The return of the native

On Human Rights Day 1992, the United Nations proclaimed an International Year of the Worlds Indigenous People. A Decade for Indigenous Peoples was subsequently launched, to run from 1995 to 2004, and a Forum of Indigenous Peoples established. The inaugural meeting of the Forum, held in Geneva in 1996, was unfortunately disrupted by gatecrashers. A selfstyled delegation of South African Boers turned up and demanded to be allowed to participate on the grounds that they too were indigenous people. Moreover, they claimed that their traditional culture was under threat from the new African National Congress government. They were unceremoniously ejected, and no doubt their motives were far from pure, but the drama might usefully have drawn attention to the difficulty of defining and identifying indigenous people.