Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is about the rights of indigenous peoples and explores the role of different actors in shaping these rights and the many challenges of implementation. It recalls James Tully's work: where treaties were negotiated between colonizers and indigenous peoples, they did so on the basis of mutual respect for sovereignty. The book shows how the dominant legal system fails to accommodate indigenous systems of knowledge, imposing patents, property rights, copyright laws and other material concepts on what are non-material collective goods in indigenous societies. It focuses on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) uses the Zapatista Women's Revolutionary Law, developed by indigenous women directly, to highlight the gaps in the international indigenous rights framework, particularly with respect to human rights violations in the private sphere.