Legal effect of the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People

“Modern society has tried to extinguish the indigenous voice. Its language, institutions, and rituals have become dominant. Modernity’s law, in particular, has imprinted itself on indigenous peoples, following the sword o conquest in the Western Hemisphere and beyond.

Its domination of indigenous ways of life was to be expected. Its aggressive use of the Earth and its resources, combined with sanctions to punish perceived transgression its focus on “getting ahead” via technological and social “progress,” its premium on Cartesian reason and logic, and its emphasis on the individual ran head-on into and rolled over the soft, unresisting indigenous concepts of oneness with Mother Earth and Father Sky, their focus on peace and reconciliation, on faith, and on leaving nobody behind–on community.

Still, the onslaught has not been completely successful. All the military, economic, and materialistic might of the modern world has not succeeded in silencing the indigenous voice. Just like tender water ultimately erodes hardest of rocks, indigenous cultures, peoples, and their values have persisted. Like many oppressed communities, they have had to adapt, go underground and avoid open confrontation; they withdrew into niches of survival, areas not initially desired by the more dominant and aggressive part of humanity; they engaged in religious syncretism, transforming their own gods into saints of the dominant faith; they participated in the dominant economies, by way of tourism and the sale of handicraft; and they even enlisted in the armed forces of the conqueror. ”

From:
Indigenous sovereignty: a reassessment in light of the UN Declaration on the Rights on Indigenous Peoples.
Author: Wiessner, Siegfried
Date: Oct 1, 2008
Words: 17363
Publication: Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law
ISSN: 0090-2594