INDIGENOUS RIGHTS AS A WEAPON OF IMPERIALISM

Baile de los Viejitos in Morelia, photo Genaro Servín

---

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.

indigeneity becomes a way of talking about class without using the word “class.”

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 and indigeneity can be used not only to protect the rights of indigenous people and advocate for them, but to sabotage intersectionality and broader social solidarity and to serve as a useful geopolitical weapon.

When the United States was taking Mexican land in the 19th century, it used the conceit that, by being mixed-race, Mexicans were no longer properly indigenous. This imperialist argument claimed that Mexicans were not native to Mexico because they were partly European.

---

This was a deliberate legal and philosophical manoeuvre—a delegitimization of Mexican sovereignty and a legitimisation of US territorial expansion. The USA also used a logic of racial inferiority. To some extent, the U.S. recognised the rights of the indigenous people to the land it took from them. But because the Mexicans were mestizos, the racist European settlers pretended they were not the original inhabitants or a “First Nation.” They were labelled as hybrids and portrayed as people occupying a land they had no legitimate title to.

This allowed the U.S. to dismiss Mexican sovereignty as illegitimate and frame the 50% of Mexican territory the US acquired or conquered as terra nullius—empty land. This narrative persists today: the idea that authentic indigeneity requires racial purity and cultural isolation, disqualifying a huge number of people in the Americas of being of indigenous descent. This is despite the fact that most of their DNA is indigenous and their culture is syncretic with indigenous cultures.

---

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 from the very 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, indigeneity becomes a projection of the bad conscience of European colonialism 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.

---

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.

When taken to a logical conclusion, the whole concept of indigeneity becomes ridiculous. Definitions for it suggest that there are only approximately 400 million indigenous people in the world. That would mean the other 6.5 billion people on Earth are not indigenous to it. Or are the 6.5 billion all colonisers?

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.

---

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, 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; it is a social construct, not a reflection of their genes.

Yet, political and national identity and belonging to a modern state combine 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, living in Mexico City, and enjoying both aspects of their identity. Their mother is from Oaxaca, their father from Morelia, but they are also proud of Mexico’s overall national identity, which, in turn, celebrates its indigenous cultures and origins.

According to the academics and guardians of the concept of indigeneity in the imperial metropolis, however, this person no longer qualifies as indigenous because they have identified with a nation and not an impoverished rural community.

Indigeneity is also very much linked to questions of rural existence and poverty. 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.”

---

Despite the fact that it is enshrined in the UN Charter and has been defined by the ILO. Indigeneity is 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 narrower focus, separating out the struggle of indigenous communities from, say, the struggle of a poor rural peasant with a stronger racial mixing, or 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, or the actions of imperialism and more to do with your identity. You are being persecuted by the majority in your country because of your identity and so you shouldn’t make common cause with them or fight for change together at a national level. Rather, the suggestion is, you should fight for your indigenous rights (should you qualify to exercise them). You should fight the corner for your own community against the majority — perhaps with the help of a few million dollars from NED.

---

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’.