 Hello and welcome to creating a human rights culture which aims to promote a lived awareness of the interdependency and invisibility of human rights principles in our minds, hearts and bodies, that is, dragged into our everyday lives. What after all is freedom of speech to a person who is homeless and lives in a world at war? Therefore, it is dedicated ultimately to the application of the human rights triptych which in brief consists of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at its center, the conventions that is international treaties on the right and implementation measures on the left. Hello again, I'm Joseph Bronca and I want to welcome you to another episode of creating a human rights culture which calls for a lived awareness of human rights principles in our minds and our hearts, especially our hearts, and integrated into our everyday lives. How do we define these principles? By the human rights triptych. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is at its center, the declarations and conventions following it are on the right panel, such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which we're going to talk about today. It's very controversial, many people felt it should have been called the Rights of Indigenous People because Indigenous people are one, but I don't know, they added the S and I don't know, there's Eurocentric quality to the United Nations, but that's another story. There's also other conventions such as the conventions on the rights of children and people with disabilities on the right panel, which we'll get into another day and then they have implementation measures such as Philip Alston's report on poverty in the United States, which we're going to get into in part in another show. By the way, the United Nations just came up with a report saying 18 million people live in extreme poverty in the United States and the Trump administration said it was BS and there's only 250,000, but that's another story, we'll get into this. Here I am with Peter Derigo, hi, okay, good to have you here. He's Professor Emeritus of Legal Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has done extensive scholarship on historical antecedents, if not precedents, by looking at people, documents, presidential statements and court cases, among other things, that through various twists and turns, shall I say struggles, social justice of course is struggle and human rights needs to be at the theoretic foundation of it all, which eventually culminated in the United Nations declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples, its acronym being UN DRIP or UN DRIP, I don't like that acronym, but that's what they got, which was passed by the General Assembly in 2008 with countries that claiming dominion over sizable indigenous populations like New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States abstaining. These four countries abstain and the General Assembly basically was for it. They abstained in part because they felt that the right to self-determination in that document was and I want to quote a dangerous incitement, I don't know the Indians are going to go on the war path or something, I don't know, what do I know? It's a rather curious assertion as in Mohawk self-determination means living nicely together and that's according to Eric Adias, who was a special repertoire to indigenous peoples about 15 years ago or so and the right to self-determination means in essence that there is nothing to fear by those governments. Since, however, those four countries have signed on, our country, the United States of America, being the last to do so in 2010. We don't know why exactly but possibly because of the mobilization of shame for not endorsing it, shaming and blaming as they say in human rights circles. Let me add in 2010 President Obama apologized for the genocide committed against indigenous people. As you mentioned to me, Peter, in a short unannounced statement buried in a defense department appropriation bill, appropriations bill, as the saying goes, does a tree make a noise if it falls in the forest and no one hears it. That apology and the United States endorsement of the declaration on the rights of indigenous people back then got scant attention in the media. I think I heard about it on that evil show Democracy Now, I'm Rolling My Eyes, but I didn't see it on CBS, CNN or anything. It just wasn't there. However, some of you might have heard about the declaration being quoted by activists in attempts to stop the Dakota Pipeline, which could possibly and easily pollute ancestral, if not spiritual, lands, let alone ultimately threaten the health of millions of people. The right to life fundamental to human rights documents. We'll get to you in just a few minutes. Don't worry. I'm acting a little bit too professorial. Forgive me. Okay, now the declaration on the rights of indigenous people states, among other things, the right to develop past, present and future manifestations of culture like archaeological sites, ceremonies, literature, the right to retain own names for communities to participate fully in all levels of decision making affecting their lives, the right to develop contacts and cooperation across borders, full guarantees against genocide, the right to traditional medicines and health practices, and the right to maintain and strengthen distinctive spiritual and material relationships with lands, waters, seas and full recognition of cultural and intellectual property. I lived in Alaska for a while in the Arctic. I just have to say when they had the sea, the ice blowing down, I mean, I don't really understand indigenous culture like I probably should, but many of the kids and some adults, they would just sort of stand there and watch the ice flows and they'd be there for quite a while, maybe a couple