Land rights in historical and contemporary context

Applied Geography (1992), 12,95-10&S

Land rights in historical and contemporary context Erie Pawson and Garth Cant Department of Geography,

University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

Abstract The contemporary context of land rights in Canada, Australia and New Zealand is introduced by comparing European and indigenous perceptions of land and natural resources and by examining the processes of land acquisition and settlement by the colonial power. During the nineteenth century indigenous people lost land, became marginalized in economic and social terms and suffered serious demographic decline. Policies of assimilation were introduced by governments in all three countries but were rejected by indigenous people in the second half of the twentieth century. The cross-links between cultural resurgence, land claims, the recovery of traditional economic bases and moves to exercise self determination are explored in this context.

In recent years the voices of indigenous peoples living in wealthy, first world countries have been heard with increasing force. They seek to retrieve land rights and measures of self-determination after generations of existing as dispossessed minorities in lands that were once theirs. This special issue of Applied Geography focuses on such claims in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. All three countries were colonized by white settlers in the global expansion of Europe between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. In each, the rights of existing populations were pushed to one side, then all but forgotten in the face of the late Victorian orthodoxy that the weak must die out in the face of the strong. But it is perhaps one of the most striking features of modern political and cultural life in all three countries that, far from succumbing to this fate, indigenous minorities have proved to be both resistant and resilient, and today, increasingly determined to salvage something of their original places. To do so involves formal and informal political activity, action through the courts and the development of skills to foster indigenous economic bases. Academic involvement in these spheres has drawn on the expertise of a number of geographers, some of whom are represented in the national studies that follow. This special issue therefore brings to a wider audience a particular practice of applied geography. It also, however, has another purpose. The history of dispossession and oppression that is exposed by such practice can reveal much about which our teaching and texts remain silent, forcing us to confront comfortable Eurocentric assumptions in our work. The making of the European ‘New World’, in reality the appropriation of new landscapes into which to extend an existing world, was far more problematic than is often assumed. It is the purpose of this overview to identify recurrent themes from the experience of indigenous peoples of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. To an earlier generation of geographers (and historians), European settlement of 0143-6228192102 0095-14@ 1992Rutterworth-Heinemann Ltd

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the New World was something to be celebrated in overtly whiggish terms. What was seen as wilderness, waste and unproductive was destined to be changed into productive territories. Hence Stephen Leacock, the Canadian essayist, prefaced his history of that country 40 years ago with a chapter entitled ‘The empty continent’, drawing a picture of a vacant land. ‘Such, and no more’, he said, ‘. . . is the meaning and extent of the Indian ownership of North America’ (quoted in Watson 1979: 22). Similar perspectives persist. Recently one geographer concluded that ‘over large parts of the world the British established the first effective occupation’ (Christopher 1988: 217); another claimed that ‘it is, of course, a fact that most of the Indians in what is now the United States remained quite undeveloped until the white man arrived’ (Watson 1979: 23). More commonly such assumptions remain covert. Hence European colonization is frequently portrayed as a struggle against the land rather than against its indigenous owners (Reynolds 1982). They are forgotten in discussions of ‘the making of the landscape’ of ‘the regions of recent settlement’. Thus the South Australian Jubilee 150 volume on social history characterizes its centennial predecessor as ‘an unembarrassed commemoration of the triumph of British civilization’ but begins with the ‘prehistory’ of the state before 1836 and discusses ‘the peopling of South Australia’ thereafter (Richards 1986). Clearly there is a way to go yet in challenging what Harvey called ‘attitudes gleaned from many years devoted to the technics and management of Empire’ (1974: 22). Both sides of the frontier

