Introduction

Abstract

On September 13, 2007, the United Nations General Assembly voted to adopt the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a historic development more than two decades in the making. Though its genealogy is complicated, the origins of the Declaration can be traced at least to the 1982 founding of the Working Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP) through the UN Economic and Social Council. The process was, by any measure, a slow one. Even after it was approved by the UN Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities in 1994, twelve more years passed before the then-“Draft” Declaration was adopted by the UN Human Rights Council in June 2006, a step necessary before it could be put before the General Assembly for ratification. In the end, a clear majority of member states voted for adoption of the Declaration. While eleven of those with representatives present for the vote abstained, more noteworthy was the circumstance that the only four votes cast against adoption came from settler states with large Indigenous populations: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. Notwithstanding this, however, the Declaration is widely regarded as a watershed development signaling a qualitative change in the fraught history of relations between Indigenous peoples and states at the global level.