Bøker av Ronald Niezen

When Peter Dekker is hired as an investigator by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, he has no inkling of the crimes in his own family's history.

Presents a conceptual and historical map of how we think about the emerging socio-political world, and above all how we think politically about human cultural differences. This book interprets, criticizes, and frames responses to world culture.

"e;International indigenism"e; may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it is indeed a global phenomenon and a growing form of activism. In his fluent and accessible narrative, Ronald Niezen examines the ways the relatively recent emergence of an internationally recognized identity-"e;indigenous peoples"e;-intersects with another relatively recent international movement-the development of universal human rights laws and principles. This movement makes use of human rights instruments and the international organizations of states to resist the political, cultural, and economic incursions of individual states.The concept "e;indigenous peoples"e; gained currency in the social reform efforts of the International Labor Organization in the 1950s, was taken up by indigenous nongovernmental organizations, and is now fully integrated into human rights initiatives and international organizations. Those who today call themselves indigenous peoples share significant similarities in their colonial and postcolonial experiences, such as loss of land and subsistence, abrogation of treaties, and the imposition of psychologically and socially destructive assimilation policies. Niezen shows how, from a new position of legitimacy and influence, they are striving for greater recognition of collective rights, in particular their rights to self-determination in international law. These efforts are influencing local politics in turn and encouraging more ambitious goals of autonomy in indigenous communities worldwide.

The campaign of the Cree people to protect their forest way of life from the impact of hydro-electric development in northern Quebec has been widely-documented. Few have heard in any detail the outcome of this campaign and what it means for the indigenous societies' futures. This text gives equal attention to the Cree leadership's successful strategies for addressing major social and environmental pressures, with the forces of acculturation and native communities' social destruction. The titles in the "Cultural Survival Studies in Ethnicity and Change" series, edited by David Maybury-Lewis and Theodore Macdonald, Jr. of Cultural Survival, Inc., Harvard University, focus on key issues affecting indigenous and ethnic groups worldwide. Each ethnography builds on introductory material by going further in-depth and allowing students to explore, virtually first-hand, a particular issue and its impact on a culture.

Thoughtful, provocative, and uncompromising in the need to tell the "truth" as he sees it, Niezen offers an important contribution to understanding truth and reconciliation processes in general, an the Canadian experience in particular.

An exploration of the ways in which the destruction of spiritual practices and beliefs of native peoples in North America has led to conditions of collective suffering - a process sometimes referred to as cultural genocide.