The UN at 80: Between Recognition & Reclamation

Dear Relatives,

Today marks the 80th anniversary of the United Nations, an institution founded in the shadow of world war with the promise to uphold peace, dignity, and human rights for all.

The question that I hear often these days in spaces with relatives, friends, in the streets, in the silence of morning – is where do we go from here? How do we stem the tide of injustice that threatens to swallow us whole?

I wanted to take a moment to share some reflections drawn from remarks,“Between Recognition and Reclamation: Indigenous Peoples, the International System, and the Future of Solidarity,” delivered today at the Monique & Roland Weyl People’s Academy of International Law, in conversation with Hiroshi Furakai and Nick Estes.

As the world witnesses grave human rights violations, accelerating climate collapse, and deepening inequality, we know the international system itself is in crisis: ecologically, politically, and morally.

For Indigenous Peoples, this crisis is not new. From the moment the UN was founded in 1945, our Nations, whose sovereignty predated the very concept of the “state,” were written out of the system. For decades, we were invisible not because we were absent, but because international law was built to see only states. It took nearly a century of persistence for Indigenous Peoples to even be heard in these spaces.

And when recognition came, after decades of struggle that culminated in the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, it came with limits. Article 46 of that Declaration affirms self-determination of Indigenous Peoples only so far as it does not challenge the “territorial integrity of states.” The territorial integrity of the Earth, our shared responsibility to the land, waters, and future generations, remains unprotected.

Today, as the international order fractures under too many pressure points to count, Indigenous Peoples’ experiences reveal what many are only now beginning to see: the failure of the system to uphold life itself. In Gaza, in Ecuador, and across the world, we see impunity, paralysis, and silence. Even speaking truth to power at the United Nations bears a heavy cost – many are targeted and return home to threats or worse. Global Witness reported that in 2024, 146 frontline defenders were killed, a third of them Indigenous working primarily on environmental justice issues.

And yet, we continue to show up.

At Standing Rock, in the Amazon, across other crises in the Arctic and Andes, Indigenous Peoples are building something the UN was never designed to hold: an internationalism desde abajo (from the ground up). This is the work of accompaniment, of standing together in defense of life itself, and facing every storm with courage.

This August, we walked among 7,000 Indigenous women in Brasília as they marched to defend their territories, which also safeguard some of the most biodiverse places on Earth. That gathering was a breathing, intergenerational reminder that self-determination is not a clause in a treaty; it is a living practice, carried by people who rise together for land, for water, for life.

At the Water Protector Legal Collective, we carry that spirit forward, building bridges between local struggles and international mechanisms, even as we recognize the limitations of those mechanisms. The international system is not beyond redemption, but it must be grounded again in relationship, reciprocity, and responsibility.

On this 80th anniversary of the UN, we honor the generations who fought for Indigenous visibility within its walls. But we also remember recognition was never the endpoint. We didn’t need to be “recognized” to know we existed before the creation even of states. Presence in spaces of power that weren’t built for us, was always the beginning of reclamation.

The challenge and opportunity before us is to reclaim spaces and (re) imagine what lies beyond the colonial systems that still shape our world, and root that imagining in responsibility to land, to each other, to future generations.

Join us in taking up the mantle of human rights, remembering our greatest obligation is to the territorial integrity of the Earth, and to one another.

Urpillay sonqollay,

From the heart,

Natali Segovia, Esq.

Executive Director & Senior Attorney

Water Protector Legal Collective