Indigenous world leader shares insights on three decades of treaty rights work,  global advocacy

International Indian Treaty Council Executive Director Andrea Carmen on treaties, climate change and Indigenous rights

On Friday, as the International Indian Treaty Council begins the proceedings of its 50th Anniversary Treaty Conference at Standing Rock, Buffalo’s Fire reporter Alicia Hegland-Thorpe shares an in-depth interview with IITC Executive Director Andrea Carmen. Alicia caught up with Andrea at the end of February when she was visiting the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council, laying the groundwork for the meeting from June 21-24 in Wakpala, S.D. Carmen discusses the organization’s challenges and legacy during her 32 years as executive director. 

Read Alicia Hegland-Thorpe’s International Treaty Conference returns to Oceti Sakowin for 50th Anniversary, June 19.

Here’s the transcript from the podcast interview with Andrea Carmen:

ANDREA: I am from the Yaqui Indigenous Nation, which is divided between the border of the United States and Mexico now. But we have six pueblos, or Yaqui communities, in southern Arizona, including a reservation and federally recognized tribal government. And then we have a large land base in northern Mexico, in Sonora, Mexico. We have the only treaty with any Indigenous nation and the government of Mexico, because we were at war with them until 1939.

And so we got a treaty and recognition of part of our traditional land base, and we have eight unbroken traditional governments there that still operate by a traditional government consensus system. Anything to do with the land and the land base there and the water rights has to be agreed to by consensus of all eight of the traditional governments, and they come to consensus within themselves. 

On the Mexico side, by law, all of our government meetings have to be conducted in our language, 100%. So it’s an unbroken traditional government system.  And it’s still the primary language of fluency in our lands on the Mexican side. Now we have to say “side,” right? And on the Arizona side, just like here, kids have gone to school and all of that. And so there’s a struggle to hold the language fluency on the Arizona side. But in Mexico, most of the households and all of the people, I’d say, 50 years and above, their primary language is Yaqui, our Indigenous language. 

ALICIA: How did you get the position here with IITC? What kind of brought you in? What kind of led you up to this? 

ANDREA: Well, it’s been a long time. I started working with IITC as a student intern when I was going to school at University of California in Santa Cruz. We formed an organization within the Women’s Studies Department, where we had probably five or six Indigenous women to respond to the policy of the United States government of forced sterilization of Native American women in places like Claremore, Oklahoma, Rocky Boy, Montana, Rosebud, all over the place. 

“Treaties don’t make nations, but only nations make treaties. And that’s international law, too. It affirmed that nation-to-nation relationship and codified it in a way that was legally binding.”

Executive Director Andrea Carmen, International Indian Treaty Council

So we formed the Coalition Against Sterilization Abuse, CASA, through the Women’s Studies Department. We were able to get course credit for the organizing. And I met Lehman Brightman, who was our faculty advisor. He’s from Rosebud. And he introduced me to Bill Wapipa, who was coordinating the work of the IITC in San Francisco. And this was back in 1976 or so. And I became a student intern for IITC. 

I traveled around for a while after I graduated. And then I got convinced to come back and see about working with the IITC. And they started sending me to some of the international meetings, along with the elders and the more experienced people. And finally, I became a staff person, full-time staff person, in 1983. I became executive director in 1992. So it’s been 31 years. Kind of amazing to even think that.

Holding the Line on Climate Change

I’m the lead person for IITC with a really good, strong team at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. I’m going from here to Rome to a meeting at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. 

IITC does a lot of work in the area of food sovereignty, everything from supporting the work of grassroots food producers on the ground to bringing them together to share knowledge and information, to impacting international policy, to support the perspectives of our traditional food producers. Because frankly, that’s what’s going to save our lives with the climate crisis that’s  happening. I go to these meetings, and here are the scientists and the governments. And last year was the single largest domestic oil production by the United States government in history.

The year before that was the largest was under Trump, 2019. So all this talk about climate change and alternative energy… 

And we met with John Kerry, I have, several times before. And they’re trying to change the conversation from fossil fuel production to emissions reduction, which means this scary new technology. They’re coming up with something called carbon capture and carbon injection. And all these things that are not going to work, and they’re going to cause more destruction.

Not only that, they’re going to move Indigenous peoples off of their traditional lands. Things like forest offsets and all these things that they talk about net zero. Well, what does net mean? It means you can still have the oil fields on Fort Berthold, or the tar sands in Alberta, Canada, if you’re investing in saving some forests in the Amazon, where Indigenous peoples are pushed off their land because now it’s a carbon capture sink. I mean, this is what we’re seeing, the solutions that are being proposed. We made a breakthrough. We just did in Dubai at the last climate change talks, COP 28 of the UN, of really helping the countries to understand the Indigenous people’s knowledge about food production.  Whether it’s restoring buffalo and getting rid of cattle, whether it’s bringing back our traditional drought-resistant seeds, pesticide-free methods. It’s actually part of a solution to climate change. Because healthy, living soil is the third largest absorber of greenhouse gases.

