Movement for Rights of Indigenous Peoples: World Experience and Ukrainian Context

Author

Borysenko Myroslav – a Doctor of History, a professor at Ethnology and Local History Subdepartment of the Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University

Movement for Rights of Indigenous Peoples: World Experience and Ukrainian Context

Abstract

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples has been adopted in 2007. Some countries (New Zealand, Australia, Canada and USA) have refused to pass it because of the contradictions to their low system. However recently they have changed opinion and admitted it. Ukrainian Parliament confirms this Declaration in 2014 suddenly after the Crimean Republic has been attacked and occupied by the Russian Federation. Movement for the rights of indigenous peoples is one of the painful pages in the world history. Governments of the USA or the Great Britain have tried to adopt indigenous peoples levelling their ethnicity, removing them to boarding schools since 1950s–1960s. This policy is called cultural genocide. It is condemned by world community. International organizations consider rights of indigenous peoples as inalienable part of movement for human rights and it is a basement of current development.

Movement for indigenous peoples rights coincides with the raising of ecological consciousness in the second part of the XX century. In general Europeans belief that many indigenous peoples live in harmony with surroundings and they use aboriginal symbols to avoid earth or water pollution. Meanwhile, the general conflict is generated by contradiction between people rights and collective rights of indigenous peoples. In the present time almost all rights of indigenous peoples are preserved by low and government in North America or Australian, but Asian and African countries support them not enough.

Case of Ukraine is different because it is a postcolonial country which has got independence not a long time ago. Ukrainian anthropologists (ethnologists) are isolated from the consideration of the statement proposed by Ukrainian Parliament in the February, 20 2014 because it has been caused by dramatic political events.

Keywords

indigenous peoples, collective rights, the United Nations Declaration, cultural genocide, assimilation.

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