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This introductory chapter presents an outline of the topic of Creole indigeneity in Guyana. Between the myth of great wealth waiting to be discovered in the New World and the nation-states that eventually emerged as expressions or completions of capitalism, offering social rebirth from colonialism, Creoles come to belong, or indigenize. It explores how Creoles and Indigenous Peoples within the postcolonial state came to be subject to different narratives of belonging and forms of citizenship and sovereignty. From here, theory of Creole indigeneity comes to play, suggesting that modern Caribbean history and discourse are driven dialectically not only by external forms of conflict or even internal conflict between majority groups but are also driven by the opposition between settler practices of belonging and indigenous ones, and the ways in which they reproduce the conflict between labor and capital, and between idealist and materialist critical practices and cultural forms of expression.

This chapter focuses on the complexities that emerge in the system of global governance following the acceptance that indigenous peoples are ‘peoples’ with a right to self-government through (indigenous) law. The chapter proceeds as follows. It first provides an overview of the adoption of the UN Declaration and its status in international law, before examining the provisions on shared government and self-government. The Declaration reflects a condition of legal pluralism, and the chapter examines the meaning of the idea before considering its relevance beyond the state. It concludes on the need for a distinction to be made between normative pluralism and legal pluralism, and in doing so, develops a concept of law that applies to state law, international law, and the laws of indigenous peoples. The chapter then returns to the question of the conflict of law norms in conditions of global legal pluralism, complexity, uncertainty, and reasonable disagreement. It argues that legal orders should approach the question of the conflicts of laws from the perspective of democratic legitimacy. It questions whether it is appropriate to apply this ‘meta-perspective’ to the position of indigenous peoples, and concludes with a number of observations on the right of political participation for persons belonging to indigenous peoples in the fragmented system of global governance.

This chapter explores the development of international law on indigeneity. It reviews the legal protections endowed by key documents, such as International Labor Organizations Convention No. 169 and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The chapter also provides a short comparative legal perspective on land rights of indigenous peoples which helps to situate the Israeli case within other settler colonial situations and to address the status of the relevant international legislation and norms. It concludes that several components of the UNDRIP have gained a status of international customary law, and hence with growing relevance to Israeli jurisprudence and to the Bedouins. The chapter ends by addressing the question of indigenous peoples’ rights in Israeli law and how Israeli basic laws should expand to incorporate the legal protection of the Bedouins.

Ch. 8 argued for combining a rather restrained, justice‐based view of the unilateral right to secede, the Remedial Right Only Theory, with a much more supportive stance toward forms of self‐determination within the state: various forms of intrastate autonomy. This chapter argues that the international legal order ought to acknowledge the importance of self‐determination by supporting intrastate autonomy, and also suggests that, apart from the role that international law should play, individual states should generally give serious consideration to proposals for intrastate autonomy. The chapter first makes the case for including in the domain of transnational justice the monitoring and enforcement of intrastate autonomy regimes under certain rather exceptional circumstances, and then, in the last section, suggests that even where principles of transnational justice do not require it, there are cases in which the international community might play a constructive role by providing diplomatic support and economic inducements or pressure to encourage the creation and well‐functioning of intrastate autonomy regimes. The five sections of the chapter are: I. Intrastate Autonomy and Transnational Justice; II. Indigenous Peoples’ Rights; III. Justifications for Intrastate Autonomy for Indigenous Peoples; IV. Basic Individual Human Rights as Limits on Intrastate Autonomy; and V. International Support for Intrastate Autonomy: Beyond the Requirements of Transnational Justice.

The chapter seeks to answer the question: are the Bedouins an indigenous people? It first addresses the positions of the Israeli state as well as a group of Israeli scholars who deny the indigeneity of the Bedouins and cling to anachronistic concepts and definitions concerning indigeneity. The chapter then demonstrates that contrary to Israel’s position, the Negev Bedouins correspond to current international standard characterizations and experiences of indigenous peoples. It relates to international debates and discussions over the definition of indigenous peoples with special focus on the various transformations of the internally-accepted definition of indigeneity and its application to the Palestinians in general, and the Negev Bedouins in particular.

