Indigenous Peoples, World Heritage, and Human RightsIndigenous peoples’ emphasis on protecting their cultural heritage (including land) through a human rights-based approach reveals the synergies and conflicts between the World Heritage Convention and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). This article focuses on how their insistence on the right to participate effectively in decision-making and centrality of free, prior, and informed consent as defined in the UNDRIP exposes the limitations of existing United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and World Heritage Convention processes effecting Indigenous peoples, cultures, and territories and how these shortcomings can be addressed. By tracking the evolution of the UNDRIP and the World Heritage Convention from their drafting and adoption to their implementation, it examines how the realization of Indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination concerning cultural heritage is challenging international law to become more internally consistent in its interpretation and application and international organizations to operate in accordance with their constitutive instruments.
We Are Here: Powwow and Higher Education in North CarolinaAt 7:00 a.m., the first students arrive at the gym. Sleepy but excited, they begin setting up, making sure there are chairs for dancers and tables for vendors, organizations, and T-shirts. Finally, it’s powwow weekend. It will be hours until the singers and dancers show up, but the vendors are already here, having left home early in the morning to sell their jewelry, leather-work, and shawls. Warm-ups and grand entry are about to begin, and these are the last quiet moments before conversations, drums, jingles, and singing announce to the campus community: this is us. We are here. For Native students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, powwow is one of the most important events of the year. It serves as both a teaching tool and a community gathering space for Native youth who often feel overlooked at a predominantly white institution (PWI). Powwows are a safe space full of laughter, community, food, music, dancing, and pride, created by and for a Native student body that is comprised of individuals from diverse tribal communities. These events provide a time for the campus to see Native students and know that they are vital to Carolina.
"Guardians of the Indian Image": Controlling Representations of Indigenous Cultures in TelevisionThis study enhances existing scholarship on Indigenous media and activism by documenting the strategies Native organizations have historically used to challenge misrepresentation in television. Focusing specifically on the efforts of the National Congress of American Indians, the National Indian Youth Council, and the Native American Public Broadcasting Consortium, this article demonstrates that control of televisual images is a political struggle in which Indigenous activists have repeatedly asserted self-determination through confrontation and collaboration with governing institutions. Historical news sources, organizational reports, legal proceedings, and interviews reveal the motivations for and consistency with which Indigenous activists have attempted to seize control of mediated images. Since the 1960s, Native advocacy groups have initiated petitions, boycotts, and lawsuits to hold lawmakers and federal agencies accountable for misrepresentation. In doing so, these organizations have relied on Indigenous peoples and resources outside of the media industry, including intertribal and interethnic coalitions that supported the broader Red Power movement. Ultimately, these activists have created opportunities for Native peoples to re-present meaningful images of themselves in television. This history of organized resistance to racism in television offers important lessons to activists engaged in the ongoing battle against popular stereotypes and cultural imperialism.
Australian Blackness, the African Diaspora and Afro/Indigenous Connections in the Global SouthTHE CONTINENT OF Australia remains the ancestral homeland for one of the world's oldest living and continuing black civilizations, with lines of connection that spread out to the rest of the global black world. There are long histories of African/Indigenous relationships both within and outside of Australia. The black bi-cultural landscape of Australia is a rich confetti of many black embodied/identifying people; including first and second generation continental Africans, African Americans, Black Brits, Haitians, people of Afro-Caribbean and Aboriginal descent, Pacific and Pasifika Islanders. Blackness in the global south is also embodied across the black Pacific Melanesian, Polynesian, Micronesian, all of whom are our relations from neighboring islands such as the Torres Straits, Vanuatu, Tonga, Fiji, Tokelauan's, South Sea Islanders, Papuan and Maori to name a few. Each of their experiences of blackness have shared spheres of influence, and often a historical connection to the African diaspora and Aboriginal Australia.
