Statement by Charmaine White Face: “Bill C-15 is based on a Lie”

Indigenous Activists Networks

Defenders of the Land, Truth Campaign, Idle No More

 

Statement by Charmaine White Face

“Bill C-15 is based on a Lie”

April 16, 2021

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First of all, if Bill C-15 is based on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), it is based on a lie. The Declaration that was approved by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 2007 is NOT the Declaration approved by Indigenous Peoples. Having a Bill based on a lie makes the Bill a partner in the lie and therefore, not good law. To say that Bill C-15 will affirm the rights of Indigenous Peoples is not true. The UNDRIP was changed to satisfy colonizing governments’ continued pursuit for control over Indigenous Peoples and resources.

If Bill C-15’s sponsors really wanted to “affirm” the rights of Indigenous Peoples, they would base their Bill on the Original Text that was approved by all Indigenous Peoples in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1994. That Original Declaration was also approved by two UN Committees: the Working Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP), and the Subcommission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities. After that, the most powerful colonizing governments pushed the Declaration off into another working group and changed not just the words but the meaning and purpose of the UNDRIP.

Canada can do that. The Canadian government could base their Bill C-15 on the truth, the Original Declaration passed in 1994, and support the intent and purpose in that Original document. To support Bill C-15 based on the UNDRIP that was approved in 2007 is to base Bill C-15 on a lie. Such an action will only bring dishonor and regret to the Canadian government.

Charmaine White Face is an Oglala Tituwan Oceti Sakowin writer, scientist and great-grandmother. She wrote an indepth analysis of the UNDRIP based on her experiences at the UN debates called: Indigenous Nations Rights in the Balance published by Living Justice Press, St. Paul, MN. She can be reached at cwhiteface@gmail.com.

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UNDRIP BILL C-15 DEEPLY FLAWED AND MUST BE REJECTED SAY INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AND LAND DEFENDERS 

December 11, 2020

(December 11, 2020) The Federal UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Bill C-15 “is a sleight of hand that promises to increase and expand Indigenous rights but actually accomplishes the opposite,” says Truth Before Reconciliation Campaign spokesperson Russell Diabo.

 

“The government has done this,” he says, “by flipping the requirement for making Canadian law’s subject to the provisions of UNDRIP, to making UNDRIP subject to existing Canadian laws under Section 35 of the Constitution. Section 35 of the constitution has already been adjudicated in Canadian courts to give Canada control of Indigenous lands under the Doctrine of Discovery, and places severe limits on the right of self-determination.”

 

By subjugating UNDRIP to Section 35, Diabo says, “the government is taking away all of the rights the declaration was designed to recognize. Under Section 35, the Indian Act and other federal laws directed at First Nations and Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous Peoples are not recognized as part of self-determining nations, as UNDRIP is supposed to do, but only as what Prime Minister Trudeau has described as a “fourth level of government” behind the federal, provincial and municipal governments. Similar conclusions have been reached by the Association of Iroquois and Allied Indians (AIAI).”

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1 Defenders of the Land is a network of Indigenous communities and activists in land struggle across Canada, including Elders and youth, women and men, dedicated to building a fundamental movement for Indigenous rights, was founded at a historic meeting in Winnipeg from November 12-14, 2008. Idle No More was founded by four women (three of whom are Indigenous and one of whom is White) in November 2012 in response to several bills passed in Canada that undermine Indigenous rights and environmental protection. The movement grew quickly, and by January 2013 there were tens of thousands of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people taking part in locally-based actions and mass mobilizations around the world. The Truth Campaign is a core team of people who worked on Russ Diabo’s 2018 campaign for the position of AFN National Chief and who are now working to get Crown governments and Canadian society to address “Truth Before Reconciliation” because the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its Calls to Action are not sufficient to address the colonization that First Nations have historically experienced and which continues today particularly under the colonial policies and legislation passed under the Constitution Act 1867.

Indigenous Nations' Rights in the Balance
An Analysis of the Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples

By Charmaine White Face, Zumila Wobaga

Softcover, 160 pages, indexed
$20.00
Publication 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9721886-8-5
e-Book ISBN 978-1-937141-11-0

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Comparing three different versions of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (DRIP), Indigenous Nations' Rights in the Balance analyses the implications of the changes made to DRIP for Indigenous Peoples and Nations.

 

This is a foundational text for Indigenous law and rights and the global struggle of Indigenous Peoples in the face of modern states.

 

Between 1994 and 2007, three different versions of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples were passed by various bodies of the United Nations, culminating in the final version passed by the UN General Assembly. Significant differences exist between these versions—differences that deeply affect the position of all Indigenous Peoples in the world community.

 

In Indigenous Nations’ Rights in the Balance, Charmaine White Face gives her well-researched comparative analysis of these versions. She puts side-by-side, for our consideration, passages that change the intent of the Declaration by privileging the power and jurisdiction of nation states over the rights of Indigenous Peoples. As Spokesperson representing the Sioux Nation Treaty Council in UN proceedings, she also gives her insights about each set of changes and their ultimate effect.

 

Reviews and Comments

 

Charmaine White Face, a Lakota Wiyan from Pine Ridge, S.D., who is devoted to the political rights of indigenous peoples, gives us here a lucid and implacable analysis of the crucial relationship between Indians and their colonizers. Her work in Geneva, Switzerland, as well as her defense of the Black Hills of the North Plains region, challenges the United Nations Human Rights declaration of 2007 as deeply flawed. In examining the role of the UN, she charges that it has again through its recent declarations provided legitimacy and prestige not only to historical eighteenth-century genocide, but to the continuing plunder of rights and resources of native peoples. Her profoundly disturbing message forces us to ask the question: what happens when international law says powerful nations can use the idea of law as a weapon to gain consensus for theft? The so-called rule of law, as “discoverers” have shown us from the beginning, entrenches legal doctrines that justify genocide. The UN complicity, White Face tells us, has enormous consequences. No readers of this little text can dismiss the logic of her analysis if we are to learn the lessons of history.