At the end of the nineteenth century Britain, the hegemonic imperial power, formally controlled a quarter of the world’s lands and peoples and, through the agency of capital, extended its informal influence over considerably more (Taylor 1989). The first phase of formal British empire-building took place in the Caribbean and North America from the seventeenth century, based on a network of mercantile trading relationships. These were designed to protect British interests against competing European states, notably the Dutch and the French. But having emerged as dominant in Europe during the Napoleonic wars, and with surplus capital generated by industrialization, Britain thereafter adopted policies of free trade and free movement of resources, from which it had most to gain (Pawson 1990). Its rising population could no longer be fed from domestic sources and self-sufficiency in food production was abandoned as the interests of industrial and finance capita1 were given precedence over those of domestic agricultural producers (Denoon 1983). By 1913, British overseas investments were worth nearly f4 billion, the bulk being in European settler territories. It was during the nineteenth century that the massive incorporation of new lands in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand occurred; it was in the latter three countries that British per capita investment was highest, ranging from g73 in Australia and New Zealand and &71.5 in Canada to only f8.2 in the US and f1.2 in India and Ceylon (see Saul 1960: 67; Denoon 1983: 51). British investment was used to develop new economic production zones to supply the global economy with basic primary products. Between 1815 and 1914, some 10 million people also left the British Isles, the majority bound for North America and Australasia (Baines 1985). This was 23 per cent of the total leaving Europe during this period. Between 1853 and 1930, a quarter of British emigrants went to Canada, one fifth to Australia and New Zealand (Baines 1985). These migrants took with them the competitive, acquisitive

instincts characteristic of the cultures of which they were a part. Indeed, a prime motivation for emigration was to find more congenial environments in which to practise such instincts, in places which were considered to be relatively empty. But emptiness was only relative. The pre-contact Indian populations of North America may have numbered as high as lo-12 million; there were possibly 750000 Aboriginals in Australia and upwards of 140000 Maori in New Zealand (Pool 1977; Crosby 1986; White and Mulvaney 1987). These indigenous peoples were most numerous in the accessible and temperate coastal environments that Europeans coveted most (Watson 1979). Contact was therefore immediate and differences readily discernible. Indigenous cultures were not grounded in ideologies of competitiveness. Although competition was by no means absent within and between different groups, their cosmologies and modes of existence were essentially cooperative. They lived by rules of kinship, not class, and considered themselves allied by descent with the landscape and different elements of nature (Highwater 1981; Yoon 1986; Chatwin 1987). The notion of separation from nature, so characteristic of Christian Europe (Nasr 1968), was absent. This is not to say that they lived in some sort of romantic harmony with their surroundings. Indeed, there is considerable evidence of widespread species loss, particularly of large mammals and birds, in North America and Australasia during earlier periods of human habitation (Blainey 1975: 52-8; Crosby 1986: 270-80). But this merely underlings that these were not static cultures, as was so readily assumed from the European perspective of perpetual change. Rather they were people who had learnt means of survival and prosperity through developing understanding of their environments-understandings codified in bodies of ritual knowledge that kept demands for resources within sustainable funds (Martin 1978; Brody 1983). To Europeans, the peopies they met were savages, indeed often considered so close to nature as to be barely human (Watson 3979; Dickason 1984). in part this judgement was based on the nomadic routines and reliance on hunting that even the more settled indigenes displayed. They also lacked material possessions and were therefore dismissed as poor. But when survival depended on movement, to be unencumbered was entirely rational. Their lives were enriched in other ways: for example, for the Aboriginals of South Australia by ‘a high degree of social interaction and a rich artistic and ceremonial life’ (Foster and Gara 1986: 92). It is also clear that most by no means merely survived. Sahlins (1974) has referred to hunters and gatherers as ‘the original affluent society’, because of the relatively small amounts of time and effort that were required to satisfy everyday needs. It has been argued that the diets of the Aboriginals and Inuit, both peoples that Europeans saw as existing on the most inhospitable margins, were much more nourishing than has been supposed (Bfainey 1975; Brady 1987). A number of studies of Northern Canadian Indian bands still living in part by traditional means supports this view (Brody 1983; Asch 1984). Careful European observers were aware of these features of indigenous lifestyles. Most, however, judged only the surface manifestations of what they saw-the apparent absence of hallmarks of ‘civilization’. The lack of familiar class and of clear lines of authority, were taken as indicative of structures, backwardness. Thus the Maori, whose tribal chiefs had obvious status to European eyes, were seen as less primitive than the Aboriginals, who had ‘no visible political framework’ (Hughes 1987: 274). But what was not visible was not absent: the exercise of autho~ty in Aboriginal societies depended OR circumstance. In the family, it was the father; within the band, the most respected hunter in economic

