On August 3, 2014, Dr. Rudy Ryser, Chairman of the Center for World Indigenous Studies, published a response to my recent column “Some Questions Regarding the UN High Level Plenary Meeting.” He said that my column “reflects the view” that “the World Conference is supposed to be a panacea to all of the past wrongs done to Indigenous Peoples.”

Funny, but I have never held such a view and thus it has not been expressed in any of the several articles that I have written about the United Nations High Level Plenary Meeting (U.N. HLPM), including the article to which Dr. Ryser has responded. I have never thought or written in terms of “correcting past wrongs,” which is an impossibility (they’re called “past” for a reason).

Instead, I think and write in terms of efforts to solve the present day problems faced by our nations and peoples. I have never said what the U.N. High Level Plenary Meeting ought to be, let alone that it ought to be a “panacea.”

What I have done for quite some time now with regard to the UN HLPM is raise questions. I have done so ever since first hearing about the HLPM, and finding out that it is not a World Conference, but only “to be known as” one. Dr. Ryser, disregards such nuances by continuing to call the HLPM a “World Conference.” Thus, for example, he claims that I “ask if the World Conference will reverse ‘the domination/subordination framework of U.S. federal Indian law and policy that has been and continues to be used against our originally free nations and peoples?’”