Election and Human Rights Series: Indigenous Peoples Rights and Elections

-Michael Witgen: Michael Witgen is a member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, a past Director (twice) of the program in Native American Studies, and a professor in the Departments of American Culure and History at the University of Michigan. His publications include An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America, (Philedelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), and “American Indians in World History,” in the Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed., Fred Hoxie, (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, April 2016). Witgen’s work explores the juxtaposition of Native and European experiences and responses to the process of mutual discovery that created the New World in North America, with a particular focus on the Great Lakes and Great Plains. His current research examines the intersection of race, national identity, and state making in the Old Northwest of the early republic, and includes the essay “Seeing Red: Race, Citizenship, and Indigeneity in the Old Northwest,” published in Journal of the Early Republic in 2018, and awarded the Ralph D. Gray prize for best original article by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. He is also the author of Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, Black Lives, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America forthcoming with the press of the Omohundro Institute for the Study of Early American History and Culture.

-Janene Yazzie: Janene Yazzie is an entrepreneur, community organizer and Indigenous rights and human rights advocate. She has worked on climate change, water security, food security, broadband development, energy development, and nation building with Indigenous communities for the past eleven years. She served as a research associate on several studies looking at the impacts of environmental contamination on Indigenous communities in New Mexico and Arizona. She co-founded the first community-led watershed planning program on the Navajo Nation known as the Little Colorado River Watershed Planning Project. Currently she is program manager of Sustainable Community Development with the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC). She also represents IITC as the co-convener of the Indigenous Peoples Major Group (IPMG) to the United Nations High Level Political Forum on the SDGs. The IPMG has championed rights-based approaches to landscape development including the Right Energy Partnership and the development of an international Gold Standard for landscape scale development to be launched November 2020. She ran for New Mexico Public Regulations Commission in 2018. 

-Elsa Stamatopoulou: Elsa Stamatopoulou is the Director of the Indigenous Peoples' Rights Program at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University. Born in Athens, Greece, Stamatopoulou has devoted 21 years of her UN work to human rights, in addition to several years exclusively focusing on Indigenous Peoples rights. Most recently, she directed the work program of the Secretariat of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) as its first Chief from its inception in 2003 to 2010. She also promoted the integration, at international and national levels, of UN policies on indigenous peoples’ issues in the areas of economic and social development, environment, health, human rights, education and culture. She supervised the production of the first ever State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples publication of the United Nations (2010).