A New Framework for Rights

Rights for the Future We Were Promised

Three co-equal foundational documents. Rights that were promised and never delivered. Rights that were always there and never honored. Rights that a free society cannot keep pretending are optional.

Introduction to the Rights Frameworks

The original Bill of Rights told government what it could not do to you. Franklin Roosevelt tried to extend it — in 1944, in the middle of a world war with the Great Depression still in living memory, he proposed a Second Bill of Rights that would make freedom real for ordinary Americans. Congress never passed it. He died before he could force the issue. The window closed. This is the next chapter.

These three documents address three distinct registers of rights — constitutional rights for every person, economic rights in the labor sphere, and sovereignty rights that predate this government. They are not appendices to each other. They do not form a hierarchy. They are co-equal: the New Bill of Rights for every person in the reach of this government; the Workers' Rights Bill for the specific obligations that arise in the employment relationship; the Declaration of Indigenous Rights for sovereignty that existed before the United States did and was never extinguished.

All three apply the PolicyOS floor+duty model. These are not aspirations. They are requirements. The floor is the minimum the government may not violate, erode, or fall beneath. The duty is what it must actively secure, build, preserve, and advance. A policy that does not satisfy the duty is incomplete. A policy that crosses the floor has failed.

Part One

A New Bill of Rights

A draft for public review — Freedom and Dignity Project, April 2026

Preamble

The First Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791, told government what it could not do to you. Ten amendments. Freedom of speech, of religion, of assembly. The right to due process, to a fair trial, to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. Essential. Still contested. Still unfinished.

Franklin Roosevelt saw that they were not enough. In 1944, in the middle of a world war with the Great Depression still in living memory, he proposed a Second Bill of Rights — economic guarantees that would make freedom real for ordinary Americans. Congress never passed them. He died before he could force the issue. The window closed.

Eighty years later, those rights remain unfinished — and the world has changed in ways Roosevelt could not have imagined: mass digital surveillance, algorithmic control, climate collapse, systematic erosion of democratic institutions, and rights under assault from both state power and private concentration.

This is the next chapter. Ten amendments — a deliberate parallel to the original Bill of Rights — that extend the unfinished work of 1791 and 1944 into the century we actually live in.

These rights belong to every person. Not just citizens. Not just people with money or connections or the right paperwork. Every person within the reach of this government.

How to Read This Document

Each amendment is structured as follows: the right (a short, plainly stated name); what it means (one sentence); sub-rights (the major guarantees that together constitute the amendment); Floor — the minimum government may not violate, erode, or fall beneath; and Duty — the positive obligation government must actively secure, build, preserve, and advance.

The floor and duty model is drawn from PolicyOS Platform Values. These are not aspirations — they are requirements.

The Ten Amendments

Amendment I — Right to Vote

Your voice in who governs you is sacred — and may not be denied, suppressed, or made practically impossible.

Sub-rights:

  • Universal suffrage — every eligible person has the right to register and vote
  • Equal weight — no vote may count more or less than another
  • Practical access — the right to vote must be practically achievable, not just technically available
  • Ballot integrity — every vote must be accurately counted and protected
  • Freedom from interference — no person or institution may interfere with another's exercise of the right to vote
Floor: No law, rule, policy, or practice may restrict, condition, suppress, or make practically burdensome the right of any eligible person to register and cast a vote that is counted equally. Voter suppression in any form — ID requirements designed to exclude, polling place closures, purging of eligible voters, gerrymandering that dilutes votes by race — violates this floor.
Duty: Government must actively ensure that every eligible person can register easily, access a ballot conveniently, cast their vote securely, and have it counted accurately — removing every structural barrier including distance, documentation requirements, work schedule conflicts, language barriers, and disability. Automatic voter registration, sufficient polling locations, and vote-by-mail are duties, not options.

Amendment II — Right to Self-Governance

You have the right to shape the institutions and systems that govern your life — and no private interest may buy or capture that right away from you.

Sub-rights:

  • Free and fair elections free from money's corrupting dominance
  • Equal representation — communities have a right to meaningful voice in proportion to their numbers
  • Anti-capture protections — no private individual, corporation, or foreign entity may effectively control democratic institutions
  • Transparent governance — the decisions that affect your life must be made in the open
  • Civic participation — every person has the right to participate in democratic life beyond just voting
Floor: No individual, corporation, or concentrated private or foreign interest may capture, distort, or effectively control the democratic institutions through which people govern themselves. Dark money, gerrymandering designed to entrench power, and institutional structures that systematically silence communities violate this floor.
Duty: Government must actively structure institutions to ensure that political power remains distributed and contestable — including public financing of elections, enforceable anti-corruption rules, independent redistricting, and affirmative measures to ensure that every community has meaningful voice in the decisions that affect it.

