About the authors:
Lawrence E. Susskind is the Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Vice-Chair of Education at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, Director of the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program, and founder of the Consensus Building Institute.
Elizabeth Anguelovski is a doctoral student in Environmental Policy and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT.
Indigenous people have lived in the same locations for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The national governments involves either refuse to recognize the land claims of indigenous people or are only willing to settle claims in ways unacceptable to them. However, unless these claims are resolved in such a way the First Peoples gain control sufficient, at the very least, to maintain their language and culture, they will disappear. This paper explores 14 cases of indigenous land claims, concentrating on the strategies that these First Nations have pursued and the responses they have received from the dominant cultures that surround them. The goal of the research is to understand the preconditions for effectively resolving the land claims of indigenous people around the world.
The full article is available online (pdf) from the MIT Program on Human Rights & Justice.