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matters and the ritual elders in religious affairs. General community concerns were dealt with by informal councils (Foster and Gara 1986: 82). The one difference of which Europeans sought to take greatest advantage was the absence of systems of private property, as access to land was what the imperial drive was about, above all else. Indigenous systems of landholding were not simple. At the broadest level, it can be said that land was held in common by the group, in trust for past and future generations. For instance, Maori land was held by the tribes (or in$), with kinship groups allocated use rights according to need. But the mana of the land (its integrity and creative power) was vested in the chief, and only he, with the consent of the iwi, could alienate it (Walker 1990). Competition for land between iwi was often fierce, as it was between Indian bands in North America, but each identified strongly with core territories (Wishart 1979). In Australia, Aboriginal ranges were organized in a complex fashion, with clans intermingling, foraging and hunting in each other’s territories (Reynolds 1982: 63-4). But land was far more than ter~tory: it was ‘hearth, home, the source and locus of life, and everlastingness of spirit’ (Stanner 1968). All land was occupied and valued, even though it did not appear so to Europeans hungry for space. The protestation of a New Zealand newspaper in 1843 that Maori had let their land ‘lie idle and unused for so many centuries’ (see Pawson 1987: 309) was echoed throughout the New World. The British simply assumed that Australia in 1788 was ‘terra nullius’. The term ‘wastelands’ came into wide usage in all three countries to describe areas not permanently cultivated (Wynn 1979; Reynolds 1989). Yet indigenous peoples were powerful agents of landscape modification: the grasslands of eastern Australia were created and managed by continual firing to attract game and encourage edible tuber growth (Blainey 1975; Lourandos 1987). It has been suggested that such husbandry techniques gave the Aboriginals a better claim to a true farming role than has been realized (Butlin 1983: 158-60). In New Zealand, the Maori reduced the original forest cover from some 78 to 53 per cent of the land area in the thousand years before white colonization, in the quest for game birds and the creation of sites for fixed horticulture (Molloy 1980). None of this, however, impressed predatory European pioneers. From their side of the frontier, the prevalent attitude was crystallized by President Monroe in the US in the 1820s: ‘[The Indians] yield to the greater force of civilized population . . . and of right [they] ought to yield, for the earth was given to mankind to support the greater number of which it is capable’ (quoted in Watson 3979: 39).

Processes of interaction

Nonetheless the British Crown sought to respect the rights of indigenous peoples when it was expedient to do so. Hence the Royal Proclamation of 1763, concerning territories west of the Allegheny Mountains, outlawed private purchase of Indian lands and laid down provisions to protect them from European encroachment. So too did the Royal Instructions sent in the same year to the governor of the new colony of Quebec, in order to maintain peaceful relations with the powerful which had allied with the British against the French Iroquois Confederacy, (Slattery 1983). The Treaty of Waitangi of 1840 guaranteed Maori their lands and fisheries, enabling the Crown alone to purchase any that iwi wished to sell. But despite hundreds of examples of treaty-making throughout the British empire (Williams 1989), the privilege was not extended to Aboriginals, who were mistakenly considered not to pose any threat to colonization. Early governors of