Amendment III — Right to Organize

You have the right to join together — with coworkers, neighbors, or fellow citizens — to demand better, and no one may punish you for it.

Sub-rights:

  • Freedom of assembly — the right to gather and organize for collective action
  • Labor organizing — the right to form unions and bargain collectively
  • Political organizing — the right to organize for civic and political change without retaliation
  • Community organizing — the right of neighborhoods and communities to organize for local change
  • Protection from retaliation — no employer, government, or institution may punish organizing activity
Floor: No employer, government, or institution may prohibit, punish, or retaliate against any person for exercising their right to join together with others for collective action — whether in labor, civic life, or political advocacy. Union-busting through surveillance, termination, or intimidation violates this floor.
Duty: Government must protect and affirmatively enable the conditions for organizing — including protecting organizers from retaliation with meaningful enforcement, ensuring union rights are enforceable in practice, funding legal support for workers facing retaliation, and supporting civic organizing infrastructure in underrepresented communities.

Amendment IV — Right to Bodily Autonomy

Your body is yours — your reproductive choices, your medical decisions, your gender identity, and your right to age and die on your own terms.

Sub-rights:

  • Reproductive rights — the right to contraception and to abortion, free from government prohibition or undue burden
  • Gender-affirming care — the right to transition-related medical care without government interference
  • Freedom from forced medical treatment — no person may be compelled to undergo medical procedures
  • End-of-life decisions — the right to make decisions about one's own death with dignity
  • Protection from medical coercion — no person may be threatened, deceived, or coerced into or out of medical decisions
  • Sexual and reproductive self-determination — the right to make all decisions regarding one's own sexuality and reproduction
Floor: No law, policy, or government action may compel, coerce, or deny a person the right to make decisions about their own body — including reproductive choices, medical treatment, gender identity, and end-of-life decisions. Laws that ban abortion, prohibit gender-affirming care, or criminalize personal medical decisions violate this floor.
Duty: Government must ensure that every person has practical, accessible, and affordable access to the full range of reproductive healthcare — including contraception and abortion — as well as gender-affirming care, disability-affirming care, and end-of-life options, regardless of geography, income, or insurance status. Access that exists only on paper is not access.

Amendment V — Right to Privacy

Your personal life, your body, your data, and your communications belong to you — not to corporations, not to government agencies, and not to anyone who can afford to buy them.

Sub-rights:

  • Freedom from surveillance — the right not to be monitored, tracked, or watched without a warrant
  • Digital privacy — control over your data, your devices, and your online life
  • Medical privacy — your health information may not be shared or used without your consent
  • Financial privacy — your financial information may not be shared or used without your consent
  • Search and seizure limits — government may not search your person, home, or digital life without judicial warrant and probable cause
  • Right to be forgotten — the right to request deletion of personal data held by private entities
Floor: No government or private entity may surveil, collect, retain, sell, or use data about a person's life, communications, health, finances, or identity without their informed, meaningful, and revocable consent — except under strict judicial warrant issued on probable cause. Mass surveillance programs, warrantless data collection, and the commercial sale of personal data without consent violate this floor.
Duty: Government must establish and enforce strong data protection standards across public and private sectors; limit government surveillance powers to what is strictly necessary and judicially supervised; hold corporations and agencies accountable for privacy violations with meaningful remedies; and ensure that digital infrastructure serves people rather than surveilling them.

Amendment VI — Right to Indigenous Sovereignty

The nations that were here first have rights that predate this government — and this government has obligations it has never fully kept.

This amendment is a constitutional statement of recognition and obligation. The full architecture of these rights is set out in the Declaration of Indigenous Rights below, which carries equal force as a foundational document of this project.

