Eric Vandebroeck 4 October 2007

The Scandal of the Indigenous Boarding Schools Part Five of Five

With the occupation of indigenous territories the rhetoric of contemporary indigenous politics suggests that the arrival of newcomers was an unvarnished disaster for the aboriginal peoples and their lands. While the arrival of outsiders transformed the biological world in ways that are still substantially unknown, a profound and sweeping ideological revolution likewise accompanied the mingling of cultures and peoples. Land and questions of land ownership stood at the center of this remarkable transformation, one which continues to bedevil indigenous populations around the globe. It may well be the most fundamental distinction between tribal and non-tribal peoples. The manner in which diffèrent societies understood and understand their relationship to the physical world and the resources upon and within it sits at the heart of being indigenous and, likewise, is one of the defining characteristics of surplus and industrial societies.

The Bible has often been evoked to defend the Christian assertion that human beings have dominion over the land. This simple concept is rife with ideological meaning, for it speaks directly to the separation of the human beings from the natural world and asserts the right of human population to use the land and its resources for their purposes. Indigenous peoples, in contrast, identify themselves as being "part" of the land and, at best, as having stewardship responsibilities for their physical environment. Their obligation is to pass on the land to future generations much the same as they found it. In non-tribal societies, in contrast, land ownership is generally assigned to individuals or groups of individuals, or the state in the case of communist and selected socialist countries in the twentieth century, many of whom, it must be noted, hoped to pass it on to future generations in good and profitable shape. Through a variety of technical structures and processes, individuals or groups gained the right to exploit the land and its resources for personal or collective benefit. That the land and resources might be dramatically transformed in the process is, again, well with the rights of the owner(s) of the land.

These concepts of land tenure and control sit at the center of the transition of many peoples around the world from mobile, harvesting societies to sedentary, specialized, and surplus-producing cultures. Indigenous peoples, in contrast, resisted many of the changes, often in the face of dramatic pressures and incentives to accept the new order. That they did so rested, in large measure, on their conceptualization of their community's relationship to the land. Indigenous peoples considered themselves part of their natural environment, not separate from 'it and certainly not in dominion over it. This does not mean, as is often suggested, that aboriginal societies lived in perfect harmony with their physical setting. They were, as human beings, capable of mistakes, vulnerable to unpredictable changes in resources, weather, and intergroup relations.

Europe and other agrarian and highly structured societies approached questions of land and resource use very differently. They had no difficulty finding moral justification for their exploitation and use of whatever nat­ural resources came before them. Agriculture flourished only where there was a suitable land-tenure system in place to ensure continuity of owner­ship and appropriate control of the land and its bounty. As a consequence, societies from China and Japan to England and Spain developed elaborate land-tenure systems which, in turn, served to maintain the strength and position of a relatively small number of land owners. A cant of ecological domination quickly emerged. Forests represented convert­ible wealth, and were cut down rapidly either to clear land for agriculture or to produce wood products for use or sale. Mineral deposits were excavated for the purposes of the state or the individual owners. As explo­rations pushed out to new lands, the value of the territories was determined in large measure by the ability to produce crops or other natural resources for export back to the sponsoring colonial power.

The concepts of individual ownership and private property which accompanied the colonial expansion conditioned the initial contact experience. Most indigenous societies had a generalized sense of indi­vidual responsibility for and use of specific territories, be it family trap­ping grounds, community fishing sites, or effective use of a sizeable tract of land for ceremonial and subsistence purposes. This did not accord readily with the introduction of the idea of state-sanctioned land-tenure systems and with the assertion of the new claimants that they could use the land and its resources for their private benefit. '1b the largely com­munitarian indigenous peoples, the emergence of societies in their midst where individuals could amass large land holdings and generate considerable personal wealth made little sense. The newcomers did not bring a single land-tenure system. Some societies, as in parts of North America, Australia, and New Zealand, introduced freehold land and allowed selected individuals to own specific and comparatively small pieces for their personal use. More common throughout North and South America were larger landholdings, assigned to an individual, often through personal ties to the monarchy or government, and worked by others. In Central and South America, the control exercised by the landowners, oli­garchs with strong connections to colonial and national governments, established a cruel domination of the indigenous peoples throughout the region. These large holdings, in places like New York, Mexico, and through much of South America, established among the newcomer societies an hierarchical order which provided little room or flexibility for the indigenous peoples. If they had a role, it was as lowly paid laborers, forced or voluntary, on large plantations, farms, or ranches.

