Indigeneity

Origin and Development of the Indigenous Peoples’ Movement

The history of the indigenous peoples’ movement is traced by many to the 1923 appeal by Deskaheh to the League of Nations on behalf of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. Deskaheh, a traditional leader of the Cayuga, sought the support of the League in his claims against the Canadian government, who were imposing a tribal council system of administration on the Six Nations Grand River reserve. Despite his failure to address his petition, “The Redman's Appeal for Justice,” before the League, Deskaheh did succeed in presenting his case before several ambassadors with the assistance of the mayor of Geneva and convinced these ambassadors to address these concerns directly with the Canadian government. Unfortunately, while he was in Geneva, the Canadian government succeeded in forcing a “democratically elected” government on the Six Nations reserve, and subsequently, Deskaheh lost his mandate.

Despite Deskaheh's failure to have his nation recognized by and their case heard before the League, the recognition of the unique political status of indigenous peoples has nonetheless slowly developed in the international community for over the past 80 yrs. (years). The first significant recognition of the need for protecting indigenous peoples’ rights against the encompassing domination of state governments came in 1957, when the International Labour Organization (ILO) issued its “Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention,” later updated in 1989 by a more strongly worded convention. Through these conventions, the ILO set in motion an evolving international legal framework that not only [Page 1554]recognizes the status of indigenous peoples as a unique category within international law but also recognizes that indigenous peoples require protection from the continuing colonial and neocolonial projects of state governments.

Following in the footsteps of the ILO, the United Nations (UN) began in 1982 to investigate the demands made by indigenous peoples for attention to their unique status within the international state system. While the UN had adamantly affirmed the sovereign rights of peoples colonized by European powers throughout Africa, Asia, and the Pacific to decolonization and self-determination through the “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples of 1960,” the organization had made no move toward addressing the situation of peoples whose lands had been subsumed into settler states, predominately in the Americas and the South Pacific, or those peoples who remained disenfranchised minorities within the newly decolonized states of Africa and Asia. Beginning with the Martinez-Cobo study in 1983, the UN started down a path whose ultimate outcome has been the recognition of indigenous peoples’ self-determining rights within an organizational structure that had previously failed to acknowledge any self-determining authority other than through internationally recognized states. Following the recommendation of the Martinez-Cobo study, the UN created the Working Group on Indigenous People under the Office of the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights. The primary aims of this working group were twofold: first, to create a permanent forum for indigenous peoples within the UN system and, second, to draft a Declaration on Indigenous Peoples Rights with the hope that this instrument would provide the next step in further defining the evolving international legal framework for indigenous peoples’ rights. With the creation of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2000 and the approval by the UN Generally Assembly of the Declaration on Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in 2007, the international indigenous peoples’ movement has entered a new era.

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