“We don’t talk about rights, we talk about responsibilities. And because we don’t separate humans from the rest of the natural world.”

Executive Director Andrea Carmen, International Indian Treaty Council

The first is the ocean, which they’re contaminating fast. Second is the atmosphere, hence climate change. And the third is healthy, living soil that’s not killed by pesticides or chemicals or overgrazing and all those things.

Making a Global Impact

So we have that knowledge that we can bring into the talks. And the countries are really starting to realize that Indigenous knowledge holders that we’ve brought officially into those discussions for just the last three years have solutions to offer. We’re not just complaining about the impacts and about the land loss and the things that are happening as a result, but we have something to contribute.

And we’re actually starting to see that make an impact. They really are listening.  And so we think, gee, they must be really scared. They’re listening to us. 

ALICIA: It’s hopeful, though. 

ANDREA: Yes, But my best advice to everybody, Indigenous peoples, find out your own source of food and find out your own source of water.  Because people don’t know how bad it’s going to get. I have to hear the scientists talk about what is coming and what’s already here. Last year, for the first time, the global temperature broke through what was supposed to be the cap, the Paris Agreement, the 1.5 degrees centigrade increase.

July and August exceeded it last year for the first time. And it was the hottest year ever recorded in the Sonora Desert, where I live. So I mean, we had over 100 degrees for 60 days straight. So we’re trying to work with seeds that can survive that. We have a family farm, you could say, and doing seed trading with other Indigenous peoples in the desert. Our original seeds, not the ones that have been modified and reduced in vitality, because everybody really has to do that.

I see buffalo here, and buffalo are a key part of resilience against climate change for the people here. Go back to your original food, that food that understands how to live there and can withstand the variances of climate that are just getting worse. 

Repatriating our Relatives

Another one that they mentioned here that I really specialize in, we’re creating an international mechanism for repatriation of Indigenous peoples’ cultural items and human remains that are in museums and private collections and auction houses and universities all over the planet.  People don’t even know where their items are.  

Last July, we got returned our sacred masakova, which is a, masakova is literal in our language for deer’s head. It’s a ceremonial deer’s head for our deer dance. But for us, once it’s been in a ceremony, it’s alive. It’s not like a thing. It’s a living being. We say, sayi la maso, our little brother of the deer. 

I saw it 20 years ago, more than 20 years ago. Came upon it in a museum in Stockholm, Sweden, of all places. The Samis invited me to this event. And it’s a government museum, too. It’s like the Smithsonian. And it took us 20 years to get it back. We engaged the United Nations, because the museum in Sweden wasn’t giving it back. They said that, “We don’t see why we should give it back. We have it. You guys have no claim that’s legal.” And we forced them, through the United Nations intervention, to return it. I mean, the UN declaration that they’ve agreed to says they’re supposed to return it. 

So with that struggle, we really saw the need to activate, because so many Indigenous peoples say the same thing. Our ghost shirt, they took our ghost shirt. We don’t know where it is. They took our treaty pipe, they told me, in Canada. We don’t know where it is.  The Chickasaws are trying to get the skull of one of their chiefs back. It was taken as a war trophy. And they’ve been trying to do it for more than 30 years. And they can’t. 

So, we’re creating an international mechanism. We have to work with UNESCO, the UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, which is hard to work with for a few reasons. But creating a mechanism and a protocol that Indigenous peoples will, No. 1, first be able to find their items, like an international database. And then regulations that will mandate that if Indigenous peoples say this item is sacred – and all human remains, ALL human remains, need to come back to the rightful caretakers of those items to be able to see how they should be put to rest,  or who should take care of them. 

ALICIA: You’re listening to the Buffalo’s Fire Podcast with special guest Andrea Carmen, the longtime executive director of the IITC. She is responsible for bringing Indigenous voices to the table with those who make the decisions on the environment, climate change, food sovereignty and repatriation of our relatives. In this next half, she says something pretty startling: that in all her years working with Indigenous people, she has never found an Indigenous language that has a literal translation for human rights. She also talks about what happens at treaty council meetings, like the 50th Anniversary council meeting planned in Standing Rock, where the first one was convened in 1974. 

“We’d say in Yaqui Yoemem Tekia, ‘Our duty or our obligation to the Creator,’ which is fighting when we need to, keeping our ceremonies going, our language, how we treat one another, how we treat the natural world.”

