Our Self-Inflicted Burden

We like to stand on our human rights record here in Canada, and it is a record that’s better than the records of most countries on this planet. We have a skeleton or two in our national closet, though. Our treatment of our native peoples is one of those skeletons. It is a skeleton you’ll find in many closets...the way indigenous people have been treated has been a travesty for a very long time.

In this age when we purport to be fighting genocide, the developed world has yet to come to terms with the fact that a large part of the way we became “the developed world” was by subjugating and abusing indigenous people whenever we found them. Not only haven’t we come to terms with what we did, we’ve never even acknowledged it to any real extent.

In Canada, National Aboriginal Day came and went with barely a mention. We celebrate the birthday of long-dead Queen Victoria, but we do little to officially recognise the contribution our native people made in the formation of this country. On July 1 we mark Canada Day, but among the fireworks and speeches there is only cursory attention paid to the people we subjugated while building this country.

In the United States they celebrate Colombus Day. It marks the onset of what was likely the biggest genocide in human history, yet is not a day of remembrance for those who suffered but a celebration of the conquest. They celebrate Independence Day and there is much talk at that time about their founding fathers, but rarely do you hear a high-level politician give more than a passing mention of the people who were the first Americans.

Australia has Australia Day and although the country instituted Sorry Day in 1998 and has made at least some effort to reconcile the devastating impact that Britain’s colonization of Australia had on the indigenous people there, the reality of that devastation still exists and has a massive daily impact on aboriginal people there.

Those are just the three groups of indigenous peoples most likely to be recognised by North Americans. There are indigenous people scattered across the plant though not just in the Americas and Australia, and even among the groups we readily recognise we fail to acknowledge that they are not a single cohesive people, but many nations with different cultures and customs. According to the definition the UN uses, written by José Martínez-Cobo, the Special Rapporteur to the Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, "Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of societies now prevailing in those territories, or parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop, and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal systems." The UN further uses the International Labour Organisation’s definition from Convention 169, “a. tribal peoples in independent countries whose social, cultural and economic conditions distinguish them from other sections of the national community, and whose status is regulated wholly or partially by their own customs or traditions or by special laws or regulations; b. peoples in independent countries who are regarded as indigenous on account of their descent from the populations which inhabited the country, or a geographical region to which the country belongs, at the time of conquest or colonization or the establishment of present state boundaries and who, irrespective of their legal status, retain some or all of their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions.”

Indigenous peoples are, by definition, those who have had their cultures, religions, and laws undermined by people who came to their lands much later. There are about 5000 groups of indigenous peoples for a total population of 250-300 million individuals. They range from small tribes, many nearing extinction, many that have chosen to remain isolated; to fair-sized minorities, often made up of many subgroups.

In 1993 the United Nations declared that the decade from 1995 to 2004 would be the decade of the International Decade of the World's Indigenous People. That decade is now passed and while there have been some improvements, the situation is far from satisfactory. Canada still has poor records in the way our indigenous people are dealt with. The slightest talk of land claims brings out the vitriol of those who would give nothing to our aboriginal populations regardless of longstanding treaties that clearly leave Canada indebted to those populations.

Ownership and control of land is not a problem restricted to Canada. In Indonesia the Malay and Sakai people have had vast tracts of their lands seized. This land is now owned by the state, the equivalent of our Canadian Crown land, and was taken for forestry in an illegal seizure. The land was seized for logging.

According to Human Rights Watch, "Intimidation, harassment and violent attacks against indigenous communities are frequent occurrences in countries including Honduras, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico and Venezuela," In Colombia, as the war on drugs morphs evermore into the war for oil, it is the indigenous people who suffer the most. In Venezuela the Pemon community has suffered threats and violence for opposing an electricity supply project on their lands. In Brazil the violence and threats hinge on the designation of land that belong to the indigenous communities.

As long as companies like Enron, Halliburton, and Shell are able to exert pressure on local governments through their own governments and the policies of agencies such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, even directly addressing the issues surrounding the subjugation of indigenous peoples is difficult in international forums.

In Canada the industrial use of Crown lands has traditionally been done without settling land claims first. In Manitoba(pdf file) this has led to ongoing legal challenges and caused strife among native communities. Similar issues have been raised from the Maritimes to British Columbia and north into the three territories. The resources and immediate issues change, in Canada and around the world, but the larger issue never does.

Canada, if it were to seriously begin to address native issues, could become a leader on the issue of indigenous people’s rights. If South Africa could use Canada as a guiding influence for apartheid in South Africa, there is no reason why Canada cannot be a guiding influence in working towards solving the situation indigenous people all over the planet find themselves in. All we have to do is find a way to make our first nations into equal members of our own society and others will have a map to follow.

There’s a new dimension to the term white man’s burden, one that we need to pay particular attention to if we have an intention of making this world a better place. There is need for the nations of the world who thought they could dominate other cultures to take up a new burden...working with indigenous peoples to correct the problems that the old idea of the white man’s burden caused. To do that we must first toss out the old notions of profit being the only worthwhile outcome.

It is time to learn the right lessons instead of trying to teach the wrong ones.

Note: National Aboriginal Day Colombus Day. Australia Day Sorry Day definition International Labour O... International Decade of... Malay and Sakai Enron Shell Canada Manitoba