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Australia were merely instructed to treat them with ‘amity and kindness’ {Hughes 1987: 273). The law of nations in respect of aboriginal rights was thus interpreted according to circumstance. Vattel, perhaps the most widely read international jurist of the eighteenth century, articulated the ancient Christian obligation to reclaim the earth, hence denying rights of indigenous peoples to anything but cultivated land (Curtin 1972). His views were the basis of wasteland policies and were often used to justify the appropriation of Australia (Reynolds 1989: 67-8). But his was a narrower interpretation than the doctrine of aboriginal title that asserted that all rights in land must be respected, until extinguished with the consent of owners and upon payment of compensation. Thus the provisions of the Treaty of Waitangi have been interpreted as merely spelling out existing law (Hackshaw 1989). But it is clear that explicit treaty guarantees were required in such situations, where the political and military power of existing inhabitants would otherwise threaten new colonies (Williams 1989). Colonization was often initially more tenuous than subsequent experience allowed. European settlers were thousands of kilometres from familiar surroundings, their ability to survive by no means certain. Axtell (1981) describes how new arrivals on the American seaboard learnt from Indians the arts of forest agriculture, clearance and the potential of American food and medicinal plants. Likewise Aboriginal and Maori guided Europeans in environments that seemed strange and hostile. Productive economic relationships developed: the dynamics of the fur trade in Canada are well known (Ray 1974); less so is the participation of Tasmanian Aboriginals in seal hunting (Ryan 1981) and the Maori in whaling. The latter quickly grasped the benefits of trade in augmenting iwi influence, exchanging flax for muskets and, in the North Island, keeping the struggling settlements of Auckland and Wellington alive with shipments of fish, wheat, meat and potatoes in the 1840s and 1850s (Asher and Naulls 1987). Once it became clear that European intentions were self-serving rather than mutually beneficial, however, there was formidable indigenous resistance. This has been well documented in North America (Brown 1973; Friesen 1987) and was as ubiquitous in Australia. Aboriginals fought bush wars, some lasting for ten years, against pastoral farmers who shot game and whose stock invaded hunting ranges. In Tasmania, they attacked shepherds, stock and farmhouses, terrorizing the white population in the 1820s until the ‘settled districts’ were ‘cleared’ by the infamous Black Line of armed colonists and soldiers in 1830 (Ryan 1981). Detailed research in the Three Rivers district of New South Wales concluded that one-third of its inhabitants were killed by Europeans (Blom~eld 1986). In New Zealand, the wars of the 186Os, which followed earlier conflicts in the 1840s were precipitated by iwi resistance to undue Crown pressure for land sales in contravention of treaty guarantees. A maximum Maori fighting strength of 2000 men exacted a series of victories over an adversary that included 12000 imperial troops, more than were then available for the defence of England (Belich 1986). But indigenous peoples had no resistance to European diseases, such as smallpox, respiratory infections and influenza, from which distance had long shielded them (McNeil1 1976). Smallpox in particular raced ahead of white settlement over much of North America and Australia, maybe halving native populations (Butlin 1983; Crosby 1986), while sexually transmitted diseases, fostered by practices of offering women for hospitality or in exchange for trade goods, undermined fertility levels. Populations went in to steep decline. By 1900, there were probably only 150000 Aboriginals; Maori numbers had been cut to

