A short history: from contact and colonisation to self-determination

Lesson 1 of 5 in "Rights and law", about 7 minutes

Colonisation means one society taking control of another's land and government and settling or exploiting it. From the late fifteenth century, European states did this across the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania. Other empires expanded over neighbouring peoples as well. The details differ greatly from place to place, yet the stages below recur often enough to serve as a map.

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1. Independent peoples. Before colonisation, peoples ran their own affairs. They farmed, hunted, herded, traded over long distances and made alliances. They were not waiting to be discovered.
2. Contact. Contact often began with trade. It also brought diseases such as smallpox and measles, to which people in the Americas and Oceania had no immunity. Many communities lost most of their members.
3. Colonisation. Colonial powers claimed ownership. In Australia the land was treated as belonging to no one, an idea later called terra nullius. Elsewhere treaties were signed and then often broken.
4. Forced assimilation. Many states then tried to absorb indigenous people. In Canada about 150,000 children were sent to residential schools, where their languages and customs were forbidden.
5. Resistance. Resistance never stopped. In India the Santhal rose in 1855 and Birsa Munda led a rising around 1900. In the twentieth century peoples took their case to courts and the United Nations.
6. Legal recognition. Law slowly shifted. In 1992 Australia's High Court rejected terra nullius in the Mabo case. In 2007 the United Nations adopted its Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
7. Self-determination. Self-determination means a people freely deciding its own political status and development. Examples include Nunavut in Canada and the Sámi parliaments. In most places the work is unfinished.

Contact and collapse

Columbus reached the Caribbean in 1492. Within decades, Spain had overthrown the Aztec and Inca states. The greatest killer was disease. Smallpox, measles and influenza swept through populations that had never met them. Estimates of the population of the Americas in 1492 vary widely, but scholars agree that in many regions the great majority of people died within a century or so.

The legal fictions of empire

Colonisers needed a justification for taking land that was plainly occupied. One was the doctrine of discovery, drawn from fifteenth-century papal decrees, which held that Christian rulers could claim lands not ruled by Christians. Another was terra nullius, Latin for 'land belonging to no one', applied to Australia. The Vatican formally repudiated the doctrine of discovery in 2023.

Treaties, removal and reserves

In North America and New Zealand, colonial powers signed treaties with indigenous nations, which in itself recognised them as nations. Many were then broken. In the United States, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 led to the forced march of the Cherokee and other nations to lands west of the Mississippi, a journey remembered as the Trail of Tears. Survivors were confined to reservations.

In Africa, European powers divided the continent among themselves at a conference in Berlin in 1884 and 1885, drawing borders through the lands of many peoples. In what is now Namibia, German forces killed tens of thousands of Herero and Nama people between 1904 and 1908. In 2021 Germany formally acknowledged these killings as genocide.

India under colonial rule

In India, British forest laws from the 1860s and 1870s turned forests that tribal communities had used for generations into state property, and treated customary use as a concession or a crime. Shifting cultivation was restricted. Moneylenders and landlords moved into tribal areas. The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 branded whole communities, many of them nomadic, as criminal by birth. It was repealed after independence.

Assimilation

From the nineteenth century, many states tried to absorb indigenous people by erasing what made them distinct. Children were the main target. In Canada, about 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children passed through residential schools, the last of which closed in the 1990s. The United States ran similar boarding schools. In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children removed from their families are known as the Stolen Generations.

Governments have since acknowledged the harm. In 2008 the prime ministers of both Australia and Canada made formal apologies in their parliaments. Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported in 2015 with 94 calls to action. The effects, in lost languages and broken families, are still being felt.

The turn towards rights

• 1923: Deskaheh, a Cayuga chief of the Haudenosaunee, travels to the League of Nations in Geneva to seek a hearing and is turned away.
• 1957: the International Labour Organization adopts Convention 107, the first treaty on the subject, with an assimilationist outlook.
• 1989: Convention 169 replaces the assimilationist approach with respect for indigenous institutions.
• 2007: the United Nations General Assembly adopts the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Self-determination

Self-determination is the right of a people to decide its own political status and to pursue its own development. For most indigenous peoples this does not mean a separate country. It means running their own affairs within the state: their own governments, schools, courts and control over land. The United States adopted self-determination as official policy in the 1970s, ending an earlier policy of terminating tribes.

The arc is not finished, and it is not a simple story of progress. Rights won in court are often not applied on the ground. Land is still being lost in many countries. Yet the change since the middle of the twentieth century is real: indigenous peoples are now recognised in international law as peoples with rights, and they speak for themselves.

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