Indigenous leaders convene at UN amid visa barriers and digital data risks

Indigenous delegates gathered at the United Nations in April for the world’s largest gathering of Indigenous peoples, but many confronted visa denials from the Trump administration and warned of threats to their lands, health, and cultural knowledge.

The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues centered its discussion on ensuring Indigenous health amid conflict, with leaders framing protection of territories, languages, and data from extraction as fundamental to their survival.

Delegates faced barriers reflecting geopolitical strain and global technological change. Geoffrey Roth, a Standing Rock Sioux descendant and former vice chair of the Permanent Forum, said the gathering’s core insight was simple: “You can’t separate human health from the health of the environment, or our culture, or our language.”

The Visa Wall

Mariana Kiimi Ortiz Flores, an advocacy assistant at Cultural Survival, said the Trump administration’s visa restrictions had made it increasingly difficult for Global South delegates to secure entry. “It’s getting harder and harder to access the United States, not only because of the visa issues,” Flores said. “People from the Global South, especially Indigenous peoples that have a certain look like brown skin and certain characteristics, we feel threatened because of the general climate of insecurity and hate speech against Latin people and Indigenous peoples.”

Her organization had Indigenous representatives from Africa denied visas last year. This year, one of their Indigenous staff members from South America was denied a visa as well. Last year, Indigenous leaders from Bolivia attended the forum to protest mining in their traditional lands but left after facing harassment and have decided not to return.

Health as Territorial Integrity

Roth outlined what he calls the Indigenous determinants of health in a report prepared for the forum. The framework moves beyond clinical medicine to encompass land tenure, governance authority, cultural continuity, and protection from dispossession. The Coquille Indian Tribe in Oregon adopted the Indigenous determinants of health by ordinance last year and now approaches activities like monthly fishing outings for elders as health interventions—not separate from clinical care but central to it.

“When they take elders out on a monthly basis to do fishing activities, that is health for those elders,” Roth said. “It’s continuing their tradition as Coquille people, and it improves the mental health, behavioral health of those elders.”

Roth also called on the UN to recognize Indigenous midwifery, a practice frequently banned in favor of Western clinical approaches. Indigenous women often face racism in conventional institutions, including procedures performed without consent. “Indigenous people have been doing this for thousands of years, not only midwifery, but also caring for the environment and caring for our culture and preserving these food systems,” Roth said.

The Digital Extraction Threat

A major concern involved artificial intelligence. Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, Indigenous Mbororo from Chad and former chair of the Permanent Forum, warned in a report to the forum that AI presented a double-edged sword. While AI tools could help Indigenous peoples revitalize endangered languages and monitor their territories, she cautioned against what she termed “digital extractivism”—the scraping of cultural content, medicinal knowledge, traditional stories, and genetic data by AI systems and tech companies without Indigenous consent.

Lydia Jennings, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College and citizen of the Pascua Yaqui and Huichol tribes, has witnessed the problem directly. She discovered a mining company had extracted information about Indigenous cultural practices from an environmental impact statement and used it on its website to promote a mining project.

“That was very alarming to me,” Jennings said. “How much information do we share in efforts to protect our sacred homelands? And what are the ways that we can govern how and who uses that data?”

Jennings advocates for Indigenous data sovereignty—the movement ensuring communities retain the right to own and control their own data. While AI could offer opportunities, she said she remained concerned about how much Indigenous data AI systems may be co-opting without consent and the severe risks that massive data centers pose to tribal lands and water resources. “Who has the power and how do we redistribute that power?” she asked.

Sovereignty Under Siege

According to a February UN report, rigid state borders and exclusionary “fortress conservation” models were curbing the traditional mobility of pastoralists, hunter-gatherers, and seafarers—adaptation strategies refined over centuries.

Samante Anne, Indigenous Maasai from Kenya and representative of the Mainyoito Pastoralists Integrated Development Organization, said that although 60 percent of Kenya’s land is considered communal, it is increasingly being subdivided for developments and claimed for carbon offset projects that limit pastoralists’ access and movement.

“Mobility has everything to do with us adapting to climate change,” Anne said. “Mobility has everything to do with ensuring our livelihoods are secure, our food security is good.”

A persistent problem complicated Indigenous voices within the UN system. International bodies frequently lumped Indigenous peoples with “local communities” under the acronym “IPLCs”—Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. While the grouping might appear to expand Indigenous representation, Roth argued it had the opposite effect. Indigenous peoples hold distinct, legally recognized rights under international law. Grouping them with other stakeholders diluted that specificity.

Roth said he recently confronted the World Health Organization on the issue. “This is not an equity issue,” he told the agency. “We are not just another one of your minority populations. We are rights holders, and this needs to be approached from a rights-based approach.”

In 2023, the UN’s three top Indigenous rights bodies—the Permanent Forum, the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples—issued a joint statement demanding that UN environmental treaties stop using the IPLC acronym. “Indigenous Peoples should not be grouped with an undefined set of communities that may have very different rights and interests,” they wrote.

Despite the institutional hurdles, visa denials, and geopolitical challenges, delegates remained determined. Flores, speaking for many Indigenous representatives at the forum, said she would continue to show up. “If we as Indigenous peoples don’t do it,” she said, “No one else will speak for us and defend us.”