Australian Indigenous Law Reporter
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[Europeans] pretend to have purchased a right of residence and tyranny; but surely the insolence of such bargains is more offensive than the avowed and open dominion of force. What reward can induce the possessor of a country to admit a stranger more powerful than himself? Fraud or terror must operate in such contracts ... they promised protection which they never have afforded ... Their treaties are only to deceive, and their traffic only to defraud us. They have a written law among them, of which they boast as derived from him who made the earth and sea ... Why is this law not communicated to us? It is concealed because it is violated. For how can they preach it to an Indian nation, when I am told that one of its precepts forbids them to do to others what they would not that others should do to them.
Dr Samuel Johnson, The Idler, November 3, 1979, disdaining news of Wolfe's victory at Quebec and European actions and transactions in the New World, here in the voice of an imagined Indian chief, p 267, The Oxford Authors Edition of Johnson.
The concept of the `regional agreement' has become somewhat tattered. Passionate advocacy or scepticism, unwitting or calculated misuse of terms, nationalist chauvinism, unsuited or unprepared organisation forms, political winds of change, and, mostly, plain ignorance have made the concept seem doubtful or an outright casualty in many minds. Yet this Australian term and concept, based in considerable part on practical experience in Canada over recent decades, continues to have value.
The Canadian experience followed from a landmark judgment of the highest court in Calder (1973) recognising that native title might continue to exist in large parts of Canada. In that same period the courts had found that Canada and the Province of Quebec had unfinished business in the Northern half of that province where Cree and Inuit stood to lose traditional livelihoods, homeland areas, and much else from hydroelectric damming projects. This latter experience was the first negotiated regional agreement of modern times, and was quite unlike the `Indian treaties' which had been signed much earlier in Canadian history and which had been much ignored by governments and white settlers. [2] When this 1970s approach was begun it consisted essentially of the Federal government extinguishing native title in a region in exchange for a package of perpetual Indigenous rights to various categories of lands, Indigenous sharing in socioeconomic and environmental management and planning, substantial compensation payouts to provide an Indigenous economic development fund and to finance a perpetual collective Indigenous entity to represent Indigenous interests, and various self-management and self-government entities. With time and experience the contents and sophistication of agreements have evolved, and there is now a reliable Australian and Canadian literature on this experience. [3] The basic motivation for the Federal government declaring itself open to negotiation was the uncertainty of land title in areas of potentially enormous resource extraction or shipment projects, so-called `mega-projects' (eg, oil and gas pipelines, offshore drilling, mining, tanker traffic, hydroelectric power), and the uncertainties of litigation, although blanket extinguishment of native title was always an option in some official minds. It was always seen, after a moment's fantasy, as unacceptable [4] -- its offensiveness to common law tradition, the likelihood of vehement non-Indigenous protest, the virtual certainty of Indigenous civil unrest (and the existence of Indigenous means and will to conduct it), and the image of dispossessing the people who were already the most marginal, disadvantaged, and dispossessed in the country, ie, Inuit, Indians, and Metis.
The discussion of regional agreements in Australia is interesting in itself. We do not have space or time to go into it, but must note a few of the problems. Most obvious may be that information, however ingeniously or quickly moved between remote places on the globe by new technology, continues to require context and texture to be meaningful and useful, things which only experienced personal mediation can bring. Sometimes vehement argument on regional agreements witnessed by the authors has seemed the more amazing for the near total lack of information or understanding of those disputing. Most puzzling may be that the great era of modern Indigenous impact on world policies since the 1970s actually preceded by some years the general availability and affordability of today's information technology. Are we not using that equipment well, have we become lazy, or are there other problems involved in the contemporary sharing of ideas? Most troubling may be the hardening of national pretensions and isolationism not only in Australia but abroad, ranging from the raging xenophobia of populist leaders to smug views of national self-sufficiency in governments (and, alas, even among some academics). [5] Most tragic may be the resistance to outside sources of help and ideas of many Indigenous peoples themselves, usually the least advantaged, educated, and informed element of `first world' society.
