Abstract
Advocacy of an indigenous right to isolation in the Latin American context responds to multiple depredations, above all to plundering by extractivists. Two prominent international instruments declare a human right to indigenous self-isolation and articulate a principle of no contact between indigenous peoples and the non-indigenous majority population: Indigenous Peoples in Voluntary Isolation and Initial Contact in the Americas and Guidelines on the Protection of Indigenous Peoples. In analyzing both, (1) I argue against the notion of a human right to indigenous isolation and for limited, controlled contact between the indigenous peoples and a narrow segment of the larger society. (2) I propose relational human rights as rights that connect people, as rights-bearers, across borders and differences. They would allow for limited outside observation for possible human rights violations within indigenous communities. I then articulate relational human rights of indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation as rights to (3) agency, (4) health, (5) territory, and (6) identity.
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Notes
Indigenous communities in Indonesia (Baduy Dalam) and Papua New Guinea, in South America, Central Africa, New Guinea, and India (Andaman Islands, North Sentinel Island) also lead lives without significant contact with the outside world. There are thought to be around 67 “uncontacted” tribes in Brazil (with the greatest diversity of indigenous peoples in isolation, followed by Peru and Bolivia), about 15 in Peru, a handful in other Amazonian countries, a few dozen in the Indonesian part of the island of New Guinea, and two tribes in the Andaman Islands off the coast of India.
“Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that, developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing in those territories, or parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal systems” (para. 379).
I bracket this fact here but pursue it in Gregg (2019).
Activities connected with the extraction of natural resources are responsible for most incursions into indigenous territory (Recommendations, para. 101).
The government of Peru, for example, has established concessions for mahogany and cedar loggers (Hill 2015). Further, infrastructure projects, such as highways and hydroelectric plants, both impact indigenous lands and unintentionally benefit illegal logging and gold mining. The extraction of natural resources can pollute the rivers and induce the flight of fauna, an indigenous food source.
I focus on the idea of a right of indigenous peoples to voluntary isolation rather than the circumstances of indigenous peoples in initial contact, that is, “indigenous peoples or segments of indigenous peoples who maintain intermittent or sporadic contact with the majority non-indigenous population, generally used in reference to peoples or segments of peoples who have initiated a process of contact recently,” whereby the term initial refers to the “scant extent of contact and interaction with the majority non-indigenous society” (IACHR 2013, para. 14).
At least one of the master thinkers of the Renaissance, Montaigne (1588), and several of the European Enlightenment, such as Diderot (1989), share this image. Anthropologists today reject the Rousseauian trope of l’état sauvage and la vie primitive. See, e.g., Mbembe (2001) and Gupta and Ferguson (1997).
According to Rousseau (1964a: 169): “united by manners and characters, not by regulations and laws, but by the same kind of life and food, and by the common influence of the climate.” All translations by the author.
This concept of nature delivers into his hands the normative foundation for a critique of modern European society: where nature increasingly yields to culture, the consequences for political community can only be disastrous. Rousseau (1964a: 171) constructs his standard not as “pure nature” but as a stage more “civilized” than nature yet more “natural” that civilization: “a middle ground between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our amour propre had to be the happiest and most sustainable time” and “the best for man.”
“Although he deprives himself in this state of several advantages which he derives from nature, he regains so much from them, his faculties exert themselves and develop, his ideas are extended, his feelings become ennobled, his whole soul rises to such an extent that, if the abuses of this new condition do not often degrade him below that which he has left, he ought to bless the ceaselessly happy moment that tore it away forever, and which, from a stupid and bounded animal, made an intelligent being and a man” (Rousseau 1964a: 364).
By what standard does one measure a “near-perfect,” mutually beneficial relationship between human populations and their natural environments? If the outsiders who make this claim have no contact with the self-isolated peoples, how are they able to evaluate the relationship of indigenous peoples to nature?
The Recommendations make a similar claim about indigenous peoples in initial contact, peoples “who were previously in voluntary isolation and who for some reason, voluntary or otherwise, came into contact with members of the surrounding population, and although they maintain a certain level of contact, … are not fully familiar with nor … share the patterns and codes of social relations of the majority population” (para. 14).