Executive Director Andrea Carmen, International Indian Treaty Council

ANDREA: It came out of a history of Indigenous peoples’ activism being revitalized and standing up. The fishing rights struggles on the Pacific Coast, the treaty rights struggles, the walks across the country, the armed occupations at Wounded Knee, court cases, everything. People tried everything to get the treaties to be honored and to get justice.

So, the first meeting came out of basically all the lack of results. In fact, more repression, more people were in jail, people were killed… Leonard Peltier is still in prison from those days. And the decision was made by the elders and the founders who these elders here today have talked about. Frank Fools Crow, Matthew King, those that came together at the first gathering to seek a voice and a seat in the international arena as nations, as treaty nations, because we weren’t represented there and because we could not find justice within the so-called justice systems.  

Not just of the United States, but there were people from Canada there, from Guatemala, from Brazil. There were 5,000 people from throughout the Americas, telling the same exact story. “How can we find justice in the colonial systems that are the ones that have oppressed us?” So, IITC was instructed to go to the United Nations, find a seat, find a voice, and it’s been since 1977, IITC was the first Indigenous organization to get what’s called consultative status at the United Nations Economic and Social Council. 

And in 2001, we were the only one still to be upgraded to what’s called general consultative status because of how many bodies we’re working at.  We’re still, you know, full force in the human rights arena, we’re at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, we’re at Climate Change, we’re at the United Nations Environment Program, Convention on Biodiversity. Everywhere where our rights are being discussed and impacted, we feel we have not just a right, but a responsibility to try to be there.  IITC accepts no government money from any government, so our struggle is all, funding to get to these places. We write proposals, we sell T-shirts, we do all those things. 

ALICIA: Are you a 501c3?

ANDREA: Yes, we’re a non-profit 501c3. But we’re unique also since the very beginning in being a representative Indigenous body. We have 14 board members from the different geographical areas. Bill Means is still on the board from Oceti Sakowin. And at the treaty conferences like the one we’re about to have, not only are we commemorating 50 years of survival, I guess you could say, and a lot of historic achievements. We were one of the leaders in the struggle to get the United Nations Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted in 2007. It took 30 years.

The first UN meeting that IITC led the way on was in 1977, and that meeting in Geneva called for an international standard recognizing the collective rights of Indigenous Peoples. So when the UN Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted 30 years later, exactly, 2007 at the General Assembly, that represented the achievement of that objective, I guess you could say, from our first meeting ever at the UN. So we tend to take the instructions from our peoples, our affiliates, and you’ll see it if you come to Standing Rock, they’ll do resolutions, they’ll be adopted by consensus of everybody, and those are our instructions for what to work on, what positions to take. What do we want to do about biodiversity or intellectual property, where they’re patenting our traditional seeds? 

Setting the Agenda by Consensus

ALICIA: So at these conferences then, what people are talking about are actual things that obviously need attention and need change, a place for discussion and how to make change? 

“A lot of the issues we’re dealing with directly are the decisions made in some international arena.”

Executive Director Andrea Carmen, International Indian Treaty Council

ANDREA: Exactly. And what our affiliates want IITC to do. We’ve made some real progress in kind of bringing treaties back into the international limelight. In the last couple of years, we have at least two internationally, legally binding treaty bodies to which the United States is a party.

They have to, they’re supposed to implement them, calling on the United States to set up a nation-to-nation process with the treaty partners where there’s an equal participatory participation to talk about treaty violations. Not like the courts where that’s the decision-making of one of the treaty partners, usually the violating treaty partner. How can they  be the ones who decide if there’s a violation, let alone what should be the remedy?  We’ve actually brought that discussion back up again in the United Nations bodies that are telling the United States, you need to do this. And so now the question is, okay, how are we gonna do this? It’s not just for IITC, it’s for the treaty nations that are part of IITC.

I don’t think some Indigenous peoples realize how many Indigenous nations are treaty nations. The nation of Hawaii, which will be at the conference, they’re on our board of directors –before the US forcibly invaded them and annexed them in violation of their peace and friendship treaty with Hawaii, nation of Hawaii, they made treaties with 18 countries –and not one of those countries said anything when the US decided to annex Hawaii instead of respect it as a separate country, a nation. 

So the treaty movement needs to be revitalized. We need to make sure that all of the treaty nations know each other, even know about each other, and really create an international movement to bring back the treaty discussion onto the table, on the front burner, front and center. 

Three of the four countries that voted against the UN declaration when it was adopted at the General Assembly were the three countries that have some of the most treaties with Indigenous peoples, the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. The other one was Australia, where the Aborigines really would like to have a treaty. They don’t have any treaty. But they should, and they want one. 