Nor should we think the regional agreement a uniquely Canadian development. While the similarities of Australian and Canadian law, political culture, federalism, geography and British Empire history make comparison particularly apt, we are no less mindful of the recent experience of Greenland and Alaska. The modern regional agreement experience emerged first in Alaska with the Federally legislated Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (`ANCSA' as it is universally known) of 1971. [6] Canada's first modern regional agreement in 1975 built on that Alaskan experience, noting its strengths and weaknesses, just as successive Canadian agreements have been attempts to improve on the previous one.
Nor is Australia alone in looking at the North American agreements as a possible inspiration in solving long-standing Indigenous policy problems at home. [7] Gorbachev opened Russia to active cooperation and exchange visits with other members of the Circumpolar North in the late 1980s. [8] Since then the Circumpolar interest and visits back and forth have been intense. The Inuit Circumpolar Conference and Sami Council have been obvious forums through which Russia's Inuit and Sami peoples, at least, can maintain useful Western contacts. [9] There is much Indigenous and non-Indigenous Russian interest in regional agreements as a model for that country's `numerically few' or `small', ie Indigenous peoples, and even draft all-Russia framework legislation to empower such regional entities.
It is significant that while Australians have been whittling away the scope and meaning of regional agreements in theory before practising them, the Canadians who actually live with such agreements have seen them as a success to be broadened, a pattern for the whole country, even the basis of a new constitutional order.
This article centres on the function of regional agreements as political and territorial settlements which cover not only native title but wider issues of Indigenous grievance and relations with Canada's European settlers and their governments.
Within Canada it is hard to get a clear view, given the noise of dispute, the disinformation of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous opponents of one or other agreement, [10] traditional rivalries among Indigenous peoples, the confidentiality of negotiations which affect major economic and other interests, and the usual nonsense put about by the fearful or reactionary. Australians can take a more dispassionate view and survey the field, as some have done. [11]
The regional agreement which has emerged in North America is a major political
reform, a novelty
for both Indigenous peoples on the one hand and national
and subnational governments on the
other. It is a step by which an
Indigenous society reorganises itself the better to defend traditions, social
ways, and territory,
while attaining practical and enforceable recognition and
autonomy as a
significant political community within an existing
nation-state. It is also a step by which a contemporary nation-state recognises
that Indigenous people are not mere feckless unfortunates needing a helping
hand `to become like us' but distinct peoples with cultures,
rights,
territories, traditional resources and livelihoods, and collective identities
which must be recognised within the legal and
political structures of the
country.
Needless to say, neither step comes easily to either side. There have been more failures to achieve regional agreements than successful signings. This is not surprising. The depth of mistrust in Indigenous society about `the white man' based on past land and social policies, and the conservatism (or, more precisely, classical liberalism) of governments worried about recognising `special rights' based on ethnicity, mean that substantial leadership and motivating factors are required on both sides. Australians looking for Canadian `experts' will find more who are eager to criticise the practice and concept than those who are practised in successful reaching of agreements. Implementation of these novel reforms also had novel requirements, something not properly recognised in the first Canadian agreements. Now, implementation and phase-in are themselves subjects for special attention and agreements.
