Tom Goldtooth, coordinator of the Indigenous Environmental Network, leads an indigenous protest at the UN World Conference Against Racism (September 2001).

Indigenous Rights
Indigenous rights and reparations:
an interview with Alberto Saldamando
by Ethan Flad

Alberto Saldamando (Zapoteca/Chicano) is General Counsel of the International Indian Treaties Council (IITC), an organization founded in 1974 at a gathering of over 5,000 indigenous people from throughout the world. Interviewed in the IITC office in San Francisco's historic Mission District, Saldamando spoke highly of the historic solidarity of the mainline Christian justice and peace workers in the struggle for the sovereignty and self-determination of indigenous peoples. "I have nothing but love and respect for the World Council of Churches," he said, referring especially to the WCC’s Geneva office and the work of Bob Scott and Eugenio Pomo. "They have been long-standing allies, not just recent supporters of our work." At the same time, he mentioned the resistance of some major Christian communities, such as the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America, to indigenous rights. "And increasingly, right-wing evangelicals are even becoming violent" in oppressing indigenous communities, he noted. Much of Saldamando's work deals with getting grassroots indigenous participation into high-level international forums, such as the UN’s Commission for Human Rights.

Ethan Flad: What are the Treaties Council’s priority projects these days?

Alberto Saldamando: We deal with everything, all kinds of human rights. Since last year, we’ve been very active on the right to food and nutrition and other related subjects. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), a subsidiary organ of the UN, named us as the focal NGO (non-governmental organization) for the Indigenous Peoples’ World Food Consultation in Guatemala, where we had indigenous peoples from all over the world coming to discuss the right to food. A few years ago, our work was primarily centered on political rights, resulting in the report we did on torture and the report on arbitrary detentions and disappearances. Our first complaint had to do with arbitrary detention – a case of an Indian who was in prison in Mexico. But since then, we’ve had a broader view of human rights. And essentially, even in questions of development and globalization, we continue to take a human rights perspective. Generally, the position is that you can’t have development that violates human rights. Otherwise, it’s unsustainable by definition.

Ethan Flad: There’s been so much negative reflection on the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, last year by people in the NGO community. I remember being there, with just a couple days left, and attending a big rally that the indigenous people’s caucus held. The caucus wanted to strike out all references in the UN documents to indigenous peoples. Were there any positive aspects for you from the Durban conference?

Alberto Saldamando: I think that on a political level, from the states’ perspective, it was doomed to fail. Because I don’t think that the North – that includes Europe, the U.S., Australia and New Zealand – has any willingness to really grapple with the problem of racism. What killed it, and what was bound to kill it, was what killed the first two world conferences on racism and two [UN] "decades to struggle against racism" – the references to Israel. From an NGO perspective, particularly for a human rights worker, as I am, it’s very difficult to say that condemnation of Israel for its human rights abuses is anti-Semitic. It really is very difficult to swallow. But that’s essentially the position that Europe and the U.S. took: that any condemnation of the state of Israel was anti-Semitism. And that’s essentially the position that the Commissioner on Human Rights was taking.

Ethan Flad: Mary Robinson?

Alberto Saldamando: Right, Robinson’s position was, "Don’t mention any countries. We aren’t going to focus on any one country." The condition of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is even worse now than it was then – there are gross and massive violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention. You can’t ignore it, there’s just massive violations of human rights by Israel. But the position was that if you condemn the state of Israel, you’re automatically an anti-Semite. That was also the politics within the NGO community – there were Jewish NGOs who struggled with the proposition that Israel could do wrong, but there were also Palestinian NGOs and their supporters who felt that the only reason to be there was to beat Israel on the head or beat the Jewish NGOs on the head. And so that kind of politics really played itself out pretty radically.

We were successful, however, in applying a strategy whereby every group could fashion its own portion of the resolution we produced. So indigenous peoples had writers, Afro-descendents had writers, the Romany had writers. It was all their language. The Dalits, for the first time in history, were recognized as an oppressed minority. In their own words they described their own situation. That was the whole objective, to have the victims speak with their own voice. I don’t like the word "victim," you know, but that was what it was about. It was about those most oppressed being able to express that oppression in their own voice, in their own way, the way they saw it themselves. I still don’t think that’s a mistake. I do think that that declaration we produced states what the oppressed feel about racism and how they perceive their oppression, and the solutions they see for it. And so I think it’s a very positive document. However, because of the politics, primarily the politics around Israel, people have generally tended to disregard it.

Ethan Flad: In the mainstream media coverage of the WCAR, in addition to the Palestine/Israel conflict, the other issue that was deemed controversial was reparations, particularly from the U.S. and Global North perspective. How did you see that debate being played out?

Alberto Saldamando: The reparations issue was very controversial because the African states took it up. Certainly, one can describe colonialism in Africa as a massive violation of human rights – continuing to this day, as a matter of fact. Certainly the aftermath of colonialism has not in any way been ameliorated. The data on the condition of African peoples now is worse than it was before, not just with AIDS, but with malnutrition and hunger.

Conversely, the U.S. governmental delegation was actually quite small. I think they intended to walk out even before they went there. So there were various aspects to the problem of reparations that never really got sorted out. Declarations at world conferences are not legally binding, but the U.S. takes them very seriously because they have this very legalistic approach. So their idea is not to propose an ideal. Certainly a world summit on anything should at least pose the broadest aspiration of humankind. Whether or not anybody’s going to listen is another matter. But at least they should say those things; they should say the things that really are the ideal.

