5 - The politics of indigenous rights

Summary

A number of people in “traditional dress” stand in line to get through security at the United Nations headquarters in New York City. Two African men wear pointed straw hats decorated with cowrie shells, their bodies draped in red shin-length fabric. One woman has long black hair and wears a necklace of leaves that reaches to her knees. An older man is wearing a headdress of white feathers and a beaded deerskin shirt. A young man is wearing a Ché T-shirt, but his face is marked with red and yellow paint, and feathers are woven into his long braids. As he nears the security gate, he takes a feathered headband out of a plastic shopping bag and adjusts it around his forehead.

As we snake our way through the security tent that has stood well outside the door of the UN building since September 2001, they start to nod familiarly to one another. Once inside, their numbers swell, and as we approach the assembly hall where the meetings of the second session of the United Nations Permanent Forum for Indigenous Issues are taking place, we pass some invisible tipping point. Although there are never more people in indigenous dress than there are in “Western” dress, the indigenous is gradually normalized and the Western is out of place. Whether this space has been ceded or co-opted is at the heart of indigenous politics.

At the start of the twenty-first century, indigenous peoples occupy a familiar political location with worldwide visibility.