Universal limits for the powers governing the people of the world were agreed upon after the second world-war by the foundation of the United Nations, and by its Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Universal rights of people and peoples were required to ensure the unity of world’s justice in removing the threat of horrors, resulting from brutal ruling of the world by war-power.

All constitutional justice in the world was thus required to be set into a stable context of universal rights so that the life of people shall be in no case determined against their will of the realization of these universal rights. Constitutive foundation of the powers of law and governance are thus to be designed and controlled not by whims of rulers but to advance people’s fundamental rights

Power of law is thus to be constituted to belong to the people to initiate the conditions and direction of legislation to realize these universal rights by electing the highest authorities, who enact legislation.

The obligation of the universal realization of human rights over all powers of world’s governance has got international recognition and ratification as the basis of all legitimate constitutional justice in the world by the ratification of the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as well as civil and political rights :

“All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources” and pursue their development” according to their such “mutual benefit and international law” that “in no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence”. (Article 1 in the UN Human Rights Covenants ICCPR and ICESCR, ratified by some 150 states)

This collective freedom as people’s free self-rule over the means of their common life is thus recognized to constitute the decisive universality of justice in life of all peoples - even where it is not yet realized by existing law or governance. Peoples’ will to realize fundamental universal rights to means of their life should be progressively free to develop and determine the constitutive powers of justice and legislation where ever people’s basic means of subsistence are not yet realized.

Therefore, those around 5000 indigenous and tribal peoples in the world, who are widely forced to renounce their own means of subsistence due to the global commercial structures, have right to the restitution of their own means of subsistence.

Right to self-determination constitutes justice by people’s self-rule of their means of subsistence as freedom from tyranny and colonization, and has advanced through 60’s and 70’s to become internationally ratified in the spirit of Gandhian idea of ‘Swaraj’. (as considered in WSF-seminar on Gandhi’s ‘Hind Swaraj’):

“The economic constitution of India and… of the world, should be such that no one under it should suffer from want of food” or other basic needs. “Everybody should be able to get sufficient work to enable” all to meet their basic needs of life. “And this ideal can be universally realized only if the means of production of the elementary necessaries of life remain in the control of the masses. These should be freely
available to all as God’s air and water ought to be; they should not be made a vehicle of traffic for the exploitation of others. Their monopolization by any country, nation or group of persons would be unjust.” (Gandhi, Young India, 1928)

But “globalisation has relocated sovereignty from people to corporations… Rights of people are being appropriated by States to carve out monopoly rights of corporations over our land, our water, our biodiversity, our air” These common foundations of life are commercially “privatized by using the government’s right to acquire land often in violation of the constitutional and community rights as in the case of Bastar”. (Vandana Shiva; “Earth Democracy, Living Democracy”, 2002).

Indigenous activist from Bastar, Ms. Indu Netam (Gond tribe) noted that when “we are forced away from the lands”, “even if the government would give us money to get our lands, we do not want money, but our land which is our only way to live”. “We can not sell it” because earth’s “land or water are value in itself” as life-giving element prior to options of being exchanged (by money or exchange value). “Food, which can not be eaten but sold” is not real food, when the “forests from which we got bamboo to eat are sold by the government to the transnational corporations.....” Life of the primary nature of world’s material basis, ‘prakriti’, “does not belong to us, but we belong to it” (Indu Netam in WSF-debate on Survival of
Indigenous Peoples (Adivasis) Globally and WSF-seminar on identity of indigenous people on 20.1.2004, Mumbai).

Indigenous inheritance is most self-conscious and distinctive representation of the intentions of such less commercial means to live, by which the majority of world’s people leads its life. Less commercial means of life of the less literate majority are treated by modern world as less official means and less ‘proper’ means to live.