Sub-rights:

  • Treaty rights — all treaties with Indigenous nations are the supreme law of the land and must be honored
  • Territorial sovereignty — Indigenous nations have rights to their ancestral lands and the resources within them
  • Governmental sovereignty — tribal governments are sovereign and must be treated as co-equal by federal and state governments
  • Cultural sovereignty — Indigenous languages, ceremonies, and practices may not be suppressed or erased
  • Free, prior, and informed consent — no decision affecting Indigenous lands, waters, or peoples may be made without genuine consent
Floor: No federal, state, or local government may abrogate, diminish, or override the sovereign rights of Indigenous nations — including treaty rights, territorial rights, and rights of self-governance — without the free, prior, and informed consent of the relevant nations. Continuing to break or ignore treaties, overriding tribal jurisdiction, and extracting resources from Indigenous lands without consent all violate this floor.
Duty: Government must honor all existing treaties, acknowledge and begin remediation of historical violations, recognize and resource tribal governance structures, and ensure that Indigenous nations have meaningful participation in all decisions affecting their lands, waters, and peoples. Acknowledgment without action does not satisfy this duty.

Amendment VII — Right to a Healthy Environment

Clean air, clean water, healthy waterways and ecosystems, and a stable climate are not luxuries — they are the shared conditions of life itself.

Sub-rights:

  • Clean air — the right to breathe air free from harmful pollution
  • Clean water — the right to safe drinking water and to healthy rivers, lakes, oceans, wetlands, and other waterways and ecosystems
  • Climate stability — the right to a livable climate not deliberately destabilized by preventable emissions
  • Environmental justice — no community may be made to bear a disproportionate burden of environmental harm
  • Ecosystem protection — intact ecosystems are a shared inheritance that government must protect
  • Future generations — environmental decisions must account for the rights of those who will inherit this world
Floor: No government, corporation, or entity may take actions that knowingly degrade air quality, contaminate water sources or waterways, destroy ecosystems, or accelerate climate change in ways that threaten human health and the conditions for human life — particularly in communities already bearing disproportionate environmental burdens. Environmental racism — the systematic placement of pollution, waste, and hazard in communities of color and low-income communities — violates this floor.
Duty: Government must actively protect and restore the environmental conditions necessary for human life and ecological health — including enforceable clean air and clean water standards, protection of all waterways and ecosystems (not just drinking water sources), binding commitments to climate stabilization, and affirmative measures to remediate environmental injustice in overburdened communities.

Amendment VIII — Right to Equal Justice

The law applies equally to everyone — and every person has the right to participate fully in the life of this country.

Sub-rights:

  • Equal protection — no person may be treated differently by the law based on race, gender, sexuality, disability, national origin, religion, or other protected characteristic
  • Due process — every person is entitled to fair notice, fair hearing, and fair process before the government may deprive them of liberty, property, or rights
  • Full participation — every person has the right to participate in public life, employment, housing, education, and civic institutions without discrimination
  • Accessibility — the right of people with disabilities to full and equal access to all public and private spaces and services
  • Family integrity — no government may arbitrarily separate families
  • Right to form a family — the right to marry, adopt, and form family relationships of one's choosing
Floor: No person may be subjected to unequal treatment under the law based on race, gender, sexuality, disability, national origin, religion, or any other protected characteristic. No person may be denied due process. No person may be excluded from full participation in public life. A justice system that produces systematically unequal outcomes by race or wealth fails this floor, regardless of formal neutrality.
Duty: Government must dismantle the structural barriers — in the justice system, housing, employment, healthcare, and education — that produce unequal outcomes even under formally neutral rules; actively enforce anti-discrimination protections; ensure that due process is meaningful and accessible, not just nominally available; and make full civic and public participation genuinely achievable for every person.

Amendment IX — Right to Cultural Identity

Every person has the right to their language, their faith, their heritage, and their cultural life — and the right to pass them on.

Sub-rights:

  • Religious freedom — the right to practice one's faith, or no faith, free from government interference or establishment
  • Linguistic identity — the right to speak one's language and raise one's children in it
  • Cultural participation — the right to participate in cultural life and institutions of one's community
  • Artistic expression — the right to create and share art, music, and cultural expression
  • Cultural heritage protection — the right to protection of cultural sites, objects, and practices
  • Minority cultural protection — the state may not use its resources to suppress or erase minority cultures
  • Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander rights — the specific cultural, linguistic, and community rights of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islander peoples are recognized and protected under this amendment
Floor: No government or institution may prohibit, punish, suppress, or forcibly erase a person's language, religion, cultural practices, or community identity. The boarding school era — in which Indigenous children were forcibly separated from their cultures — is a named violation of this floor. Cultural suppression through law, policy, or systematic defunding violates this floor.
Duty: Government must actively protect and support the conditions for cultural survival — including funding for language preservation and revitalization programs, cultural education and heritage protection, equitable support for cultural institutions across communities, and explicit recognition and protection for the cultural rights of Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and other historically suppressed communities.

