Indigeneity is a category of analysis to read the world. Indigeneity is not a culture and much less a race; it is not a linguistic or biological feature. People have long identified through their nations, such as Tikuna, Kaqchikel, Aymara, Naga, or Chumash, before states labeled them Indian during various processes of land-grabbing. The concept of indigeneity is a category invented by the western modernity that produced a world-system hierarchizing life. Indigeneity is a useful lens to understand why some nations have sovereignty to speak at the UN, while others do not. It sheds light on who owns and who is owned, who has citizenship and who is framed as savage. Indigeneity is a category of political analysis that matters for what it reveals about the modern states that use it, more than the people called Indigenous. Indigeneity operates on three levels: as a political identity, as a relation to the state, and as co-constitutive of political modernity. It matters to understand how we got here, and how to get out of it. Today, Indigenous peoples protect water to restore public life, to enrich our polities with relations of non-domination centered on sustaining life.

Before there can be deliberation between peoples, there must be recognition and a mechanism through which deliberation can occur. In 2023, Australians voted on whether to create an advisory body – a Voice – enabling Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to make representations to Parliament and government. The Voice was to be both recognition and deliberation mechanism. This article explores the Voice proposal as a means for peoples to come together in constitutional relationship. First, we establish that First Nations and non‑Indigenous peoples have long met, though this meeting has not yet been formally recognised in the Constitution. We situate the Voice within the necessary constitutional history and trajectory of Indigenous claims. The Voice is presented as being an institutional response to the problem of recognition and constitutional identity, offering a platform for a more meaningful relationship between different peoples within a shared polity. Finally, we explain how the Voice was designed to work within existing constitutional arrangements to create a constitutional intersection. The referendum’s rejection does not resolve the enduring challenge of constitutional relations.

The 1972 World Heritage Convention is one of the world’s most widely adopted treaties, providing for the international protection of world cultural and natural heritage that is of outstanding universal value to humankind. While the treaty has enjoyed some significant successes in the protection of heritage around the world, the criteria for assessing and inscribing cultural and natural properties create significant obstacles to meaningful engagement with and recognition of Indigenous relationships with land. Indigenous Peoples have argued that the separation of cultural and natural heritage under the convention is artificial and reifies a problematic nature/culture dichotomy that is inconsistent with the inseparable relationship between Indigenous Peoples, culture, and their lands and waters. Adopting the frame of political ontology, this article explores tensions between Indigenous ontological assertions and the current operation of the World Heritage Convention. The article examines the case study of the Pimachiowin Aki World Heritage property, showing how the World Heritage Advisory Bodies are working to improve engagement with Indigenous ontologies, despite barriers created by inscription criteria. Finally, the article provides pathways forward for a more meaningful and holistic recognition of Indigenous Peoples in World Heritage through amendments to criteria to align with emerging practice.

Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, Indigenous peoples have been asserting their right to decide the future of their ancestors’ human remains and material culture. This global Indigenous social movement has been referred to as the repatriation movement. This report examines its emergence in South America, focusing on the cases of Chile and Argentina. In particular, this research reflects on how Indigenous repatriation activism has fostered contemporary debates on the ethical treatment of Indigenous human remains and materials of cultural significance. From this perspective, it provides a brief overview of the impact of these debates on scientific and museum communities in both countries, demonstrating the centrality of the repatriation movement for opening up spaces to facilitate a greater understanding of Indigenous peoples’ rights and the responsibility of science to redress historical injustices structured by academic practices.

This article examines how the emerging framework of “Planetary Health” challenges us to reconsider the role and boundaries of global health law, for example by engaging with systems thinking, eco-centric perspectives, Indigenous knowledge, and newly emerging human rights. How does planetary health inspire novel thinking or new approaches around the conceptualization, design, implementation and/or interpretation of global health law and health-related rights, aiming to protect vital ecological foundations or determinants of health?

