From Wounded Knee to Checkpoint Charlie by György Ferenc Tóth

Author:György Ferenc Tóth [Tóth, György Ferenc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, Native American Studies, History, Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, Europe, Eastern
ISBN: 9781438461236
Google: fGwJDAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2016-04-21T02:35:53+00:00

Performing American Indian Sovereignty at the 1977 UN NGO Conference

By the spring of 1977, UN officials in certain key positions had decided to help open a way for the representation of indigenous populations in the world body. Since 1972, Ecuadorian UN ambassador José R. Martínez Cobo had been working on a “Study of the Problem of Discrimination against Indigenous Populations” commissioned by the United Nations’ Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. According to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Cobo had been convinced to propose the Study by the UN human rights secretariat’s Augusto Willemsen-Diaz, who was motivated by his growing concern for the Maya communities in his native Guatemala. Through Cobo’s ongoing study and directly, Willemsen-Diaz placed indigenous issues as a category on the UN human rights agenda.50

Dunbar-Ortiz claims that by the mid-1970s, Cobo’s study was languishing without annual reports due to a lack of interest and political will among the members of the Sub-Commission, who were all closely associated with their own national governments.51 This suggests that their closeness to the ideology of the nation-state made them reluctant to support a study the results of which would have challenged national governments over their treatment of Indians and other native communities.

While Williemsen-Diaz and Martínez Cobo were working on the inside, American Indian activists worked on the outside to open doors. Dunbar-Ortiz credits the Treaty Council’s Jimmie Durham with building relations while living in Geneva, and gradually convincing international organizations such as the World Council of Churches (where his wife Ann had worked), the World Peace Council, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and the International Commission of Jurists to sponsor a conference on Indian issues at the United Nations.52 On September 20–23, 1977, the radical sovereignty movement held its breakthrough Non-Governmental Organizations International Conference on Discrimination against the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas in Geneva, Switzerland.

The conference was attended by representatives affiliated with thirty-eight different “international organisations,” including the above sponsors, human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the International Federation for Human Rights, youth movements such as the World Alliance of YMCAs and the World Federation of Democratic Youth, professional bodies such as the International Organisation of Journalists and the Union of Arab Jurists, women-focused associations like the International Federation of University Women and the International Council of Women, faith-based groups such as the Lutheran World Federation and the Muslim World League, international organizations such as the Afro-Asian Peoples Solidarity Organisation and the International Movement for Fraternal Union among Races and Peoples, and indigenous rights groups such as the Scandinavian-based International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs and the Canadian-based National Indian Brotherhood. Indigenous delegates participated from Argentina, Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Surinam, Venezuela, and the United States. In addition to the above countries, national governments sent representatives from Australia, Columbia, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Iraq, Italy, Israel, Jamaica, Mauritania, Morocco, the People’s Republic of Mongolia, the Netherlands, Norway, the Syrian Arab Republic, and the Arab Republic of Yemen.

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