Indigenous rights are not simply civil rights extended to an ethnic group but claims of a different order: rights to self-determination, sovereignty, and the land relationships that predate and cannot be absorbed into the legal frameworks that colonialism imposed. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples represents international consensus on these rights that most settler-colonial governments signed while largely failing to implement. Land justice for Indigenous peoples is not only a matter of property transfer but of recognizing that the dispossession was a foundational injustice whose consequences persist and require structural address.
Juana