100 42000

Land rights in h~torical arsd co~tern~orar~ context

(Pool 1977; White and Mulvany 1987). Having been portrayed as savage murderers for resisting European encroachment, they were now condemned as inherently weak for being unable to resist European diseases. The assumptions of moral and increasingly racial superiority that were a fundamental element of the British culture of imperialism were married with Darwinian beliefs to legitimate the apparent inevitability of what was happening (Pawson 1990). ‘When civilised nations come into contact with barbarians, the struggle is short’, wrote Darwin, using demographic examples from Hawaii, Tasmania and New Zealand (1901: 283-90). In 1888, white Australia’s centennial year, The Age of Melbourne declared that it ‘seems a law of nature where two races whose stages or progression differ greatly are brought into contact, the inferior race is doomed to wither and disappear’ (quoted in Reynolds 1989: 9). In settler parlance, a ‘dark cloud’ was passing (Hughes 1987: 277). The same reasoning was applied to the apparent success of introduced plant and animal species at the expense of native species (Crosby 1986). By the late nineteenth century, such a fate was seen as one likely solution to the ‘native problem’. Another was that of assimilation: the separation of indigenes not only from their lands but from their cultures as well. Policies of assimilation had a America they had been propounded as a long history; in revolutionary consequence of the Enlightment belief in the perfectibility of mankind. Indians, it was averred, could be reclaimed from a state of nature. Thus Henry Knox, Washington’s Secretary of War with responsibility for white-Indian relations, offered them ‘all the blessings of civilised life’, whilst Thomas Jefferson, seeing them ‘on a level with Whites in the same uncultivated state’, believed that once they had adopted European principles of property and farming practice, ‘you will become one people with us’ (quoted in Horsman 1981: 107-8). E. G. Wakefield, the patron of schemes of planned colonization in South Australia and New Zealand, put it more bluntly: the choice for the Maori, he said in 1846, was ‘amalgamation or extermination’ (quoted in Miller 1974: 97). Some indigenes followed such advice, and paid the price. The infamous example is that of the Cherokee nation of Georgia who, despite adopting the settled ways of white agriculturalists, were forcibly removed from their lands in the 1830s to the new Indian territory of Oklahoma in order to make way for European settlers. The Waikato Maori of New Zealand’s North Island were invaded in the wars of the 1860s to satisfy settlers hungry for land that the Waikato were successfully farming. Assimilation was to occur on the colonizer’s terms alone. The reserves policy of Canada is a good example (Friesen 1987). A series of numbered treaties were signed with Indians in the west and north between 1871 and 1929, the purpose of which was ‘the removal of any obstructions’ to white colonization and the settlement of Indian populations. Treaty 8, covering northeast British Cotumbia and northern Alberta, offered reserves of one square mile of land per family of five, agricultural implements and educational assistance, and small cash payments in exchange for surrender of ‘all their rights, titles, and privileges whatsoever’ (Brody 1983: 63-8). The British North America Act of 1867 reserved to the federal government exclusive jurisdiction in Indian matters, in order to deal with the inhabitants of the vast western and northern territories coveted by the white population but as yet uncolonized. In contrast, the Australian federal constitution of 1900 largely ignored Aborigines, expressly excluding them from both federal jurisdiction and the national census (Morse 1987a). ‘The great Australian silence’ had begun. In New Zealand, governments promulgating the myth of the colony’s harmonious race

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relations reminded others that Maori men had received the vote in 1867. That this was a post-war move designed, along with the individualization of Maori land title, to break the authority of iwi, was passed over. In 1877, when the colonists were secure in numbers and land, the Chief Justice declared the Treaty of Waitangi ‘a simple nullity’, asserting that the Maori had been too primitive to enter into such an agreement. Appeals to the Privy Council in London merely produced successive rulings that rights conferred by treaties could not be enforced unless incorporated in the laws of the land (Williams 1989). Throughout the New World, the colonizers simply forgot; their unwilling hosts, however, did not. Indigenous resurgence That they did not forget is perhaps unsurprising given the remarkable facility of those raised in oral cultures to recall and recite the past. Sporadic resistance to white encroachment continued in parts of Australia into the 1920s (Lippmann 1981), yet a chilling recapitulation of the terra nullius assumption occurred in the 1950s when the British nuclear bomb tests at Maralinga were conducted without reference to local Aboriginal populations (Pilger 1989). From the late nineteenth century, Maori elders mounted a succession of appeals to their treaty partner, the Crown in London, in respect of treaty rights (Orange 1987); all were referred back to the New Zealand government. It was not until the 1960s that protest in all three countries became more politicized. In Canada, this was prompted by reaction to the federal government’s reaffirmation of the policy of assimilation in 1969, aiming ‘to eradicate all special Indian rights in the near future’ (Asch 1984: 8). From then on, its indigenous peoples lobbied politically to ensure that rights they consider inalienable were not excised. They were given a considerable boost by the publication of the Berger Report on the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline hearings, which drew a sensitive portrayal of the extent and vitality of traditional economics. Agitation in Australia for recognition of civil rights for Aborigines led to the holding of a national referendum in 1967 in which a 90 per cent vote was recorded to repeal discriminatory clauses in the federal constitution. But the slow pace of change in respect of land rights led young Aboriginals to establish a tent embassy outside Parliament House in Canberra in 1972 to draw media attention to their cause (Lippmann 1981). In 1975, 30000 people took part in a Land March through the North Island of New Zealand to the state Parliament. Other land rights protests were widely publicized. One, the occupation of Bastion Point in Auckland, occurred after 16 court actions, 6 appearances before commissions or committees of inquiry, and 15 parliamentary petitions over many years (Walker 1990: 217). As with the tent embassy, after some months the police forcibly cleared the site. Pearson (1990) has drawn attention to the increasing political vitality of indigenous minorities as a worldwide phenomenon. He draws on the work of Ross, who sees the relationship between colonizer and colonized as ‘a developmental progression in which most [colonized] groups progress from the communal stage to the ethnic stage by way of the minority stage’ (1980: 18). Communal groups are those isolated from interaction with the world beyond, whilst minority groups, having been subjected to processes of assimilation, have a dependent and inferior status within it. Ethnic groups are politically mobilized to alter the group’s inferior status through collective behaviour. For Ross ‘ethnic identity differs from communal identity in that it is explicit and not taken for granted, and it differs from a minority identity that is defined by the group rather than for it’ (1980: 15).

