Announcement of Website: “The deployment of the terms indigenous, aboriginal, and Indian(s) in the texts of international constitutions.”

Authors

Charles D. Bernholz, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Marcia Dority Baker, University of Nebraska - LincolnFollow

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

1-27-2014

Citation

The URL for this resource is http://treatiesportal.unl.edu/indigenous/

Comments

Government Documents and the Marvin and Virginia Schmid Law Library at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln are pleased to announce the release of a World Wide Web site entitled “The deployment of the terms indigenous, aboriginal, and Indian(s) in the texts of international constitutions.”

We welcome your comments, as well as your error reports.

Abstract

Abstract Indigenous societies around the world are stepping forward to assert their place as an equal partner in their nation’s future. In many cases, these efforts have been undertaken in response to the development and the 2007 publication of the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, as endorsed by the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations. Governments also have begun to reconsider their stance on the associated issues. The digital texts of 189 international constitutions – as offered by the Constitute Web site – were examined for occurrences of the four tokens indigenous, aboriginal, and Indian or Indians to yield country indices. Documents from forty countries were found to contain the term indigenous and seven possessed aboriginal (N uses = 320 and 19, respectively). The more familiar token Indian, or its plural, occurred 88 times in ten of these political affirmations.

The Link button (upper right) goes to the resource at the Treaties Portal section on the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities site at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
The Summary Excel spreadsheet is attached (below) as a related file.