Indigenous Rights Movements & the Law

Self-Determination as Voice addresses the relationship between Indigenous peoples' participation in international governance and the law of self-determination. Many states and international organizations have put in place institutional mechanisms for the express purpose of including Indigenous representatives in international policy-making and decision-making processes, as well as in the negotiation and drafting of international legal instruments. Indigenous peoples' rights have a higher profile in the UN system than ever before. This book argues that the establishment and use of mechanisms and policies to enable a certain level of Indigenous peoples' participation in international governance has become a widespread practice, and perhaps even one that is accepted as law. In theory, the law of self-determination supports this move, and it is arguably emerging as a rule of customary international law. However, ultimately the achievement of the ideal of full and effective participation, in a manner that would fulfil Indigenous peoples' right to self-determination, remains deferred.

A look at how an 1862 act impacted Native lands and eventually led to UA's fossil fuel use despite climate pledges.

There was celebration at a press conference in Berkeley a day after Berkeley’s City Council voted unanimously to adopt an ordinance giving the title of the land to the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust.

Tribal climate action plans are being stymied by state-owned land within reservation borders.

The urgency of the green transition hasn’t made tribal concerns any less important.

Forcing Indigenous people out of protected areas they help manage and rely on is not the way to achieve biodiversity and climate goals.

The Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe is making kiosks available in key locations so tribal members can access important information for their judicial and law enforcement systems. It’s part of a multi-phase effort to make their official procedures more transparent and accessible. They plan on ultimately providing digital access to their entire law library, court decisions and other documents that improve citizens’ understanding and engagement with government functions. We’ll talk with tribal representatives from Saint Regis and other tribes putting a priority on transparency and openness.

This webinar showcases authors featured in the upcoming edition of Human Rights, which focuses on current issues and recent developments regarding Native American rights.

Extractive industries filling public university coffers on stolen land. Here's how 14 land-grant colleges took 8.2 million acres from 123 Indigenous nations.

"Written by leading Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, Voicing Identity examines the issue of cultural appropriation in the contexts of researching, writing, and teaching about Indigenous peoples. This book grapples with the question: who is qualified to engage in these activities and how can this be done appropriately and respectfully? The authors address these questions from their own individual perspectives and experiences, often revealing personal struggles and their ongoing attempts to resolve them. There is diversity in perspectives and approaches, but also a common goal: to conduct research and teach in respectful ways that enhance understanding of Indigenous histories, cultures, and rights, and promote reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Bringing together contributors with diverse backgrounds and unique experiences, Voicing Identity will be of interest to students and scholars studying Indigenous issues as well as anyone seeking to engage in the work of making Canada a model for just relations between the original peoples and newcomers."--

"In 1987, when Karen Van Fossan's teenage identity was stolen in a botched bank robbery, she maintained an unquestioning allegiance to the colonial legal system. In 2021, when she found herself in a jail cell on a Water Protector charge, she had long since been a resister of her own colonial culture. But what does it mean, as a descendent of colonialism, to seek to be un-colonial?"--

By Kirstin Nelson (Follow us on LinkedIn) When I started my job at the National Agricultural Library, I had yet to think much about land grant universities. I attended one (University of Nebra…

Only about 2% of public school teachers in Arizona are Indigenous.

"A call for the rethinking Navajo sovereignty in a way more rooted in Navajo beliefs, culture, and values"--Provided by publisher.

