ABSTRACT
This chapter examines three ways of understanding the relation between human rights and Indigenous rights. The first views Indigenous rights as the elaboration or development of human rights, the second views Indigenous rights as distinct from and incompatible with human rights, while the third views Indigenous rights as the product of interaction between Indigenous and non-Indigenous conceptions of rights including human rights. With a particular focus on the rights laid out in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the chapter argues against the first and in favour of a version of the third interactionist view. Actually existing Indigenous rights must be understood as a product of the interaction between Indigenous societies, their colonisers and the evolving order of international law. However, the idea of human rights and the second “discontinuist” view are important in order to understand existing Indigenous rights. The latter must be taken into account in order to understand the wrongs to which Indigenous rights are a partial response and what it is that makes them “Indigenous.”
