COMMENTARY

Indigenous Identity and the State

With the approach of this summer's meeting of the UN Working Group on Indigenous Peoples comes the day when the Draft Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples will very likely be handed up from the Working Group to the Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. At that time, one of the major new points of conflict that will unfold is the question of determining to whom the final Declaration will ultimately pertain. The struggle for the right to determine indigenous identity implicitly contains the subject of the newly defined rights; the rights are pointless without that subject. But the identity problem is not likely to be very easily negotiated in all cases, either within any particular state or in the global context, in which indigenous identity would presumably rest upon some commonly accepted criteria. Instead, the question is likely to be the source of ensuing patterns of deep division and a target for attack by state governments that intend specifically to divide and rule native peoples. Already, it is clear how some of these patterns will unfold.

Although all current definitions (including those issued by the ILO and World Bank) insist that indigenous peoples can and must decide identity questions for themselves, it is not the least bit clear exactly where the authority is retained to determine who will be the indigenous authorities who decide identity within any particular people or nation. The decision on defining that higher authority is apparently going to be left to the discretion of states to determine; after all, it will be incumbent upon states to recognize those authorities. The role of international observers will be diminished in this process of determination, and in fact, these observers already are almost totally powerless to argue against states about who is and is not indigenous. It is bad enough that indigenous people must fight against contradictory definitions that are imposed by states. When international organizations, including the UN, continue to diminish political and juridical identity, through their persistent use of definitions of indigenous "populations" or "ethnic groups" or "minorities," the situation is greatly exacerbated.

In the first cut, those peoples who are clearly observable as "tribals" or "primitives" (e.g.: Yanomamis, Penan, Maasai, Nagas, etc.) will be viewed as the subjects of the rights of indigenous peoples. The fact is indisputable, however, that there are progressively fewer peoples who fall neatly into such categories, as each year passes. The attrition is due to the considerable pressures imposed by a variety of factors, including: cultural diffusion, true (bilateral) acculturation, "directed culture change" (commonly referred to as either assimilation or ethnocide), genocidal wars, alien invasions, the competition for and depletion of resources and habitat, and in addition, various overt and clearly destructive policies of dispossession of land and resources, forced relocation, missionization, state-directed educational projects, proletarianization, and the monopolization of wealth that results in poverty, malnutrition, low life expectancy, illiteracy, and child prostitution. As those who follow these issues are quite aware, the ranks of "tribals" and "primitives" have thinned and things are not getting better.

But what of those whose ancestors were indeed "tribal" and/or "primitive" but who themselves cannot qualify easily within these categories? What of those whose ancestors were forcibly relocated, whose cultural traits were destroyed as they were flung without mercy into the mass mainstream societies organized by states? Those who, racially, culturally, linguistically, religiously, or otherwise, have more observably in common with the mainstream than with "their own people?" On what basis will they be able to assert their identities as indigenous people with the full set of rights to recognition and protection? Given such conditions, the ability of peoples to decide for themselves whether they are indigenous, and the ability of external observers to corroborate those definitions, is greatly weakened.

Perhaps the best evidence of the pattern by which this identity question will be worked out ought to be taken from the United States, not only because of its international hegemonic role, and not only because so many American Indian nations have long since ceased to be either "tribal" or "primitive" in their lifestyles, but more because US representatives within the State Department have felt so very free in the past several years to preach to other states (especially socialist states) how they should resolve questions of "ethnic and national rights." The prescription is to conform to the model by which the US has ostensibly attempted to "foster cultural diversity and pluralism, by, for example, supporting the efforts of native American Indians to preserve their tribal structure and unique heritage."1

As an excellent example of how difficult it is to discover the consistency of such bold principles in practice, in May, the Clinton Administration held a "National American Indian Listening Conference," which was attended by some 547 elected tribal officials, and at which Attorney General Janet Reno promised to "kick open the federal doors that have been closed for so long." Apart from begging the obvious question of whether the Clinton regime has any more credibility among Indians than previous administrations (like that of the late Richard Nixon, who achieved notoriety for his duplicitous "self-determination" language of the 1970s), a more troubling question emerged in the context of the Listening Conference. That question concerns a very contradictory policy that has been emanating concurrently within the Interior Department.

The new Interior policy would make a distinction between "historic" and "non-historic" Indian tribes and thence diminish or extinguish the sovereignty of perhaps as many as 230 tribes which could not meet the criteria of being "historic." Many of the "non-historic tribes" consist of the remnants of Indian nations that were almost (but not quite) completely destroyed, mostly during the 19th century, and which were assembled together on reservations with other remnants of Indian peoples of completely different cultures. The new administrative dichotomization of tribes is totally inconsistent with the expansive rhetoric dispensed at the Listening Conference, while it picks up the trend toward "termination" legislation that was presumably repudiated in the 1950s. The policy contradiction is clearly an example of how some states (even hegemonic leaders) will dodge and weave in order to escape the obligations expressed in the Declaration on Indigenous Rights, in this case by limiting the number and character of the bearers of those rights.

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Fourth World Bulletin • July 1994