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Such mobilization has occurred under certain conditions. The first is a considerable revival in the demographic fortunes of indigenous peoples, following the containment of disease and extension of health measures. Far from dying out, their numbers in all three countries are rapidly increasing, abetted by changes in census enumerations from racially based definitions to those based on declarations of ethnicity. Although Aboriginals still constitute only 1.5 per cent of Australia’s population, Indians, Metis and Inuit are 4 per cent of Canada’s, whilst Maori now make up 12 per cent of New Zealand’s. Equally significant has been the growing urbanization of indigenous populations as younger people leave reserves and country areas. In the 1940s three-quarters of Maori were still rural dwellers; 30 years later, three-quarters lived in towns. Walker suggests that a result of this is ‘increased knowledge of the alienating culture of metropolitan society and its techniques of domination’ (1990: 209), and consequently growing awareness of how to fight it on its own terms. In this regard, a key trigger has been the emergence of indigenous intelligentsias (Pearson 1990) and their ability to mobilize opinion through the platform that television has provided. The first Aboriginal graduate in Australia, Charlie Perkins, led a number of freedom rides into the country towns of New South Wales in the mid-1960s, emulating those of civil rights activists in the American South. Such people, informed about processes of decolonization that were occurring throughout the third world, and trained in the ways of the majority society, provide the bridge between the guardians of tradition and the retrieval of freedoms. They have achieved significant concessions from governments: the passage of land rights legislation in the Australian states, and the return of considerable areas of land in the Northern Territory and South Australia, under unalienable title; the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal in New Zealand and limited recognition of the treaty in domestic law; and the inclusion in the 1982 Constitution Act that ‘the existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognised and affirmed’. That this has taken place with at least the acquiescence of white majorities is clear; a question remains as to how much such moves can finally deliver. Delivery may well result in arrangements for degrees of ‘apartness’ at variance with current political practice (Asch 1984). Hence it is ultimately subject to the same democratic process that has always favoured the rule of the majority.

Contemporary

priorities

The contexts within which land rights are being claimed, the language and mechanisms of negotiation and achievements to date differ widely between Canada, Australia and New Zealand and across the provinces of Canada and the states of Australia (Keon-Cohen and Morse 1984; Brock 1991). These variations stem directly from the fact that the colonial power perceived the resident indigenous peoples and their economic and land use systems in very different ways and either recognized or ignored their existing rights of occupation at the first point of formal contact. Despite these variations the contemporary priorities are directly parallel. Land is the focus and the recognition or recovery of rights to land is the central concern. Land is the source of communal identity, the place of belonging, the link between present, past and future generations. These themes occur again and again in the remembered stories, prayers, creation legends, writings, legal submissions and proclamations of indigenous peoples from all three countries which contribute to this special issue.

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The concept which for Maori is furunguwaewae, a place to stand, is named and held in common by indigenous peoples on every continent. The Maori proverb: Whatu ngarongaro te tangata, Toitu te whenua!