Amendment X — Right to Basic Necessities

Healthcare, housing, food, a living income, education, childcare, elder care, and rest are not privileges — they are the floor of a free society.

Sub-rights:

  • Healthcare — the right to medically necessary care without financial ruin
  • Housing — the right to stable, safe, and affordable housing free from arbitrary displacement
  • Food — the right to adequate and nutritious food
  • Living income — the right to an income sufficient to meet basic needs, whether through employment or direct support
  • Clean water — access to safe drinking water (see also Amendment VII for the broader ecological frame)
  • Education — the right to a quality public education at all levels, free from debt servitude
  • Childcare — the right to affordable, accessible, quality childcare
  • Elder care — the right to dignified care in old age
  • Economic security — protection from want in unemployment, disability, and hardship
  • Rest — the right to time free from work, free from obligation, and free from the demand to be always available
Floor: No person in this country may be left without access to the minimum conditions of a dignified life — healthcare, housing, food, income, clean water, education, childcare, elder care, and rest — because of inability to pay or structural exclusion. A society that allows people to die for want of insulin, to sleep in the street, or to work until they break without protection fails this floor.
Duty: Government must build and maintain the systems — universal healthcare, affordable housing programs, nutrition support, a living income floor (through wages, direct supports, or both), free public education through higher education, subsidized childcare, elder care infrastructure, and labor protections for rest — that guarantee these necessities as a practical reality for every person. The market alone cannot and does not satisfy this duty.

A Note on the Number Ten

The original Bill of Rights has ten amendments. This project's New Bill of Rights has exactly ten. That is not a coincidence. It is an assertion: this is the next chapter of that document. The unfinished work of 1791. The unbuilt promises of 1944. The rights we have not yet had the courage to guarantee. Ten amendments for the century we live in.

Explore the Full Platform →

Part Two

A New Bill of Workers' Rights

A draft for public review — Freedom and Dignity Project, April 2026

Preamble

Labor built this country. Farmers grew its food. Miners dug its steel. Workers stitched its clothes, assembled its cars, stocked its shelves, raised its children, cared for its sick, and drove its trucks through the night. Every generation produced wealth — enormous, historic, unprecedented wealth — and every generation was told that the wealth belonged to someone else.

Franklin Roosevelt saw it clearly. In 1944, the same year he proposed a Second Bill of Rights, he understood that without economic rights, all other rights were incomplete. The freedom to speak means less if you can lose your job for speaking. The right to vote means less if poverty and insecurity make political engagement a luxury you can't afford.

The labor movement fought for a century — and won real gains: the 8-hour day, the minimum wage, the weekend, workplace safety, the right to organize. Those wins were real. They were also attacked, eroded, and legislated away, year by year, as the balance of power shifted toward capital.

This document is a restoration and an extension. Ten rights — not as negotiating positions, not as aspirations, but as guarantees. The floor below which no employer, no legislature, and no court may push working people.

These rights stack on top of the New Bill of Rights. A worker is a person first. All ten amendments of the New Bill apply to every worker in every workplace. These rights address the specific obligations that arise in the relationship between labor and capital — where the imbalance of power is greatest and the need for protection is most acute.

How to Read This Document

Each right is structured as follows: the right (a short, plainly stated name); what it means (one sentence); Floor — the minimum that no employer or government may violate; and Duty — the positive obligation government must actively secure, build, preserve, and advance.

The floor and duty model is drawn from PolicyOS Platform Values. These are not aspirations — they are requirements.

The Ten Rights

Right 1 — Right to Fair Wages

Your labor must be fairly compensated — no exploitation, no wage theft, no poverty wages.

Floor: No employer may pay any worker less than a wage sufficient to meet basic needs in the cost-of-living context where they work. Wage theft — including unpaid overtime, illegal deductions, misclassified tips, and failure to pay the agreed wage — is unlawful in all its forms. No employer may pay workers of different races, genders, or national origins different wages for the same work.
Duty: Government must set, enforce, and regularly adjust a minimum wage indexed to cost of living and productivity growth; actively enforce equal pay requirements with meaningful penalties for violations; fund wage theft enforcement and ensure workers have effective recourse; and require pay transparency so workers can identify and challenge pay discrimination.

Right 2 — Right to Organize and Bargain

Workers have the right to form unions, bargain collectively, and strike — and no employer may punish them for it.