"Illuminating the First Nations struggles against the Canadian state, It's All about the Land exposes how racism underpins and shapes Indigenous-settler relationships. Renowned Kahnaw:ke Mohawk activist and scholar Taiaiake Alfred explains how the Canadian government's reconciliation agenda is a new form of colonization that is also guaranteed to fail. Bringing together Alfred's speeches and interviews from over the past two decades, the book shows that Indigenous peoples across the world face a stark choice: reconnect with their authentic cultures and values or continue following a slow road to annihilation. Alfred proposes a radical vision for contesting and confronting the ongoing genocide of the original peoples of this land: Indigenous Resurgence. This way of thinking, being, and practising represents an authentic politics that roots resistance in the spirit, knowledge, and laws of the ancestors. Set against the historic arc of Indigenous-settler relations in Canada and drawing on the rich heritage of First Nations resistance movements, It's All about the Land traces the evolution of Indigenous struggle and liberation through the dynamic processes of oratory, dialogue, action, and reflection."--

"The book provides individual Diné/Navajo examinations and understandings of Níhi kéyah, Navajo homeland. These examinations and understandings represent a distinctive lens of Diné/Navajo peoples and way of life"--

Diné perspectives : revitalizing and reclaiming Navajo thought-book

"Informed by personal experience and offering an inclusive view, Diné Identity in a Twenty-First-Century World showcases the complexity of understanding and the richness of current Diné identities"--

"An original account of the stakes of sovereignty for recovering anticolonial pasts and fashioning anticolonial futures. Despite their signal contributions to present-day anticolonial struggles from #NODAPL to Idle No More, Indigenous societies around the globe are recurrently neglected in histories and theories of decolonization. What results from this disregard is not only skewed history, but also diminished political horizons for those (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) striving to transform an unequal world profoundly shaped by colonialism. Bridging political theory and Indigenous Studies, political theorist David Temin shows how key 20th-century Indigenous intellectual-activists in lands today claimed by Canada and the United States fundamentally recast the philosophical substance and normative goals of decolonization. Through history, textual interpretation, and conceptual analysis, his book recasts a vision of anticolonial thought and agency that circles around a politics of self-determination disentangled from sovereignty as institution and ideal-one committed to the relational flourishing of human and other-than-human beings against colonial domination"--

Native communities see clean energy as a way to remedy some of the abuses depicted in the new Martin Scorsese film, "Killers of the Flower Moon."

Leaders from the Indigenous Resilience Center shared at the One Water Summit about their efforts to work with tribal communities on water audits, filtration systems, and other solutions.

This blog post is a discussion of the history of the movement and passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

Lakota historian Nick Estes talks about the violent origins of Thanksgiving and his book Our History Is the Future. “This history … is a continuing history of genocide, of settler colonialism and, basically, the founding myths of this country,” says Estes, who is a co-founder of the Indigenous resistance group The Red Nation and a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe.

"An award-winning author investigates the entangled history of her Jewish ancestors' land in South Dakota and the Lakota, who were forced off that land by the United States government. "A brilliantly conceived family history, one that places questions of responsibility and atonement at the center of the conversation about America's political future."--the Whiting Foundation. Growing up, Rebecca Clarren only knew the major plot points of her tenacious immigrant family's origins. Her great-great-grandparents, the Sinykins, and their six children fled antisemitism in Russia and arrived in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, ultimately settling on a 160-acre homestead in South Dakota. Over the next few decades, despite tough years on a merciless prairie and multiple setbacks, the Sinykins became an American immigrant success story. What none of Clarren's ancestors ever mentioned was that their land, the foundation for much of their wealth, had been cruelly taken from the Lakota by the United States government. By the time the Sinykins moved to South Dakota, America had broken hundreds of treaties with hundreds of Indigenous nations across the continent, and the land that had once been reserved for the seven bands of the Lakota had been diminished, splintered, and handed for free, or practically free, to white settlers. In The Cost of Free Land, Clarren melds investigative reporting with personal family history to reveal the intertwined stories of her family and the Lakota, and the devastating cycle of loss of Indigenous land, culture, and resources that continues today. With deep empathy and clarity of purpose, Clarren grapples with the personal and national consequences of this legacy of violence and dispossession. What does it mean to survive oppression only to perpetuate and benefit from the oppression of others? By shining a light on the people and families tangled up in this country's difficult history, The Cost of Free Land invites readers to consider their own culpability and what, now, can be done"--

‘Indigenous presence is vital to the stewardship of the land.’