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One of the ongoing struggles of indigenous people against colonization is to be able to exercise the fundamental right to represent themselves and to speak to the dominant society with their own voices and words, rather than to be spoken of or about. This essay discusses the mainstream academic peer review process and the suppression of indigenous standpoints by the dominant culture. The essay goes on to analyze the ways in which one mainstream international academic journal accepted and contained the expression of an indigenous standpoint by then inviting a response from a mainstream scholar who largely delegitimized the indigenous voice, at which point the inquiry ended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous peoples throughout the world are experiencing the full presence of injustice in the form of duplicitous development schemes, poverty, landlessness, dispossession, political and religious oppression, and genocide. They resist the injustices, yet resistance is only part of the struggle. Protests, social movements, and organizations such as the Indigenous Environmental Network engage in similar struggles against injustice and for nature. A crucial feature of indigenous peoples is their substantive reliance on the interrelatedness of nature. Today's call for, and acceptance of, global diversity is limited when it is built within the constraints of modern nation-states, which often view diversity as deviance if it does not conform to modern norms and definitions. Traditional indigenous knowledge can provide some inclusive approaches to current environment problems and critical ideas on how to improve our questions to create more equitable, less oppressive structures from which to approach the numerous crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews discussions and case studies of indigenous peoples, especially American Indians (Lakota, Navajo, and Wampanoag), the Zapatista movement, Latin American examples (Mapuche, Guarani, and Miskito), the Adevasi in India, and the Maori, adding short sketches of Kurds in the Middle East, Pashtun in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and cases from Africa and southeast Asia to develop a general indigenous model, including social systems of decision making, economic distribution, land tenure system, and community relations. The authors present two such models, one on indigenous revitalization and another on the resistance to state domination and the forces of globalization, especially in respect to neoliberalism, and then the authors make an applied analysis toward indigenous peoples' struggles globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization has created the space for indigenous peoples to seek rights in new and creative ways. This article introduces the relational concept between indigenous peoples and others. Then it defines human rights and identifies three generations of human rights as expressed in doctrine and the protections they provide. After discussing the application of human rights to indigenous peoples, the author examines human rights in two cases: the Native Hawaiian sovereignty movement and the Zapatistas (Maya) movement. In each case she seeks to discover which structure—either the state or international system—offers greater openings for the rights that the indigenous groups seek. To discover the range of rights apportioned to indigenous peoples, the author also looks at several state constitutions in the Americas. The findings suggest that the rights of indigenous peoples are better protected by international doctrine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]