ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 re-historicizes the production, formation and emergence of Indigenous peoples in international legal discourse. It highlights the emergence of Indigenous peoples within international legal discourse as a new international legal subjectivity. Building upon theorizations of discourse and power, it explains how members otherwise identifiable as Indigenous populations subjectified themselves in international legal discourse beginning in the late 1970s and the 1980s to have their rights recognized. They determined their selves as subjects of international law and became identifiable Indigenous peoples. Building upon a performative approach to discourse and power, it then explains how self-identifying Indigenous peoples asserted rights throughout the 1990s and 2000s, which provides the appearance that Indigenous peoples were natural subjects, rather than a historically contingent subject status that emerged from international legal discourse. While Indigenous peoples began asserting rights, the international legal discourse underwent processes of democratization amidst growing and influential business and commercial interests on human rights discourse. It ends by describing how the UN adopted UNDRIP.
