Over the past two weeks, nearly 1,500 indigenous leaders, activists, and representatives from throughout the world have met at the U.N. headquarters in New York City. The Permanent Forum advises and makes recommendations to the U.N. Economic and Social Council regarding economic and social development, environment, health, human rights, culture, and education.
At this session, the forum examined situations faced by indigenous peoples as countries and organizations strive to meet the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDG). Discussion focused on two of the eight MDGs: eradicating extreme poverty and hunger and achieving universal primary education.
Indigenous groups have raised concerns that nations’ attempts to address extreme poverty by 2015, the close of the MDG decade, has resulted in the unintended consequences of hastening the loss of indigenous peoples’ lands and deepening their poverty.
A 1998 Inter-American Development Bank report by Roger Plant found that indigenous peoples as an ethnic group are disproportionately among the poorest of the poor, and that their situation had in fact worsened over the past decade.
"The imposition of so-called development projects and policies without the free, prior and informed consent of those affected … can lead to destruction or loss of ancestral territories and resources, denigration of indigenous worldviews and values and of their political, economic and socio-cultural systems and institutions, ecosystem degradation, displacement, and violent conflicts," writes Victoria Tauli-Corpuz , the newly appointed chairwoman of the Permanent Forum and a Cultural Survival board member, in an expert paper published in advance of the session.
A May 25 U.N. press release said that a representative of the Latin American Caucus noted that lands and water resources were under constant threat in his region, due to mining, privatization, and forestry. Tauli-Corpuz calls this occurrence "development aggression" in which indigenous peoples have suffered rather than benefited from development projects.
Indigenous representatives at the Permanent Forum pressed for governmental recognition of indigenous peoples and their rights to natural resources on their territories, including traditional knowledge, because many development projects intended to bolster the state economy can take the shape of commercial logging, the introduction of chemical-intensive agriculture, or industrial forest plantations.
Vietnam is one of the few countries on track to meet the MDG to eliminate extreme poverty, but its work has come at the expense of indigenous populations. Tauli-Corpuz cites research conducted by Yale anthropologist Pamela McElwee that "most indigenous groups [in Vietnam] suffer from disease, lack of clean water, and have low literacy and income rates."
Indigenous leaders at the forum emphasized that state efforts to achieve universal primary education must include indigenous peoples’ worldviews and should at least be available in indigenous languages for the first three years.
When addressing the Permanent Forum on May 19, U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Deputy Executive Director Rima Salah said studies have proven that education conducted in children’s mother tongue allowed them to learn more quickly and transfer skills to another language.
A representative of the North America Caucus described indigenous languages as key resources for knowledge, and as instruments for passing on traditional knowledge to indigenous children. But she also noted that over 70 percent of indigenous languages are only spoken by the grandparent generation in North America.
Because of the urgency of language loss, indigenous language preservation advocate and Cultural Survival Program Council member Richard Grounds pressed for consideration of an International Year of the World’s Indigenous Languages in 2006 or 2007.
In the final days of the session, the Permanent Forum discussed the provisional agenda for its fifth session in 2006 and chose a theme focusing on redefining the MDGs with particular attention to development and indigenous consultation and on cross-cutting approaches to the MDGs’ implementation and monitoring.
