Indigenous Peoples: North America’s Restless Natives

Source: ISN

North America’s Restless Natives

One obstacle to further integration in North America is the region's localist, indigenous and separatist movements.

Prepared by: ISN staff

While those like Andres Rozental highlight the benefits of further economic and even political integration, mainstream opinion still largely opposes this project. More often than not, the fear of integration is fueled by concerns that it will encourage 1) bureaucratic elitism and the creation of an inevitably self-interested bureaucratic overclass; 2) locked-in, institutionalized insensitivity to local conditions and needs; 3) an inexorable tendency towards social engineering at the macroscopic level, particularly in the case of material redistribution; and 4) a tendency toward socio-cultural homogenization that would cast a smothering “The Great Same” over the ways human beings organize their socio-economic and political lives. It is this latter fear, among others, that has rekindled the identity politics we see today – an anti-integration politics that exists within the political mainstream and without. In the last case, integration threatens the interests of movements as serious as the Zapatistas in southern Mexico to those as inconsequential as the Nevis Independence Movement. Such outliers argue that, in the case of North America, the current extent of economic and political integration is already too much. With all these thoughts in mind, today’s map highlights the rebuttals to regional integration in North America, which do vary in terms credibility and notoriety.

Please click on the embedded links to find out more about the agendas of different indigenous and separatist movements in this part of a semi-integrated world.

Large Map