The energy and buzz in the air is electric on the first day of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the second largest nongovernmental gathering hosted by the international organization. The area around the Vienna Café in first basement south roars with conversation in colonial and Indigenous languages from across the globe.

Morgan Brings Plenty navigates around half a dozen groups of people. She is in a ribbon skirt and one of many attendees wearing their traditional clothing or regalia.

The space was the opposite of quiet and private but that didn’t keep Brings Plenty from talking vulnerably about her deepest loss. Two years ago Brings Plenty lost her mother, Joy Braun, who was a lifelong environmental activist. Tears were falling down Brings Plenty’s face as she talked about her mother’s legacy and how she continues that work today.

“She told me to always carry on even after she goes,” Brings Plenty said. “She told me that, ‘When I go, it’s your time.’”

This is her first time at the United Nations headquarters in New York, a place she never dreamed she would be.

Brings Plenty was wearing her mother’s signature black beret with a beaded green turtle, a choice she made to honor her mother. She came with two other young people from the Indigenous Environmental Network.

Brings Plenty, Cheyenne River Sioux, and AnnaLee Yellow Hammer, Standing Rock Sioux, came to deliver an intervention about shutting down the Dakota Access pipeline, a years-long legal battle that came to international infamy during the NoDAPL movement in Standing Rock, North Dakota, in 2016. An intervention is when speeches are given during the forum, often including a call to action.

Yellow Hammer was 12 when she participated in a prayer run from her homelands in what is now known as North Dakota to Washington, D.C., to petition the federal government to shutdown the controversial pipeline.

Eight years later, Brings Plenty, 29, and Yellow Hammer, 20, are still bringing attention to the impacts of the pipeline on their communities and the impending lawsuits against environmental organizations for protesting it.

“We are also here to warn the global community about the rising threat of abusive lawsuits known as a strategic lawsuit against public participation,” Brings Plenty said during the intervention. “The lawsuit is seeking $300 million in damages from GreenPeace and is set to go to trial in the summer of 2024 in North Dakota. The lawsuit against GreenPeace is also an attack on the Indigenous movement and our fight for self-determination to protect Mother Earth, our waters, sacred and cultural sites and our youth and future generations. These colonist lawsuits are trying to send a message and warning to anyone who might consider speaking out and to be quiet. Any of you could be next.”

There are more than 100 youth delegations at the 23rd session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, as this year’s theme centers Indigenous youth. This forum has seen the largest and most diverse cohort of Indigenous youth, according to the Global Indigenous Youth Caucus. From the very beginning, involvement of young people has always been part of the forum and their participation is important because one day they will be sitting as chair, filling the seats of conference room four, and ultimately, continuing the generational fight to defend the rights of Indigenous peoples across the globe.

Morgan Brings Plenty, Cheyenne River Sioux, gives an intervention about lawsuits targeting protesters during the NoDALP movement at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues at the UN headquarters in New York City on April 16, 2024. (Pauly Denetclaw, ICT)

The sacrifices, hard work and advocacy to create and pass the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is many. There were six Indigenous leaders who held a hunger strike to push member states to pass the historic resolution. Others left their families and communities to do full-time advocacy work at the United Nations as well as sit-ins, Ghazali Ohorella, an international Indigenous rights attorney, said.

“There’s a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in there (UNDRIP),” Ohorella said. “So we’ve got to protect it with our lives. How do you protect it with your lives, is to not only use it, but breathe life into it. So that is one of the reasons why it’s super important for Indigenous youth to be walking side by side with those that have been there before.

Many youth attending expressed that there has to be vigilance on protecting and advancing Indigenous rights globally. It’s not hyperbolic to say that in a single day, with one motion, a call for a vote, for the work done on the declaration — where the second article states that Indigenous people are equal to everyone else — to go away. An article that had to be included because as far back as 1977, member states were saying that Indigenous people didn’t have a right to self-determination or subject to international laws because they weren’t peoples, according to Kenneth Deer, who worked to help get the forum created and to pass UNDRIP.

“If we don’t ensure the participation of our future generations, then all of that work will be lost,” said Rochelle Diver, UN environmental treaties coordinator for the International Indian Treaty Council. “Not only is this an opportunity for us, it’s also a responsibility for us to come here and ensure our future generations are protected in any way that we can.”

Youth historically a forum focus

The forum members took feedback from last year and used that to craft the focus. The theme for this year is, “Enhancing Indigenous Peoples’ right to self determination in the context of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: emphasizing the voices of Indigenous youth.”

UN Permanent Forum Member Geoff Roth said moving “the idea of self-determination beyond just North America into other areas” inspired this year’s theme. They wanted to get the youth involved in it.

“I just have to say I have been really impressed so far with the youth and the way they’ve participated,” Roth said.

This isn’t the first time the forum has included youth in its yearly theme. In fact, the second theme in 2003 was simply, “Indigenous children and youth.” It was chosen to, “focus attention on the survival of Indigenous peoples.”

