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Social Justice & Human Rights Issues:
A Comparative Investigation
Economic Independence
Investigation Two
Jan Ryan (Teacher - Tweed River High School)
Effects of colonisation and dispossession
The established and successful economic systems of indigenous groups were severely affected by colonisation and subsequent events. Students should give specific examples of the effects of dispossession in their three case studies, for example, the impact of forestry on the James Bay Cree land.
The Indigenous self-sufficient economy, which had sustained generations of Indigenous Australians, was destroyed quickly after 1788. In most areas of Australia Aboriginal land and water management was swept aside within a decade of the arrival of Europeans and this destruction occurred due to the dispossession of Aboriginal land and often life itself. The land and its resources were taken from the Indigenous people in two stages.
A. Legal dispossession
(i) (Australia)
Legal dispossession was instantaneous and was accomplished before European settlement began. James Cook annexed the Eastern part of Australia to the British Crown in 1770 and declared it ‘Terra Nullius’ ? no-ones land. At a stroke Aborigines were deprived of any legal right to their homelands. All land belonged to the British Crown unless it was granted or sold to an individual. This made Aborigines trespassers on their ancestral lands.>
(ii) (International)
From 1607 the United States adopted the practice of negotiating formal treaties with Indian tribes, directly from customs that were established by Great Britain and its colonial governments. Congress abolished treaty making with Indian tribes in1871 thus making it illegal to negotiate further treaties. Historically tribes viewed treaties as ways of preserving themselves as people. They sought recognition of their rights to their specific homelands and commitments from the government to protect and defend their rights from encroachment by non-Indians. The treaties did not give rights to land and resources to the Indian tribes rather it was the Indian tribes that granted the US rights to the land and resources. Often, a subsequent section of the Treaty would ‘reserve’ a small area of the Indian lands which they would keep for the use and occupancy of the tribe. Today treaties provide the foundation for the expanding body of US law known as Federal Indian Law.
B. Physical dispossession
(i) (Australia)
Physical dispossession was somewhat more gradual. It began around Sydney in 1788 but relatively few groups were affected until pastoral methods of fine wool production were developed in the 1820’s. Another example, from the Tweed Valley, was the Robertson Land Act of 1861. This encouraged massive clearing of the rainforest vegetation to make the fertile soils available for agricultural pursuits. Land was cleared and fenced and with these acts the food sources of the local Aboriginal people disappeared, leading to the eventual disappearance of the people themselves. To a large extent non-Indigenous Australians were able to gain economic independence because the Indigenous Australians lost it. The redistribution of resources was not handled particularly well and the outcome was that the Indigenous economy lost more than the non-Indigenous community were able to gain.(ii) (International)
As a result of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty the Lakota were expected to move to the Great Sioux Reservation, on which the US hoped the majority of Indians would eventually settle and take up agriculture with American aid. Despite military confrontation, dispossession of the Plains and movement onto the reservation was inevitable.Go to next section of Investigation Two
Statistics of economic independence
