Indigenous Rights

Author(s):  
Thomas Duve

Many indigenous peoples now practice their own laws, their own cultural traditions and customs. In doing so, they draw on history, reconstructing their legal pasts, recreating—or even creating—their identities. At the same time, historical research has increasingly pointed out the intense interaction between indigenous peoples and European invaders during colonial period. Thus, it has become clear that many of the so-called ‘indigenous’ or ‘colonial’ legal traditions are more properly seen as hybridizations of indigenous and colonial laws and legal practices. This chapter introduces this historiography and its relevance to law and presents some methodological challenges in writing the history of indigenous rights in Latin America resulting from this fairly recent shift in (legal) historiography.

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 163
Author(s):  
Juan Guillermo Mansilla ◽  
José Rubens Lima Jardilino

This article on the education of indigenous peoples in Latin America is a synthesis of an approximation of studies on the history of Education of indigenous peoples (schooling), taking Brazil and Chile as a case study. It represents an effort of reflection of two researchers of the History of Latin American Education Society (SHELA), who have been studying Indigenous Education or Indigenous School Education in Chile and Brazil, from the theoretical perspective of “coloniality and decoloniality” of indigenous peoples in Latin America. The research is based on a comprehensive-interpretative paradigm, whose method is linked to the type of qualitative historiographic descriptive research considering primary and secondary written sources, complemented with visual data (photographs). The documentary analysis was made from material based on primary written sources, secondary and unobtrusive personal documents. The study included three distinct phases in the process of producing results: 1) a critical review of the data of our previous research, in addition to the bibliographic review of research results regarding the presence of the school in other indigenous cultures of the Americas; 2) capturing and processing of new data; and 3) validation and return of results with the research participants. Content analysis was carried out in order to reveal nuclei of central abstract knowledge, endowed with meaning and significance from the perspective of the producers of the discourse, as well as knowledge expressed concretely in the texts, including their latent contents.


Author(s):  
Soledad Torrecuadrada García-Lozano ◽  
Vladimir Aguilar Castro ◽  
Carlos Grimaldo Lorente

In this chapter, the authors attempt to demonstrate that respect for cultural identity of all human groups should be seen as a fundamental right. Ignoring Collective rights of indigenous peoples, those related to their cultural traditions, generally causes the lack of respect. Thus, knowledge of the cultural manifestations and their origin and meaning (as part of the history of the territories they inhabit) can conquer this respect on a par with its defense. This obviously with comprehensive training aimed to sensitize the general population in the positive assessment it deserves it different. The actions of nation-states governments with strong indigenous population has been characterized, until recently, by a remarkable disregard for indigenous cultures, having as a result the result of which such attitude, today from the non - indigenous perspective indigenous cultural manifestations are reduced to colorful folklore shows, when not seen as backward and primitive traditions. This chapter delves deeply into the legal framework for the protection of collective and cultural rights of indigenous peoples. The authors also attempt to show the weaknesses of the law and how states should act to strengthen them. Proposed article does emphasis on indigenous traditional knowledge and not in a wider debate on the topic of knowledge in general.


2019 ◽  
Vol 118 (4) ◽  
pp. 921-927
Author(s):  
Jeremie Caribou

This essay reveals the true history of my people. It demonstrates our highly developed social, spiritual, and political governance structures. Our use of the water systems underscores the ecological integrity of sustainable development that we fostered for thousands of years. Yet, due to colonization and oppressive policies designed to destroy Indigenous identity, culture, and history, Indigenous knowledge and governing systems have been put in jeopardy. Colonial policies intended to dispossess and oppress First Nations by depriving us from Indigenous lands, controlling all aspects of our lives, which created dependence by limiting Indigenous peoples’ abilities to provide for themselves. Furthermore, these policies had no Indigenous input or representation and were designed to eradicate or eliminate Indigenous rights, titles, and the right to self-determination to easily gain access to Indigenous lands for development and industrialization, such as in the case of the massive hydroelectrical dams that continue to alienate my home community today.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 4-16
Author(s):  
Jay Corwin

The history of the Americas from the colonial period is marked by a large influx of persons from Europe and Africa. Fiction in 20th Century Latin America is marked by ties to the Chronicles and the history of human melding in the Americas, with a natural flow of social and religious syncretism that shapes the unique literary aesthetics of its literatures as may be witnessed in representative authors of genuine merit from different regions of Latin America.


