Marcia Dority Baker’s recently published article, “The deployment of the terms indigenous, aboriginal, and Indian in the texts of international constitutions”, can be found at http://treatiesportal.unl.edu/indigenous/ and will also be available in the UNL Digital Commons. Dority Baker and fellow author, Charlie Bernholz of Love Library, will give an Academic Activities Brown Bag talk on the paper in February.
Tuesday, Feb.25, 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m., Library Instruction Room
“The deployment of the terms indigenous, aboriginal, and Indian in the texts of international constitutions”
Indigenous societies around the world are stepping forward to take their place as an equal partner in their nation’s future. In many cases, these efforts have been undertaken in response to the development and the recent publication of the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, as endorsed by the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations. Governments also have begun to reconsider their stance on the associated issues. The digital texts of 189 international constitutions – as offered by the Constitute Web site – were examined for occurrences of the four tokens indigenous, aboriginal, and Indian or Indians to yield one index of national pronouncement. Documents from forty countries were found to contain the term indigenous (N uses = 320) and seven possessed aboriginal (N = 19). The more familiar token Indian,or its plural, occurred 88 times in ten instruments.