While watching the fraudulently-labeled United Nations World Conference on Indigenous Peoples (HLPM/WCIP) on UN WebTV on September 22-23, I was reminded of the famous quote from Thomas Pynchon: "If they get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." The UN meeting was full of state members who had convinced a fair number of indigenous attendees to ask a multitude of the wrong questions. Unfortunately, whatever questions the indigenous people asked, the answer was always the same: the forces that invaded our homelands are firmly in charge at the UN.

Worse yet, the room at the UN contained indigenous people who attended the meeting from a position of fear, not from the courageous stance that defined the birth of the contemporary international movement for indigenous peoples' rights forty years ago. The indigenous spectators seemed to be attending because of insecurity that they were going to be left out of something big. They weren’t sure what, but they weren’t going to miss it. They refused to assert their most fundamental rights, for fear of irritating the UN members -- the very states that invaded our territories, slaughtered our people, and attempted to exterminate our cultures. It was a sorry spectacle, indeed.

The meeting proved to be a predictable success for invader-states of the United Nations. It also marked a retreat from the forty years of international struggle towards indigenous peoples' self-determination that took hold after the 71-day liberation of Wounded Knee in 1973.