Encountering, occupying and exceeding categories: being indigenous within the United Nations system.

My Ph.D. dissertation investigates the Latin American indigenous participation within specific United Nations mechanisms. It seeks to depict how indigenous participation becomes concrete and advances indigenous peoples’ rights and the agenda of the indigenous international and local movements in the United Nations system. Likewise, more theoretically, it contributes towards a better understanding of what it is to be indigenous within the scope of the international human rights fora. This research studies the United Nations (UN) as an institutionalized structure where indigenous delegates are visible and heterogeneous actors. The latter participate in different manners in UN mechanisms, treaty bodies, councils, covenants and in the international human rights milieu as a heterogeneous global movement and as individual community delegates. Since the late seventies, a lot of work has been done in the western international institutionalized human rights platform, working groups, instances, bodies were created with the active participation of indigenous delegates, non-indigenous partners and UN staff. Besides, relevant documents, studies, researches were and are conducted at the international, regional, national and local levels. In addition to the different initiatives led and implemented by indigenous peoples (IP) in their territories. Presently in the international milieu, there are two major meaningful documents for IP, the ILO (International Labour Organization) 169 binding Convention and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The latter was adopted by the General Assembly in September 2007. Nevertheless, indigenous peoples’ fulfillment of their rights is constantly challenged by strategic, economic and political power relations and structures, mainly, at the national and local levels. Therefore, to comprehend the Latin American indigenous peoples’ participation in the UN System, I concentrate my analysis on the Peruvian indigenous participation through the Indigenous Fellowship Programme (IFP) which is hosted by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva since 1997. Thus, to respond to my research interests, the following queries are key. First, I seek to understand how the indigenous Peruvian former fellows encounter and expand expected ways of being indigenous through their experience in the international human rights milieu. Secondly, I explore how they mobilize the indigenous peoples’ rights discourses and mechanisms after participating in the fellowship in their territories and their everyday life. Finally, in a broader fashion, I explore how indigenous former fellows enact a (un)expected way of being indigenous and how they embody and incorporate UN ways of doing in their practices and discourses. My methodological design was based on a one-year international multi-sited ethnography (July 2018-July 2019). I conducted an institutional ethnography in the OHCHR in Geneva, in the Indigenous peoples and minorities section (IPMS) for seven months. Besides, I have participated in multiple UN meetings on indigenous issues in New York and Geneva since 2017, and I conducted interviews and structured conversations with Peruvian former fellows in Peru and with other Latin American former fellows. Likewise, I have gathered essential documentation and online materials that will allow me to further analyze and triangulate my data. The purpose of this research is to understand how multiples ways of being and knowledges, relate to each other. The indigenous knowledges encounter UN knowledge through UN expertise, documents, bureaucracy and ways of doing; and indigenous delegates adapt themselves to participate in the UN system. This research will contribute to current anthropological debates on identity, indigeneity, and representation; epistemologies/ontologies; indigenous peoples’ rights; human rights; anthropology of international law and anthropology of institutions.