38-3 Concrete Identities: Indigenous Peoples Shaping the Future

On August 7, 2014, the government of Bangladesh issued a decree to all officials and Peoples, Sultana Kamal, co-chairperson of the Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission, said, “We despise it. We reject it, and for that if we have to face any penalty, we are ready to accept. Stopping eviction of Indigenous people and their human rights protection is the role of the state.” Forbidding the use of the word, and hence the recognition the existence of Adivasis, is the latest assault on the rights of Indigenous Peoples in Bangladesh.

Seen through the lens of Nadya Kwandibens, being Indigenous in a modern world is a beautiful balance. As a Toronto-based professional photographer and Ojibwe/Anishinaabe of the Northwest Angle #37 First Nation in Ontario, Canada, Kwandibens has spent years capturing the spirit of today’s Indigenous Peoples in a manner that highlights the unique way Native identity intersects with contemporary life.

Inspired by a healer’s dream and prescient vision that destruction of the Brazilian cerrado (savannah) is endangering the red pi’ã, the bird that warns Xavante of impending danger, leader and activist Hiparidi Top’tiro sprang into action. In 2006 he founded the Mobilization of Indigenous Peoples of the Cerrado, a coalition of diverse peoples that pressures the government to implement environmental protections for the cerrado equivalent to those in place for Amazonia.

During the First UN Decade to Combat Racial Discrimination (1973–1982), Indigenous Peoples were invited to share their stories of self-determination. They would walk in the footsteps of Chief Deskaheh, a Haudenosaunee statesman who, in 1923, traveled to Geneva to speak to the League of Nations in defense of the right of his people to live under their own laws, on their own land, and under their own faith.

In 1980, the Sealaska Corporation brought together Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian Elders in Sitka, Alaska for a gathering of discourse, stories, and traditional songs and dances in the first Sealaska Elders Conference. During one evening, Charlie Joseph, Khaal.átk’, elder of the Kaagwaantaan clan, led traditional performances of Tlingit songs and dances—many of which, he told his peers, had not been seen or heard in many years. He asked his elder peers to have patience and forbearance for the young dancers as they were learning and could make mistakes.

The so-called UN World Conference on Indigenous Peoples, to be held this year on September 22–23, is really a High Level Plenary Meeting of the General Assembly. No one should be fooled by the title. It will have color and pageantry supplied by the Indigenous Peoples who attend, and the General Assembly hall and rooms will be filled with Indigenous representatives dressed in their traditional regalia. But this was not the original intent. In 2010, the government of Bolivia floated a resolution calling for a World Conference on Indigenous Peoples.