A United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues has been constituted and their first general session at the UN headquarters in New York has just concluded. It is learnt northeast India was well represented in the session. It is also heartening that the contentious issue, often bordering the tragic, has gained international recognition at this level. But UN or no, we are now more than ever convinced that unless the indigenous peoples are also ready to make accommodations and adjust to the changing times, no lasting solution can ever be forthcoming. Before we look at our own cases in our troubled lands, a look at some physically distant cases, such as that of the American Indians and the Saami people of the Scandinavian Peninsula will be illuminating. The objectivity provided by the distance should help us see the issue more detachedly as well as clearly, and the absence of blinding emotions will also perhaps help us draw the lesson that certain historical milestones cannot just be removed. We are inclined to believe that American Indians, Saami people and for that matter all other indigenous peoples, have little choice but to look for salvation not in illusory visions of the ancestral happy hunting grounds, but in the guarantees and safeguards of modern democracies. We cannot for once think of the American Indians reverting history back to the pre-Columbus days, or the Saami people to the pre-Viking days. Such nostalgia can only result in unredeemable pain and heartbreaks.

The case of the Saami people is interesting because it has a lot of similarities with the situation back home. For those not familiar, the Saamis, often referred to as the Reindeer People, (once also known as the Lapps, a nomenclature discarded now because of its derogatory overtones) are a groups of nomadic herders, speaking 10 different languages, who once roamed the region in the Arctic Circle known to as Lappland. With the advent of modern nations and its hard political boundaries, the small population of Saamis who once herded and grazed their reindeers, hunted and fished freely in the region that they always understood to be their homeland, are now spread over four countries, Finland, Sweden, Norway and the Russian Federation. The impossibility of the situation has led those looking for a solution to the Saami issue, to propose a non territorial settlement and ever since 1956 the Saamis have an experimental umbrella body called the Saami Council which looks after, and ensures the cultural and spiritual identity of the Saamis is preserved, but without any political boundary around itself. A solution that seeks to have two different concepts of territory, namely, the "nation" and the "homeland", overlap and exist simultaneously. Thanks to Prof. BK Roy Burman, the Saami Council idea is gaining currency in looking for a solution to the problems of the northeast, particularly that of the Nagas. Another veteran journalist, BG Verghese, has recently noted a similarity between the Saami Council and the Siromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee. The Sikhs are spread over many different states and countries but the gurudwara holds them together and gives them the affiliation to an identity that makes them distinctly what they are, wherever they are. A kind of spiritual dual citizenship.