The ideology of colonial land-tenure systems swept through societies around the world. In India, the introduction of fixed land allocations interfered with land use by indigenous peoples, who saw their territories assigned to and used by others. The disruptions were not all due to the actions of the British imperial authorities. Local Indian business people recognized commercial opportunities and joined with the new commer­cial system, setting themselves at odds with communally oriented peo­ples. The result, running throughout the nineteenth century, was a series of local revolts and skirmishes, launched by indigenous communities attempting to prevent the alienation of their land. The British reacted to the protests in a few areas by taking small steps to protect local access to the land.

The imposition of new ideologies of land ownership and resource control altered dramatically the foundations of the tribal world. As outsiders entered onto "unused" and "unclaimed" aboriginal lands, they saw few of the normal signs of land occupancy and use. Outside gov­ernments declared the land, as in Australia, terra nullius, and asserted the right to assign ownership of land and resources to newcomers. They chided, in the process, the indigenous societies for failing to capitalize on the evident potential of the vast lands, often covered in forests, well-suited for agriculture, or rich in minerals, and considered themselves fortunate that the "backward" indigenous societies had ignored the wealth at their very feet.

In many colonies, the arrival of settlers ushered in an age of unchecked growth and expansion - and greater conflict with indigenous peoples. Many colonial officials, from New Zealand to British Columbia, worried openly about the avariciousness of the newcomers and sought ways to protect indigenous rights and resources. David Abernathy sum­marized the situation:

Adding to the problem colonial governors faced, settlers threatened the indigenous population. Given their intense interest in appropriating land and using it in new ways to make a profitable living, settlers were generally far more destructive of indigenous ways of life than even the most exploitive of governors. Indeed, officials in pure and mixed settlement colonies often felt that in order to maintain peace and assume some measure of justice they had to limit settlers' proclivities to undermine if not exterminate indigenous societies. In such situations tensions developed between colonial bureaucrats, whose power reflected the spatial stretch of a European government, and a community whose presence marked the partial diffusion of Europe's activistway of life.(1)

The new ideologies effectively interpreted tribal concepts of stewardship and resource control out of existence - and even late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first century efforts to reestablish a tiny measure of indigenous responsibility have made few inroads. All of the world, save for the ice-covered reaches of Antarctica (which falls under a unique multinational political arrangement), falls within the jurisdiction of a nationstate. These states, in turn, have procedures for allocating land and resources to individuals, collectives, or corporations, with the expectation that these lands will be used for "productive" purposes. Most of the world's agricultural production now comes from privately held lands, ranging from the complex rice terraces of Bali, Indonesia, and the barren dry lands of the Sudan to vast corporate farms in North America, and even larger ranches in the dusty outback of Australia. In only a small number of places, such as the largely inaccessible highlands of Papua New Guinea and the densely forested areas of Sarawak, do sig­nificant numbers of people continue the mobile, basic agriculture and harvesting patterns of the past.

In explaining what he described as the "explore-control-utilize syndrome" of European expansion, David Abernathy argues that there were fundamental misunderstandings between indigenous peoples and newcomers around the human-land relationship. Not having a sense of fixed land ownership in accordance with European concepts, indigenous peoples had more flexible arrangements regarding the use of land and resources. The idea that the land could be sold, alienated, bargained away through treaty, or otherwise passed permanently into the hands of the newcomers was not familiar to them. Settlers and governments saw any land transfers as permanent and irrevocable; indigenous peoples saw such discussions and arrangements as part of a fluid, ever-changing relationship, in which the land and resources could be returned to indigenous control as needs warranted. This fundamental misunder­standing would, of course, dominate indigenous-newcomer relations in many parts of the world.

Land and resources controlled by indigenous peoples have increasingly come under the sway of imposed concepts of land ownership.

Reserves in Canada and reservations in the United States, typically involving small amounts of marginal and uneconomical land, seek to define a balance between collective and individual ownership, but with little success. There is some recognition of collective rights and, in a few nations, large blocks of land set aside for exclusive indigenous use, such as Arnhem Land in Australia and substantial tracts of tribal territories in the Amazon basin. In most areas, however, the hold of indigenous peoples on their traditional lands and resources, if they have one at all, is tenuous in the extreme. Instead, personally and corporately controlled land and resources dominate much of the world.

