“Conclusion: Declaring a Fouth World.”

I have been wondering what are the visions of indigenous people. In this sense, the most interesting part is “Conclusion: Declaring a Fouth World.” He concludes with a discussion of the 1975 Sloemn Declaration of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples. According to WCIP definition,

Indigenous peoples are such population groups as we are, who from age-old time have inhabited the lands where we live, who are aware of having a character of our own, with social traditions and means of expression that are linked to the country inherited from our ancestors, with a language of our own, and having certain essential and unique characteristics which confer upon us the strong conviction of belonging to a people, who have an identity in ourselves and should thus be regarded by others. (p. 213).

Included in this discussion is reference of George Manuel’s The Fourth World: An Indian Reality, written with Michael Posluns and published in 1974. Manuel characterizes the formerly colonized peoples of the Third World as imitating the First, "rapidly learning to adapt [their] life-style[s] to Western technology", whereas he sees the Fourth World as seeking ultimately to develop a "new society." The Fourth World is "a vision of the future" rooted in "the values, the strengths, and the basic spiritual beliefs" of indigenous ancestors.

Indigenous minority activists and writers have created an interdependent and essentially inseparable triad out of "blood," "land," and "memory," and this triad has come to define minority indigeneity, its celebrated past, its contested present, and its imagined futures.