Floor: No employer may prohibit workers from forming unions, threaten or penalize workers for organizing activity, interfere in union elections, refuse to recognize a validly formed union, or refuse to bargain in good faith. Captive audience meetings, surveillance of organizing activity, and retaliatory termination are unlawful.
Duty: Government must protect the right to organize with swift, enforceable sanctions for retaliation; ensure union elections are free, fair, and timely; extend organizing and bargaining rights to gig workers, domestic workers, and other historically excluded categories; and support workers' ability to bargain collectively through strengthened labor law enforcement and expanded legal coverage.

Right 3 — Right to Safe Working Conditions

No employer may put your life or health at risk for profit — and the government must ensure they do not.

Floor: No employer may knowingly expose workers to hazardous conditions without adequate protection, proper disclosure, and available mitigation. No employer may retaliate against a worker for reporting an unsafe condition or refusing a demonstrably dangerous assignment.
Duty: Government must set and regularly update safety standards across all industries — including for physical, chemical, ergonomic, and psychological hazards; fund robust inspection and enforcement; hold employers criminally and civilly accountable for injuries and deaths; and proactively identify emerging hazards before harm occurs rather than only responding after workers are hurt.

Right 4 — Right to Family and Parental Leave

Paid, job-protected leave for birth, adoption, and caregiving is a right — not a benefit your employer chooses whether to offer.

Floor: No employer may deny, delay, or penalize paid, job-protected leave for birth, adoption, foster placement, or the serious health needs of a family member. No employer may demote, reassign, or otherwise disadvantage a worker for taking leave to which they are entitled.
Duty: Government must establish a universal paid family and parental leave program — publicly funded, available to all workers including gig, part-time, and self-employed workers, at full or near-full wage replacement for a meaningful duration — and enforce anti-retaliation protections with real consequences for violations.

Right 5 — Right to Reasonable Hours and Rest

No employer may claim all of your time. You have a right to a life outside of work.

Floor: No employer may require working hours that endanger health or safety, deny legally required rest breaks and meal periods, fail to compensate overtime at a premium rate, or demand off-hours availability — including digital availability — as a condition of employment or continued employment.
Duty: Government must set and enforce maximum hours standards and overtime requirements; mandate paid rest breaks and meal periods; establish a right to disconnect — the right not to be contacted for work during non-work hours — and protect workers from discipline for exercising it; and proactively enforce these standards rather than requiring workers to file individual complaints.

Right 6 — Right to Economic Security

Unemployment, injury, disability, and retirement are risks that workers should not have to face alone.

Floor: No worker may be left without meaningful income support when they lose work through no fault of their own, are injured on the job or become disabled, or reach retirement age after a working life. Benefits must be accessible, not designed to exclude through paperwork or delay.
Duty: Government must maintain unemployment insurance that is genuinely accessible, adequately funded, and provides meaningful wage replacement; workers' compensation that covers all work-related injury types without adversarial barriers; and a retirement system that provides genuine economic security — not market-dependent speculation — for every worker, regardless of the type of work they did or how long they held each job.

Right 7 — Freedom from Workplace Discrimination

No one may be treated differently at work because of who they are — in hiring, pay, promotion, discipline, or any other term of employment.

Floor: No employer may treat any worker differently in hiring, pay, promotion, assignment, discipline, or termination based on race, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, national origin, religion, age, pregnancy, or any other protected characteristic. Harassment based on these characteristics is a form of discrimination.
Duty: Government must actively enforce workplace anti-discrimination law with meaningful penalties that deter violations — not just remediate individual cases; ensure the EEOC and equivalent agencies are funded and empowered; address structural and systemic patterns of discrimination, not only individual incidents; and protect workers who report discrimination from retaliation with genuine remedies.

Right 8 — Right to Job Security

Workers may not be fired arbitrarily, in bad faith, or in retaliation for exercising any protected right.

Floor: No employer may dismiss a worker arbitrarily, in bad faith, or in retaliation for organizing, whistleblowing, taking protected leave, reporting safety violations, or exercising any other protected right. At-will employment does not authorize bad-faith or retaliatory termination.
Duty: Government must establish just-cause employment protections that require employers to document and justify terminations; provide enforceable whistleblower protections with meaningful remedies including reinstatement; ensure workers have accessible, affordable recourse when termination is wrongful; and prohibit non-compete agreements that trap workers in jobs without fair compensation.

Right 9 — Right to Wage Protection

Wage theft is theft. Equal pay for equal work is not optional. Pay must be transparent.