Over several centuries, indigenous territories and ecosystems had been transformed by the arrival of outsiders. More had changed than the ethnic composition of the population; much more had happened than the marginalization of the tribal peoples whose roots on the land often went back for thousands of years. The process of ecological globalization brought sweeping alterations to the physical world, particularly through the introduction of animals, birds', plants, and fish to new territories. Equally, as we have seen, the spreading of microbes which accompanied cultural encounters resulted in the destruction of tens of thousands of indigenous peoples, making colonial conquest and occupation far easier than might have otherwise have been the case. The effects of the bio­logical encounter lasted for generations, with the indigenous communities weakened, in some cases to the point of extinction, by the advance of newcomers. At the same time, the imposition of ideologies of land ownership and management carved up the landscape in ways the original inhabitants could scarcely have imagined and could not control. What had once been vast tracts held in common, available for the use of the many, became private holdings, controled by the powerful and fortunate few. The physical manifestations of the ideology of land tenure and ownership - fences, survey marks, national boundaries, and the like - asserted human domination over the land and ensured the newcomers could record their control of specific territories.

New concepts of domination 'and authority accompanied the more direct transitions associated with the expansion of newcomer societies. European countries, in particular, debated concepts of sovereignty over the lands. Individual nations asserted through the act of discovery, the authority of the church, military conquest, treaty, or other method that they had dominion over the newly found territories. In the process, they dismissed, often with little consideration, the reality of indigenous use and control. For generations, Australian courts upheld the concept of terra nullius, the idea that the land was unoccupied, even though Aborigines had walked on the continent for more than 40,000 years. The Ainu, likewise, found their generations-old use of the land swept aside by a Japanese government that denied their control of the land. In New Zealand, the Maori were granted tracts of land for personal use, but lost the community control and tribal regulation which had long dominated their land-use system. Governments of the new nation-states placed a premium on the proper use of land and resources and, unilat­erally, deemed aboriginal use to be "inefficient." New legal systems, involving courts, land registries, and a variety of concepts of land tenure, provided the administrative manifestation of the ideas that land was divisible, that it could be owned and used for the benefit of individuals, and that the original owners could be dispossessed with little con­cern for their longstanding relationship with their territories.

The global process of expansion, conquest, and occupation transformed the world in ways that are only now become fully understood. Biological conquest, combined with ideologies of land holding, effec­tively turned the natural world and its relationship with indigenous societies on its head. The age-old system of living and working with the ecology was displaced by an aggressive assertion of humanity's capacity and willingness to exercise control over the landscape. Scientific knowledge was not sufficient to warn the expansionary powers of the ecological consequences of transporting plants and animals to the newly discovered worlds. Medical understanding did not alert the newcomers to the reality that their presence in new worlds unleashed epidemic dis­eases of devastating power. The cultural significance of the imposition of new land-tenure systems meant little to newcomer authorities who assumed that the indigenous peoples would simply adopt the lifeways and economic means of the newly dominant societies. Only the passage of time would awaken nations and peoples to the full impact of the biological transformation.

There is a tendency as well to see the transformative effects of ecological imperialism and the new approaches to land tenure as artifacts of the past. Much of the literature and discussion, save for that produced by the indigenous support groups and aboriginal organizations, suggests that historic acts created the contemporary problems. The implication appears to be that modern governments have avoided these difficulties, that the errors of the past have been acknowledged and that a new order is emerging. There is, however, a fundamental continuity between the past and the present regarding biological, epidemiological, and land issues. Imported diseases continue to cause significant difficulties for indigenous communities, particularly in the Amazon basin, Papua New Guinea, and other regions where there has been limited contact with outsiders. The sharing of the globe's biological resources continues apace, with plants, aquatic life, animals, and birds still being introduced to areas outside their normal habitants. The struggle to control this biological imperialism is ongoing, with little prospect for an early end to the dislocations and transformations.

The creation and imposition of approaches to land and resources in conflict with indigenous uses likewise remains a feature of the indigenous-newcomer relationship. In Botswana, for example, the con­flicting imperatives of a national park, conservation, and traditional indigenous land use have caused considerable strife and the relocations of the !Kung off their territories. The expansion of oil exploration in northern Canada resulted in the carving up of the land through seismic lines and other access routes, upsetting harvesting and community life. Mining, ranching, and logging operations in the Amazon, all controlled by non-indigenous operators and organizations, have challenged indigenous activities and undermined local harvesting and community structures. Post World War II preoccupation with hydroelectric develop­ment and grand water-diversion schemes flooded vast tracts of indige­nous lands, destroyed harvesting opportunities, and caused incalculable disruptions to aboriginal societies.

