20as,concept%20escape%20its%20colonial%20past%3F&text=Identity%20evolves.

https://press.un.org/en/2007/ga10612.doc.htmavajo

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‘Indigenous’ social theory, the theoretical drama of ‘critical race theory’ that poses severe criticism of anyone colonial ancestry.  This is identity politics at one of its worst which causes serious risk within the nation state. However I would like to expand on this by saying what I personally believe. “If there is crisis in a nation state, a racial divide,  rebellious minority groups all demanding their own self determining rights above all others then surely the Nation State will always fail and International Roles (UN Agreements that are ratified by UN State member countries) will determine that only interdependence on the U/WEF will be able to succeed hence the advancement of globalization and the Sovereign Nation State becoming obsolete and a one world global governance (The UN/WEF Partnership Global Corporate Capture of Nation States) will succeed.  The global expansion in UN Nation States of the tyranny of human rights where revolutionary minority groups all (each one) wanting their own self determining rights over that of others has become totally insane.

RESEARCHER: Carol Sakey

LINK  https://monthlyreview.org/2020/02/01/marx-and-the-indigenous/

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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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