The winds of change: twentieth-century recognition

Detail

Why the change came: the official surveys

• 1928 — The Problem of Indian Administration, a big survey of native life directed by Lewis Meriam. It painted a grim picture of health and education on reservations.
• The US Congress had ordered this survey in 1924, partly to thank the many Native Americans who served in World War I [3].
• The survey team found most Native Americans "extremely poor", in bad health, without education, and cut off from the Euro-American culture around them [3].

• The report said plainly that government policy crushed native people and destroyed their culture and society [3].

• The bad conditions the report described grew out of the Dawes General Allotment Act (1887) — the law that had cut tribal common land into small individual plots. The 1928 report made people demand reform [2].

• Note the chain: survey (1928) → public anger → new law (1934). Facts alone did not do it; the report gave reformers a weapon.

USA: the Indian Reorganisation Act, 1934

• 1934 — Indian Reorganisation Act (USA): natives living on reservations got the right to buy land and the right to take loans.
• Passed on 18 June 1934. Its aim was to cut federal control over native affairs and increase native self-government [2].
• It stopped further allotment of tribal common land to individuals, and let surplus land go back to the tribes instead of to white homesteaders [2].
• Many of the Meriam report's recommendations were written into this Act [2].
• The reform era is linked with John Collier, head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs; before his reforms the Courts of Indian Offences worked mostly as tools of Bureau control [2].

1950s–60s: the push to 'join the mainstream' and native refusal

• In the 1950s and 1960s both the US and Canadian governments tried to end the special provisions for natives.
• Idea: natives should 'join the mainstream' — that is, accept European culture and stop being separate.

• Natives refused. They did not want equality bought by giving up who they were.

• 1954 — 'Declaration of Indian Rights': natives accepted US citizenship, but on two conditions —

• reservations were not to be taken away, and

• their traditions were not to be interfered with.

• So the bargain flipped. Earlier the state offered rights in exchange for culture; now natives took the rights and kept the culture.

Canada: from refusal (1969) to the Constitution Act, 1982

• 1969 — Canada announced it would 'not recognise aboriginal rights'.
• Natives answered with organised demonstrations and public debates.
• Result: the Constitution Act 1982 accepted existing aboriginal and treaty rights.
• Point for answers: this was won by native political action, not gifted by the state.

Australia: breaking 'The Great Australian Silence' (1968 onwards)

• 1968 — the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner gave an electrifying lecture called 'The Great Australian Silence'. His charge: historians had stayed silent about the aborigines.
• From the 1970s aborigines began to be studied as communities with their own distinct cultures, not as one backward mass.
• Henry Reynolds wrote Why Weren't We Told? He attacked the habit of writing Australian history as if it began with Captain Cook's 'discovery'.
• What followed this shift:
• university departments for native history and culture,
• galleries of native art,
• museum dioramas (life-size models of scenes) showing native life,

• life histories written by natives themselves.

• Judith Wright, the poet, championed aborigine rights. Her poem 'Two Dreamtimes' is the named example.

1974: end of 'White Australia'

• 1974 — the 'White Australia' policy ends.
• Asian immigrants were now admitted.
• Multiculturalism (respect for many cultures side by side, native and immigrant) became official policy.

The two Australian wounds: terra nullius and the stolen children

• Australia had no treaties with natives — unlike the USA, Canada and New Zealand.
• Reason: the land had been declared terra nullius — Latin for 'land belonging to nobody'.

• Under this doctrine British colonial law treated Australia as unoccupied when Europeans came. So Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were held to have no rights in the land and nothing to pass to their children [4][5].

• The second wound: a long history of the forcible separation of mixed-blood children from their native relatives.

1992: the Mabo case kills terra nullius

• 1992 — the High Court of Australia in the Mabo case declared terra nullius legally invalid, and recognised native claims to land from before 1770.
• The case was filed in 1982 by Eddie Koiki Mabo and others as Mabo v. Queensland. Mabo died before the verdict [4][5].
• Judgment delivered 3 June 1992 in Mabo v. Queensland (No. 2); it struck down terra nullius and established native title [4][5].
• Condition in the ruling: natives can claim native title if they have kept practising their traditional laws and customs on that land [5].
• Follow-up law: the Native Title Act, 1993 [6].
• The Mabo case manuscripts are inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register [7].

1995–1999: the enquiry and the apology

• 1995 — a National Enquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their families was set up.
• 26 May 1999 — 'National Sorry Day': a public apology for the children 'lost' between the 1820s and the 1970s.
• Read the span carefully: the taking of children ran for about 150 years, so the apology covered many generations, not one bad decade.

Prelims Hooks

• 1928 — The Problem of Indian Administration, survey directed by Lewis Meriam; Congress had ordered it in 1924 [3].
• Indian Reorganisation Act, USA — 1934 (passed 18 June 1934); gave reservation natives the right to buy land and take loans [2].
• 1954 'Declaration of Indian Rights' — natives accepted US citizenship on condition reservations stayed and traditions were untouched.
• 1969 — Canada said it would not recognise aboriginal rights; Constitution Act 1982 then accepted aboriginal and treaty rights.
• 1968 — W.E.H. Stanner's lecture 'The Great Australian Silence'.
• Why Weren't We Told? — by Henry Reynolds; 'Two Dreamtimes' — poem by Judith Wright.
• 1974 — 'White Australia' policy ends; multiculturalism becomes official policy.
• Terra nullius = 'land belonging to nobody'; struck down by the High Court in the Mabo case, 1992 (judgment 3 June 1992) [4][5]; native claims recognised from before 1770.
• Native Title Act — 1993, Australia [6]; Mabo case manuscripts on UNESCO Memory of the World [7].
• 26 May 1999 — 'National Sorry Day', for children taken from the 1820s to the 1970s; enquiry set up 1995.

Mains Points

• Recognition followed native pressure, not settler generosity. In every case the state first tried to end special status — USA and Canada in the 1950s–60s, Canada again in 1969 — and retreated only after natives organised. The 1954 Declaration and the 1982 Constitution Act are both bargains won from below.
• Knowledge is political. The Meriam survey (1928) turned into law in 1934; Stanner's 1968 lecture and Reynolds's Why Weren't We Told? turned into university departments, galleries and finally courtroom argument. Writing natives back into history was the first step to writing them back into land law.
• Terra nullius shows how law does the work of conquest. Calling the land empty removed the need for treaties — which is exactly why Australia, alone among the USA, Canada and New Zealand, had none. Once the Mabo judgment (1992) called the doctrine invalid, the whole legal base of dispossession fell, and native title dated to before 1770 became arguable.
• Two kinds of loss need two kinds of repair. Land was answered by a court verdict (Mabo, 1992; Native Title Act, 1993); the stolen children were answered by enquiry and apology (1995, National Sorry Day, 26 May 1999). Useful for GS-I comparison with India's own debates on tribal land rights and historical wrongs.