The long road to indigenous rights

by Tim Shenk

Robert T. Coulter, executive director of the Indian Law Resource Center. / Tim Shenk

After decades of advocacy by indigenous groups, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007.

Robert T. Coulter, executive director of the Indian Law Resource Center, spoke about his role in creating the declaration during a Nov. 23 lecture at SIPA.

“It was a joke almost that it took so long,” said Coulter, who drafted the original version of the declaration in 1976.

However, the declaration was worth the wait, Coulter said. It represented a historic acknowledgement by 143 nations of the rights of indigenous peoples, which have long been ignored.

As late as the 1970s, indigenous people in most countries had no rights to the lands that they lived on, Coulter said. Violence against indigenous communities was common in Latin America, and U.S. Indian reservations were the scene of frequent human rights abuses.

The declaration recognizes indigenous peoples’ rights to peace and security and to the land and resources that they have traditionally used. It states that indigenous peoples have the “right to exist” as groups.

But Coulter believes that much work remains to be done to strengthen indigenous rights. The United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand voted against the declaration, and many countries that voted for it have no intention of following it, according to Coulter.

Nevertheless, Coulter is optimistic. “I think the U.S. will come around” and eventually sign the declaration, he said. “Canada will probably follow suit.”

Elsa Stamatopoulou, Chief of the Secretariat of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, attended Coulter’s lecture and gave a response. She asked whether the “right to self-determination” in the declaration is satisfactory and how it relates to the concept of sovereignty.

Coulter said he believes that the right to self-determination is satisfactory, but “sovereignty” has many different potential meanings, so the writers of the declaration avoided the term. Although many Native American nations claim to have “sovereignty,” the U.S. government claims the right to violate Indian treaties and take Indian land, Coulter said.

In a reflection of the status of indigenous rights in the U.S., the Senate recently issued an apology for the government’s abuses of Native American nations.

“The problem with that is that Congress is continuing right on doing what it was apologizing for,” Coulter said. “(The apology said) nothing about stopping taking Indian land ... violating Indian treaties.”

Information on the work of the Indian Law Resource Center is available online at indianlaw.org.

Published in RightsNews Volume 28, no. 1, February, 2010.
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