On September 13th the UN General Assembly adopted the “UN Declaration of Indigenous Rights of Indigenous Peoples” with 144 votes for, 11 abstentions, and votes against from Australia, the US, Canada, and New Zealand.1

I’m intrigued, confused, and slightly worried about the four votes against. First intrigued: because these are four countries that have reached some sort of legal accommodation with their indigenous populations, albeit after a historical process that is pretty damn embarassing on all counts.2 I would have expected them to be in favour of promoting that sort of accommodation process in general.

And then I get confused, because when I read the articles of the declaration itself, I don’t find anything obviously unreasonable, or anything that I’d expect New Zealand (as the example I’m most familiar with) to be strenously against. I thought I had it with article 26, which begins “Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired”3, but then articles 27 and 28 (dealing with establishing an open process for adjudicating claims and the right to redress) seem to address exactly this issue, so I’m left with no idea quite what the objection is.

And that’s where the worry comes in. I have a couple of hazy ideas of where the problem might lie, but I don’t like either of them very much.

The first is an anti-apartheid argument: the declaration as it stands will promote the existence of indigenous ‘nations within a nation’, with separate education and legal systems, which only increases the potential for discrimination. The danger of such an argument is that if it’s persuasive enough, it leads to integration as the only solution, and that’s obviously a solution the declaration does not accept as allowable.4

The more unpleasant possibility is that these four nations all consider the solutions they have come up with as not meeting the standards of the declaration. I’d like to think better of my country, but I honestly don’t know enough of the real politics involved to say.

So can anyone with more political savvy help me out? This is an honest question, I’d be glad of any answer you can come up with.

Notes:

  1. Hat tip: of all places, I came upon this news on BoingBoing. [↪]
  2. I don’t know anything about Canadian history, but I presume they also have skeletons in their closets. [↪]
  3. This is problematic in New Zealand, because there are people living on those lands, whose families have lived there for generations; part of the complexity of these issues is that you have in general multiple people with fair claim to the land, so that there’s simply no solution that will be completely just. [↪]
  4. Article 8 gives the right to not be subjected to forced assimilation or integration. [↪]