A Resiliência da Identidade: Indigenato e a Virada Histórica no Direito Internacional

Abstract

In this article, I discuss the lack of Indigenous-centric accounts in the turn to history in international law. Considering that one of the main political uses of this turn to history aims at exposing, critiquing, and ultimately undoing the harm of colonial encounters (in Third World Approaches to International Law, for instance), it is somewhat sobering that often, and particularly in Indigenous contexts, this encounter is still told from the perspective of the colonizer. In doing so, it frames Indigenous existence solely from the perspective of victimhood, which is inevitably articulated in a way that denies the agency of Indigenous people and peoples as historical actors. This paradox showcases the resilience of Eurocentrism in our articulation of international legal projects, and the resilience of Indigenous identity and resistance despite ongoing structural erasure. This chapter therefore asks what it might mean epistemologically and methodologically to centre Indigeneity in the turn to history in international law, arguing for the recovery and leveraging of Indigenous agency in the turn to history in international law. I am myself non-Indigenous, so I do not aim to offer an “Indigenous view of international legal history”, but rather simply to drive and exploit wedges in scholarship on the turn to history. These wedges might make the field more amenable to attend to the resilience of the subaltern, open the field up to other historical methodologies, and fundamentally query whether we can learn about resilience in the face of external challenges to international legal ordering from the resilience that already exists within international law.