of hours. I don't know what was going on. I should have maybe spoken with them. Maybe it was a way of praying. I have no idea, but there was definitely a spiritual relationship. Okay. Okay. So that's it. That's Professor Ronca talking a bit too much as usual, but I'm here with my special guest, Peter Jericho. He's done, as I said, extensive scholarship on past historical practices regarding the rights of indigenous peoples, or should I say practices that violated their human rights, legacies that were actually atrocious. And some of these legacies endure to this day, in my view, the Dakota pipeline and whatever. It's up to you. So you've got the floor. What we're going to do, we're sort of going to have just a, what's the word, a conversation. We'll freely associate in Freudian terms, I don't know. For the first part, we have about 20 minutes left. And the second part, we have a number of slides on the doctrine of Christian discovery that we'll get into. But for the time being, this is the first part. So Peter, the floor is yours. Great. You could say anything you want. Or maybe I should start off on the wrong foot. Both of us are not indigenous. We're white. Does that mean anything? Let's talk about this. My father was born in Italy. And there was a time when Italians were not white. So the category of whiteness is an invented category, like the category race, the notion of race. And that's a long discussion that we could have about that. So I really don't come to this with any sense that I am pontificating about something. I am sharing my experience. Some 50 years ago, I graduated from Yale Law School and went to work for Navajo people as an attorney. And that turned my head around, turned my life around, really, in some important ways. I began to understand questions that I had had just about what it meant to be a human being. So I don't want to be overdramatic about it. But I'm speaking from my own experience as a litigator and then as a teacher. I've continued to be active, even after retiring from teaching. There was a Yakamination case that was affirming, the Supreme Court was affirming a treaty between the Yakamination and the US just a couple of months ago. I helped a little bit on that brief. And so I feel that what I'm talking about comes from actual experience with legal issues primarily. And there's no apology to be made about whether I have some color skin or not or what kind of blood I have. I think the whole notion of blood quantum, if you look at the history of blood quantum rules and laws, it's essentially grown from the efforts of the United States to eradicate indigenous peoples. Just think about it for a minute that you say, okay, the Lakota Nation consists of people who are so-called full blood, whatever that means. And so as soon as one of them marries somebody outside, even if it's another native nation, they marry somebody who's Ojibwe. Now there kids are only half Lakota. And when that child marries somebody, unless there's incest, which I think is just absurd to imagine that human beings didn't know anything about incest until the US came along. But so the point being that as soon as you set up regulations that define identity in terms of blood, you have set in motion another example of what is essentially a genocidal move. So for me, the whole discussion about who's native, who's not is a diversion. So I don't want to take any more time to talk about that. From the beginning with working with Navajo legal issues, I taught at the University of Massachusetts for 30-some years, helped found the legal studies department where I could talk about native issues and then move toward a global perspective, indigenous people's rights in international law and on the international stage. And so courses came out of that, articles came out, and I continued to be involved with litigation. So let me just say a couple of things. You mentioned about the title of the UN Declaration of Rights and Indigenous Peoples. Actually the S was a hard fought battle that the indigenous nations determined was absolutely necessary because there's a difference between people and A people. And the US position and New Zealand, as you mentioned, Canada, that history of basically the British Empire and English colonialism asserted that there aren't really no more peoples left, indigenous peoples. They're just indigenous people. And today there's still a lot of confusion about that. When you read about some person who has generally the blood thing comes in, native blood, or they're a member of some particular native nation that they ran for US office and that's supposed to be a triumph for native peoples. To me, it seems pretty clear that's the ultimate assimilation. The boarding school system was designed to eradicate the understanding of children, of their own language, of their own society, of their own people, their own cultures, and to produce in out of the boarding school the model American citizen. Canada apparently apologize. Yes, well this was not unique to the United States. So the point I'm making is it's a lot of confusion today about what is the issue here. From my perspective I'm talking about the Navajo Nation, the Lakota Nation, the Wampanoag Nation, the Ojibwe Nation, Anishinaabe. Even the names become problematic. But I'm not talking about people who happen to have some ancestor who was a member of that nation. So I am not Italian. What am I? I'm half Italian if you want to look at that way by some genealogy. If I was to say, oh well I'm really concerned with Italian issues, does that make me an Italian? Or if I run for office somewhere else in the U.S. I'm actually a member of the Select Board and the Leveret. So I am actually, I occupy an office in the U.S. governmental system. Does that mean the Italians have now taken over part of Leveret? All