The struggle continues in more recent times, owing to the continued expansion of industrial societies and settlers onto indigenous territories, the sweeping effects of global warming, which carry grave risks for the island peoples of the Pacific and the harvesting societies of the far north, and the intrusive impact of international pollution. Scientific investiga­tions in remote regions have documented the spread of industrial pol­lutants into the indigenous food chain, particularly in the North, and serious concerns have emerged about the continued utility of country foods. The explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in 1986 resulted in the spread of radiation across Scandinavia and, in particular, the contamination of reindeer and fish - the cornerstones of Sami harvesting and economic activity. The disaster forced the destruction of thou­sands of reindeer and the undercutting of the economically important commercial reindeer market. Throughout indigenous territories, environmental change, poor management of resources, and the spread of pollution continues to harm indigenous harvesting activities.

The expansion of surplus societies into the lands of indigenous peoples caused enormous changes in the global biosphere. For indigenous peoples, these often subtle, occasionally dramatic, transitions in their natural world provided yet another challenge to which they had to respond. In some instances, most notably epidemic disease, there was very little that they could do to protect themselves. In other cases, as with the arrival of the horse in North America, adoption and adaptation was swift, creative, and culturally dynamic. The sharing of resources added to the complexity and diversity of foodstuffs, improved the qual­ity of life in many quarters, and generated new economic opportunities. This often-neglected aspect of the encounter process has been a persistent influence on indigenous peoples and played a significant role in shaping the response of aboriginal communities to the arrival and settlement of newcomers.

Authorities wondered if these peoples would survive the onslaught of modern influences; they also worried that the pre-industrial societies would stand in the way of productive and profitable exploitation of the newly claimed land and resources. Some colonizing powers, like Belgium in the Congo and Japan with Hokkaido, devoted little administrative or political effort to the rights and needs of indigenous peoples Others, most notably the British, committed a great deal of effort to conceptualizing and implementing policies for indigenous peoples. In the mid-1830s, for example, the British House of Commons established a Select Committee with specific responsibility for evaluating British colonial policy toward the aborigines throughout the Empire.

The colonial authorities faced a formidable challenge, from their perspective. Few of the tribal peoples showed much of an interest or aptitude for the new resource or agricultural economies - the Inuit and the Arctic whaling industry, Native Americans and the fur trade, and the Maori and the South Pacific whaling industry being among the best examples where there was substantial adaptation. The outsiders brought trade goods, and most indigenous groups sought opportunities to trade for the new items, particularly metal goods, firearms, and the other accoutrements of the industrial age. Most of the tribal peoples, however, maintained their commitment to the mobile, harvesting lifeways that had served them well for centuries, and showed little interest in much more than a tangential connection to the newcomers' activities. The recalcitrance and lack of interest in commercial agricultural pursuits among indigenous peoples in the Americas, for example, proved to be a crucial element in the development of the transatlantic slave trade, for the newcomers found the tribal populations unwilling to contemplate work in the plantation fields that sprang up along the east coast of South, Central, and North America.

Underlying the expansion of colonial powers and, later, national governments into indigenous territories were clear assumptions on the authority of the western and dominant states to assert ownership over under-utilized aboriginal land. There was a handful of philosophers and commentators who defended the right of indigenous peoples to sovereignty over their territories. The arguments of people like early Spanish commentators Franciscus de Victoria and Bartolomé de Las Casas could not stop the more aggressive positions taken by imperial authorities. Faced with the demands of settlers and ranchers for lands and miners for access to minerals, governments assumed that they could move forward without securing full approval from the indigenous owners of the lands. In the United States and Australia, in particular, governments brushed aside aboriginal claims that they had sovereignty over their lands.

