D. THE INDIGENOUS LANDS

"The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is a culmination of a centuries-long struggle by indigenous peoples for justice. It is an important new addition to UN human rights instruments in that it promotes equality for the world's indigenous peoples and recognizes their collective rights."--Back cover.

The unique cultures of minorities and indigenous peoples worldwide – spanning a wide variety of customs and practices – are under threat. This year’s edition of State of the World’s Minorities and Indigenous Peoples highlights the impact of land dispossession, forced assimilation and other forms of discrimination on the most fundamental aspects of their identity, including language, art, traditional knowledge and spirituality. But while the effects of this attrition can be devastating, minority and indigenous cultures have also been critical in strengthening communities and providing activists with a platform to fight for their rights. As this volume illustrates, ensuring that the cultural freedoms of minorities and indigenous peoples are protected is essential if their other rights are also to be respected.

For the indigenous peoples of North America, the history of colonialism has often meant a distortion of history, even, in some cases, a loss or distorted sense of their own native practices of justice. How contemporary native communities have dealt quite differently with this dilemma is the subject of The Problem of Justice, a richly textured ethnographic study of indigenous peoples struggling to reestablish control over justice in the face of conflicting external and internal pressures. The peoples discussed in this book are the Coast Salish communities along the northwest coast of North America: the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe in Washington State, the St¢:lo Nation in British Columbia, and the South Island Tribal Council on Vancouver Island. Here we see how, despite their common heritage and close ties, each of these communities has taken a different direction in understanding and establishing a system of tribal justice. Describing the results?from the steadily expanding independence and jurisdiction of the Upper Skagit Court to the collapse of the South Island Justice Project?Bruce G. Miller advances an ethnographically informed, comparative, historically based understanding of aboriginal justice and the particular dilemmas tribal leaders and community members face. His work makes a persuasive case for an indigenous sovereignty associated with tribally controlled justice programs that recognize diversity and at the same time allow for internal dissent.

"This report documents how illegal logging by criminal networks and resulting forest fires are connected to acts of violence and intimidation against forest defenders and the state's failure to investigate and prosecute these crimes."--Publisher website, viewed September 27, 2019.