We may call these first decades `the heroic age' of regional agreements in North America. They may be over now. Governments and Indigenous peoples faced with new circumstances and demands, not least from a public supportive of the Indigenous and environment goals represented by agreements, engaged in epic struggles. Some were successful and some were not. What is not in doubt is that the concept has been a success. What remains is to ensure that this new form of political, socioeconomic, environmental, and territorial `constitution' all rolled into one is made more achievable, workable, and successful in future. Alaskan, Canadian, and Greenlandic evaluations and studies continue with that purpose and effect, as well as the usual and sometimes heated deliberations of the representative bodies created under the agreements. For all of us who are heirs to long-evolved, slowly reforming political and legal systems, as in Australia and Canada, it is strange to hear demands for instant perfection in Indigenous reforms. But perhaps that reveals the real problem: too many non-Indigenous persons see regional agreements as a quick administrative fix, a `solution' to make `the Indigenous problem' go away. They do not perceive the reality: dynamic political communities wishing to enter into new relationships with the white man's established order. [12]
Like all heroic ages, at least as we know from their epic literature, these early years of regional agreements have been full of rhetoric and ceremony. Too much sound and too little substance, some would say! Indigenous heroes and white politicians or lobby group notables have announced great dangers, and perceived dragons and demons to be slain. There has been much feasting, downing of frothing goblets accompanied by dramatic feasting-hall antics, wit, and drama. Fear of the unknown and spectacular tales of the dangers lurking in the dark or the woods or over the hill have sometimes swept through the rival bands of heroes. In fact, having much less experience of real life in Indigenous hinterlands, the clever white men and women involved have been rather more prey to such fantasies of doom or national destruction, often prompting their ministers and prime ministers to outlandish outbursts of fanciful fearfulness. A class of professional story-teller has followed along, some mighty folklorists and, later, film-makers. The more astute Indigenous leaders have employed cool spokespersons and semi-official scribes to get their story out in the white man's idiom to help calm audiences upset by the more frantic newspaper columnists and talkback hosts. Some have not, however -- a mistake the Vikings and other European heroes would not have made. [13] Unfortunately, monkish literacy on the government side has sometimes been substantially the greater in the heroic regional agreement era, so that some Indigenous leaders, wonderful in oral flight, have been let down -- and their people with them -- by a lack of reading and writing ability. Those damned clever clerks and lawyers, not to mention a whole cast of new social and environmental experts who, in Canada, have essentially been born of the land claims era, could prove telling. Many chose to work for Indigenous leaders for reasons of morality and excitement, recognising that something new was happening, although Canadian governments never lacked for relevant expertise in the way the Australian governments did in the 1992-1993 post-Mabo period.
Like all heroism there was danger and betrayal. A few Indigenous warriors sold out, and not a few wooden horses were rolled into Indigenous communities where, luckily, the local people had the intuition to roll them right back out again before being overwhelmed. There were beddings and weddings, uproars, false or broken friendships, drunken confessions, denials, and furious destabilising feuds within both camps. The strain was often immense, Indigenous families and communities dividing over `native rights' entitlements. There were many ills attending prominent Indigenous individuals -- enough ulcers, hospitalisations, breakdowns, and attempted or successful fallings on one's own sword to leave a bitter legacy and times of silent soul-searching. Was it all worth it? many may ask.
This metaphor has several points. We have seen a unique time unlikely to be repeated -- in Canada, at least. Both sides were operating in a dark age where belief, fear, cultural habit, and desire to show leadership, rather than knowledge, understanding or analysis of relevant experience, confident judgment, or foresight about outcomes, shaped both process and contents. There had been sudden great problems without precedent, requiring leaps of faith and strong leaders. It was a time which no Australian government or Indigenous organisation may seek to duplicate willingly.
A heroic age may inevitably be giving way to something more predictable, mechanical, even boring. Now, `instead of mounting barbed steeds to fright the souls of fearful adversaries', governments and others want to define and refine, and, sadly, confine. And yet the successes and value of the early experience resulted in no small part from the equality and honesty of ignorance of both Indigenous peoples and governments. Everyone was trying to achieve an acceptable and workable outcome. The process was long because everyone was uncertain. Every idea had to be inspected closely, the people in the background had to be persuaded. Cabinets and justice departments had to be convinced, as well as hunter and gatherer communities who had never been consulted in a serious way on anything of importance in their entire history of white relations.
