Indigenous Nations' Rights in the Balance: An Analysis of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

[Charmaine White Face's] work in Geneva, Switzerland, as well as her defense of the Black Hills of the North Plains region, challenges the United Nations Human Rights declaration of 2007 as deeply flawed. In examining the role of the UN, she charges that it has again through its recent declarations provided legitimacy and prestige not only to historical eighteenth-century genocide, but to the continuing plunder of rights and resources of native peoples. [...] What happens when international law says powerful nations can use the idea of law as a weapon to gain consensus for theft? The so-called rule of law, as discoverers have shown us from the beginning, entrenches legal doctrines that justify genocide. The UN complicity [...] has enormous consequences. A lucid and implacable analysis of the crucial relationship between Indians and their colonizers. --Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Hunkpati Dakota, Author of A Separate Country and Anti-Indianism

"Charmaine White Face provides a series of powerful arguments and direct documentation that indigenous rights were passed over in favor of nation-state powers and jurisdiction over indigenous nations within nation states. Many indigenous organizations that participated in the long negotiations of the Declaration did not give their consent to the final UN versions of the Declaration. The final form of the declaration ignored indigenous self-government, rights to territory, plural citizenship, rights to appeal to international bodies for dispute resolution, and effective rights of informed consent. Instead of protection and articulation of indigenous rights, indigenous peoples are saddled with over 30 unenforceable mandates for nation states to include indigenous peoples as citizens within cultural, legal, and political orders of nation states. Indigenous peoples are willing to work with nation states, but not at the price of losing their indigenous rights to land, self-government, and cultural autonomy. This book provides a detailed analysis and evaluation that shows how nation states and the UN ignored the rights of indigenous peoples when finalizing the Declaration." --Duane Champagne, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, Author of Captured Justice and Professor of Native Studies, UCLA