People perish But the land remains!

is echoed by Fred Plain, policy analyst for the Nisnawbe-Aski in Canada, when he looks towards his network of ancestry and voices the prayer: Great Grandfather, you gave us the land and its resources, you made us one with the birds, the animal life, the fish life; you made us one with nature itself. This is our aboriginal right. It is a right that no Government can interpret for us. (Plain 1985: 40) Likewise the physical and spiritual lives of Aborigines in Australia are intertwined by stretches of open land and sacred sites; they belong to the land rather than the land belonging to them (Lippmann 1981: 8-9). Galarrwuy Yunupingu elaborates: My land is mine only because I came in spirit from that land, and so did my ancestors of the same land _ . _My land is my foundation, I stand, live and perform as long as I have something firm and hard to stand on. (Quoted by Keon-Cohen and Morse 1984: 74) Aboriginal rights are based on a covenant with the Creator from time immemorial (Boldt and Long 198.5: 17). Land is everything: bound up with it are survival, politics, myth and religion; it is not part of life but life itself (Asher and Naulls 1987: 3). The geographical extent of lands retained for indigenous use is far greater in Canada than in Australia or New Zealand. The initial European occupation was negotiated and agricultural settlers kept close to the southern and coastal margins. Large areas of Arctic and subarctic Canada remain under indigenous occupation provide explicit and outside provincial control. Treaties and constitution recognition of rights to land and these are upheld by the Canadian, if not the British Columbian courts. New Zealand is, by comparison with Canada, a small unitary state. Relationships between the British Crown and the Maori were negotiated and formalized by the Treaty of Waitangi. Rights to land, as to forests, fisheries and cultural resources, were recognized by treaty but not entrenched in legislation. The Waitangi Tribunal, set up in 1975, provides a framework for redress of grievances. Rights to land in Canada and New Zealand are based on treaties and aboriginal title; to a variable extent they are recognized in the courts and in the legislative and constitutional processes. Australian Aborigines are, by comparison, in a much more individious position. British settlement from 1788, and the legal doctrines of today, are based on the fiction of terra nullius, an empty land available for expropriation by a European power (Slattery 1983: 3-7; Reynolds 1987). Given the way in which the terra nufl~us concept is entrenched in federal and state law, the quest for a makarrata or treaty is now seen as a first priority by many Australians, white and black (Coombs 1981; Lippmann 1981; Wright 1985; Rowley 1986). Land not only provides a source of identity but also a base from which indigenous peoples can participate in the wider economy. Land, however, neither exists nor is used in isolation; it is one component of a wider resource complex. Land, water, plants and animal life are interconnected in physical and in spiritual terms. Indigenous peoples, in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, as elsewhere, have utilized a very wide variety of resources for subsistence and exchange, for necessities and luxuries of life. Systems of resource use are intricately interwoven