Charmaine White Face is the Rachael Maddow of the Lakota political world concerning environmental and civil rights....

Her research is flawless. Her opinions are provocative and courageous and path breaking…. This is a good read.

 

—Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Hunkpati Dakota

Author of A Separate Country: Post-coloniality and American Indian Nations

 

Charmaine White Face's mesmeric account of the Declaration painstakingly reveals the enormous difficulties that Native nations face in their quest to have their rights and resources respected by their host states and by the international community at large. The tortured process she described reveals that states interpret the phrase "rule of law" to mean "their rules and their laws," leaving indigenous peoples even now at the mercy of states and state-dominated institutions, like the U.N.

 

—David E. Wilkins, Lumbee

Co-author of Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law

 

Does the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples actually protect indigenous rights? Charmaine White Face provides a series of powerful arguments and direct documentation that indigenous rights were passed over in favor of nation-state powers and jurisdiction over indigenous nations within nation states. Many indigenous organizations that participated in the long negotiations of the Declaration did not give their consent to the final UN versions of the Declaration. The final form of the declaration ignored indigenous self-government, rights to territory, plural citizenship, rights to appeal to international bodies for dispute resolution, and effective rights of informed consent. Instead of protection and articulation of indigenous rights, indigenous peoples are saddled with over 30 unenforceable mandates for nation states to include indigenous peoples as citizens within cultural, legal, and political orders of nation states.

Indigenous peoples are willing to work with nation states, but not at the price of losing their indigenous rights to land, self-government, and cultural autonomy. This book provides a detailed analysis and evaluation that shows how nation states and the UN ignored the rights of indigenous peoples when finalizing the Declaration. Everyone interested in the well being of indigenous peoples should read this book.

 

—Duane Champagne, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa

Author of Captured Justice: Native Nations Under Public Law 280

 

What a great piece of work—it is necessary for the people who were present to write the true history of the declaration and the gutting of the key language that we fought so hard to get into the original document. You have done the most amazing job. I am in awe of you and your work. It is the love of a woman for her people that you have undertaken this work for the future generations. We are in a long struggle to free ourselves. Indigenous Peoples must continue to push forward, as the ones not yet born are waiting for us to make a good place for them.

 

—Sharon Venne, Nehiyaw (Cree) Lawyer

 

Indigenous Nation’s Rights In The Balance (Charmaine White Face, Zumila Wobaga - 2013, Living Justice Press.) clearly shows that we are trapped by a system that does not recognize the rights or values of indigenous people – that the ‘entitlement’ to human rights is limited by the system and what States will agree to implement. It also reveals the true nature of the United Nations as an institution which is not above the system but is part of it.

 

Beginning in 1984, The Sioux Nation Treaty Council and other indigenous bodies from around the world were involved in developing the ‘Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’. In 1994 a United Nations (UN) Declaration, Original sub-commission text, was drafted and approved by two UN committees. But in 2004 Chairperson-rapporteur Louis Enrique Chavez presented his own version of the text to the UN Intersessional Working Group on the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This text was ultimately sent to the UN Human Rights Commission for passage. It did not have approval of the Indigenous People or the States who took part in the Original Declaration of 1984. This led to a five-day hunger strike/prayer fast, by six of the Indigenous representatives, the author included, to reinstate theoriginal text. An agreement was not reached. In 2007, The UN General Assembly completed its passage of The Declaration, which was finally approved, not in Geneva but in New York City. Comparative analysis of the three versions show how the Original Declaration is altered in favor of States leaving indigenous people without basic human rights or indigenous integrity.

 

The author tells us how ‘the wording in the UN’s amended and approved Declaration will benefit the colonizers more than the Nations it was designed for’. It is plain to see when reading the comparative analysis that changing a sentence, deleting or changing a single word from the Original Declaration has been carried out with the intent to disempower an Article or severely weaken it. This also has the effect of changing the bias of an Article from being a Right to be upheld for Indigenous Nations, to a lesser commitment. Throughout, the changes are aimed at removing the language of rights, substituting instead the language of responsibilities or intentions, which governments can choose to implement or not. In short, the aims of Original Declaration have been brutally compromised.

 

Preambular paragraphs and Articles are shown separately in their three different versions, with passages underlined to show the changes. After each set of three a detailed comparative analysis is made by the author. This makes for disturbing reading as you see the Original Declaration change from positive to negative.

 

It is made clear that the ‘United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’, as the published version is entitled, will not attribute Sovereignty to Indigenous Nations. The UN speaks of indigenous ‘populations’, ‘people’, ‘peoples’ etc and clearly avoids the use of the term Indigenous Nations. Many indigenous peoples view themselves as separate Nations (the Great Sioux Nation for example) but this status has never been recognized by States, who insist they are simply minorities within greater Nation States.

 

The book also carries a brief history of the Great Sioux Nation and its association with the US over the past 150 years. Treaties and agreements that have been made with the US over this long period have always been ‘cheated on’. The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, a legally binding agreement granting land rights to the Nation has been repeatedly violated. Since that time vast areas of land granted in the treaty have been taken and abused, and tribal land continues to be drastically reduced.

Charmaine White Face, Zumila Wobaga is Spokesperson for the Sioux Nation Treaty Council. She is also volunteer Coordinator with Defenders of the Blackhills - www.defendblackhills.org

—David Terrey Glasgow Scotland

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