International Trusteeships, the Unfinished Responsibility

Indigenous peoples and nations were the original concern of 16th and 17th century diplomats and legal experts in Europe as they considered explanations for relationships between colonizing kingdoms and states and the peoples of Africa, the Americas, and those already living on islands in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans. They formulated juridical and diplomatic concepts of greater powers protecting smaller peoples and conceived thereby the modern understanding of international trusteeships. The League of Nations Mandate system and the United Nations Trusteeship Council are products of these early ideas. The United Nations Trusteeship system supervised the relationship between administering states and non-self-governing territories to implement internationally agreed decolonization measures. The Trusteeship Council became moribund in 1994, but could be resurrected to more directly address non-self-governing peoples located inside the boundaries of recognized states. The Trusteeship Council could become the supervising body for negotiated Trust Compacts between states’ governments and indigenous nations, thus providing regularized protocols for relations between each indigenous nations and each state.