By Dr Jennifer Allsopp
Birmingham Fellow, School of Social Policy, University of Birmingham
The migration of Indigenous communities is often far from safe and, to date, States have failed to deliver adequate protections for these populations. A new report has found that Indigenous communities have therefore developed their own strategies to respond to rights violations. Drawing on the direct knowledge and experience of Indigenous migrant communities, the report presents a novel approach to human rights literacy and advocacy that includes Indigenous practices in policies.
It is on International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples that the report is published by the United Nations Centre for Policy Research (UNU-CPR) in collaboration with staff at the Institute for Research into International Migration and Superdiversity (IRiS) at the University of Birmingham and the Centre for Education and International Development at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. The report is titled KNOW Your Rights: A Critical Rights Literacy Framework Based on Indigenous Migrant Practices across Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States. It draws on grass-roots practices of people on the move in Guatemala, Mexico and the United States to argue for a new framework for the inclusion of Indigenous practices in policies and practices in efforts to protect the rights of Indigenous migrants and their families.
Both Guatemala and Mexico are home to large Indigenous populations. Approximately 43 per cent of the Guatemalan population identifies as Indigenous (6.4 million people), speaking 25 languages, while 23 per cent (27.5 million) of the Mexican population identifies as Indigenous, speaking at least 64 languages.
Having historically been excluded from development initiatives, people from Indigenous communities constitute an important population of domestic and international migrants who are from, transitioning through, or residing in Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States. Their migration is spurred through a combination of threats such as environmental change, livelihood collapse, and State fragility. The last three reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also make extensive and alarming references to the impacts of climate change on migration.
Most Indigenous migrants are adult men whose movement is part of a family livelihood strategy but since 2014 there has been a large increase in the number of women, children and young people migrating. Both Guatemala and Mexico are sites of significant organised crime, being strategically located in the corridor between South and North America. Women and youth are particularly vulnerable in these environments and it is estimated that 70 per cent of human trafficking victims in the region are Indigenous women. Femicide also disproportionately affects Indigenous women due to weak democratic and justice mechanisms.
These factors are compounded by a lack of State-sanctioned (often known as ‘regular’) mobility opportunities. As a consequence, people in communities with relatively large Indigenous populations are more likely to migrate through irregular channels. An Indigenous community leader from Sololá, Guatemala, who contributed to the report explained:
“We don’t have the opportunity to go to other countries freely as we don’t have the opportunity to get a visa or a passport.”
Dr Jennifer Allsopp, Birmingham Fellow and first author of the report explained,
“Whether the dominant threat is one of land dispossession, labour exploitation, gender-based violence at the border, or some other risk, the migration of Indigenous communities is often far from safe and orderly and, to date, as the UN has recognised, States have failed to deliver adequate protections for these populations.”
Speaking previously on the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, UN Secretary-General António Guterres remarked:
“Indigenous peoples around the world continue to face overwhelming marginalization, discrimination, and exclusion.”
The scale of Indigenous migration, coupled with its tendency to take place outside of legal channels, poses a challenge to international rights frameworks which seek to protect people on the move. Against this background, Indigenous communities have developed strategies to respond to rights violations and arm themselves with human rights education as a means to exercise their rights and seek justice for the harms they have endured. The report argues that the bottom-up and networked practices developed by Indigenous communities can inform policy interventions at local, national, and international levels.
Dr Allsopp explains,
“The critical rights literacy approach proposed in this report links raising awareness of rights to thinking about how such knowledge can be operationalized by different populations of concern and across different stages of the migration cycle. Indigenous communities are taking leadership in educating themselves and others about their rights and are putting in place processes which facilitate the operationalization of such rights.”
The report showcases examples of grassroots initiatives working to uphold labour rights; women’s rights; access to due legal process; language rights; and cultural preservation rights among other areas. It also provides concrete examples of effective partnerships, and how statutory and intergovernmental organisations and institutions can best resource these initiatives and protect Indigenous migrant communities in their endeavours across all stages of the migration cycle, from pre-migration and transit to settlement in host communities and post- return. Access to digital resources here is key.
One initiative showcased is the Citizen’s School for Human Rights in Guatemala which uses Indigenous storytelling methods to co-develop rights literacy content which is shared as audio files for mobile phones. Another case study is that of the CIELO map “We Are Here”, a women-led effort which has mapped Indigenous languages in Los Angeles. They created a virtual map as a way of addressing the fact that Indigenous communities are often erased in the immigrant narrative of the US and are commonly missing from data collection and datasets on migrant communities. The map was important to the Covid-19 response by demonstrating that people surveyed were overwhelmingly essential workers, such as people employed in the food industry or as dry cleaners.
Key to the report’s findings is that authorities must recognise and seek to support the range of initiatives communities are already engaged in. The authors propose the KNOW framework for rights literacy, which involves valuing Indigenous Knowledges, Networks, Ownership, and Words. The framework – which is both a tool and ‘checklist’ to inform policy interventions at local, national, and international levels – is grounded in community practices and has been developed in consultation with Indigenous communities.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Birmingham.