In Indigenous politics circles, a grand debate has been raging for a decade and a half about the role, meaning and effects of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (“the Declaration”) in theory and practice. Some scholars and Indigenous rights activists argue strongly for its normative value based on its origins in grassroots Indigenous rights movements of the 1960s and 1970, which transformed it into a global human rights consensus document. Meanwhile, other scholars and Indigenous rights activists view the history of UN negotiations over the Declaration and its connection to the liberal international human rights regime as so profoundly problematic that it cannot be normatively salvaged in any meaningful way.
The simple truth is that state recognition and respect for Indigenous rights were grossly insufficient before and continued so after the passage of the Declaration, and the pervasive neoliberal, capitalist model has done significant damage to Indigenous Peoples around the world. The need to restore and revitalize Indigenous languages, cultures, governance, and ways of life is dire, and coupled with the urgent need to protect Indigenous lands and waters in a time of great global change, this debate is not merely an intellectual one but is also a deeply existential one. It is often emotionally charged, sometimes producing critiques with very sharp edges.
Andrew Erueti’s book, The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: A New Interpretive Approach, brilliantly offers a pathway through this grand debate, revealing a political history of the Declaration that is at once explanatory of the debate itself while also offering a “mixed-model” interpretation that significantly sharpens both its meaning and effects. Erueti analyzes how, using this mixed-model approach, the same Declaration can and does serve the diverse needs of Indigenous Peoples worldwide. His timely intervention encourages them to come back together in global solidarity.
Indigenous rights and politics scholars such as James Anaya, Claire Charters, Dalee Sambo Dorough, Brenda Gunn, Joshua Nichols, and this reviewer ground their work in the notion that the Declaration is a useful, appropriate, and potentially powerful tool as a specific articulation of Indigenous Peoples’ rights within universal human rights as articulated in the core human rights treaties. Grounding Indigenous rights within the human rights language also enhances the legibility and credibility of the Declaration with state actors. It provides Indigenous Peoples with an international-level tool for Indigenous rights advocacy in national, regional, and global contexts.
Although some scholars have addressed the grassroots, and often quite radical, origins of the Declaration and its roots in community-based gatherings before the first international Indigenous meeting in Geneva in 1977 (which eventually gave birth to the UN Working Group that produced the draft declaration), none has considered the complex Indigenous political history of the UN negotiations as Erueti has done here. Erueti finds that the globalization of the international Indigenous rights movement was a critical juncture in its political history, creating a fundamental tension between the Global North and Global South that threatened to undermine its grassroots, more radical origins (the “decolonization model”) in favor of a “human rights model.”
This is the argument of the Declaration’s harshest scholarly critics, who view it as having become so watered down that it no longer meaningfully represents Indigenous Peoples’ rights and interests. From this perspective, the Declaration derived from Indigenous movements across North America, New Zealand. and Australia that were based on radial decolonizing thought and were inspired by national liberation movements and Marxist-inspired intellectual philosophy. For Indigenous activist scholars such as Sharon Venne and Charmaine WhiteFace and resurgence school scholars like Glen Coulthard, Jeff Corntassel, and Hayden King, the text of the Declaration that passed the UN General Assembly in 2007 veered far off its original intent during UN negotiations, getting “co-opted” by liberal states and the international liberal human rights regime.
Erueti boldly and effectively demonstrates how this grand debate need not—and must not—be an either/or zero-sum consideration. The Declaration, he argues, required global solidarity to achieve, and it needed Indigenous Peoples from Asia and Africa, as well as the Saami people of the Scandinavian Arctic, to participate in its negotiations. This global solidarity, however, created certain tensions between the Global North and Global South that were grounded in their diverse needs, experiences, and perspectives. The Global North movements emerged from a decolonization standpoint based on self-determination, autonomy, and respect for treaties. In contrast, the Global South movements emerged slightly later and emphasized domestic political participation and equality. Non-Indigenous scholars Karen Engle and Courtney Jung have previously argued that the decolonization framework was problematically dropped during UN negotiations in favor of overemphasizing culture. Erueti directly challenges this line of argumentation, contesting its accuracy and claiming that the human rights and decolonization frames need not disrupt one another or compete in a zero-sum fashion.
Chapter 1 carefully and thoroughly traces the roots of the Declaration and today’s international Indigenous rights movement to the decolonization model, deftly demonstrating how self-determination has always been the cornerstone of the Global North’s decolonization movement. He also shows how advocates of the decolonization model held firm to self-determination and treaty rights during UN negotiations in the face of significant pressure to drop or dilute them. Chapter 2 describes the entrance of the Asian and African Indigenous Peoples’ movements, which focused primarily on culture and human rights. This chapter also expertly walks us through the UN negotiations process for the Declaration.
In chapter 3, Erueti makes a compelling case for the mixed-model interpretation of the Declaration. Through his reading of the Declaration’s complex and nuanced political history in the first two chapters, Erueti shows how these two frameworks—decolonization and human rights—were merely different emphases by the Global North and Global South movements and were never intended to disrupt or undermine the other. The need to retain both frameworks in our contemporary interpretations of the Declaration is evident from its political history, as shown by Erueti. Chapter 4 explores some key examples of contemporary rights struggles in Canada and New Zealand and the global push for free, prior, and informed consent to show how the mixed model is superior to the human rights model or the decolonization model standing alone. The brief conclusion responds to additional critiques of the Declaration’s applicability in domestic contexts.
Impeccably researched, superbly written, and grounded in Erueti’s experience as a lifelong Māori rights advocate in New Zealand and at the UN, as well as serving as Amnesty International’s first Indigenous rights adviser, this book provides a fresh look at the Declaration’s political history; Erueti’s conceptual analysis makes a robust case for resolution of the grand debate over the Declaration’s usefulness and potential. He resurrects its radical roots and invites its harshest critics back into the international Indigenous rights movement. As Erueti illuminates for us, not only is there intellectual space for both interpretations within the Declaration but also the continued existence of the decolonization model will only be secured through advocacy alongside the human rights model.