The United Kingdom also took that legalistic approach, as did France. And certainly, as colonizing powers, they have a great deal to be ashamed about. I think they saw the African position as an economic threat. If we say on an ideal basis that victims of racism should be compensated, that means we owe Kenya, say, 16 billion dollars and Belgium owes the Congo a trillion dollars for everything that they’ve ripped off. So they took that legalistic position to say, well, wait a minute, let’s let bygones be bygones. Let’s have a forward-looking declaration. Which is what Mary Robinson kept saying.

Our position was, as was probably the position of the African states, you can’t really face the future until you know your past. You can’t pretend the past wasn’t there. Let’s talk about what you did and let’s find out how you’re going to pay for it in blunt terms. That was the issue of reparations that put the kibosh on things. Colonizing powers are not willing to recognize historical injustices and historical exploitations because they don’t want to pay for them now.

Then there was the issue of a state owing reparations to the citizens within it that have suffered, and continue to suffer, racism. That’s another issue. Africa supported those efforts as well. African states may be poor, but they do exert a growing influence in the UN. I think they’re becoming real hip to a lot of things, including the fact that most of their citizens are indigenous, and that there’s a value to preserving those cultures and those languages and those ways of life – that it’s good for people to try to preserve the environment, that there is a value in the forest with animals in it just for its own sake.

Ethan Flad: So you see that happening at the executive level of many of these governments in Africa?

Alberto Saldamando: To a degree. The U.S. entered into the TRIPS agreement (the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights), which requires states under the World Trade Organization (WTO) to adopt their own systems of intellectual property protection. It doesn’t have to be the U.S. model of patents, but it has to be some form of protection. The African states, a couple of years ago, appointed a working group on indigenous peoples for Africa, which is big progress for us. The Organization of African Unity (OAU) wrote model legislation that is supposed to be consistent both with the WTO TRIPS agreement and the UN Convention on Bio-diversity, in which they declare as immoral and illegal the patenting of life forms and in which they provide for the free and informed consent of local communities to bio-prospecting with substantial benefit sharing, if they do agree. But it declares the local and traditional communities to be the owners of the bio-diversity. The OAU asked the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), another subsidiary organization of the UN, to comment on this model legislation. Now the Secretary General of WIPO is pushing African states not to adopt it.

So it does seem to me that African governments are in fact attempting to address the issue of development more and more in keeping with the interests of their own constituents, which does not necessarily mean the generation of dollars, but perhaps looking toward a different form of development. I think that more and more African countries are coming around to the proposition that perhaps their interests do not coincide with developed countries’, and that perhaps they can develop their own systems that more coincide with the interests of their own constituents. So I have a great hope for Africa.

Africans also understand racism at all different levels. One of the primary works on racism is Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, which is a contemporary description of racism that is still very appropriate today.

So right now, different African countries are taking a different view toward indigenous peoples. In some African countries, though, "indigenous" is a bad word. They don’t want to be called indigenous, because that means non-citizen, and somehow that is a bad thing. But there are NGOs beginning to focus more on the preservation of language and traditional culture. Once they start using their languages, and valuing their languages, then they’re valuing that culture’s whole way of looking at the world. I think that’s going to lend a great deal toward indigenous peoples from other parts of the world having more friends. We’re not there yet. But I think that there is a growing influence of indigenous people at the UN.

Ethan Flad: In addition to language, one of the other areas that is a hot topic in Africa, and I would expect would be important for the Treaties Council, is land. Certainly land being returned to peoples is one context of the debate.

Alberto Saldamando: Oh, certainly. There’s also a realization, I think, on the international level, that people providing for their means of subsistence is preferable to having them unemployed and underemployed in an urban area that only requires a greater infrastructure. And that it is possible to be self-sufficient in food on the micro level like that. I’m not aware of any African states adopting land reform as policy, however.

I know land reform is a bigger issue in Asia, particularly in the Malaysian archipelago – in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines. There the cry for land is astounding. Those people are indigenous peoples who have a connection to the land. They’ve been producing their own means of subsistence for thousands of years. India’s the same way. They’ve had small-scale farmers for millennia, producing food. So Asia, I think, is more attuned to land reform on that level. Whether or not they can comply with the demands for land is another matter.

In Latin America, land reform will always be an issue. Indigenous lands are just not recognized. They do have some communal lands still, but for the most part, the land has been privatized.

Reparations, in the context of the World Conference Against Racism, is one issue. I think land reform can be looked at as an independent issue, independent of reparations. And there are national dialogues with regard to what appropriate land reform is. It’s becoming more of an issue as industrialized agriculture takes hold. It’s going to be going to transnational corporations that are more and more going to exploit the hell out of indigenous land, to the detriment of the indigenous peoples there. So the issue of land reform is not exaggerated. Certainly that kind of colonialism still has very deep roots in racism. But I think it’s more and more going to become a strong political struggle. I think maybe that’s one of the difficulties of racism, because in many respects, racism is so tied to economic and social systems, that in order to get at it you’d have to take those systems apart. And I don’t think states are ready for that.

I think the critical distinction, at least under international law, as I see it, is that indigenous peoples have a historical connection to the land. And that historical connection defines their identity as indigenous peoples. The Macaw, for example, in Washington State, their culture is built around whales, whale hunting. The plains people, the Lakota, are buffalo people. The Mayans, the Mexican Indians, are people of the corn. It’s those relationships with means of subsistence and production and the land that produces it. Their sacred sites are there. I mean, the Vatican could be built in south central Los Angeles and it would still be a holy place. But you can’t move Big Mountain.