Floor: No employer may withhold earned wages, make unlawful deductions, misclassify workers as independent contractors to deny legal protections, pay employees less than colleagues of another race or gender for the same work, or require that workers keep their pay secret as a condition of employment.
Duty: Government must enforce wage payment laws with strong penalties including criminal liability for systematic theft; require pay transparency — including published pay ranges for positions and aggregate pay equity data by race and gender; close misclassification loopholes that deprive workers of legal protections; conduct proactive audits for pay discrimination rather than relying only on worker complaints; and fund labor department enforcement at levels adequate to the scale of the violations.

Right 10 — Right to Caregiver Protection

You may not be fired, demoted, or penalized for being a parent, a pregnant person, or a caregiver.

Floor: No employer may fire, demote, pass over for promotion, reassign disadvantageously, reduce pay, or otherwise penalize a worker for being pregnant, nursing, a parent, or a caregiver for a family member with serious health needs. Penalizing workers for caregiving responsibilities is a form of discrimination.
Duty: Government must prohibit all forms of caregiver discrimination with meaningful enforcement; require reasonable workplace accommodations for pregnancy and nursing; ensure that caregiving responsibilities do not become a barrier to employment, advancement, or economic security; and address the structural patterns — especially the motherhood penalty and the gender pay gap's relationship to caregiving — through proactive policy rather than individual litigation only.

A Note on These Rights and the New Bill of Rights

Workers are people first. Every guarantee in the New Bill of Rights applies in the workplace: the right to privacy, the right to organize (Amendment III), the right to equal justice (Amendment VIII), the right to bodily autonomy (Amendment IV). Those rights do not stop at the employer's door.

These ten rights are additional — the obligations specific to the employment relationship, where the concentration of economic power creates its own forms of coercion that the general Bill of Rights does not fully address. They stack. A worker wrongfully terminated for organizing has protections under both Amendment III of the New Bill and Right 8 of this document. A pregnant worker facing discrimination has protections under both Amendment VIII and Rights 7 and 10 here. The documents reinforce each other.

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Part Three

A Declaration of Indigenous Rights

A draft for public review — Freedom and Dignity Project, April 2026

Why a Declaration

The New Bill of Rights is a bill — an assertion of rights within the constitutional framework of the United States. A bill asks for rights to be recognized and protected.

This is a declaration.

A declaration does not ask. It asserts. Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous rights did not come from the United States Constitution, the U.S. Congress, or any federal law. They predate all of those things. They were not given. They were here.

What the United States did — through conquest, forced removal, broken treaties, cultural erasure, and centuries of systematic dispossession — was violate rights that already existed. This declaration does not grant Indigenous rights. It recognizes them, names the violations, and states the obligations that flow from those violations.

The word "Declaration" is also an echo: the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), adopted in 2007, which the United States initially opposed and later endorsed without fully implementing. This document is a commitment to implement that spirit — and to go further where necessary.

A Note on Scope

This document addresses the obligations of the United States government to:

These are not separate categories with separate standings. They are all peoples whose sovereignty, land, culture, and futures were shaped — and harmed — by U.S. policy. All of them belong in this document.

How to Read This Document

Each right is structured as follows: the right (a short, plainly stated name); what it means (one sentence); Floor — the minimum the government may not violate, erode, or fall beneath; and Duty — the positive obligation government must actively fulfill, build, preserve, and advance.

The floor and duty model is drawn from PolicyOS Platform Values. These are not aspirations — they are requirements.

The Ten Rights

Right 1 — Right to Sovereignty and Self-Determination

Indigenous nations are sovereign peoples with the right to govern themselves — and that sovereignty belongs to them, not to the federal government to grant or revoke.

Floor: No federal, state, or local government may override, diminish, or circumvent the self-governing authority of Indigenous nations without their free, prior, and informed consent. Federal policies that terminate tribes, abolish tribal courts, or nullify tribal laws without consent violate this floor. State jurisdiction exercised over internal tribal matters without tribal consent violates this floor.
Duty: Government must recognize, resource, and defer to tribal governance structures on matters within the scope of Indigenous self-determination — including law, land use, education, health, language, and cultural affairs. The federal government must treat tribal nations as sovereign co-equals in intergovernmental relationships, not as subordinate administrative units.

Right 2 — Right to Treaty Fulfillment

Every treaty with an Indigenous nation is the supreme law of the land — and every broken treaty is a federal obligation that remains outstanding, not a chapter that is closed.