of that is nonsensical. So I think what's crucial to move back up to the level of the United Nations at the international level, what needed to be affirmed and what was affirmed was the rights of indigenous peoples as peoples for self-determination. Not the right of people who happen to have something called blood to participate in their national dominating systems. The U.S. has insisted, even after signing the declaration, as you said they resisted it for about four or five years, even at the time that the United States signed on to the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the U.S. State Department issued a signing statement indicating that the U.S. doesn't actually agree that there are native peoples and that the U.S. position is the same as under the declaration is the same as the U.S. position in its own legal system. And we'll talk about that in the second half where we get into what is the U.S. legal position about native nations. So it's really important to think about this not only because of the difference between people and peoples, but to understand that it's a battle indigenous peoples fought for over two decades to get a formal recognition that they actually exist as peoples. Another parallel confusion is civil rights versus native rights. Recently there, well, recently in the last few years there's debates about mascots, native mascots, so-called Indian mascots. And you think about the use of the word Indian that's obviously misnomer. And it's part of the language that obscures the reality of native nations. And we can talk about that. Each one of these things could become kind of a program, a show, a discussion in itself. So the mascot that was the little town north of here, Turner's Falls, went through over a year of really anguished discussions about this because they had a so-called Indian mascot. And there are people who thought this was really honoring the natives. I'm not sure which natives they're trying to honor, the ones that were massacred at Turner's Falls by Captain Turner or somebody else. But part of what happened in the discourse, the public debates, was that people who thought of themselves as like, well, I'm pro-native and I think the mascot is bad, they came out with signs that said, native rights are civil rights. Actually they said Indian rights are civil rights. So they had a sign allowing them to fish or something. The point is civil rights is the rights that citizens have against their own government. We're talking about native rights, which is something completely apart from this government. So there's so much to say here. Let me back up again. I was critical a moment ago about saying Indian. I'm just as critical about and more critical of talking about Native American. Not only is Native American not a solution, it further obscures the problem because people think the problem has been solved. How can a people or any people who existed before the United States was formed be called native to the United States? It's a non-secretary, it's a completely illogical. The indigenous nations that were here when the invasion of the colonists came clearly had their own self-determined existence. So to call them Native Americans is as foolish as calling them Indians. They're not in India and they're not in America. So who are they? Well, they're Navajo. You have to call them by their own name, Dine, Anishinaabe. You can't even say for sure that the names are right because the names have been contaminated by this colonial history. So when we're talking about what rights are important to talk about, let's be clear about that. Civil rights is an important topic in its own right, but it is not the same as talking about indigenous people's rights. And human rights is important. You've done a lot of work around human rights issues, but human rights is not the same thing as indigenous people's rights. By being a human being, you can claim human rights. By being a member of an indigenous nation, you can claim indigenous national rights, which is the right to self-determination. These are separate legal concepts, and they need to be understood as being separate legal concepts in order to avoid the kind of confusion that happens where everything is in a jumble. So there's a book out recently called The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, and I was thinking, okay, I'm going to take a look at this. I was asked to review it, but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to review it. It is such a confusing book. It's, of course, gotten some good press because it's a popular topic, but it lumps together the things that I've been here trying to separate, lumps together events that are happening within self-determination of indigenous nations with other events that are happening just because somebody who happens to have some ancestry has done something like got elected to an office. Those are completely separate phenomena, and the book mixes them all up. Citizenship, for example, citizenship was essentially imposed by the United States government on Native peoples as part of the destruction of the Native nations themselves, and to inculcate a sense that you're not really different. You don't have self-determination. You're just another American. Now you're a citizen. We hereby declare that. So Troyer talks about that in this book, but two or three pages later, he's talking about a citizenship as if, wow, it lasts the natives got citizenship. Well, there's deep confusion there. You can talk about citizenship as a concept. You can talk about it as a legal issue. You can talk about it as a historical development. But if you're talking about it in relation to Native nations, you've got to understand that it was part of the extinguishment program. And then extinguishment was accomplished under the guise of, oh, now