At a 2025 symposium in Japan organized by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), I and around 80 other heritage experts from more than 19 countries worked together to develop a declaration on the future of heritage governance. In one small-group discussion, I encountered a deeply troubling argument: Indigenous Peoples did not need to be recognized in the declaration because their survival of colonization and subsequent adaptation and interaction with other cultures left them culturally “contaminated” and no longer distinct enough to warrant explicit protection.
The paradox was palpable. Alleged champions for cultural diversity were using Indigenous survival as an argument for Indigenous erasure. After sustained discussion and advocacy, the symposium ultimately produced the Gunma Declaration on Heritage Ecosystems, which explicitly recognizes Indigenous Peoples and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Such inclusion may change how heritage is understood worldwide.
But the adopted text also hides a troubling truth.
The absurdity behind the declaration
The declaration defines heritage as an “ecosystem”: a living network of peoples, places, cultures, knowledges, nature, and more-than-human life. It rejects the established institutional habit of separating natural heritage from cultural heritage and people.
For Indigenous Peoples, heritage ecosystems are a longstanding lived reality, not a novel or a newly discovered idea. Relational understandings of lands, waters, ancestors, stories, responsibilities, and living beings have guided Indigenous law and governance for millennia.
Yet no Indigenous representatives served on the symposium’s scientific committee, which prepared the early texts. The working draft discussed “heritage communities” and promoted an integrated approach to heritage, but it did not name Indigenous Peoples or UNDRIP. These omissions were especially glaring because ICOMOS had adopted a resolution in 2023 that recognized Indigenous Peoples’ inherent authority over their heritage and called for their inclusion throughout the organization.
As discussed in my published remarks on the development of the Gunma Declaration, the symposium was emotionally confrontational. While some participants supported including Indigenous Peoples and UNDRIP in the declaration text, others argued that doing so would create division, questioned whether urban lifestyles or mixed ancestry annulled individuals’ Indigeneity, or treated cultural adaptation as proof of lost heritage.
Here is the absurdity of the symposium in a nutshell: a heritage institution tasked with protecting and advancing cultural diversity reproducing the very cultural erasure it supposedly exists to prevent. It embraced a concept long central to Indigenous worldviews—heritage ecosystems—while leaving Indigenous Peoples outside the processes of interpreting and institutionalizing these ecosystems. Indigenous knowledge was being “Columbused”: separated from the peoples who have nurtured and preserved these understandings since time immemorial and subsequently rediscovered, renamed, and celebrated as institutional innovation.
When protection becomes cultural erasure
The word “contaminated” bandied about at the symposium exposes the deeper logic that allows the co-opting of Indigenous ideas even as the people themselves are erased or marginalized. According to this way of thinking, a legitimate Indigenous culture must be pure, static, and isolated—an impossibility under the realities of colonization and state disruption of Indigenous cultures, languages, lands, and institutions. Moreover, any successes of adaptation and survival are used to deny Indigenous Peoples their distinct identity.
That logic has an especially corrosive effect when deployed in a field built around cultural “authenticity.” When heritage experts weaponize “purity” to determine which cultures count, cultural diversity is not protected. It is policed through a colonial lens. The threat to heritage, then, comes not from outside the institution. It is produced by the institution’s own categories, committees, and drafting processes.
This problem extends far beyond a single symposium. The public usually sees only the finished declaration produced at such events: polished language hailing rights, participation, and sustainability. The public does not see who was absent when the first draft was written, whose identity became negotiable, or how much resistance had to be overcome to add references to Indigenous Peoples and their rights.
Rights language can record progress. But it can also sanitize the exclusion that made progress necessary in the first place. Without a doubt, the Gunma Declaration is an achievement. For the first time, it connects Indigenous Peoples, UNDRIP, and heritage ecosystems to the World Heritage system’s concept of authenticity.
But it still emerged from a process that treated the existence of Indigenous Peoples as negotiable. While the final text represents real progress, the symposium also exposed persistent institutional failure.
From consultation to authority
Former United Nations Special Rapporteur Victoria Tauli-Corpuz has written that rights-based conservation still faces serious implementation gaps. The Gunma Declaration reveals a gap earlier in the process: who gets to formulate the language of rights before any attempts at implementation?
The answer is not another round of superficial consultation. Reaching out after the fact cannot repair a process that excluded Indigenous Peoples from the establishment of the agenda, concepts, and initial drafts. Nor is the nebulous term “stakeholder engagement” enough. Indigenous Peoples are not stakeholders in their own heritage. They are peoples and nations with rights to self-determination, culture, lands, knowledge, and consent.
Heritage institutions must consistently include Indigenous Peoples as co-designers and decision-makers sharing authority over agenda-setting, drafting, and governance. They must apply UNDRIP to their internal processes, not merely cite it in final documents. And they must publish transparent accounts of how declarations are developed, rather than allowing polished texts to erase their underlying conflicts.
The Gunma Declaration proves that institutional language can change. The harder test is whether heritage institutions will change who holds power. A UNESCO advisory body like ICOMOS cannot protect cultural diversity while treating Indigenous recognition as a threat. Indigenous Peoples must be in the room from the beginning—not simply thanked once a resolution has already been written.
All too often, the global “guardians of heritage” are actually guarding contemporary colonialism and embedding it beneath the surface of institutional governance. If the task of preserving global heritage is to be more than empty lip service, this cannot continue.