The newcomers had to assert, as a top priority, their dominion over the indigenous populations. In nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writings, authors declared that the tribal peoples had been over­whelmed by the military power and technological prowess of the expansionist powers. Their subsequent defeat at the hands of the colonial armies, where armed intervention proved necessary, or their acquies­cence in accepting incorporation, appeared preordained and obvious. Historical analysis has now overturned these assumptions. Newcomers were often ill-prepared for the new worlds, and suffered grievously in the heat of the jungles and the cold of the Arctic. They had trouble adapting to the climatic and biological conditions in their new territo­ries. Early European settlements on the east coast of the Americas, throughout Africa, and in Asia often experienced strikingly high death rates. Indigenous peoples often came to their assistance by introducing local medical treatments, giving them food, and otherwise assisting the newcomers with their adaptation to strange lands. But the period of maladaptation passed, faster in some areas than others.

Governments extended their military, economic, and political dominance, often over populations seriously weakened by the importation of foreign diseases or the ravages of prolonged armed combat. With the primary struggles out of the way, and with their formal control of land and resources asserted to the satisfaction of other colonial powers, if not the local indigenous peoples, authorities now had to determine how best to manage the tribal societies. While there was no fixed pattern for the way this relationship evolved, governments were generally effective in stripping the autonomy and authority of the indigenous peoples. Incoming immigrations found that they could count on the power of the colonial authorities to back their plans to capitalize on the wealth and opportunities of the new territories.

In the initial phases, governments often negotiated treaties or peace agreements with the indigenous peoples. Spanish authorities signed treaties of voluntary obedience with chiefs of Central America, like that accepted by the Cacique Queco in 1510. Queco averred that he wanted to be the vassal, servant, and churiga of Their Highnesses, and that all his principales and Indians did also. He said that he did not come the first time they sent for him because he was greatly afraid. He said he did not want the gold they had taken from him, but gave it willingly for Their Highnesses and the Christians, and that all he wanted from now on was to eat, drink, and plant maize, and that he and his people would make houses, plant fields, and build roads for the Christians, and that he wanted the wives they had taken from him returned.'

While the passage of time would reveal a striking imbalance in power between the small, widely scattered tribal peoples and the well-resourced and militarily powerful colonial governments, the distinctions were not immediately evident. Only a small number of newcomers - explorers, traders, and soldiers - typically formed the vanguard of the colonial power; and indigenous populations, in their pre-epidemic state, generally outnumbered the migrants by a substantial margin. Similarly, the

later military dominance of the newcomers was, after the shock and surprise of the first encounter with firearms had passed, more assumed than real. Tiny outposts of soldiers and traders, often thousands of miles from homelands and typically existing for months without new provisions, were surprisingly vulnerable, a reality the immigrants and the tribal peoples both acknowledged.

As a consequence, and because of the uncertainty about the legal authority of colonial authorities in the new worlds, several colonizing powers signed treaties with the indigenous peoples. The treaties varied widely, and played a particularly prominent role within the British Empire and its colonial fragments. At one end was the hastily crafted pact between the Dutchman Pieter Minuit of New Netherlands and the Metoac of Manhattan in 1626, which saw the Dutch gain the island for a pittance. There was, as well, the famous Two Row Wampum treaty that the Iroquois signed with the British in the 1640s, and which drew the two sides together in what the Iroquois saw as an agreement to operate in parallel in the future and the British referred to as a "Covenant Chain," or intertwined relationship of mutual respect and reliance. At the other extreme was the more complex, bilingual resolution of Maori claims in New Zealand in 1840, which resulted in the Treaty of Waitangi, signed for the British by Captain William Hobson and by more than forty Maori chiefs, led by the influential Tamati Waka Nene. The treaty process, as will be discussed later, is far from complete, as aboriginal groups continue to negotiate land claims and rights with national governments, resulting, in a few countries, in agreements worth hundreds of millions of dollars, land and resource rights, and considerable powers of government and decision-making authority. The 3,000 members of the Tli-Cho Dene (Dogrib First Nation) of the Mackenzie Valley in Canada, for example, signed a modern-day treaty in August 2003, gain­ing over $150 million in financial compensation, annual payments of close to $3.5 million, broad powers of self-government, a share in future resource revenues from traditional lands, and effective management control over an area roughly the size of Switzerland (39,000 square kilo­meters). In Canada and other nations, governments have found it much easier to deal with indigenous groups in remote, non-agricultural regions than with communities in more densely settled parts of the country, where there are competing demands on the land and resources.