These less commercially ‘proper’, less literal or less ‘civilized’ senses and means of life and its subsistence are decisive for the life of the world and its majority, but these majority’s own means are excluded globally (as not ‘proper’ senses) from that how things are officially decided. While modern market acts “without compensating for regeneration, the informal economic system of the Adivasis depended upon small scale, labour intensive and regeneration based economics”. People’s more original basic means of subsistence are endangered by “consumerism where people are enticed to buy or consume more than they actually require for their sustenance”. (“Redeeming the World Order - The Adivasi perspective”, publication in WSF Mumbai by Indian Confederation of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples)

“A huge majority of people… are living outside or in the margins of… formal economy” by less commercial, non-official means of life so that for example “over 90% of agricultural work force of Mexico and India are in informal jobs”. This marginalized majority is increasingly “left out from the political decision-making”, hand in hand with the growth of “representative democracy” under the structures of nation states by “pluralism, alternation of power, division of the state powers,... elections of authorities and recognition of the right of minorities”. (Foreign minister of Finland, Mr Erkki Tuomioja, in Mumbai WSF side-event seminar “Democratising Globally - Civil Society Engaging with State Actors”, 18 January 2004)

Why has the world-wide expansion of official procedures of ‘modern democracy’ been accompanied by the spread of universal inequality in the world? Law and governance have also crucially shifted to a global level, without any structures of global impartiality or alternation of powers by equal representation of the affected. There is no global constitutional or democratic basis in the flow of global decisions, which affect people, and no global democratic division of powers.

Also globalized culture of ‘western democracy’ provides less equal chances - than diversity of other cultures - to lead life by majority’s own, unofficial - less literal and less commercial - intentions of life. Due to this subordination and exclusion of the majority’s own less literal and less commercial (mostly indigenously inherited) guidance of the means of life, community and communication, ‘modern democracy’ has led to globally more unequal life than many other cultures.

Marginalized majority of the world has thus got further deprived from their equal rights under the modern expansion in which formal “democracy has spread further in the world than ever before, but… Millions of people are feeling being left out from the political decision-making”. In this way formal democracy of nation states does not ensure equality in that, how “people can influence those changes that are taking place in their immediate sphere of life” regarding “the right of different communities to preserve their identity and ways of life”.

“Societies, especially those of indigenous people” are threatened by “the expansion of the market economy. “Democracy cannot work efficiently… without giving people chance to influence their own lives” by their equal “democratic access to resources: education, technology, natural resources, land and water. If market forces are left uncontrolled the livelihoods of many are endangered. Increasing monetisation and transforming of natural resources into commodities is threatening the environment. People should be empowered to guide their own lives”, “preserving space for local spheres” (Foreign minister of Finland, Mr Erkki Tuomioja, in Mumbai WSF side-event on “Democratising Globally”, 18 January 2004).

Democracy should thus require proximity and community of identification and treatment of things and issues to become decided so that the universal needs can be realized in an equally free manner for all people to lead the life according to their intentions and understanding of that what advances life.

Globalized economy and its growth are often merely shifting such use of resources, which is less commercial and thus in practice less counted as economy (or as economic rights), to become commercially consumed. By being used in commercial ‘growth’, the resources become merely consumed (without due compensating maintenance) away from the less commercial and less consuming life of majority.

This less commercial life of the majority saves world’s resources in more renewable condition and is thus in sustainable ‘economic’ way more decisive for maintaining world’s life than the official economy of commercial growth and profits.

‘Space for the local spheres’ of majority’s less commercial life would require in the major part of the world, the restoration of majority’s own, more indigenously inherited means of life. Their less commercially ‘proper’ means of life have been deprived from them by result of the globalized force of colonial occupation and modernity.

Global equality in leading the life is criterion of democracy of global life. It is equality to live and to lead the life, which is globally democratic according to that how equal are the rights of all to guide and control the means of life.

Globalized structure of modern nation state is in many ways a structure for purposes of European inheritance and is thus not culturally impartial. It has no means for ensuring global equality. “The colonial industrial societies established predominance of predatory spectral mode of livelihood and today when existence of life on planet has become problematic, the… industrialized… societies are pushing ahead… hidden predatory mode of livelihood with a tendency to bring the whole of humanity within its ambit”. (Anthropologist B.K. Roy Burman; Aboriginal cultures and modern Society, 2004)

As more equal and just world can be negotiated only between equals, a new equilibrium is needed in that global control of the resources, which have resulted from the colonial occupation. Repatriation of the historical flow of resources, which has made “the South to enrich the North”, is needed for the restoration of common human dignity and that how lands are controlled. (A Tanzanian woman in Mumbai seminar on Helsinki Process on 18.1.2004))

1.2. Indigenous Means of Life as Earth Democracy

50 years ago the decolonization of the world started from ‘Swaraj’ of Gandhian India, which is the home of the largest indigenous population in the world and home of indigenous and unofficial means of subsistence. This inheritance may provide awakening and representation of the will of the less literal and less commercially ‘proper’ life of world’s majority as an alternative destiny for the world.