This chapter presents a theoretical framework of Creole indigeneity, arguing that the concept is a way of recovering the excess or remainder of history and identity that shapes both social formations in the postcolonial state and Caribbean intellectual production. It lays the groundwork for the discussion of the topic of the rescripting of indigeneity as a socio-discursive and politico-economic phenomenon. Two arguments seem to represent Creole belonging, both of which engaged regimes of labor that necessarily displace Indigenous Peoples: first in terms of not or no longer being African proposed by Sylvia Wynter, and second, in terms of a relationship to the New World that is an indigenous one, a notion by Richard Burton. It brings focus on how and where in the critical literature being and becoming Creole is elaborated as an indigenizing process.

This chapter analyses how indigenous peoples have used soft law in their efforts to put an end to historically rooted patterns of subjugation, dispossession, and cultural assimilation. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), adopted in 2007 by the UN General Assembly, represents the culmination of a long and difficult journey, in which indigenous peoples themselves and their representatives have been the driving force and key participants. Many of the provisions enshrined in the Declaration simply reaffirm existing customary rules of international law, while others point to future developments. Irrespective of the uncertain legal nature of the UNDRIP, they have thus become an unavoidable parameter of reference when implementing indigenous peoples’ rights.

This chapter analyzes the myth of El Dorado “located” in Guyana as a founding myth for social formation in the Caribbean region, and as part of a discursive framework for cultural and political articulations of Caribbean modernity. By examining colonial and contemporary reinscriptions of the myth, the chapter seeks to understand how Caribbean subjects are represented within plantation social hierarchy and labor similar to Caliban, while simultaneously being fitted into and refashioning the discursive structure of the myth to suit their own needs. The myth works by encoding consquistadorial attitudes that first managed the difference of Indigenous Peoples in a way that remains productive for postcoloniality, and allows for representation of the land as no longer existing for the sake of God or for the colonizer, but, according to Wynter, propter nos or for the sake of the Creole.

This concluding chapter suggests a significant shift in Caribbean studies, stressing the need to go beyond Caliban and the metaphysics of modern labor. What is at stake in the ability to stop acting out Caliban’s role is both indigenous sovereignty and land rights, as well as a rejection of being in terms of capitalism and the continued requirement of master/slave modes of being that cannot account for Amerindian epistemologies. The various modes presented in the book ties the displacement of the narrative and political position of “prior arrival” to the solidification of black and other Creole modes of settler belonging in the New World. It also looks into studies done by others such as Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Kevin Bruyneel who present a “third space of sovereignty”, which is produced when the inherent sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples confronts the special and temporal ways of interpreting that sovereignty within the U.S. political system.

Chapter one sets out the social, economic and political positions of Indigenous peoples within the settler colonial states of Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States, and the various measures of marginalisation. It discusses the over-representation of Indigenous people as victims and offenders in the settler colonial states. The chapter discusses the absence of the concept of colonialism in mainstream criminology. It contextualises the position of Indigenous people within debates around sovereignty and self-determination, and introduces the importance of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

This chapter considers the contemporary implications for Indigenous peoples attempting to both recover and rebuild their nations while simultaneously asserting a political voice that often transcends precolonial national borders. Focused mainly on the Australian case, it also draws comparisons with Indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States in considering the challenges of trying to develop a pan-Indigenous political identity in a colonial/postcolonial nation that has never recognized the borders of Indigenous nations. Implicit in this analysis is an understanding of the deep and wide-ranging diversity of Indigenous life and culture, both within Australia and elsewhere in the world. Despite this diversity, however, the category of indigeneity still functions to denote a political solidarity among colonized peoples, including with regard to their precolonial borders, such as is evident at the United Nations through the development on the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

This chapter discusses Afro-Creole subjectivity in Guyana and the ways in which black postcolonials set terms for an articulation of citizenship by themselves and Indo-Creoles that would constrain Indigenous Peoples. It analyzes the cultural propaganda piece Co-operative Republic Guyana 1970, commissioned and disseminated by the Guyanese government under Forbes Burnham which transformed the economic and political landscape through a socialist program of economic egalitarianism and concentrated on interior affairs, including Indigenous Peoples. The manifesto reveals the political consciousness of the need to integrate Indigenous Peoples into the nation-state as a cultural object, and at the same time mobilizes the poetics of the myth of El Dorado to produce Guyanese nationalism as an inherited right of Afro-Creoles and at the same time create a social template to which all groups seeking power would have to subscribe.

