The draft declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples completed by the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations in 1993 has been described by Robert Williams, Jr. as ‘one of the most important encounters occurring on the frontiers of international human rights law’. For Williams and other indigenous commentators, its importance is procedural as well as substantive. The draft is portrayed as responding significantly to the stories told by indigenous peoples about their place in the world and to their arguments about the human rights that must be recognized for them to preserve this place. But Mary Ellen Turpel describes the draft as significant, first and foremost, for the remarkable ‘power-sharing of the pen’ between the human rights experts who comprised the Working Group and the indigenous peoples and state representatives who took part in its work.

The participation of indigenous peoples themselves in the articulation of their rights in international law, including their right of self-determination, differentiates this interpretive forum from the international courts and tribunals in the previous chapter. The UN Working Group integrated indigenous participation into both its credo and its methods. The number of participants in the 1993 session of the Working Group, including observer governments, UN organizations, indigenous nations, organizations and communities, non-governmental organizations, individual experts and scholars, totalled over six hundred. In addition to the nine indigenous NGOs having consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council, more than one hundred indigenous nations and organizations were represented at the session.