you're going to join us. Now you're part of the melting pot. Well, what happened to the indigenous nation? Oh, we abolished it and we just took the rights to the land and we distributed the land in the allotment process. So everything is done now. Now the interesting thing is that it's not actually done, that the Native land issues are still alive. And at root, something like Standing Rock, I know it got presented as an environmental problem. It's not an environmental problem. It's a land issue. It's an issue of whose land is it? And when you talk about public land, like Bears Ears National Monument, okay, that's a monument on public land. How did it get to be public land? The public means the U.S. owns it. We'll talk about that when we get in the second half when we talk about the Doctrine of Christian Discovery. It's not public land. It belongs to particular Native nations. Those are issues that are behind Standing Rock. Is it Standing Rock's land or is it U.S. land? And Standing Rock itself was not very clear about that in its legal position. It was asking the U.S. to apply these U.S. environmental laws to this land rather than saying this is not U.S. land and U.S. environmental laws are irrelevant. It's Lakota internet, Standing Rock issues environmental perspectives that are going to control whether or not that pipeline happens. That's a sharp conflict. And it was being presented as if somehow it's all one ball of wax that U.S. environmental laws and environmental permits are somehow applicable inside Standing Rock that confused the issue for a lot of people. So anyway, I've gone on long enough probably here, Joe, but the comments that you make are so important that as ways of beginning to tease apart, it's like the notion of Native issues is like a tangled ball and we're trying to tease out threads and see what connects to what. And when it's all just left as a tangled ball, not only does stuff not get addressed, but as I said, sometimes the greatest danger is you think you've addressed it. You think you've, for example, oh, Indians is a misnomer. These people Columbus was mistaken. They didn't know it didn't know where he was. That's true. But you say, oh, now they're Native Americans. You've deepened the problem rather than solve the problem. And I think that's what's dangerous when when people have discussions that they think is clarifying a situation. But it's actually making the situation more murky. I think that that we need to avoid murkiness when we're trying to clarify something. Yeah, when you're talking, I'm reminded of the words of former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, that said the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in men of zeal that are well meaning, but without understanding. So this is, I think, what you're talking about. Hell is paved with good intentions. That's what exactly. And you know, the idea of good intentions, I mean, there's this sense that, you know, well, that we can say this was good intention. And of course, we know what you just said the notion of hell is paved. The road to hell paved with good intentions. But you know, there's been nothing but good intentions. The pilgrims came over with good intentions. The colonists came with good intentions. I don't think there's any governmental leader, including Hitler and Stalin, that didn't claim they had good intentions. And Paul Pot, good intentions. I'm tired of that. The notion of doing good, it seems to me has been the cover under which unbelievable atrocities have been carried out. But always with the name of good, I don't know any leader who stands up and says, I'm here to do bad things. It hasn't happened in history to my knowledge that there's been a leader who has not claimed to be doing good. So we should just get rid of the notion of good and bad as related here. I want clarity about what is that. So it's not that it's bad to say Indian and good to say Native American. It's bad to say both of you want to be clear, but it's not bad for some moral reason. It's just bad because it's faulty logic. It's misunderstanding of history. And we know how little history is actually understood by people when we see the abysmal state of politics around the world. And it's not just the US. It's just the kind of the sense that who remembers last year, who remembers the last decade, who remembers the last century, who remembers the 200 years, who remembers that the US founding fathers, so called, weren't actually here for freedom. They were here for capitalist profits. They were here for extractive wealth. They were here for colonial purposes. That's why slavery was completely compatible with this project. That's why stealing land was completely compatible with this project. So that seems to me these are examples of unpacking history and taking a view that's contrary to the accepted sense of things, the myths that get told. Okay, that all sounds great. That's a lot of a rant. No, that's not a rant. You're passionate about what you're doing. And we should all be as passionate like that. We have about one minute. I just want to go back to my point about us being white people, only because I lived in Alaska, like I said, and there's a native in here. I said, Mom, he was a noopy. He was a noopy at profit. There you go. His name was Manilik. And he prophesied the white people coming. And he said, some of them will be bad, and some of them will be good. And if you're indigenous people out there listening, I'd like you to think that we're good, maybe we aren't, but we're at least trying. And that's what I meant by that. We are an indigenous, but at least we're trying. So that's the end of part one. Take care of yourself, everyone, and take care of others as needs be. And we'll have a slideshow on the second part. Thank you very much. Thank you.