A compelling statement by the Cherokee orator Onitositsah outlined the complex indigenous response to the demand for treaties:

When we enter ... into treaties with our brothers, the whites, their whole cry is more land! Indeed, formerly it seemed to be a matter of formality with them to demand what they knew we durst not refuse. But on the principles of fairness, of which we have received assurances during the conducting of the present treaty, and in the name of free will and equality, I must reject your demand .... Let us examine the facts of your present irruption into our country, and we shall discover your pretensions on the ground. What did you do? You marched into our territories with a superior force ... your numbers far exceeded us, and we fled to the stronghold of our extensive woods, there to secure our women and children ... You killed a few scattered and defenceless individuals, spread fire and desolation wherever you pleased, and returned again to your own habitations ... The great God of Nature has placed us in different situa­tions. It is true that he has endowed you with many superior advantages; but he has not created us to be your slaves. We are a separate people! He has given each their lands, under distinct considerations and circumstances; he has stocked yours with cows, ours with buffaloe; yours with hogs, ours with bear; yours with sheep, ours with deer. He has, indeed, given you an advantage in this: that your cattle are tame and domestic while ours are wild and demand not only a larger space for range, but art to hunt and kill them. They are, nev­ertheless, as much our property as other animals are yours.(1)

The motivations for the treaties varied widely. Some of the agreements were imposed on weak and already dislocated indigenous peoples; others were negotiated from positions of mutual strength and shared interests, with aboriginal peoples securing considerable concessions from the colonial authorities. In many instances, the treaties either ended or prevented armed conflict and brought peace into regions inflamed by indigenous-newcomer conflict. In northeast North America, the overlapping claims and ambitions of the French, British, and Dutch resulted in the negotiation of treaties designed to commit specific aboriginal groups to colonial alliances, thus defining the military and political balance of power in the region. A significant number of the treaties were negotiated or imposed at the end of a period of armed conflict, and were accepted by the indigenous peoples as unavoidable. As the British victories over the French in Acadia (now the Maritime provinces of Canada) mounted in the mid-eighteenth century, the Mik'maq and Maliseet signed treaties with the British, at least in part to head off further destructive conflicts with the clearly superior British armed forces.

In the broad history of British treaty-making, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 holds particular pride of place, certainly in defining aboriginal rights across North America. The British, having finally vanquished the French in the Seven Years War, sought to cap the expense of running the costly North American colonies. The Colonial Office was anxious, as well, to keep settlers in the eastern regions of the vast continent, and hoped to avoid further and expensive conflict with the aboriginal peoples in the interior. The Royal Proclamation established a notional western boundary of settlement and required that treaty negotiations with indigenous peoples be concluded before settlement proceeded on their lands. The Royal Proclamation was not observed closely. Colonists, freed from fear of French retaliation, spread to the fertile lands of the west. Even more importantly, the American Revolution, which followed little more than a decade after the Proclamation, rendered the docu­ment of much lesser importance in the former British colonies that now formed the United States of America. In the remaining British North American colonies, authorities paid some attention to the document and endeavored to clear away potential indigenous claims before permitting settlement and development to occur.

More than anything, the Royal Proclamation provided dramatic and high-profile evidence that at least one major European nation accepted the idea that aboriginal people had a legitimate claim to their tradi­tional territories. And while the sovereignty of the nation-state and colonial authority was assumed to trump indigenous claims, it was nonetheless made evident that British officials respected the rights of aboriginal peoples. The British followed their Proclamation, however, only in selected instances. They made no effort to negotiate for the land rights of the Aborigines of Australia, believing that these mobile and pre-industrial peoples had no substantial claims to the land. The mili­tarily impressive Maori, on the other hand, forced Britain's hand. The British did not negotiate with the aboriginal peoples of the Canadian west before transferring land to the Canadian government in 1870; the task of signing a series of treaties, Number 1 to Number 11, negotiated between 1871 and 1921, fell to the newly formed Dominion of Canada. The British signed a small number of treaties on Vancouver Island, but refrained from extending the treaty process to the mainland colony of British Columbia. The later treaties in northern Canada, particularly Treaty 11, were signed in unclear conditions; subsequent investigations revealed that the Dene of the Mackenzie River valley had not been prop­erly consulted about the agreement.