Back to Standing Rock

ALICIA: All right, so the purpose of being in Standing Rock today, if you can explain a little more about that.

ANDREA: We came here to meet with the Tribal Council and also the Elders Preservation Council who’ve been having kind of independent discussions about hosting the 50th anniversary. Really, there was no place we could have the 50th anniversary treaty conference except Standing Rock. So we’re super excited we’re being met with open arms and a lot of enthusiasm and interest because it’s part of Standing Rock’s history, not just ours, of course. And a lot of people are really interested in revitalizing those discussions, talking about what is a treaty and what does that mean? 

So our first goal is to bring everybody in and have the affiliates, the members of the nation, whoever’s hosting it, be able to hear themselves what is happening with the work that we’ve been doing for however many years in the past because they’re not, maybe two or three people can go to a conference in another country, but we wanna have the whole people understand and hear and have a chance to be updated and learn from what’s happening.  And I try to explain that a lot of the issues we’re dealing with directly are the decisions made in some international arena. And if we’re not at the table, as they say, we’re on the menu. 

And also, like I said about climate change, we have something to offer. We’re not just there to be on the defense, even though we’ve gotta do that, no doubt about it. So, we get those instructions. You know, we adopt resolutions. There’s commissions that will happen. There’s panels, you know, plenary discussion for everybody.

But then people will break into working groups we call commissions. And from all the different Indigenous peoples that are there, you know, people wanna talk about mining. Whether they’re from Guatemala or the Black Hills or, you know, other places that’s affecting them. So they come up with a resolution, they present it on the last day. 

A lot of people are interested in more than one topic, but they’ve got to choose, that’s their time to say, well, can you include our sacred site struggle in that resolution? And everyone accepts it. And then the affiliates agree that this is adopted by consensus, this becomes IITC policy, and this is what we’re going to do. And usually we have them once every two years, just because it’s kind of expensive. 

ALICIA: And so I heard you talk earlier about how important it is to follow protocol. Can you explain a little more about why protocol is important to follow on something like this? 

ANDREA: That’s part of our guiding principles. We support and uphold the spiritual and cultural practices of each of our affiliates and they’re different. And how you are in a certain place is going to be different. So we never want to undermine the traditional cultural practices. Most, if not all of our staff and definitely board members and affiliates are very involved in the ceremonial way of life of their own peoples. We just started last week our seven week spring cycle that will end with the deer dance in about seven weeks. And that’s one of the things we support, strongly, is the right to practice our culture; the protection of our sacred sites; our ways of life; our language. 

New Generation Takes the Staff

Another very exciting thing that I just want to mention is the role, the growing role and leadership of Indigenous youth in the international work. We’re really going to feature that. We have some very strong youth representatives that are staff members who will be here and want to meet with the youth groups from here and other places that have said they’re really excited. Climate change of course is an issue.  Our young people are very involved. We will have a panel of Indigenous youth and definitely a commission of youth where they can say okay this is, as youth, this is where we want IITC to go. Because they’re the future of the organization.

“My best advice to everybody, Indigenous peoples, find out your own source of food and find out your own source of water. Because people don’t know how bad it’s going to get.”

Executive Director Andrea Carmen, International Indian Treaty Council

I mean the sustainability of our work depends on bringing in Indigenous youth that have that same vision of the original founding of IITC.  You can look on our webpage for the Declaration of Continuing Independence, the founding document that was adopted here in 1974. They have that vision at the same time they have new strategies, they have new ideas and we have to be open to that. Sometimes it’s hard. 

ALICIA: I think that it’s so important. Even though we are a culture of passing on oral knowledge and traditions, I think it’s important to embrace the fact that there is technology that can help preserve these too. When we say going back to our traditional ways prior to colonization, there was no digitalization then. But having to understand that intersection of new technology and what our traditions are and why it’s so important that they come together. And our youth is going to be a prime example of what that means.

ANDREA: I was about, I don’t know, 18 and I said to my grandma, probably I was being a brat, right? Saying, well how can we keep our traditions going in this modern world? It’s so different. I don’t even think that they fit. She said in Spanish, what you need to do is take the values in our traditional cultures and apply them to what’s going on now. I had, of course, no comeback for that. I remember it really clearly. It was in the kitchen at my mom’s house.

Finding youth that understand, yes, there’s new technologies and they can communicate with each other. I think COVID gifted us Zoom, for example. But we still use it because we can talk to each other. You can actually see each other, not like a conference call. But it doesn’t replace that face-to-face contact and there’s no way it can ever replace our ceremonies and those practices. And we really believe in those ways. 

