Celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day

Monday was Columbus Day or, for a growing number, Indigenous Peoples Day. Is the new designation over-the-top political correctness? Or does it recognize a long and shameful chapter in American history?

Try putting yourself in the moccasins of the 100 million or so people who already lived in the Americas when Columbus arrived in 1492. Being “discovered” meant murder, disease, rape, theft, displacement and near extinction as distinct cultures. By 1700, it is estimated, 98 percent of the native inhabitants had disappeared. Not much to celebrate.

Indigenous peoples continue to be marginalized and dispossessed. Indeed, they are perhaps the principal victims of globalization, as their remaining lands not only are targets of resource extraction but also are seen as prime locations for biofuel plantations. Against the odds, however, First Peoples persist. Indeed, increasingly they demand the full rights of the larger society.

Today, an estimated 370 million indigenous peoples live in some 5,000 groups in 70 countries. Once invisible in international bodies such as the United Nations, they have elbowed their way in the door and are sitting at the table. In 1982, they began to lobby for a declaration of human rights that named them specifically, but one or another country was effective in raising objections to approving a document that might empower a population within its borders. After nearly a quarter century of discussion and diplomacy, in 2006 the UN’s Human Rights Council recommended approval to the UN General Assembly, and that recommendation was backed enthusiastically in May this year during the Sixth Session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

On Sept. 13, the General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted the Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The vote was 143 yeas, 11 abstentions, and 4 nays. Along with Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, the United States opposed the resolution. Sidestepping confrontation with substance, a U.S. representative said this country could not go along because the drafting process was flawed. “Unfortunately,” said Robert Hagen, “the text that had emerged from that failed process was confusing and risked endless conflicting interpretations and debate about its application.”

Does the case for confusion hold water? If there wasn’t room for conflicting opinions, the process wouldn’t have consumed 25 years. But perfection is not possible in such a forum and, in any case, the declaration is not binding. The argument reminds one of the special rights vs. equal rights battles here in Maine, and for me the conclusion is the same: “equal” means just that – no more, no less.

Article 1 of the Declaration’s 46 articles reads, “Indigenous peoples have the right to the full enjoyment … of all human rights and fundamental freedoms as recognized in the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and international human rights law.” It is shameful that a nation that so loudly trumpets its commitments to freedom and democracy could not see fit to endorse such a statement.

Declarations aside, what does the future hold? One plausible scenario is that, through resource depletion or wars over oil, or both, energy costs will rocket and the expense of transporting food and other necessities from distant corners of the globe will become untenable. Society may become more local, less global. Old skills will become in greater demand, as we will have to become more self-sufficient. In such a world, the wisdom of those who have been here longest may have much to offer, both in substance and in perspective.

At the United Nations Non-Governmental Organizations Conference on Climate Change last month, Daniel Salau Rogei, a Maasai from Kenya, offered this view through a different prism on his people’s pastoral life. “We follow the seasons, the rains, with our animals,” he said. “You call this way of life ‘subsistence farming.’ We call it ‘sustainable agriculture.'”

In his wonderfully hopeful new book, “Blessed Unrest,” Paul Hawken writes that we can expect the value of natural resources to rise significantly and that we will have to change our understanding of what we value. Once Europeans dismissed native peoples and their cultures as inferior. But today, Hawken says, it is the indigenous people who “express distance from and disapproval of Western customs. Jesus was very clear about who will inherit the earth; so, too, are most indigenous people.”

Kent Price of Orland is a member of the board of directors of the Unitarian Universalist United Nations Office.