Few of the treaties ended up defining subsequent relations in a profound or systematic way. For a wide variety of reasons, only a hand­ful of indigenous groups had the authority and presence to compel com­pliance by colonial officials or national governments. The newcomers, for their part, generally revealed both a shallow collective memory and considerable bad faith. Loron Sauguaarum, commenting on the unhappy experiences with the Casco Bay treaty (Maine), said:

My reason for informing you, myself, is the diversity and contrariety of the interpretations I receive of the English writing in which the articles of peace are drawn up that we have just mutually agreed to. These writings appear to contain things that are not, so that the Englishman himself disavows them in my presence, when he reads and interprets them to me himself... . What I tell you now is the truth. If, then, any one should produce any writing that makes me speak otherwise, pay no attention to it, for I know not what I am made to say in another language, but I know well what I say in my own.(1)

The broad promises and seemingly solid assurances contained in the documents rarely stood up in the face of pressures to expand settlement onto indigenous land or to develop newly discovered resources within treaty territories. The famed struggle over the Black Hills is an excellent case in point. The land was assigned to the Sioux under the Treaty of Laramie of 1868. It was soon overrun by miners and developers anxious to exploit the rich goldfields in the region. The Sioux, led by the famed warrior Sitting Bull, resisted, with the conflict peaking at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876. Although victorious, the Sioux were forced to flee north to Canada, where they stayed until the early 1880s. In 1877, the United States government confiscated treaty lands in the Black Hills. Similarly, the Treaty of Waitangi promised the bicultural development of the resource rich islands of New Zealand and seemed to assure the Maori of a critical role in the development of the area. British authorities and newly arrived settlers paid scant attention to the docu­ment; the bold promises in the Treaty (which read differently in English and Maori) proved to be illusory. Instead of purchasing Maori land, set­tlers and developers simply moved onto rich tracts. For almost three decades, from 1845 to the early 1870s, the colony of New Zealand found itself beset with a series of bitter conflicts, the first sparked by Hone Heke of the North Island. The struggles ended when British troops defeated the powerful Maori leader, Te Kooti, forcing him to flee into the King Country on the North Island. The end of the wars did not see a return to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. The clear commit­ments and assurances of the accord were virtually ignored - save by the Maori, who regularly reminded government of the treaty's existence - until it was resurrected in the 1970s.

Treaty-making with indigenous peoples began, in the first decades of contact, as accords between nations, designed largely to prevent conflict and to solidify alliances. Over the decades, treaties took on a new role, that of clearing the way for settlements and development and of formalizing the subordination of tribal peoples to the will of the colonial powers or nation-states. Once signed, and despite being assigned central importance by the indigenous leaders and communities, the treaties typically played little practical role. The British, for instance, signed a series of treaties with groups in Kenya, focusing on those occupying agri­cultural land, thus identifying areas available for British settlers and development. Indigenous groups that remained in the forests of Kenya and therefore on the margins were not offered treaties. National gov­ernments generally felt free to abrogate the terms of the treaty if a broader national or non-indigenous purpose had arisen. Indigenous leaders, as in the Canadian west, struggled in subsequent years to get the Canadian government even to acknowledge the existence of promises clearly made during the treaty negotiations. Even the terms of the accords were not always honored or implemented, raising serious doubts among the indigenous populations about the integrity of the govern­ments and individuals who signed the documents. From a non-indigenous perspective, however, the treaties accomplished one clear and central goal: they provided tangible evidence that the question of land and resource ownership had been settled, opening indigenous lands for occupation and development. The treaties may have failed dramatically from an indigenous perspective, but to the degree that smoothing the path for settlement was a primary motivation for government involvement, the accords met the needs of the newcomer populations.  
 

Government Relations Without Treaties

While treaties were, particularly within the British colonies, a primary point of contact between indigenous and newcomer authorities, numerous occupations of aboriginal territories occurred without formal accords. Instead, the demands of commerce and international diplomacy and the pressures of migrants resulted in governments proceeding without nego­tiated arrangements. Furthermore, most colonial authorities thought lit­tle of the political and international status of indigenous peoples; treaties were often more about demonstrating the legitimacy of their claim to new territories before the world community. Particularly in the early years of expansion, when the first Europeans ventured to the Americas, Africa, and Asia, colonial powers were obsessed with their relations with the com­plex hierarchical societies they encountered. They relaxed considerably when they were confronted by smaller, tribal populations, without the mil­itary power and internal organization necessary to prevent a long-term threat to their expansion plans. In such circumstances, treaties of convenience were negotiated or imposed on the aboriginal peoples. Even more commonly, indigenous lands were simply occupied by the newcomers, who used the assumed superiority of their civilization as a justification for imposing themselves on a new population.

