The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

Voting With Their Feet

Among the many books published on the theme of "hope in bad times" published between 2002 and 2005, one of the early bestsellers of the time came from the pen of Rebecca Solnit. This was the by turns poetic yet more often anodyne Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, which I read in a circa 2004 printing that seems to me must have been a paperback. But then again, I borrowed it from the public library, and public libraries lean towards hardcovers as they stand up to the rigours of cycles of borrow and return through slots and bins. In any case, I took note of a few specific snippets to follow up on, but hilariously, forgot to chase her footnotes in order to find details on the most interesting of them, the following two-sentence excerpt from page 126:

[International Indian Treaty Council] activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz was at the UN General Assembly in 1980 when Spain proposed that 1992 be declared "the year of encounter of civilizations" and "it was the most amazing thing – every African government representative stood up and walked out, so I walked out. They were not thinking about Indigenous people, but this was the onset of slavery and they sure knew that."

Being far more familiar with Indigenous leaders based in northern north america rather than its more southerly regions, I had no idea what an understatement Solnit's description of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz was. Since then I have learned much more about Dunbar-Ortiz's important record as a scholar, leader, and activist in both Indigenous and Feminist politics and history among others. Good fortune led me tp pick up a 2014 copy of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. Despite my admittedly not quite sensible hopes, a longer version of the UN anecdote was not in this book. It is so excellent, I wanted to find the original. Perhaps it was in an interview somewhere. As it stood, twenty years later, Solnit's book was no longer easy to borrow, and not in evidence even in used bookstores. The sad decline of the most mainstream search engines is notorious today. The still less popular but more privacy respecting and better quality smaller players like mojeek by nature have smaller indexes. However, two key things suggested this might not be as much of a barrier as for other Indigenous-related searches. The event in question happened at enough remove from the dread year of 1992 it was not likely to be swamped by other search results indexed as "more relevant," and Dunbar-Ortiz has a wonderfully distinctive name. Still, it seemed to me this should be easiest to trace signs of via the UN's own website.

Circa 2023 photograph of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and cover of the tenth anniversary edition of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, quoted from the Beacon Press newsletter. The author photograph was taken by Judy McKie of Grace Image Photography, and the cover by Louis Roe. Original page accessed 24 august 2024.

Silly me. The state of the UN's website and archives is, tangled, at best, even for such formidable and famous documents as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Therefore it was back to searching the open web for a probable reference to an interview or even an article by Dunbar-Ortiz herself. The last possibility turned out to be the right one, Dunbar-Ortiz's 2006 article in the journal Peace and Change. A rushed reader might still miss it though, because what in hindsight was a part of a growing development of international solidarity between Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Africa, is tucked away in a pithy footnote which reads as follows, after a citation of Fact Sheet No. 9 (Rev.1), The Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Programme of Activities for the International Decade of the World's Indigenous People (1995–2004):

August 9 was selected as the day (General Assembly resolution 49/214 of 23 December 1994 para. 8), and 1993 as the year for indigenous peoples (resolution 45/164 of 18 December 1990), while the UN Decade for the World's Indigenous People spanned 1995–2004 (General Assembly resolution 50/157 of December 21, 1995, annex). These dates were compromises after a long attempt by the governments of Spain, Italy, the Vatican, and the United States, to acknowledge the 500-year anniversary "encounter" of Europe and the Americas with the landing of Columbus on October 12, 1492, by celebrating that event in the United Nations in 1992, calling for a day, a year (1992), and a decade (1993–2002). I was present in the General Assembly meeting in October 1982 when Spain presented the proposal. I was shocked, then disgusted, when the Irish and the Norwegian ambassadors teased the Spanish that their countries had been first to "discover America." After a half hour of general hilarity, suddenly one of the African delegates stood up and walked out of the room, followed by every other African representative. A recess was called, and the Western European and North American delegates appeared dazed and confused. I heard one say, "Why on earth would Africans even be interested in the issue?" I was amazed at their ignorance. When the African bloc returned an hour later, its elected spokesperson read a statement that condemned the call to celebrate the onset of "colonialism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and genocide" in the halls of the United Nations. That killed the proposal, but did not faze its supporters. The Vatican even wanted to expand the concept of "encounter" to include a phrase about the "gift" of bringing Christianity to the heathens. During the decade that followed Spain, the Vatican, Italy, the United States, and all the Latin American countries they could bribe brought full pressure on the African states to agree, but they never budged. Meanwhile the international indigenous movement and local indigenous groups of the Western Hemisphere opposed it and insisted on those dates to honor indigenous peoples, a battle they won in the end. To pacify Spain and the Vatican for their total defeat, August 9 was designated as the day, and 1993 rather than 1992 was named the "UN Year for the World's Indigenous Peoples," followed by a UN Decade (1995–2004) by the same name.

When I first read this fuller description this year, alas it could not be as astonishing from a present-day perspective. Since then, we have all seen repeated examples of similarly ignorant and disrespectful behaviour by multiple diplomats from across what is regularly referred to as "the west." It was also before the small pebbles pending the avalanche of awareness following Indigenous rights activists including survivors of residential schools and a growing number of mainstream cross-trained Indigenous historians blew apart the cover hiding the truths about colonialism in the Americas.

Today things are emphatically very different, as reflected not only by Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States becoming a bestseller and now available in a new tenth anniversary edition. Among the many other ways to learn about Indigenous survival and success as well as the horrors of dealing with ongoing settler colonialism, there are now not only books but also films, documentaries, podcasts, and the day to day work of Indigenous scholars both in and outside of the academy.