From Wounded Knee to the United Nations
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- Published on Wednesday, 30 September 2015 23:00
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1169 .... October 1, 2015
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From Wounded Knee to the United Nations
Rob Albritton interviews Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014) presents a much needed history of the United States as a settler colonial-state from the perspective of Indigenous Peoples. In it she argues: "The form of colonialism that the Indigenous peoples of North America have experienced was modern from the beginning: the expansion of European corporations, backed by government armies, into foreign areas, with subsequent expropriation of lands and resources. Settler colonialism is a genocidal policy. Native nations and communities, while struggling to maintain fundamental values and collectivity, have from the beginning resisted modern colonialism using both defensive and offensive techniques, including the modern forms of armed resistance of... national liberation movements and what now is called terrorism."
She will be participating in a roundtable discussion of this work at York University, Toronto, on October 6 (1:30-3:00pm, Moot Court, Osgoode Hall). Roxanne has combined a distinguished academic career with a long history of involvement in social struggles, both locally and globally. The Bullet recently asked Rob Albritton to interview Roxanne on her involvement in the Indigenous Human Rights movement and, in particular, her involvement in the development of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Rob Albritton (RA): Why at a particular time in your life did you decide to contribute to "The United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples"?
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (RDO): As a graduate student at UCLA in the mid-1960s, I was active in the antiwar movement on campus, as well as in anti-racist/anti-apartheid work. I left graduate school in 1967, with only my dissertation remaining due and devoted five years of full time radical organizing, focused on building an anti-imperialist women's liberation movement. I returned to the dissertation at the time of the Wounded Knee siege, and in its wake volunteered with the Wounded Knee legal defense, then with the International Indian Treaty Council. The historic decade, 1972-1982, marked for me a life-changing involvement in the initiation of the presence of Indigenous representatives at the United Nations and the emergence of international human rights law norms.