American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In December 1991, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously agreed that the International Year for the World's Indigenous People should begin in autumn 1992, with the official theme, "A New Partnership." After the vote, a spokesman for the Caribbean countries expressed his regret that the General Assembly had avoided an explicit condemnation of "the 500-year history of the collision between explorers and indigenous peoples" and his hope that the indigenous peoples of Amazonia and the Arctic would "exercise increasing controls over their vast ancestral homeland." What does the United Nations mean by a "new partnership," and what can the United Nations do concretely to improve the conditions in which most of the world's indigenous peoples currently live? THE UNITED NATIONS AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES The issue of indigenous peoples has been with the United Nations since 1948, when the Soviet Union unsuccessfully called for a study of indigenous conditions in the Americas. Barely ten years later, such a study was in fact prepared by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) at the request of a number of Andean countries that expressed concern at the growing numbers of unemployed Indians in that region's cities. Latin America was facing a land problem, not a labor problem, the ILO concluded. In 1959, with Latin American leadership, the ILO adopted a "Convention on Indigenous and Tribal Populations" (no. 107), which was eventually ratified by twenty-seven governments. In keeping with the prejudices of its time, convention no. 107 aimed at the "integration" of indigenous peoples but emphasized that this must be voluntary. In the meantime, the convention recognized indigenous peoples' rights to land ownership and to equality of access to education and service.