History · Ch 6 — Displacing Indigenous Peoples
The Winds of Change…
The Winds of Change…
Not till the 1920s did things begin to improve for the native peoples of the USA and Canada. The turning point was a major survey called The Problem of Indian Administration, directed by the social scientist Lewis Meriam and published in 1928. It painted a grim picture of reservation life, exposing terribly poor health and education facilities for natives. The timing mattered: this report came only a few years before the USA was swept by a great economic depression that affected all its people.
White Americans responded with sympathy. They saw that natives were being discouraged from the full exercise of their own cultures while simultaneously being denied the benefits of citizenship. This sympathy produced a landmark law, the Indian Reorganisation Act of 1934, which gave natives in reservations the right to buy land and take loans.
In the 1950s and 1960s, both the US and Canadian governments shifted course. They thought of ending all special provisions for the natives, hoping the natives would ‘join the mainstream’ — that is, adopt European culture. But the natives did not want this. In 1954, they prepared a ‘Declaration of Indian Rights’, in which a number of native peoples accepted citizenship of the USA but on a clear condition: their reservations would not be taken away and their traditions would not be interfered with.
A similar development unfolded in Canada. In 1969, the government announced that it would ‘not recognise aboriginal rights’. The natives responded with a well-organised opposition — a series of demonstrations and debates. The question could not be resolved until 1982, when the Constitution Act accepted the existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the natives. Even then, many details remained to be worked out.
Today, it is clear that the native peoples of both countries, though reduced so much in numbers from what they had been in the eighteenth century, have been able to assert their right to their own cultures and, particularly in Canada, to their sacred lands — in a way their ancestors could not have done in the 1880s.
Karl Marx (1818–83), the great German philosopher, described the American frontier as ‘the last positive capitalist utopia…the limitless nature and space to which the limitless thirst for profit adapts itself’ — from his Grundrisse.
The chapter also sets the native experience against two other groups under similar domination, in a comparative table: …
"Two Dreamtimes" — Judith Wright. Judith Wright (1915-2000), an Australian writer and a
champion of the rights of Australian aborigines, wrote this poem for Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath
Walker), an aboriginal poet and friend:
'Kathy my sister with the torn heart,
I don't know how to thank you
For your dreamtime stories of joy and grief
Written on paperbark.
You were one of the dark children
I wasn't allowed to play with –
Riverbank campers, the wrong colour
(I couldn't turn you white.)
So it was late I met you,
Late I began to know
They hadn't told me the land I loved
Was taken out of your hands.'
— Judith Wright, 'Two Dreamtimes', written for Oodgeroo Noonuccal
What it shows: Wright writes not as an outside observer but as someone confronting her own
childhood — barred, by the colour bar of the time, from playing with the very friend she now …
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1974 | The 'White Australia' immigration policy ends; Asian immigrants are allowed entry |
| 1992 | The Australian High Court, in the Mabo case, declares that terra nullius was legally invalid, and recognises native claims to land from before 1770 |
| 1995 | National Enquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families |