31.1 (Spring 2007) Passing the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

If you look at Rick Bartow’s artwork you might assume that he is a highly trained, lifelong artist. Certainly his résumé supports that notion. His paintings, drawings, and sculpture are in the collections of a half-dozen museums around the world, including the National Museum of the American Indian, as well as corporate headquarters, upscale stores, and universities from Arizona to Tokyo. They are also featured in 22 books. He’s been profiled in dozens of magazines, and his list of solo and group exhibitions fills five tightly spaced pages.

Among the states of the United Nations, the ones that have concerns about the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples tend to focus on three elements: the lack of a definition of “indigenous,” land rights, and the concept of self-determination. For those states, these elements seem to threaten economic and political chaos on several fronts. But that is largely because states do not entirely understand what it is indigenous peoples are seeking.

Police documents printed on onionskin crinkle audibly with the rise and fall of my uncle’s breath. His eyes rove over the documents produced on an archaic typewriter with a wild menagerie of Vietnamese punctuation—squiggles, dots, and tiny circles—scrawled in by hand. We are in a one-story, doorless box that serves as the local police station of a hamlet in the lush coffee-plantation region of Vietnam’s Central Highlands.

As we Americans come to terms with the fact that our vast consumption of fossil fuels is fueling vast changes on our planet, indigenous peoples who live in those marginal places are facing climatic reordering of their very existence. Peoples accustomed to some relief from arid conditions now find themselves living in a permanent desert. Peoples accustomed to predictable rainfall find their homes and crops inundated by floodwaters.