Today, we celebrate several important human rights people and ideas: Indigenous Peoples’ Day, the birthday of refugee advocate Fridtjof Nansen, and the World Day against the Death Penalty.
If you want a reminder of important human rights days, subscribe to my Google calendar.
Today, I’m focusing on Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the work of S. James Anaya, who I write about in Righting Wrongs: 20 human rights heroes around the world. Anaya is part of a long legacy of Indigenous advocates who have taken up the centuries-old work of these rights.
When I was researching my book, I had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Anaya by telephone. He was just finishing his tenure as Dean of the Law School at the University of Colorado-Boulder. If I hadn’t known, I couldn’t have guessed that he was quite busy. With me, he was engaged and generous with his time (and quite patient with some of my less-than-informed questions).
Anaya didn’t begin to explore his own Indigenous identity until he was a law student. His heritage is Apache; Purépecha, from the highlands of Mexico’s Michoacán state; and Mexican.
Anaya’s parents’ professions—his father was a US Marine, then Baptist preacher, and his mother was a teacher—meant that he spent his childhood mostly away from where his extended family lived in the tiny town of Central, New Mexico.
“I only thought about my identity when I was discriminated against, when people would call me things.”
Like many from the American Southwest, he has deep roots on both sides of the US-Mexico border as well as in Indigenous, Mexican, and white culture. He also inherited a legacy that combines the violence of the extermination of Indigenous people with fierce histories of resistance and resurgence. “The history of European colonialism and empire building created scars that are still felt today,” he told me.
At Harvard Law School, his family history inspired him to learn to use the law to help Indigenous people. One of the figures he learned about was Deskaheh, the Haudenosaunee confederation chief who traveled to Geneva in 1923 to address the League of Nations, the short-lived precursor to the United Nations (Deskaheh may even have crossed paths with today’s other birthday celebrant, Fridtjof Nansen). To travel, Deskaheh carried a passport issued by his people, not Canada.
Deskaheh believed he could use international diplomacy and the law to defend Indigenous people. Also known as the Iroquois, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy stretches from Pennsylvania east and north into modern-day Canada and includes the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca peoples.
Deskaheh argued that the Iroquois were equal to other nations and had the same human, property, civil, and other rights. They rejected being forced to be part of Canada.
“Even though Deskaheh’s efforts did not bear immediate fruit,” Anaya explained, “that same optimism was present in subsequent efforts by Indigenous peoples to appeal to the international community.”
One of Anaya’s first cases as a lawyer was to help restore land rights to a Pueblo tribe. Located in the American southwest, the Pueblo people are among the oldest cultures in North America and comprise over twenty individual, soverign groups, including Acoma, Zuni, and Hopi. “This felt good, helping the tribe to be in control of their lands and their own development,” he explained.
In another case, Anaya helped sue the Albuquerque Journal for flying a news helicopter over a Pueblo feast day ceremony. Feast days are deeply spiritual. Taking pictures of the ceremonies is not permitted. For Anaya, more than any punishment, the lawsuit helped promoted greater awareness of Indigenous autonomy and vibrant culture. “Unless the broader society is sensitized about the concerns of Indigenous peoples and accepts the legitimacy of their recognized rights, it will always be difficult to sustain the enjoyment of those rights.”
Anaya took a position as a law professor to advance knowledge about Indigenous peoples and the issues they face. In the 1970s and 1980s, he joined a group of human rights and Indigenous activists who wanted to use human rights not only to defend rights, but also to stake claims on ancestral lands and culture. Anaya believes that Indigenous peoples have both individual human rights and collective rights to self-determination and land as a matter of international law.
“For Indigenous people, land represents the people in a very fundamental sense.”
An opportunity to defend land rights arose with the Miskito (also Miskitu) community in Nicaragua. Settled along the Atlantic coast of Honduras and Nicaragua, the Miskito are Indigenous mixed with European, African, and Asian immigrants. In the 1980s, a brutal civil war enveloped the region.
In Nicaragua, the rebel group called the Sandinista National Liberation Front, or Sandinistas, won. But many Miskito rejected the Sandinista opinion that Indigenous identity was a relic to be swept away in the interests of building working-class solidarity. Believing that they would be wiped out, some Miskito allied with US-backed counter-rebels, the Contra. The Sandinistas retaliated by attempting to force out the Miskitos.