They advocate “absolute respect for their decision to remain isolated” (para. 48), entailing “effective measures to prevent outsiders or their actions from entering into situations that could affect or influence, either accidentally or intentionally, persons belonging to indigenous groups in isolation” (para. 49).
Or human rights abuses between indigenous communities, for example in Peru as described by Shepard (2016: 136): “isolated peoples themselves seek[ing] out and even threaten[ing] neighboring peoples to obtain food and coveted trade goods.” Further, “Mashco-Piro bowmen have raided legally recognized native communities to take food and trade goods, sometimes wounding and even killing apparently inoffensive indigenous ‘brethren’ with their arrows” (ibid.: 135).
See Kidd (1997), who reports on native peoples held in slave-like conditions.
The Guidelines imply that the principle of participation is irrelevant when there is no contact: “Unlike indigenous peoples in isolation, indigenous peoples in initial contact have the additional right to participate in any decisions that may affect them, and such decisions cannot be taken without their free, prior and informed consent” (para. 64). Surely the Guidelines do not intend to accord isolated indigenous peoples fewer rights than accorded peoples in initial contact. In effect, however, self-isolation has the unintended consequence that isolated peoples indeed have fewer rights. After all, if peoples cannot “participate in any decisions that may affect them” because they are (self-)isolated, decisions by the larger society cannot be made on the basis of the affected people’s “free, prior and informed consent.” In that case, the peoples are politically and legally disadvantaged vis-à-vis the larger community, the nation state, and other outsiders.
No wonder, then, that in the mid-nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill, whose work contributed much to the political liberalism that defines contemporary Western political thought, was illiberally persuaded that, in the modern world, dominated by the West for the last five centuries, non-Europeans are lost without Europe’s imperial, colonial, and paternalistic protection. For Mill, the l’homme Sauvage is cognitively incapable of the kind of concern for the welfare of others that European societies make possible, certainly in such distinctively modern forms as the welfare state, medical research, technological innovation, systematic attempts to define and practice legal justice, social wealth, and economic growth.
The Recommendations hint at what the self-isolated peoples are denied (and what they deny themselves) in complete isolation: “Unlike peoples in voluntary isolation, peoples in a situation of initial contact do have a relationship with other indigenous peoples and, in some cases, with the nonindigenous or majoritarian society, which makes it possible to conduct a prior, free, informed, and good-faith consultation aimed at obtaining their consent”; they are “active subjects and holders of rights capable of deciding in a prior, free, and informed manner how to carry out the consultation and its outcome” (para. 26).
A third party can petition the state or some other organization on behalf of another party under circumstances in which the latter is regarded as unable to submit a petition. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights advocates such petitions on behalf of “uncontacted” tribes. See Boecher (2009: 89). The petitioner acts as guardian ad litem. In that sense, the tribe becomes the guardian’s ward.
For example, once contacted and settled in small villages, the Akiruyo indigenous people in Suriname suffered a “drastic change in its diet, moving from a diet rich in fats and proteins and low in carbohydrates, based on meat and other wild products, to a diet very low in meat and high in carbohydrates, such as cassava,” with “serious negative health impacts” (Recommendations, para. 119).
I return to this point in the Conclusion.
Even as some authors, such as Duffy (2008), remain skeptical of the capacity of international law and human rights to protect indigenous autonomy and territorial control.
And, of course, different indigenous peoples should not be assumed to agree with each other: “even though we need concepts such as ‘voluntary isolation’ to refer in general to people living in these circumstances, we need to be careful that such discourse does not veil the differences between groups”; further, “we should be aware of the risks embedded in talking about these groups as similar, especially if it affects the contingency and action plans. Do these groups seek contact for the same reasons? Do they have shared objectives and plans in regard to the ‘outside world’” (Opas (2016: 143)?
I develop a notion of human rights that precludes cultural imperialism in Gregg (2012, especially chapters 3, 6, and 7).
Bolsonaro’s new government in Brazil offers one example of outright hostility: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/31/tribes-brazil-genocide-jair-bolsonaro
Progress in protecting indigenous peoples tends to be the work of “indigenous federations, NGOs and international allies” than of governments (Hill 2015).
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I am grateful for the comments of the three anonymous reviewers.
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Gregg, B. Against Self-Isolation as a Human Right of Indigenous Peoples in Latin America. Hum Rights Rev 20, 313–333 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-019-0550-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-019-0550-x