Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s column, “Moving from Sovereignty to Autonomy,” is troubling on a number of levels. She advocates that we use the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to achieve “autonomy” within the context of what she terms the “multinational state.” Unfortunately, her article lacks semantic depth and critical analysis, and serves to undermine the foundation of the movement by our Original Nations and Peoples of Great Turtle Island to liberate ourselves from established patterns of domination on the basis of true self-determination.

One problem is Gilio-Whitaker’s uncritical usage of the English language. That, along with failure to address the linguistic patterns of domination and subordination endemic to U.S. federal Indian law and policy, and international law, prevent readers from understanding the stakes and the importance of current international debates about the rights of peoples termed “indigenous.”

Current international working definitions reveal that “indigenous” in that context means “dominated peoples” and “peoples under dominance.” One definition, for example, says that “Indigenous populations are composed of existing descendants of the peoples who inhabited the territory or a country.” Then, “persons of a different culture or ethnic origin arrived from other parts of the world,” “overcame” the peoples living already there, “and, by conquest, settlement or other means, reduced them [those peoples] to a non-dominant or colonial situation.” In other words, the original peoples are considered to have been “reduced” to a predicament of domination. In her article, Gilio-Whitaker fails to make this background explicit.

Another international definition treats the words “indigenous” and “aboriginal” as synonymous. (See UN Centre for Human Rights, “The Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” 1990). The term “aboriginal” traces to “aborigine,” which, according to Webster’s unabridged dictionary, means “an indigenous inhabitant [a single person] of a country: one of the native people as distinguished from an invading or colonizing people.” Thus, peoples termed “Indigenous” or “aboriginal” are contrasted with present day dominating or domination-societies, typically called “states,” which are descended from the invading and colonizing peoples of Western Christendom.