Floor: No treaty obligation may be abrogated, modified, unilaterally reinterpreted, or systematically ignored without the full and informed consent of the affected nation. The violation of existing treaties — including rights to land, water, hunting, fishing, and self-governance — is a continuing federal wrong that cannot be resolved by the passage of time alone.
Duty: Government must audit all existing treaty obligations and produce a public accounting of where and how they have been breached; acknowledge violations formally; develop remediation plans in genuine partnership with the affected nations; and honor all active treaty commitments going forward, including in regulatory and resource management decisions that affect treaty-protected lands and rights.

Right 3 — Right to Land and Resources

Indigenous nations have rights to their ancestral lands and the resources within them — and the theft of those lands is a debt that has not been paid.

Floor: No government or corporation may take, develop, exploit, or destroy Indigenous lands, sacred sites, or natural resources — including water, minerals, forests, and fisheries — without the free, prior, and informed consent of the relevant nation. Consent obtained through coercion, deception, or without adequate information does not count as consent.
Duty: Government must acknowledge land theft as a matter of historical record and federal law; develop land restoration and co-management programs in genuine partnership with Indigenous nations; ensure that resource rights — including water rights, mineral rights, fishing and hunting rights, and rights to sacred sites — are fully protected and enforceable; and prioritize Indigenous-led stewardship of traditional lands where restoration is possible.

Right 4 — Right to Cultural Survival

Indigenous languages, ceremonies, and cultural practices that were criminalized and suppressed must be actively restored and protected.

Floor: No government, school, employer, or institution may prohibit, punish, or suppress Indigenous languages, ceremonies, practices, or cultural identity. The criminalization of Indigenous religious practices — which continued in the United States until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, and with persistent violations after — is a named floor violation. Cultural suppression through defunding, exclusion, or curriculum erasure also violates this floor.
Duty: Government must actively fund and support Indigenous language revitalization programs, which are currently racing against the deaths of the last fluent elders; fund and protect cultural education, ceremonial sites, and cultural practices; mandate the repatriation of Indigenous human remains, sacred objects, and cultural patrimony held in federal collections and federally funded institutions; and ensure the preservation of living cultural practices — not just their documentation.

Right 5 — Right to Reparative Justice

The harms of genocide, forced removal, boarding schools, sterilization programs, and economic dispossession are not history — they are unresolved obligations.

Floor: The harms inflicted on Indigenous peoples through federal policy — including the Indian boarding school system, forced sterilizations conducted by IHS through the 1970s, systematic land theft, and the murder of civilians — may not be denied, minimized, or treated as resolved when they are not. "Historical" is not a defense that closes an obligation.
Duty: Government must establish a formal, Indigenous-led reparative justice process to fully document the harms of federal policy; determine appropriate forms of remediation, restitution, and structural repair in genuine partnership with affected nations and communities; fund healing resources, mental health services, and community restoration programs; and treat reparative justice as an ongoing obligation, not a one-time payment that closes the file.

Right 6 — Right to Native Hawaiian Recognition

Hawaii was illegally annexed. Native Hawaiians have rights to their sovereignty, their lands, and their cultural survival — and the 1993 Apology Resolution is a statement of obligation, not a resolution of it.

Floor: The U.S. government may not deny the documented illegality of the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom — a U.S.-backed coup acknowledged by Public Law 103-150 (the Apology Resolution of 1993) — or deny that this illegal act created ongoing obligations. The federal government may not continue to treat Native Hawaiians as a racial group rather than an Indigenous people with sovereign rights, or deny them access to the federal recognition framework that applies to mainland tribal nations.
Duty: Government must formally recognize Native Hawaiians as an Indigenous people with sovereign rights under federal law; support the restoration of Native Hawaiian land rights, including rights to crown and ceded lands; provide federal recognition and resource access comparable to that available to mainland federally recognized tribal nations; and honor the obligations acknowledged in the 1993 Apology Resolution with substantive, ongoing action — not a symbolic statement made once and then ignored.

Right 7 — Right to Pacific Islander Self-Determination

The peoples of Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the COFA nations are not second-class subjects of American empire — they have the right to self-determination and full civic standing.

Floor: The peoples of Guam (Chamorros), American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the COFA nations (Republic of the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Republic of Palau) may not be governed, taxed, deployed into military service, or subjected to federal law and policy without adequate representation, recognition of their self-determination rights, and enforcement of obligations already owed to them. American Samoans — the only people born on U.S. soil who are not automatically U.S. citizens — exist in a status that cannot be sustained under any serious commitment to self-determination.
Duty: Government must grant automatic citizenship to American Samoans born on U.S. soil; provide genuine voting representation in Congress and presidential elections to residents of Guam, American Samoa, the CNMI, and other territories; honor all Compact of Free Association commitments including healthcare access that was eroded and later partially restored; reduce the military land footprint on Guam in consultation with Chamorro communities; and create a structured path to self-determination — including independence, statehood, or free association — for all territories based on the genuine, informed will of their peoples.

