INDIGENOUS RIGHTS AS A WEAPON OF IMPERIALISM

Baile de los Viejitos in Morelia, photo Genaro Servín

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by RICHARD STEINHARDT

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) supports land rights, self-determination, autonomy, self-government, the protection of indigenous culture and intellectual property and the control of their own cultural heritage by indigenous people. Like the ILO statement, however, it is more equivocal when it comes to the rights to resource extraction and control of resource extraction by indigenous people and stresses only that indigenous people need to be consulted. Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand are the only countries who oppose the slightly more strongly worded ILO convention on indigenous people’s rights.

When it comes to the oppressed First People’s living in the USA, Canada, Australia and Canada in particular, we can understand and support UNDRIP. They have suffered terribly and in most cases experienced forms of genocide and erasure.

However, the question of indigenous rights can become a double-edged sword. Definitions orchestrated from the metropolis concerning indigeneity work to help create geopolitical weapons to be used by CIA front organisations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) supporting indigenous groups globally: Kurds, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Chechens, Chiapanecos with a view to subversion and destabilisation. Targeted support for narrowly defined indigenous groups who often have legitimate grievances is the most useful tool for imperial powers like the USA who seek to control and ‘acquire’ resources or gain strategic advantage.

The United States took 50% of Mexican land in the 19th century. Part of the ideological rationale behind the this theft was that Mexicans were mixed-race, ergo Mexicans were no longer properly indigenous. This was a deliberate legal and philosophical manoeuvre; a way to delegitimise Mexican sovereignty and legitimise US territorial expansion. The European settler state of the USA insinuated that Mexicans were not actually ‘native’ to Mexico because by the 19th century the majority of Mexicans were also partly European and the difference between mestizos and indigenous people were exaggerated out of all proportion.

The USA did use the logic of racial inferiority. However, internally, the U.S.A. implicitly recognised the rights of people they defined as indigenous to the land by making treaties with them. But because most Mexicans were mestizos, the racist European settler state could pretended that mestizos were not the ‘original’ inhabitants, or the “First Peoples”. Mestizos were labelled as ‘hybrids’ in a vile social Darwinian discourse. Mexicans were portrayed in the USA as mongrel usurpers occupying a land they had no legitimate title to. So the USA could take it.

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Thus the insinuation was the 50% of Mexican territory the US acquired or conquered was conquered from Spanish conquerors. The argument is still used disingenuously today. In the 19th century because the mestizos were regarded as strange variety of infra-human with no prior claim, the land the USA stole was a kind of terra nullius, or empty land.

This narrative persists today: the idea touted around is that that authentic indigeneity requires racial purity and cultural isolation: an ‘uncontaminated’ people. And so a huge number of people in the Americas, with mestizo heritage find that indigenous rights groups actively attempt to delegitimise mestizo claims to indigeneity and descent. This, despite the fact that often mestizo DNA is primarily indigenous (typically 60-90%) and mestizo culture, though it may often be Christian, is syncretic with indigenous culture. Though the mestizo may not live in a village in Chiapas, but in a town or city. Of course this means that a Mexican mestizo then finds themself shoved into the same category of colonialism as the descendent of a genocidal European.

Disturbingly, the argument for the protection of ‘pure’ indigeneity is touted most strongly by self-described social progressives living in the metropolitan capitalist countries.

Even more ridiculous. The moment a peasant from Oaxaca with full indigenous credentials comes to Mexico City, marries someone and becomes a taxi driver, miraculously he ceases to qualify for protection because now he is no longer ‘pure’ enough to qualify as autochthonous.

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In the academic centres of the metropolitan world, indigeneity is defined by historical continuity, strong links to territories, distinct social/economic/political systems, distinct language and culture, and self-identification. In other words, these conceptualisations of indigeneity contain the seed elements of conflict. Taken to an extreme, the right to self-determination can be used to fragment the larger nation that indigenous communities exist within, making the concept of indigeneity a key tool for imperial geopolitical stratagems. The more indigenous groups the more the opportunities for manipulation and control through subterfuge.

These definitions originate not from the indigenous people themselves, but are orchestrated by the very same people responsible for the genocide of indigenous peoples in places like Canada, the USA, Australia and new Zealand. The persecuted are the ones who defined the people they persecuted through their oppression, and now iterations of the same people centuries later advocate for indigenous rights. Thus, definitions of indigeneity become formulations and the bad conscience of European colonialism is projected out onto the entire world.

