ABSTRACT
The Introduction offers an overview of the chapters included in the volume; and in doing so it shows that thinking about ‘human rights’ in the context of the indigenous cannot be restricted merely to the established international discourse on rights of ‘individuals’. The rights issue begins, in the case of the indigenous, with land and environment. As the chapters in the volume indicate, the state apparatus intended as protective measure falls too short of achieving its intended objective because it tends to segment the rights question into different components. The Introduction discusses how the chapters forming this volume expose the slippages between policy and the context to which it seeks to respond. The question of gender in indigenous communities is interlocked with the rapidly vanishing traditional wisdom about the symbiosis between nature and humans. The gender struggles of the indigenous, therefore, tend to focus less on the question of intimidation and turn to the question of alienation. In commenting on the chapters discussing this phenomenon through imaginative expression, this Introduction points out that depiction of violence in Australian and Maori indigenous literature, as reported by the author of the chapter, is a response to the West’s fantasy of Australian eroticism. That too becomes an urgent element in the gender-justice struggles among the indigenous. The Introduction orients the reader to the insights offered by the eight chapters included in the volume.