“There’s always been an emphasis on youth. I think it was one of the early items too,” Kenneth Deer, an active participant in the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations since 1987, told ICT. “The development of a youth caucus was important to have. They have a body themselves that would be able to function and participate in that way.”

Global Indigenous Youth Caucus and UN Permanent Forum relationship

Mai Thin Yu Mon has been part of the Global Youth Indigenous Caucus for nine years. The 34-year-old is from the Chin people of Myanmar and had been working on land rights for a few years before joining the caucus in 2015.

She became a focal point for the Asia region a year later. A focal point is essentially a regional lead for each of the forum’s seven sociocultural regions — Africa; the Arctic; Asia; Central and South America and the Caribbean; Eastern Europe, Russian Federation, Central Asia and Transcaucasia; North America; and the Pacific. She was a focal point for six years before being nominated and elected by her peers to co-chair of the youth caucus.

This will be Mai Thin Yu Mon’s last term and final year as part of the caucus since the caucus is for Indigenous people who are under 35 years old.

She reflected on her time in a quiet conference room on an overcast Wednesday afternoon. The room is part of an even more silent 31st floor of the Secretariat Building overlooking the skyscrapers in midtown Manhattan.

“It’s very emotional,” Mai Thin Yu Mon said. “But at the same time, I have great hope because these days we say the younger, they have more energy, and more innovative our youth have become. So I’m very positive. I can’t wait to see who will be the next batch of leadership.”

This year’s forum chair is 40-year-old Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, from the Mbororo pastoralist community in Chad, a country in north central Africa. She is part of a 14-member forum — seven state appointed and seven appointed by Indigenous organizations which includes the chair.

“She’s young and very energetic young woman,” Mai Thin Yu Mon said of Ibrahim.

So Mai Thin Yu Mon has high hopes that the forum will continue to engage with the youth caucus with the new chair. Plus for the last nine years she knows that the forum chair has met with the youth caucus.

However, the lack of involvement from the other 13 members is a concern because the caucus is only allowed to present an intervention through an annual exception made by a vote of the entire 14-member forum.

Complications to being heard

While the forum’s theme is youth focused, some say the forum and the United Nations system, in general, is not doing enough to engage with youth in a meaningful way.

“I was honestly a little disappointed. I’m glad the youth were included but it’s a broad theme and they’re there at the bottom,” Rochelle Diver said. “Youth is a really broad term and you can be up to 35-years-old. Yes, the youth that are here that can come and articulate for themselves on behalf of their communities, that’s great. But what about the young, young people? Don’t we want to hear from those that are in middle school, that are in high school and don’t we want to train them and have them understand what this body is. These are all things we have to think about.”

The issues don’t end there.

Every year, it is a complicated and cumbersome process for the youth caucus to have their voices heard at the forum.

Only registered organizations can present interventions at the forum. If someone wants to sign up to give an intervention, they have to stand in, oftentimes, a long line that wraps around the corner to get to the registration desk. Once there, the staff determines if that organization is allowed to give an intervention.

“We need to remind them,” Mai Thin Yu Mon said. “And sometimes those who sit at the registration desk, maybe it slips out of their mind and sometimes they would just say, ‘No, you can’t sign up.’ We have to remind them, request them. So it takes a lot of coordination actually, and even today, we had to do that.”

On the other hand, the forum members recommended the creation of the Global Indigenous Youth Forum in 2016 after advocacy from the youth caucus. Five years later, the first one came to fruition online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Two years later, it was held in person for the first time in Rome, Italy. Over 100 youth participated.

In 2022, the youth caucus asked the forum to study and identify Indigenous determinants of health. The historic UN study called “Indigenous Determinants of Health” was released one year later.

Success story

Ghazali Ohorella is an example of the importance of youth involvement and the impact it can make on a person’s life.

Ohorella has a baby photo of him at the United Nations with his mother, Pelpina Sahureka, a lifelong international advocate for the Alifuru people, to say he’s grown up there would be accurate. It wasn’t until he was 12 or 13 that he began to comprehend what all of this meant.

Ohorella is Alifuru from Maluku, a province in Indonesia. At 14, his mother asked if he wanted to give a statement at the United Nations in Geneva. He agreed and gave his first statement during a general debate.

“We talked about self-determination, sovereignty, and decolonization,” Ohorella said. “That’s when I caught the bug a little bit. So I had to really pay attention to what my mom was doing. And I wanted to be of value as well because as you catch the bug, you’re like, alright, so what can I do more?”

Today, Ohorella, an international Indigenous rights attorney, has a long list of accomplishments. He is currently the executive secretary for the Indigenous Peoples at the UN. He continues to advocate for his people and other Indigenous communities at the United Nations.

“Figure out your own story. Your story does not have to be your parents’ story or your ancestors’ story,” he said. “You respect them. You stand on their shoulders. They’ve built the foundations for you to figure out what you want to do with your life. So, do that.”