Indigenous Peoples, Poverty, and Self-Determination in Australia ...

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Indigenous Peoples, Poverty and Self-Determinationtraced the historical processes that encouraged Maori to alter thispolitical structure. Such structures are generally dynamic, but theEuropean agenda shaped the process of change in particular ways.Negotiating over land, Europeans searched for and encouragedparamount chiefs at ever larger scales of social organization.Maori responded to land pressure in part by combining in largerunits to defend their interests. Over time, both Europeans andMaori tended to construct Maori—for purposes of intergrouprelations—in fewer and larger social groups. The result was toprivilege iwi, (conceived as peoples, tribes or confederations ofhapu), over hapu. Formal government policy and the organizationof social programs have tended to continue the trend in recentyears, leading to what Manuhuia Barcham (2000: 141) calls “theiwi-isation of Maori society.”But the situation is further complicated by continuingdiversification. A majority of Maori now live in cities. Alongwith the more general integration of many Maori into NewZealand society, this has produced new sets of interests that donot easily combine into hapu or iwi constructions. Speaking ofthe Maori concept of tino rangatiratanga, a polysemous conceptthat combines ideas of, among other things, sovereignty, selfdetermination,autonomy, nationhood, and chieftainship, Maakaand Fleras remark that “for some, tino rangatiratanga resideswithin the hapu; for others, the iwi; for still others only Maori asa collectivity; and for yet others still, within the individual” (2000:100). Under these conditions, what form should self-governmenttake?In Canada, as in the United States, a lengthy history of treatymaking,land loss, and paternalistic federal administration hasreshaped Aboriginal political relationships and group boundaries.Particularly under the Indian Act of 1876 and its subsequentamendments, the government of Canada recognized variousgroups of Aboriginal people as bands, recognized certain lands asreserved to those bands, replaced Indigenous governmental formsand practices with imposed ones, and, on behalf of assimilationistgoals, regulated numerous aspects of Aboriginal life. While some24
Cornellgroup identities and boundaries supported by federal recognitionmade sense, others appear to have been chosen at the whim oflocal administrators or to be simply the result of a dispersedgeography. 22 Widely distributed peoples sharing culture andlanguage often were broken up and isolated from each other insmall numbers on tiny acreages. Their modest self-governingpowers were exercised through imposed institutions that had“no…congruence with the cultural premises of aboriginal people”(Scott 1993: 322). Today, Canada’s Indigenous population ismuch smaller, in absolute numbers, than the Indian population ofthe United States, but it is divided into many more First Nationslocated on many more, and generally much smaller, reserves.In the 1990s, one of the major concerns of Canada’s RoyalCommission on Aboriginal Peoples was the effect of this historicallygenerated fragmentation on self-government. The commissionconcluded that some Aboriginal bands and communities were toosmall to effectively exercise self-governing powers. “The problem,”said the commission, “is that the historical Aboriginal nationswere undermined by disease, relocations and the full array ofassimilationist government policies. They were fragmented intobands, reserves and small settlements. Only some operate ascollectivities now. They will have to reconstruct themselves asnations” (Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples 1996: 26). Itwent on to suggest that the thousand or so Aboriginal settlementsor reserve communities in Canada comprised only “60 to 80” suchnations, based on bonds of culture and identity (ibid.: 25). Whilesome Canadian First Nations would dispute those numbers andmight see themselves differently, the underlying issue remains:At what level of the social order should institution-buildingappropriately occur? Should it be in bands, tribes, confederationsof tribes, or in different entities in different situations?22. There are similar cases in the U.S. but, thanks in part to differences in thetreaty process, they are less prevalent than in Canada.25
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Page 25 and 26: CornellThe U.S. government had inad
Page 27 and 28: CornellSuch variation does not nega
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Page 33 and 34: CornellThe overall policy implicati
Page 35 and 36: CornellReferencesAnaya, S.J. 1996.
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Page 39 and 40: CornellHarvard Project on American
Page 41 and 42: CornellJorgensen, M., and J. Taylor
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Page 45 and 46: CornellWakeling, S., M. Jorgensen,
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