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with social organization in ways that were largely unrecognized by colonists. Where treaties and saies were negotiated, the traditional owners were careful to specify foods and food-gathering places that would be reserved for their use and remain under their control. In Canada and New Zealand such resources were unevenly protected by treaties and the subsequent actions or inactions of governments. In Australia the only protections were climate, remoteness, lack of water and the paucity of soils which could be cultivated or grasslands which could be grazed by sheep or cattle. Despite innumerable native protests the traditional resources contained in water bodies and wetlands have been progressively diminished. Land and economic activities with obvious exchange value have been given priority over the use value of other resources. Lakes, seashores and rivers have been polluted by mining, agriculture and urban industrial effluent. Forests have been felled and wetlands drained to provide land for farming. Introduced species of fish and game have competed with local species in diminished habitats. The application of British common law to shorelines and river beds has given public access to highly valued food resources. Other resources have been lost to roads, railways, harbour works and housing development under the operation of Public Works Acts. Because traditional resources have been undervalued by settlers and officials, the owners have been unprotected and undercompensated. The struggles and the mechanisms to recover land have opened windows with regard to these other resources which are equally prized. The gains have been more immediate because indigenous priorities have overlapped with the concerns of the wider environmental movements. In Canada, the hydroelectric proposals at James Bay and the possibility of an oil pipeline in the Mackenzie Valley produced wide public awareness and triggered official moves to recognize and protect the relationship between indigenous peoples and their resource base. In Tasmania, concerns over the impacts of the proposed Franklin Dam have produced the sole instance where the federal government has exercised its mandate to override a state legislature in the context of indigenous rights. In New Zealand, the examples are less spectacular but equally significant. The first three claims to be presented in detail to the Waitangi Tribunal related to the coastal reefs of the Ati Awa people in Taranaki; the small Kaituna River belonging to the Ngati Pikiao in the Bay of Plenty and the large Manukau Harbour in Tainwi territory near Auckland (Cant 1990). In each case the problem was pollution of food-gathering places. In addressing these claims and bringing recommendations to government the tribunal has given major impetus to a process of resource management law reform which will benefit Maori and non-Maori alike. Concepts of aboriginal title and questions of ownership and control of non-land resources are most problematic for governments when the resources in question have an obvious exchange value and are exploited by large-scale corporations. Canada has negotiated a number of settlements which recognize rights to subsurface minerals within specified land areas, but in British Columbia the question of ownership of forest resources has not been resolved. In Australia, the Northern Territory land rights legislation allows the Aboriginal Land Councils to negotiate directly with mining companies regarding the terms and conditions of mining and to receive royalties (Keon-Cohen and Morse 1984: 112). In New Zealand, the Muriwhenua claim to the Waitangi Tribunal brought marine fisheries firmly onto the national agenda; the findings of the tribunal flowed on to the law courts and have initiated a series of ongoing negotiations between the Crown and Maori tribes (Renwick 1990: 62-72).

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The land is central, other resources are significant and all of these together are a springboard to the exercise of self-determination. In a context where the natural world and the spiritual world, together with past, present and future generations, are intensely intertwined, there is no more significant role for indigenous peoples than that of guardian, decision-maker and manager of land and resources. Observers in all three countries describe how identity and self-esteem have blossomed as stories are told and land and resources are claimed. In Canada there have been significant gains in the constitutional arena and important settlements are in process of negotiation under the umbrella of comprehensive claims. In a situation where political traditions, aibeit painfully, have come to embrace cultural pluralism, concepts such as ‘first nations’ and ‘self-government’ pose no great threats to the integrity and continuity of the Canadian nation-state (Keon-Cohen and Morse 1984; Brock 1991). As Kathy Brock reports, the creation of the Province of Nunavut, with a substantial Inuit majority, will simply complete what French-speaking Quebec has already begun, a circle of confederation (1991: 173). In the Australian case there is no constitutional basis for the exercise of indigenous self-government. The political culture and the legal system both reject any case for a special place for the ‘first people’. The buy-back of cattle stations in the outback or small blocks of urban or rural land do, however, represent important steps towards self determination (Morse 1987b: 13-17). No group stands taller, no group has taken a more decisive step towards self-reliance or commented more decisively on the costs and benefits of assimilation than the Aboriginal groups who have left the majority culture to establish outstations in the Australian North (Young 1988). Conclusion

The purpose of this introductory essay has been to draw out certain recurrent themes. It has not attempted to do justice to the subtleties of place or the fabric of history (see, for example Sinclair 1971; Fisher 1980; Denoon 1983; Morse 1987a, b). Rather it has attempted to illuminate some parallel features in the relations between indigenous peoples and Europeans in the lands that the latter called the New World, features that are still little appreciated in the Eurocentric perspective characteristic of much geographical writing. A certain history is shared by the people of the fourth world-as those dispossessed minorities in wealthy former settler colonies are called, one which they have not forgotten, even if the descendants of their colonizers are only now becoming reacquainted with it. The manner in which this reaquaintance is occurring, and the nature of the recompense that is sought by those so long oppressed and forgotten in lands that were once theirs, is explored in much greater detail in the papers on Canada, Australia and New Zealand that follow. Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Graeme Wynn and John Overton for their helpful comments. References

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