The British faced a unique challenge in India, where a large and diverse population of indigenous peoples lived amidst, not a growing newcomer population, but rather a number of complex existing agri­cultural and industrial Indian societies. The indigenous peoples lived in the largely inaccessible mountain regions, and their territories attracted little attention until the establishment of British imperial administra­tion. New roads, formal land registration systems, and an aggressive approach to economic development resulted in large-scale migrations into indigenous territories. The indigenous peoples fought back in a series of uprisings, including the Santhal Revolt of 1855, the Sardari conflict two years later, and a Bihar struggle in 1895. Fearing further unrest, the British authorities passed laws designed to protect the rights of indigenous peoples to their lands, protecting them from control by provincial legislatures. Dr. J. H. Hutton, of the Indian Civil Service, wrote of the government's effort:

Far from being of immediate benefit to the primitive tribes, the establishment of British rule in Indian did most of them much more harm than good. It may be said that the early days of British administration did very great detriment to the economic position of the tribes through ignorance and neglect of their rights and customs ... . Many changes have been caused incidentally to the penetration of the tribal country, the opening up of communications, the protection of forests and the establishment of schools, to say nothing of the openings given in this way to Christian missionaries. Many of the results of these changes have caused acute discomfort to the tribes.(2)

Settler societies evolved slowly in many parts of the world. Initial occu­pations tended to involve traders and soldiers, seeking economic and political advantage. In many areas, for example, India, Indonesia, and China, the size, complexity and deeply entrenched nature of the local population, combined with the challenges of the climate and geography, made it virtually impossible for the colonizers to see a permanent place for large number of nationals in that corner of the new worlds. The early emphasis in regions as diverse as Southeast Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Central and South America, and North America was on the assignment of economic rights to large chartered companies. The British East India Company, Hudson's Bay Company, Dutch East India Company, Russian America Company, and others, secured valuable commercial authority and were charged with maintaining or supporting the colonial presence in a specific zone. Where local conditions and commercial opportunities suited, the charter-holders or the colonial authorities granted large landholdings to friends and supporters. They believed that the impor­tation of near-feudal economic structures would produce substantial profits and stabilize the colonial society. These arrangements, the colonizers discovered, worked best in areas with large domestic workforces; failing such a local resource, as in the Caribbean and the Americas, the landholders fell back on the slave trade as a source of abundant labor.

In treaty and non-treaty situations alike, settlers discovered that the imperatives of colonial expansion rested uneasily with the indigenous population. The rapid expansion of migrant populations threatened the stability of local ecosystems and drained available resources. The ideology of the new order, based on personal or government land ownership was imposed on indigenous territories. Indigenous peoples were quickly displaced by farms, ranches, plantations, town sites, commercial fishing developments, mines, or other intrusions of the new economic order. (The situation described here, presented in the context of sixteenth- to nineteenth-century developments, is very close to that currently under­way in parts of the Amazon basin, Sarawak, and Irian Jaya.) The settlers themselves had been schooled in a view of the world which described indigenous peoples as savage, uncivilized brutes - ideas which provided ample justification for the confiscation of indigenous land and resources. They saw the indigenous peoples living around the colonial settlements in sharply negative terms. If they were not a military threat, they were viewed as diseased and impoverished. If they had economic potential, the colonizers believed that they could be incorporated into the new order as cheap labor. And if, as with most tribal peoples, they inhabited harsh, isolated, and non-agricultural lands, the simple fact of their continued existence was used as evidence of their primitive nature. In such circumstances, the intruders saw little risk and felt less guilt in occupying indigenous territories, even if it meant an accelerated assault on aboriginal societies and lands.

When settlers moved quickly onto indigenous territories, colonial authorities faced a very different `task than that of negotiating treaties, maintaining military alliances, and otherwise working on a nation-to nation basis with aboriginal peoples. Instead, intensive settlements required the marginalization and regulation of indigenous populations. They had to be removed from the path of settlement, so that agricultural and other developments could proceed. Indigenous communities had to be neutered militarily; it would not do to have powerful, armed aboriginal societies living amongst and around settler populations. Collectively, they had to be controlled and managed so as to ensure that they did not interfere with the activities of the incoming colonial settlers. 

 

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