Right 8 — Right to Nuclear Justice

Communities in the Marshall Islands and across the Pacific who bore the cost of U.S. nuclear testing are owed justice, remediation, and reparations — and that debt has not been paid.

Floor: The U.S. government may not deny its legal, moral, and remedial obligations to the peoples of the Marshall Islands, Bikini and Enewetak Atolls, and other Pacific communities — as well as communities in Nevada, Utah, and the American Southwest — whose health, lands, and futures were damaged by U.S. nuclear testing and production. The expiration of COFA financial provisions or the funding gaps in RECA do not extinguish these obligations.
Duty: Government must restore and fully fund the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), with expanded eligibility that reflects the full geographic scope of harm; renegotiate COFA agreements with the Marshall Islands, FSM, and Palau to provide adequate, ongoing compensation for the nuclear legacy and for military use of their waters and lands; fund comprehensive environmental cleanup of contaminated atolls; provide ongoing health monitoring and medical care for affected populations; and treat nuclear justice as a continuing obligation, not a closed chapter.

Right 9 — Right to Indigenous Governance

Tribal courts, tribal laws, and tribal governance structures must be respected and protected from state interference — sovereignty is not a privilege the federal government can take back.

Floor: No state, county, or municipal government may exercise jurisdiction over internal tribal matters, override tribal court decisions on matters within tribal law, or interfere with the legitimate governance authority of recognized tribal nations. The doctrine that federal or state law automatically supersedes tribal law in any conflict, without the consent of the tribal nation, is inconsistent with genuine sovereignty.
Duty: Government must strengthen tribal court systems with federal investment and capacity-building support; ensure that federal recognition is accessible and is not used as a gatekeeping tool to deny sovereignty to groups that meet the criteria; resource tribal governance infrastructure — including administrative capacity, legal systems, public safety, and social services — at levels that make genuine self-governance possible; and develop intergovernmental coordination agreements that treat tribes as sovereign co-equals rather than subordinate stakeholders.

Right 10 — Right to Indigenous Education

Indigenous children have the right to learn their history, their language, and their culture — in schools that honor rather than erase who they are. And every American child has the right to learn what actually happened.

Floor: No school or educational institution receiving public funds may teach a curriculum that erases, distorts, demeans, or systematically omits Indigenous history, culture, or ongoing presence. The history of the boarding school era — in which federal policy removed Indigenous children from their families to "kill the Indian, save the man" — may not be omitted from American history curricula. Curriculum that treats Indigenous peoples as historical figures rather than living communities violates this floor.
Duty: Government must fund Indigenous-controlled schools and language immersion programs; require accurate, honest, and respectful treatment of Indigenous history in all public schools — including the boarding school era, the history of treaty violations, and the ongoing realities of Indigenous communities today; support the development of tribally developed curricula; ensure that Indigenous students have access to education in their own languages and communities; and invest in Indigenous scholars, educators, and knowledge systems as legitimate sources of knowledge, not just subjects of study.

A Note on Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Rights in This Document

Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islander peoples are named explicitly throughout this declaration because they are too often left out of the Indigenous rights conversation — sometimes subsumed into racial categories, sometimes treated as geopolitical footnotes, sometimes simply forgotten.

They are not footnotes. Native Hawaiians are an Indigenous people whose sovereignty was ended by an illegal U.S. coup. The legal and political path to restoration is complex, but the obligation is clear. American Samoans are the only people born on U.S. soil who are not automatically citizens — a civil rights issue hiding in plain sight. Chamorros of Guam cannot vote for the president of the country that deploys them into military service and occupies their land. Marshall Islanders live with the legacy of U.S. nuclear testing on their atolls. Bikini Atoll remains uninhabitable. The people were told it was safe to return in 1968. It was not. COFA nations have complex relationships with the U.S. that include rights to live and work here, but have historically been excluded from federal benefits like Medicaid.

These are not distant issues. They are active, ongoing obligations that this government has not met. This declaration names them specifically so they cannot be quietly omitted in implementation.

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Draft for public review — Freedom and Dignity Project, April 2026. All feedback welcome. Join the review process →