Legal Studies 372 - IndigenousPeoples-GlobalIssues

This course surveys the law, history and politics of Indigenous rights across the Americas, from the First Nations of Canada to the Mapuche in Chile, with an emphasis on the 20th and 21st centuries. We begin with a basic but surprisingly difficult question: what does it mean to have rights? Liberal legal systems are built around the individual, yet Indigenous claims are fundamentally collective. Granting "autonomy" to a groups nested within a sovereign state raises hard questions that courts, legislatures, and movements have answered in very different ways. This course uses those tensions as an entry point into a broader analysis of how rights are categorized, contested, and won. We distinguish between material rights (land, resources), symbolic rights (recognition, cultural protection), and political rights (self-determination, representation), and examine the tradeoffs between them. A second major theme is strategy. How have Indigenous movements built support beyond their own communities, securing allies in civil society, international institutions, and the courts? Cases span the United States, Canada, and Latin America, from ILO Convention 169 and the Zapatista uprising to constitutional reforms in Bolivia and Ecuador and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

LEGAL 101