In 1996, Anaya helped broker a peace agreement that included the Nicaraguan government’s recognition of Indigenous rights. But that didn’t fully resolve the question of rights for other Indigenous peoples. A year earlier, the Mayagna Indigenous Community of Awas Tingni, also on Nicaragua’s eastern coast, filed a lawsuit to block the government from allowing a foreign company to log their ancestral land. The Mayagna see themselves as the protectors of some of the last surviving primary rainforest in Central America, an area more biodiverse than the US, Canada, and Mexico combined.
Although the Nicaraguan Constitution recognized the right of Indigenous communities to their lands, the government did little to protect those rights. When that lawsuit failed nationally, Anaya and the Awas Tingni presented a petition before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The Commission chooses which cases to bring before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which resolves legal disputes involving countries that are members of the Organization of American States.
The case was the first Indigenous land dispute to be addressed by this court. In 2001, the Court decided in favor of the Awas Tingni, the first time in history Indigenous land rights had been upheld as a matter of international law.
The court declared that “for Indigenous communities the relationship with the land is not merely a question of possession and production, but it is also a material and spiritual element which they should fully enjoy, as well as a means to preserve their cultural heritage and pass it onto future generations.”
The court ordered the government to recognize Awas Tingni lands and establish legal mechanisms to do the same with other Indigenous communities in Nicaragua. But for Indigenous people around the world, the decision was a landmark, recognizing some of what Deskaheh had argued before the League of Nations, that Indigenous people should have a say over their homes.
Anaya points out that the people of Awas Tingni didn’t set out to “forge an international legal precedent with implications for Indigenous peoples throughout the world.” Yet that’s what they did, compelling governments to defend their rights.
Anaya also worked for a new international rights declaration on behalf of Indigenous people. In 2007, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples passed with 143 member states in favor.
In 2008, Anaya began work as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, traveling the world to advocate for Indigenous rights. His advocacy came at an especially important moment. Around the world, Indigenous peoples are on the front line of climate change, after a history of being targeted for removal and exploitation. In areas like Nicaragua’s Pacific coast, water levels are rising. On Navajo lands in the American Southwest, severe drought has reduced the availability of drinking and irrigation water.
Yet Anaya believes that solutions are possible if people work together.
Remembering Chief Deskaheh, Anaya said, “That same optimism allowed Indigenous peoples, once having gained a foothold in the United Nations, to propose and imagine a day when there would be a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. And that same optimism now helps drive the multiple efforts across the globe in multiple settings to see the rights enshrined in the Declaration made reality in Indigenous peoples’ everyday lives.”
RIGHTING WRONGS NEWS
Thanks to everyone who has left reviews for Righting Wrongs (and for The Bond Trilogy). Thanks to Christina for posting to Goodreads:
If you have a moment, please consider leaving a review on Goodreads or Amazon—and recommending that your local library purchase a copy.
I’m also spending time updating my website and including new lesson plans for middle and high school teachers interested in using the book in class. More on that soon!
Several early readers nominated teachers to get a free copy of the book. All have now been delivered, with my thanks!
OTHER NEWS
If you want reading suggestions for some of my favorite human rights biographies and autobiographies, check out my Bookshop (note: if you purchase from Bookshop, some money goes to independent bookstores and to me).
ALSO: Please make sure you are registered to vote, have a plan to vote, and are encouraging friends, family, colleagues, and anyone else you speak to to VOTE. This election is about so much more than who goes to the state or federal capital. It’s fundamentally about rights: women’s rights, voting rights, the right to our environment, the right to be free of gun violence, the right to ensure that police are not killing people because of their race. VOTE!
RANDOM STUFF
Meet the rescue Rottie I just adopted with my partner (thank you Rottweiler Hearts Rescue). His shelter name was Little Bear. But so many Rottweilers are named BEAR. We thought and thought and thought. We finally ended up being inspired by a favorite character from The Expanse books and Amazon series.
So meet AMOS! I guess they’re both…hairy? Otherwise, Amos the dog is super cuddly and sweet while Amos the character is…not that. I console myself that his middle name is “Rico Suave” since he is incredibly sleek and soft. And they do both have soulful eyes.