In 2011, the Waitangi Tribunal, a permanent commission of inquiry into Crown breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi, recommended reforms to Aotearoa New Zealand’s intellectual property law to recognize Māori authority over mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) and taonga (culturally valuable objects). This article uses the case of the haka Ka Mate to argue that the Government’s failure to respond adequately means that Aotearoa New Zealand’s intellectual property system still fails to protect mātauranga Māori and taonga sufficiently. It highlights the limitations of existing statutory mechanisms and the delays in the Māori-Crown work program to respond to the Waitangi Tribunal. The article endorses the Taonga Record Framework, a tikanga Māori-based (Māori customary law) sui generis model, as a culturally grounded and legally viable means of safeguarding taonga and kaitiaki (guardian) relationships. It assesses its potential to support tino rangatiratanga and provide a basis for future law and policy reform.

We possess a limited understanding of Indigenous electoral behavior, partisanship, and political attitudes. Previous research has mainly focused on explaining Indigenous electoral abstention and has faced constraints, mainly because of small sample sizes. Drawing on data from both the 2019 and 2021 Canadian Election Studies, which encompass an unprecedented number of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis respondents, we explore Indigenous electoral behavior, partisanship, and attitudes toward public spending at the federal level in Canada. We show that while Indigenous respondents remain more likely to consider abstention, they can also be more supportive of third parties than their non-Indigenous counterparts and adopt views spanning the traditional left–right ideological spectrum. These findings encourage a redefinition of the expectations regarding the political behaviors and attitudes of Indigenous Peoples in order to fully engage with diverse political cultures.

This article explores the intersection of Indigenous cultural heritage and international intellectual property (IP) law. Drawing on personal narrative, community memory, and institutional experience, it traces how, despite colonial legacies embedded within global IP regimes, Indigenous Peoples have carved out space for agency and influence through diplomatic engagement in international forums such as the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The article narrates and examines the evolution of Indigenous participation within WIPO’s Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge, and Folklore (IGC), culminating in the landmark adoption of the 2024 WIPO Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources, and Associated Traditional Knowledge. Through the lens of “Indigenous diplomacy,” it argues that Indigenous advocates have not only contested exclusion but also reshaped aspects of legal norms, contributing to a broader decolonial movement that seeks justice, recognition, and the right to control and benefit from their intellectual and cultural heritage.

What do clients value in legal representation? Based on 65 in-depth interviews with Anishinaabek litigants and their relatives, this study explores how clients construct attorney–client relationships, value representation and experience justice. Drawing from the sociolegal literature on access to justice, attorney–client relationships, and legal services delivery, this article extends understandings of how relationship dynamics inform client evaluations of legal representation and their justice experiences. Caretaking, or a reciprocal relationship with a lawyer based on human connection, respect and a mutual sense of being in a difficult situation together, emerges as a crucial way Anishinaabek value lawyers that help them navigate confusing legal processes during difficult times in their lives. These findings question the promises of procedural justice by illuminating how clients decouple their experiences with lawyers from their views of the justice system. They also contribute to timely debates about the importance of legal representation and access to justice in marginalized communities.

In January 2025, a symposium convened by Japan’s National Committee of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) adopted the Gunma Declaration on Heritage Ecosystems, a new World Heritage framework that, for the first time, explicitly references Indigenous Peoples and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) as part of the World Heritage system’s “authenticity” criterion. This commentary offers a critical and reflexive analysis of the declaration’s development, drawing on the author’s experience as a symposium participant. It examines the tension between the declaration’s transformative potential – particularly its alignment with Indigenous understandings of the inseparability of nature and culture – and the structural exclusion, silencing, and erasure of Indigenous voices witnessed during its drafting. The analysis highlights how colonial narratives of “contaminated” Indigenous cultures, “purity,” and “authenticity” continue to determine Indigenous legitimacy in practice. This commentary argues that the Gunma Declaration’s advances risk becoming forms of symbolic recognition and illusory inclusion unless translated into enforceable state practice. Ultimately, this commentary is offered as an act of Indigenous resurgence, urging that the future of heritage governance be grounded not in institutional rhetoric but in Indigenous self-determination and the courage to imagine the World Heritage system otherwise.