Our work with Indian peoples has for years drawn connections between indigenous land rights, environmental protection and human rights. In most indigenous cultures, separating these issues makes no sense. Our Mission Statement points out the intersection of these threats to indigenous peoples: "Indian nations and tribes and other indigenous communities throughout the world are afflicted by poverty, poor health and discrimination. Subjected to grave human rights abuses, many Native communities are under siege. Indian land and natural resources are often expropriated or degraded, and sometimes destroyed. When indigenous peoples are deprived of their ways of life and their ties to the earth, they suffer, and many have disappeared completely."
Our projects with the Six Nations on their land claims in upstate New York, with the Yukon Inter-Tribal Watershed Council in Alaska and the Yukon Territory, with the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre Tribes of the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana have all been designed to address the over-arching issues of land, environment and human rights. And more recently, the Center has begun a new project with the support of the Indian Land Tenure Foundation to create a new framework of law relating to Indian lands and resources. This new framework of legal principles will be put forward to replace the present system of discriminatory, racist, and unjust legal rules relating to Indian lands.