In this chapter, Alvarado provides an overview of the significant achievements and ongoing challenges that indigenous peoples have had in defending their rights in the international arena. In looking at key international cases before the Inter-American Human Rights System and the work of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Alvarado argues that indigenous peoples have succeeded in making indigenous rights issues prominent parts of international and national debates and legal reforms, and in ushering a more favorable international diplomatic discourse on indigenous rights. Challenges persist however, due to limits of enforceability of international human rights standards and the ongoing social, political and economic inequalities that indigenous peoples face in fully realizing their rights.

This chapter explores the use of community radio by Indigenous Peoples in Guatemala as a vital source of self-expression. In the light of the continuing refusal of Guatemalan governments to provide Indigenous communities with legal access to community radio stations, the chapter highlights the use of legal challenges together with the emergence of citizen-based low-power FM stations in order mount pressure for reform. These activities have been complemented by intensive lobbying by local residents for constitutional change and the presentation of a petition that is currently being considered by the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States. The legalization of community radio is a crucial battle for freedom of expression for Indigenous groups and an increasingly salient issue for Guatemalan citizens.

This chapter starts with an examination of the long history of Ainu’s subjugation to mainland Japanese and their quiet acquiescence until the 1970s, when the Hokkaido Utari Association began to engage in international exchange. The international experiences from the 1970s gradually transformed Ainu leaders’ movement actorhood, leading to much more assertive collective mobilization by Ainu that leveraged international human rights forums with help from transnational activists. Their international activities exerted significant pressures on the Japanese government, prompting legislation of new laws to protect and promote Ainu culture and an official recognition of Ainu as an indigenous people. Ainu activists also contributed to the consolidation and expansion of international human and indigenous rights forums, legitimating the issue of indigenous rights outside typical settler colonies such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, and bringing in some resources to international indigenous forums.

This chapter points out that although the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) is an important milestone, its adoption was also opposed by four important countries: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. Looking through these countries’ positions and motives for opposing the UNDRIP, the author argues that commitment to a soft law instrument may involve a more complex decision-making process than conventional human rights theory suggests, at least for the states parties involved. The chapter shows that the four opposing states’ declarations directly map onto the potential developments foreseen for a soft law instrument, as each state voiced clear objections to all potential avenues through which the UNDRIP could follow the lead of the previous ‘hardening’ of provisions in soft law instruments. Such ‘hardening’ may undermine the perceived benefits of soft law instruments in terms of their flexibility and adaptability.

This introductory chapter examines the passing of a resolution recognizing Ainu as “Indigenous to the northern part of the Japanese archipelago, and especially Hokkaido.” This legislative triumph was tempered by conditions attached to Japan's 2007 signing of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Firstly, it was made clear that the Japanese government took an exceptionalist position to international discourse by stating that what the international community regarded as “Indigenous” did not apply in Japan. Secondly, in a 2009 report drafted by a panel of experts charged with assessing the resolution, questions such as colonial history, Hokkaido settlement, and Ainu identity were carefully framed to sidestep calls for decolonization or recommendations for constitutional reform.

Chapter 6 scrutinizes the spaces opened up and constraints imposed by state-sponsored (neoliberal) multiculturalism in post-dictatorship Chile. Focusing mainly on the government of the third Concertación president, Ricardo Lagos (2000-2006), it explores the processes via which competing historical truths of internal colonialism have been constructed and disseminated. Joanna Crow examines the procedures and protagonists involved in and the final reports produced by the Commission for Historical Truth and New Treatment of Indigenous Peoples (2001-3). Crow investigates the narratives constructed by Mapuche newspaper Azkintuwe, the poetic verses of David Aniñir, and a controversial collection of essays by Mapuche historians and sociologists titled ¡Escucha, winka…! Finally, Crow explores the endeavors of two Mapuche poets, Leonel Lienlaf and César Millahueique, to revise dominant ideas about history and memory from within regional state museums and the National Monuments Council.