International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples: Indigenous Rights at the UN

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DATE & TIME

12:00 pm

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Ahead of the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, UNA-USA invites you to engage in this discussion with UN and indigenous leaders. The session will discuss indigenous peoples’ participation at the UN, how the UN promotes indigenous rights, and how we can all be better allies and advocates for indigenous rights issues in our local U.S. communities. Participants will walk away with a better understanding of how the Sustainable Development Goals Framework and Indigenous Rights intersect.

 

Featured Speakers:

Nikki Fraser – UN Youth Envoy’s SDG Young Leader

Nikki Fraser is an Indigenous advocate from Kamloops, B.C. Canada. She started Uniting Our Voices, a platform working for and towards inclusion and equality by creating a space for more Indigenous voices to be heard, to build connections, and inspire more change makers through stories and her engagements. She is involved in Indigenous research and advocacy through a gender-sensitive lens. Nikki is apart of the United Nations Young Leader for the Sustainable Development Goals for the United Nations Youth Envoy, a Scholar at Thompson Rivers University and was one of Flare Magazines 50+ women #HowIMadeit 2019/2020 list.

 

Carson Kibura – Co-Chair of the Global Indigenous Youth Caucus

Carson Kiburo Kibett is a youth leader and a community organizer from the Endorois Indigenous community of Kenya. He works on indigenous people’s rights, youth empowerment, and global governance. He is the immediate former co convener of the United Nations Inter Agency Network for Youth Development (UN IANYD) representing the UN IANYD Global Youth Caucus along with UN DESA (Department of Economic and Social Affairs) and UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization ). Notably, he is also the co-chair of the Global Indigenous Youth Caucus (GIYC) Global Focal Point for Indigenous youths’ constituency at the IANYD Youth Caucus and a member of the UN MGCY (UN Major Group for Children and Youth) Coordination team.

Carson is a technical production specialist contributing to and producing multimedia works such as video shoots, graphic design, and print media some of it self-taught to advance his advocacy work in the area of preservation and transmission of traditional knowledge.

Indigenous peoples traditional knowledge is key in combating climate change, as well as environmental conservation. He is co-founder and Executive Director of Jamii Asilia Centre, a social enterprise that promotes and protects the rights of the Indigenous Peoples in Kenya.

At the local level, in the Endorois community he is involved in the documentation of oral history and traditional knowledge. Born and bred in Semi Arid area near Lake Bogoria in Kenya, where they keep livestock and subsistence crop farming, Carson is particularly interested in intertwining cultural heritage and traditional knowledge with scalable sustainable developments. Recently, he has engaged extensively on the Climate Action Campaign. He’s an alum of the University of Pretoria’s Centre for Human Rights’ Advanced Human Rights at the Faculty of Law. He’s the co-author of “Global Indigenous Youth: Through Their Eyes”, the first book to focus on Indigenous youth issues globally published by Columbia University in New York, NY.

 

Elizabeth Rule – Director, AT&T CIPP

Dr. Elizabeth Rule is the Director of the AT&T Center for Indigenous Politics and Policy, Assistant Professor of Professional Studies, Director of the Semester in Washington Politics Program, and Faculty in Residence at the George Washington University. She is an enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation.

Her work has been published in American Quarterly and the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, and her research has been featured in the Washington PostMatter of Fact with Soledad O’BrienThe Atlantic, and NPR. Her book manuscript, Reproducing Resistance: Gendered Violence and Indigenous Nationhood, explores the intersection of Native American/First Nations women’s reproductive justice issues, gendered violence, and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women; this work received the Julien Mezey Award from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities in 2020.

While at GW, Rule has served as the Principal Investigator on a number of research projects. In Summer 2019, Rule created the Guide to Indigenous DC, a mobile application and digital map of Indigenous sites of importance in the nation’s capital. The Guide received media coverage on more than thirty outlets. Access to Justice: Native America investigated barriers to justice in tribal court systems, and resulted in the creation of legal code, “Code of Ethics, Professionalism, and Culture for Tribal Court Advocates” in 2019. Traditional Notions of Justice: Ecuador examined Indigenous justice systems in Otavalo and the tri-lingual Kichwa/English/Spanish language documentary resulting from this research is in progress.

Previously, Rule has held posts as a Postdoctoral Fellow in American Studies and the Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies Collaborative at American University, Visiting Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Ford Foundation Fellow. She has received support from Holisso: The Center for the Study of Chickasaw History and Culture, the American Indian College Fund, Native Americans in Philanthropy, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Rule received her Ph.D. and M.A. in American Studies from Brown University, and her B.A. from Yale University.