Steven Newcomb: System of dominance thrust on our nations

In the context of the United Nations, the nations and peoples on whom a state of domination (“civilization”) has been imposed are called “indigenous.” When representatives of the original nations of Great Turtle Island traveled to Geneva, Switzerland in 1977, and when the Working Group on Indigenous Populations was first convened in Geneva in 1981 to work on a declaration, the pattern of domination and subjection in international law had not yet been identified as the problem to be solved by liberating colonized nations and peoples that had been forced under a system of domination. At that time, the specific pattern of domination and subjection in U.S. federal Indian law had also not yet been identified as the problem to be solved in the context of the United States and its political and legal system, solved, supposedly, by means of the pattern of domination and subjection in international law that Professor Anghie and Professor Crawford have noted.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, the international language (including international law) that states use in relation to peoples called “indigenous” apparently had not yet been understood as a language system of domination. That language system had not yet been understood as the means used by states to maintain state domination on original nations and peoples. The political language system of domination hides itself behind such neutral sounding expressions as “the law” and “the territorial integrity of the state.” Those phrases are merely euphemisms for a state’s system of domination. Indigenous peoples’ advocates in the 1970s and 80s apparently failed to notice that if the draft UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was written on the basis of the domination language system of states, then the resulting text of the Declaration would, in the name of “human rights,” merely maintain rather than end the imposition of domination on our original nations and peoples. They apparently did not notice that the drafting of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in the context of state domination would result in a document that had been written using the very concepts and categories that serve to constitute and maintain state domination over original nations and peoples.

The U.S. federal Indian law and policy system, as mentioned above, has also been constructed and maintained on the basis of the United States’ language system of domination. The United States government has made clear that it has no interest in ending its domination system called U.S. federal Indian law and policy. It is only interested in maintaining its existing system which it is careful to never acknowledge as a system of domination. Nor does the United States have an interest in using the text of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UN DRIP) as a means of liberating our original nations and peoples of Great Turtle Island from the domination and subjection system that the United States has imposed and continues to impose on our nations.