US Swings “Right”: Indigenous Peoples’ Warning

The US government has been generally hostile to indigenous peoples for most of the last 45 years in the international arena.  Their concern? “Indigenous peoples may want to invoke political self-determination and split their territory off from the US or other existing states.”

Evidence of US hostility is born out by succeeding administrations opposing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples which contains the universally accepted principle of “self-determination.”

The US government opposes the right of indigenous peoples to exercise the free, prior and informed consent underscored in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples owing to that government’s worry that indigenous peoples “will use that right to veto development.”

The recent US elections tilting the US political body farther to the authoritarian-right poses new threats to the rights of Indian people, Alaskan Natives and Hawaiian Natives. Funding will be the first area where the promises made in the past will be broken…reducing the financial supports on which indigenous peoples have needed to depend for life and limb.

The Anti-Indian Movement that began its works in the 1960s, boiled over in the 1970s and 1980s is now likely to return with a vengeance–challenging the rights of indigenous peoples to their territories, natural resources, cultural ways, collective ownership and their right to self-determination.