It is no coincidence that the United Nations pushed strongly for indigenous rights in 2007, at the apogee of U.S. hegemonic power. Imperialism, formerly British, now American, uses the groups it selects (and sometimes even manufactures) to break up the polity and unity of the nations it opposes.

For example the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), long suspected of being a front (in part) for the CIA, supports a wide range of indigenous groups globally whether it is the Kurds in Iraq or Iran, the Uyghurs or Tibetans in China, the Chechens in the Russian Federation or the Chiapanecos in Mexico.

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The most useful tool for an imperial power that wants to destroy the sovereignty of a nation in order to interfere, manipulate, gain a strategic advantage, or control a country’s resources is the targeted support for an indigenous groups who have legitimate grievances. The money and resources supplied by imperial regime-change engines like NED focus on conserving and preserving indigenous identities in opposition to national sovereignty.

The whole concept of indigeneity becomes ridiculous when it is suggested only 400 million people on Earth are indigenous. Are the other 8 billion aliens? Human beings are not made up of species, some of which are endangered. What kind of racist, Darwinian discourse is that?

One could argue that the UN concept was developed for advocacy and protection of indigenous people, but it is certainly a double-edged sword. It is not true to say that the majority of humanity belongs to a deracinated, globalised, non-indigenous mass. The majority of people in every European country are indigenous to that country; the Han Chinese are indigenous to large parts of China, and the Sikh people are indigenous to the Punjab. We are all from planet Earth; no one of us is from another solar system. The most “alien” of all are the colonisers, but how many of them are there? In the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand they number roughly 302 million.

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The definition is also ridiculous because of inconsistencies; under the standard definition of indigeneity, a Mayan person in Chiapas who speaks a Mayan language would be considered indigenous, but a Spanish-speaking mestizo in Mexico City would not be considered indigenous, even if that mestizo had 80% or even 100% indigenous DNA. Imagine a Mexican person from two different indigenous cultures, say Purépecha and Mixtec. Would they be less indigenous because they are a mixture of two indigenous cultures? And if you added one drop of Spanish ancestry, would that Purépecha-Mixtec person suddenly lose the right to be labelled indigenous?

In Mexico, less than one percent of the population can be considered white European. For white Mexicans mixing (mestizaje) is inevitable in one or two generations. The vast majority of those socially considered white in Mexico carry indigenous DNA; ‘whiteness’ in Mexico is a social construct, not a reflection of genes.

Yet, political and national identity and belonging to a modern state combine the elements of an indigenous identity. The Mexican state celebrates and reaffirms pre-Hispanic cultures and subsidises many aspects of those cultures. So that same Mexican can be proud of both their Purépecha and Mixtec origins, live in Mexico City, and enjoy both aspects of their identity. Their mother is from Oaxaca, their father from Morelia, but they are also proud Mexicans who participate in an overall national identity, which, in turn, celebrates its indigenous cultures and origins.

Indigeneity as it is defined in the metropoli of capitalism is very much linked to questions of rural existence and poverty painted in prelapsarian tones. The poorest people are often less mobile and have the strongest regional accents. Therefore, indigeneity becomes a way of talking about class without using the word “class”.

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Despite the fact that it is enshrined in the UN Charter and has been defined by the ILO, indigeneity is, in fact, a prelapsarian and patronising framing of identity sponsored by the metropolis. It is static, rooted, and doesn’t allow for evolution. It is a romanticisation of rural poverty and the preservation of traditions.

This framework of indigeneity channels claims for economic redistribution, solidarity, and development into a narrow focus, separating out the struggle of indigenous communities from, say, the struggle of a poor rural peasant with a stronger racial mixing, or the struggle of an urban mestizo working in an office or a factory. An indigenous person who moves to Mexico City or Los Angeles and becomes an engineer is no less indigenous than one who shapes beautiful clay figures, beats out copperware, and lives in a hut with no electricity.

As capitalism bestrides the world, the neoliberal framework tries to convince you that it works and that the reason you are poor and exploited is less to do with exploitation under capitalism, and more to do with your identity and competition with other groups. The framing is: ‘You are being persecuted by the majority in your country because of your identity, so you shouldn’t make common cause with the majority or fight for change together at a national level. Rather, the suggestion is, you should fight for your own indigenous community rights. You should fight the corner for your own community against the majority, perhaps with the help of a few million dollars from the NED.

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Richard Steinhardt is a committed socialist and a radical humanist and has published in the Morning Star and a variety of other communist and socialist publications. He believes that human conscience and understanding should always precede dogma and deterministic formulas posturing as ‘social science’.