Cultural Protocols

Back to the issue of the protocol… those things aren’t just things to go through, they’re real. They’re as real as anything else in terms of how we take care of that place, how we respect that place, how we fulfill our obligations to being who we are and our life being put in a place.  I’ve been all over the world, all over the world, doing presentations and stuff, and I never found an Indigenous people that have the words human rights in their language, literal translation.

We’d say in Yaqui Yoemem Tekia “our duty or our obligation to the Creator,” which is fighting when we need to, keeping our ceremonies going, our language, how we treat one another, how we treat the natural world. All of it is encompassed in that. And without those protocols that were given, the laws, traditions, and customs, the U.N. Declaration said that, and we used that language to get our Masakova repatriated.  

There’s just two places in the whole U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that use the word laws. And in our cultural protocols, it’s in there, it’s Article 11 of the U.N. Declaration, that we have laws that tell us how we have to treat our sacred items and our sacred places. And if we don’t respect those, how are we going to ask anybody else to respect them? So there are laws here about how we need to be on this place.  And everyone in IITC who’s from IITC will respect that and want to know so they can respect this place. Because when we go to their place, they want to tell us how to respect their protocols. 

Human Rights are Inherent Rights

ALICIA: Going back to how you said, literally, nobody has a word for human rights in their language because it wasn’t needed. It was already a matter of respect, that’s just how you treat other people. 

“They’re trying to change the conversation from fossil fuel production to emissions reduction, which means this scary new technology. They’re coming up with something called carbon capture and carbon injection.” 

Executive Director Andrea Carmen, International Indian Treaty Council

ANDREA:  Because we don’t talk about rights, we talk about responsibilities. And because we don’t separate humans from the rest of the natural world.

ALICIA: So in saying that, it’s interesting that there has to be even that word “human rights”, number one. Number two, that a council had to come together because human rights weren’t being recognized. 

ANDREA: Yes, that’s right. Human rights, treaty rights, inherent rights. It means, you know, when IITC was first sent by the elders from here, from Oceti Sakowin, to go to the United Nations, they say, well, find the other Indigenous peoples and get together with them. There was nobody else. It was just us at first. And we did find some words that resonated with our culture, not necessarily human rights. But the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948, that preamble talks about the ‘inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family’ is what it says.  And we can understand inherent and inalienable. 

It means no one can give rights or take it away. Not a treaty, not a declaration, not a convention, not a constitution, doesn’t give rights, right? Rights are inherent because of who you are placed where, you know, on the land, on the place where the Creator put you. And rights, therefore, can’t be given or taken away. They can’t be given up. They can be upheld or they can be violated. That’s all. So, you know, fighting violations of those inherent rights. And in the UN Declaration, in the preamble, we got to define our inherent rights. 

I’m sure you’ve read the UN Declaration. You know, it just says, the urgent need to uphold the inherent rights of Indigenous peoples. That word comes from something they said when we weren’t even there. We weren’t there in 1948, when they adopted the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. They say Eleanor Roosevelt wrote those words, the wife of the president. But we could resonate with that idea.

So I think treaty rights uphold inherent rights. And that’s how our ancestors tried to ensure that what our inherent rights were would be respected by the colonizer. You know, it didn’t always turn out that way.  But the thing about treaties, like they say in Canada, that treaties don’t make nations, but only nations make treaties. And that’s international law, too. It affirmed that nation-to-nation relationship and codified it in a way that was legally binding.  Or so we thought, on both parties, we’re upholding our treaty obligations as well. Sometimes giving up land, for example, or allowing them to pass through or whatever. But they have not done the same.

ALICIA:  That was Andrea Carmen, the Executive Director of the International Indigenous Treaty Council. The IITC represents hundreds of Indigenous Nations, peoples and organizations from North, Central and South America, the Arctic, the Pacific and the Caribbean. Since the mid-1980s Andrea has participated in several UN bodies addressing human and cultural rights, environment, climate change, food sovereignty and repatriation. She served on the Steering Committee that worked on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and has written about that Declaration in several publications. She has conducted over 300 trainings and presentations for Indigenous communities, leaders, organizations and agencies. She graduated from the University of California with a degree in Women’s Studies and currently lives in Tucson, Arizona.   

For Buffalo’s Fire and Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance, I’m Alicia Hegland-Thorpe. And Thank you for your continued support and thank you for listening!

For more information see: ‘International Treaty Conference returns to Oceti Sakowin for 50th Anniversary’ https://www.buffalosfire.com/international-treaty-conference-returns-to-oceti-sakowin-for-50th-anniversary/

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