Voices from the Margins: Legal Battles of Global Indigenous Communities

 This year’s symposium focused on the rising persecution of indigenous populations around the world and the roles that international legal systems play in holding these governments accountable. 

Michigan State International Law Review invited the legal community to our 2023 annual symposium, “Voices from the Margins: Legal Battles of Global Indigenous Communities” on February 24, 2023. Legal experts joined us from around the world to explore these legal battles.

To see photographs from our 2023 symposium, please click here.

Speakers:

Dr. Leo Baskatawang is an Anishinaabe scholar from Lac Des Mille Lacs First Nation in Treaty #3 territory. In 2021, Leo graduated with a PhD in Native Studies from the University of Manitoba. His SSHRC funded doctoral dissertation “Kinamaadiwin Inaakonigewin: A Path to Reconciliation and Anishinaabe Cultural Resurgence” reflects on the development of the Treaty #3 Anishinaabe education law as it is known in the oral tradition, into a written form of law. This work will be published as a book by the University of Manitoba Press, under the title Reclaiming Anishinaabe Law. The book is scheduled for release in Spring 2023.

Prior to joining the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Law at Robson Hall, Dr. Baskatawang held an appointment in the Law and Society Program at York University, where he taught the courses “Indigenous Peoples and Law” and “Social Justice and Law”. Previous to that, Dr. Baskatawang has also taught online courses for the Department of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba.

Heide Castañeda is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Florida. Her research areas include critical border studies, political and legal anthropology, migration, and citizenship, focusing on the U.S./Mexico border, Mexico, Germany, and Morocco. She is the author of Borders of Belonging: Struggle and Solidarity in Mixed-Status Immigrant Families (Stanford University Press, 2019) and co-editor of Unequal Coverage: The Experience of Health Care Reform in the United States (NYU Press, 2018). Her latest book is Migration and Health: Critical Perspectives (Routledge, 2023).

Dr. Castañeda has also published dozens of research articles on migration. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the Fulbright Program, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Current projects include a focus on Indigenous mobilities through the experiences of Amazigh im/migrants in the United States, as well as a National Science Foundation-funded project examining shifts in spaces of “transit” to settlement for sub-Saharan Africans in Morocco, focused on forced immobility, legal status precarity, gendered geographies of power, and local processes of racialization.

Federico Lenzerini is Ph.D., International Law, and Professor of International Law and Human Rights at the Department of Political and International Sciences of the University of Siena (Italy). He is also Professor at the LLM programme in Intercultural Human Rights at the St. Thomas University School of Law, Miami (FL), USA, Professor at the Tulane-Siena Summer School on International Law, Cultural Heritage and the Arts, Deputy Head of the Hawaiian Kingdom’s Royal Commission of Inquiry, and Member of the Academic Friends of the UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (EMRIP).

He has been Consultant to UNESCO (Paris), Counsel to the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for international negotiations related to cultural heritage, and member of the Italian delegation at meetings of the World Heritage Committee. He has been the Rapporteur of the ‘Committee on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’ of the International Law Association (ILA) (2008-2012), Rapporteur of the ILA ‘Committee on the Implementation of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’ (2013-2020), member of the ILA ‘Committee on Biotechnology’ (2006-2010), and member of the ILA ‘Committee on Cultural Heritage Law’ (2012-2016). He is the Delegate of the Rector of the University of Siena for Students and Researchers Coming from Crisis Areas, and Director of the Inter-University Centre for Research on Human Rights and Immigration Law (CIRDUIS) of the University of Siena.

Me Me Khant, from Yangon, Myanmar, graduated with  a master’s degree in international policy at Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. She graduated from Centre College with a bachelor’s degree in international studies and a minor in French. Me Me currently works for promoting peace, reconciliation, and democracy in Myanmar and is a staunch advocate for civil liberties and human rights. As a poet and diaspora activist, she has been at the forefront of speaking out against the Myanmar military for atrocities that the military has committed including the Rohingya genocide; she has organized and mobilized thousands from Burmese diaspora in global rallies and protests. 

Previously, she had worked for Camino Seguro (Safe Passage) in Guatemala, the Delegation of the European Union in Myanmar, and JFP Holdings in Beijing, China. She was awarded Nayef Samhat Prize from Centre which recognizes "graduating senior majoring in international studies judged by the program faculty to have shown the greatest promise to advance peace and justice in international affairs."