Author(s):  
María del Pilar Blanco ◽  
Joanna Page

The transnational transfers of ideas, technologies, materials, and people that have shaped the history of science in Latin America are marked, as in any region, by asymmetries of power. These are often replicated or even magnified in the narratives we have forged about that history. The journeys to Latin America of some of Europe’s most famous naturalists (Humboldt and Darwin, for example) are often depicted as the heroic overcoming by European science of savage local terrains and ways of life. Those epic explorers are recast, in other narratives, as the forerunners of (neo)colonial exploitation in the history of the ransacking of Latin America’s mineral riches to pay for European imperial ventures, repeated in the often-illegal plundering of the region’s dinosaur fossils to swell museum collections in Europe and North America. In such accounts, Latin America becomes the arena for European adventures, the testing ground for new scientific theories, or the passive victim of colonial profiteering, but rarely a place of innovation. It is certainly the case that over the centuries the flow of natural resources, data, and expertise from Latin America to more developed regions has generally been to the benefit of those regions and has not reduced an imbalance of power that dates back to the colonial period.


2010 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Athanasios Yupsanis

AbstractOn 27 June 1989, by a majority of 328 votes for, one against and 49 abstentions, the International Labour Conference adopted the Convention No. 169 Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries, which came into force on 5 September 1991. Twenty years later, the Convention remains the only modern international legally binding instrument containing a series of novel provisions specifically devoted to the rights of indigenous peoples with a view to recognising, protecting and promoting their distinct identity. Despite its shortcomings and its few ratifications (just 20), the Convention has proved to be a significant departure for the defence and strengthening of indigenous rights at national, regional (especially that of Latin America) and universal level.


IFLA Journal ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 034003522098757
Author(s):  
Edgardo Civallero

There have been library services for indigenous peoples in Latin America since at least the 1980s; they are small-scale, very specific experiences that, until recent times, have been poorly systematized and scarcely discussed. Throughout their brief but intense history – a story that has been replicated in many other countries around the world, from Canada to New Zealand – these services have faced a series of crossroads, contradictions and conflicts that they have not always been able to resolve, from the controversial label ‘indigenous libraries’ to their scope and the categories and methodologies they use. From a first-person perspective (the author was among the first library and information science professionals to work with this topic in Latin America and has been active in the field for the last 20 years), this article briefly reviews the state of affairs in South America, pointing out the main milestones in the history of these services in the region. It identifies some concepts and ideas that require urgent discussion from both a library and information science and interdisciplinary framework, and suggests some paths to explore in the near future.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Bille Larsen

This article explores the relationship between indigenous rights, international standards, and development in Latin America with a specific focus on ILO Convention 169 on the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples and its application in the region. Whereas, on the one hand, democratic change, constitutional reforms and the recognition of indigenous peoples signal the emergence of a new rights era, on the other hand, deep-running inequalities, persistent poverty and development conflicts reveal structural tensions and the ambiguities of recognition. While such ambiguity is often explained as a consequence of poor implementation and compromised rights standards, this article analyses trends in both orthodox and heterodox polities as well as in the international arena in order to draw further attention to how rights regimes are being renegotiated. Rights under this ‘new jungle law’ are no longer characterised by neglect and poor implementation, but through reappropriation, strategic attention and regulatory negotiations, revealing a sliding scale of potentialities between empowerment and normalisation.


Histórica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-175
Author(s):  
Adrián Lerner Patrón

Noble David Cook is a leading historian of the demographic and social history of the Andes and the Atlantic World. In this interview, he discusses the origins of his interest in the histories of Peru, the Andes, and the Iberian Atlantic; the methodological approaches that influenced his work; how he sees the evolution, present and future of the fields of demographic history and Colonial Latin America; the role of the archive in his career; his vital and intellectual links with the city of Sevilla; his collaborations with his wife Alexandra Parma Cook; his long history of engagement with Peruvian scholars; and his perspectives on the current COVID-19 crisis.


Author(s):  
Coralia Gutiérrez Álvarez

Severo Martínez Peláez is the most important figure in the founding of contemporary Guatemalan historiography. His work, in particular La patria del criollo (The Homeland of the Criollo), has been viewed by historians as a starting point for advancing the reconstruction of Central American history. Additionally, his work continues to have a broad readership, who consider it a factor in understanding the present. His contributions are essential to the understanding of the colonial period in Latin America, including debates that inspired his theses concerning the character of society in that period and his historical views on indigenous peoples. Like other thinkers of the 1960s and 1970s, his focus was primarily on economic and social history, in particular class struggles. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the intellectual, political, social, and even personal conditions relevant at the time he was writing in order to thoroughly understand and appreciate his work.


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