500 years ago America, Australia, most of Africa and vast areas of Asia were occupied primarily only by indigenous populations before the colonization of these lands.

As far as the human rights violations by colonization and its consequences can be removed or repaired, most of world’s land and natural resources shall belong thus to indigenous people.

As people’s means of subsistence have been deprived from their indigenous uses, their fundamental right to self-determination requires restoration of their control over their own means of subsistence. The colonial inheritance of unequal discriminatory access to resources must be corrected and people’s own access to resources of their life has to be restituted to realize democracy and human rights. Fundamental equal rights of all to use the resources of life of the land they live, must be ensured.

As “indigenous peoples have been deprived of their human rights and fundamental freedoms, resulting… in their colonization and dispossession of their lands” (for hundreds of years by ultramarine foreign control) and “their own needs” of livelihood resources, which are necessary for their survival (preface), therefore :

“Indigenous peoples have the right to the restitution of the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned or otherwise occupied or used, and which have been confiscated, occupied, used or damaged without their free and informed consent” (Draft UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Articles 27 and 29.)

Most peoples in the major part of the world could be indigenous by their cultural heritage if they could implement the right to land restitution and remove or repair colonial human rights violations of indigenous heritage of lands in the life and historical heritages of these peoples and their lands. “We urge Governments to initiate a process of restitution of indigenous peoples’ ancestral lands and territories” and “collective land tenure systems”. (Indigenous Peoples Plan of Implementation on Sustainable Development, Johannesburg 2002.)

Our most basic means to live - breathe and realize (recognize, discover, make real, make use of) nutrition, conditions for health and shelter -, consist of that indigenously inherited shared use of sense and perceptibility of locality of life, which makes surroundings accessible for lands’ life to which we belong. People’s most own means of subsistence by which they live, freely sustain and lead the life (and which have not been forced upon them - by colonialism, etc.), are thus mostly their indigenous inheritance of life on land on which they live in most parts of America, Africa, Asia, Australia, etc.

Globally, the only equal and common access to life as our possibility to lead the life of Earth, is our indigenously inherited access to live upon the Earth freely by all what it provides as resource equally for life of all in common.

How equally the Earth is for all conceivable and treatable as livability, which is common for us - as immediate sense of surrounding life as Earth, which is livable -, lives in us thus commonly as a result of the millenniums of indigenous inheritance of such sense.

The inheritance of what ‘Earth’ signifies now in world’s immediate sense-perceptibility (and in all what is perceived to take place upon the earth) as livable, is thus to a distinctive extent an indigenous inheritance by its origin also for the whole humankind.

We have all indigenously inherited that sensible perceptibility and significance of our living surroundings on earth, which have (through millenniums of Earth’s livability) made them commonly accessible and usable for life; equally free for all to advance world’s life according to their understanding of life.

We all have indigenously inherited this livability of earth as equally available for us all; it constitutes peoples’ primary ‘own means of subsistence’ and “in no case may a people be deprived of their own means of subsistence”.

“On the face of the Earth, the necessity of sustenance” has “developed the stigma of reasoning” for competitive evolution with it, but “the practices adopted by the Adivasis have lessons of sustenance of the mental equilibrium” which “abhors race in its attitude and has universal acceptability”. “The value systems of Adivasis... can contribute positively to develop an attitude of not being competitive”. “The Adivasis practice the ethos of a class less society” and “the tribes live in clans, which are symbolically grouped after animate and inanimate totems”. (“Redeeming the World Order - The Adivasi perspective”, publication in WSF Mumbai by Indian Confederation of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples)

Majority in the world could be considered indigenous to the extent how far their life, culture, means of subsistence and identity is not a product of colonization and how far Adivasi lands and use of their resources would be treated as an integral part of their heritage.

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