The UN Shifted on Indigenous Rights (And Nobody Noticed)
On two procedural moves at the HRC Advisory Committee last month.
Hope you had a good weekend,
Last month I walked into a UN Human Rights Council meeting room and spoke as Indigenous Peoples. Not as NGOs. Not borrowing someone else’s seat.
No resolution made that happen. No vote. No campaign. The room just did it. And the sky did not fall.
The Human Rights Council Advisory Committee met for its 34th session. Eighteen members. Studies on sea level rise, fossil fuels, neurotechnology. Standard setup. Standard agenda. Nothing about it looked different from any other meeting that week.
But two things happened that will not appear in any press release.
Indigenous Peoples organizations were accredited as IPOs without requiring ECOSOC status. Now if you know what ECOSOC accreditation means, you know it is a process. Takes time. Costs resources. And for many Indigenous organizations, particularly smaller ones, it is the bottleneck that keeps them outside the room entirely. This week, that bottleneck was gone.
On the speakers list, IPOs were listed as a separate category. Before NGOs. Not lumped in with civil society. Not treated as a subset of something else. Listed as Indigenous Peoples. And called to speak as Indigenous Peoples. Before anyone else who was not a State.
Two procedural shifts. No announcement. No trumpets. No resolution forced either one. They just did it.
And these are subtle but significant steps. That phrase keeps coming back to me. Subtle but significant. Because that is actually what diplomacy looks like most of the time. Not the dramatic votes on the plenary floor that make the news. Not the press conferences. Not the big speeches. It is small moves in small rooms that nobody announces. And if you are not watching carefully, you miss them entirely.
Now Sun Tzu said something that I keep coming back to. Water shapes its course according to the nature of the ground over which it flows. It does not fight the terrain. It does not try to push through rock when there is softer ground nearby. It finds where the ground gives way and moves there.
That is the best description I know for how culture change actually works inside institutions. Not just the UN. Any institution. Any system you are trying to change from inside.
We spend enormous energy pushing against walls. Writing proposals. Building coalitions. Drafting resolutions. Sitting in rooms where the same arguments get made year after year, the same objections raised by the same delegations, the same language bracketed and the same language deleted. And all of that matters. I am not saying it does not. The proposals matter. The coalitions matter. The resolutions matter. People gave their careers to get us into some of these rooms.
But here is what doing all this has taught me. The wall does not move because you push harder. The wall moves because the ground underneath it has already shifted.
The enhanced participation process has been working toward a new status for Indigenous Peoples in the UN system for years now. Something that recognizes Indigenous representative institutions as distinct from NGOs. Something closer to observer status, like what intergovernmental organizations have.
That process has politically stalled. The reasons are multiple and I will get into them in a future substack section. But the formal path is, at best, frozen. And in a climate where multilateralism is under fire and budget crises give everyone an excuse to cut what is inconvenient? That process could be killed entirely.
And yet last month. A meeting room in Geneva quietly did the thing that process has been trying to achieve. Without permission. Without a rule change. Without anyone making a speech about it. The room simply treated Indigenous Peoples as Indigenous Peoples. And everything that followed flowed from that one quiet decision. That is what subtle but significant looks like in practice.
Now this is not the first time. And that is the part that matters most. The Human Rights Council September session. The dialogue with the Special Rapporteur. The annual panel on the rights of Indigenous Peoples. EMRIP sessions. In each of these spaces, over time, Indigenous Peoples have gained the ability to participate as Indigenous Peoples. Not as NGOs credentialed through a system that was never built for them. As themselves.
No single moment made that happen. No dramatic floor speeches. It was a slow accumulation of rooms where someone made the move. A move to treat Indigenous participation as normal instead of exceptional. Where the shift happened first and the formal recognition followed. Or is still following.
And every single time? The sky did not fall.
I want to say that again because it is the most important part of this entire letter. Every time States allowed Indigenous Peoples to participate as Indigenous Peoples, the meeting still happened. The agenda still moved forward. The report still got written. The negotiations still concluded. Nothing broke. Nothing collapsed.
The only thing that changed was the room got better input. From the people who actually knew the most about what was being discussed. The conversation got more honest. That is it. That is the entire consequence of treating Indigenous Peoples as Indigenous Peoples. Better input. More honest conversations. And the sky not falling.
It is all about making Indigenous Peoples’ participation as logical as gravity. What I’ve learned in the enhanced participation process. You can achieve it with more than just changing the rules of procedure. It does not have to start with a resolution or a lobbying campaign or a floor speech.
It definitely starts with changing the culture. Room by room. Session by session. Precedent by precedent. Until the rules have no choice but to catch up. Because by then, the culture has already moved and the old rules no longer describe what is actually happening.
Sun Tzu again:Aavoid what is strong, strike at what is weak.
The formal process is stuck. The political appetite on Indigenous issues is low. Multilateralism under pressure from every direction. That is the strong wall. Push there and you exhaust yourself.
But the culture in Geneva is already moving. Advisory committee. HRC September session. Annual panel. Special Rapporteur dialogues. Room after room, the culture has quietly shifted. Indigenous Peoples participating as Indigenous Peoples. And the sky has not fallen. Not once.
That is where the ground gives way. That is where you push.
Have to do it somewhere else? Look at the system you are trying to change. Whatever it is. A company. A government agency. A community institution. Any structure where the rules say one thing and the people inside are already doing something different.
Stop staring at the wall that will not move. The policy stuck in committee. The bylaw nobody will vote on. The formal process that has been frozen for years while everyone waits for the political moment to improve. You know that wall. You have been pushing against it for months, maybe years. And it has not moved.
Find the room where the culture has already shifted. Even slightly. Even in one meeting. Even in one procedural decision that nobody announced or celebrated. That room is your opening. Make the next move there. Expand what works. Build the precedent. Let the people who write the rules see what is already happening on the ground and realize they have no choice but to follow.
The rule catches up later. It always does. But only if the culture moves first. And the culture moves when someone walks in and acts as if the change has already happened. Not with arrogance. With clarity. Because you belong. And the sky will not fall.
What do you think of this newsletter format? Do you like the essay style?
See you next week!