The most obvious criticism -- one much noted in Australia -- is the long time period for negotiation of some of the Canadian agreements. While this was certainly wearying, it is by no means clear that the hastily negotiated James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement of 1975, with inexperienced persons under immense time pressures to make unprecedented decisions, was a better approach. Certainly those who were involved on the Inuit side do not think so. [14] Some of us have concluded that the unique relationships between a hitherto isolated and powerless Indigenous region and some high-powered officials from the national capital catalysed a confident new political culture among Indigenous people while transforming governmental attitudes towards Indigenous peoples and `outback' areas. [15] Such changes in the operating methods and philosophies of governments are as important as, or the very goal of, legal and constitutional changes, after all. Also, in the complicated world of modern governance in Canada or Australia involving various layers of government and multiple agencies, preparation in executive and administrative dealings is invaluable for Indigenous self-management or self-government.
The immense difficulties and intense experiences of the negotiations for Canada's regional agreements to date have created a sort of cumulative model which threatens to become the norm for peoples and regions negotiating now or in future. If this makes their work more mechanical, less creative, and with less at stake for governments, it may remain no less daunting for Indigenous peoples. They could and should take advantage of others' experience to do their own learning, but the useful Indigenous practice of international comparative studies remains meagre, whether in Canada or Australia. [16] Perhaps high stakes will see such political pressure in some cases. That is, where native title is unclear and a major project cannot go ahead until certainty is established, government and Indigenes will experience the memorable tensions of the `heroic age'. On the other hand, the lesser urgency in the application of the concept across the whole of Canada as recommended by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) may provide for more considered and thorough study and preparation by Indigenous peoples than when developers' bulldozers are in the backyard.
The research director of the Nunavut regional agreement offered at a conference in Darwin a useful check-list of the qualities needed on the Indigenous side for success. [17] The major requirements for Australians to note from the early Canadian experience, apart from the fact that the unpreparedness of both sides may have made it unique, are:
* adequate resources for the weaker side, ie Indigenous people, to hire their own legal and other expertise and prepare their own case;
* breadth of subject matters ranging across not only specific mine site arrangements but processes for managing territory and resources,
* special social and cultural needs, etc,
* inclusion of self-government and self-management issues and structures in fact if not always in theory, [18]
* the active leadership of the federal government and provision of federal legal guarantees in perpetuity to provide security for Indigenous peoples vis-a-vis territory and `State' governments (ie the provinces, in Canada).
Particularly deserving of study is the creation and practice in British Columbia to achieve and make workable the tripartite Federal-Provincial-Indigenous umpiring and resourcing agency for regional agreements, the Treaty Commission. [19]
The making of the regional agreements has been a genuine constitutional process. Two peoples and cultures were, perhaps for the first time in the history of the `New World', negotiating the basis on which they would share territory, public revenues, power to make decisions, and the shape and terms of economic development.
With major regional agreement negotiations proceeding from the early 1970s, related exercises such as the Berger pipeline inquiry and the Inuit project for creation of a Nunavut self-governing northern territory, and the Inuit-led Circumpolar movement, Indigenous people of the most remote and isolated villages in Canada have helped redefine the country. [20] In governments which previously viewed the hinterland as a blank on which the white man could draw his destiny at will, it has come as a major shock to find not a great white space but rich and complex cultures in exotic ecological zones, systematically `harvesting' their productive bounty. The news media have also played a major role, the more notable in that the regions in question have been neither convenient nor affordable to reach. [21] All this could not have occurred without an intelligent and understanding non-Indigenous public. There has been a symbiosis not unlike that in Australia among that large section of the public -- by no means only elites as claimed in the demonology of Hanson and some Coalition politicians -- who respond to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and belonging, and who recognise in Indigenous culture the foundations for any authentic contemporary sense of nationhood.
Today in Canada there is a huge difference from the bitterness and fear, the oneliners and white anger, which greeted the regional agreements era in the early 1970s. Australians may wish to note that slow or boring as Canadians may seem to have been, in a 20-year period, one short generation, they have brought about a substantial degree of political, legal, and administrative reconciliation between races across some half of that very large country's expanse through regional agreements. There is extensive literature on many details, but unfortunately rather less on this overall achievement and its significance. Most important, however, is the magisterial 1996 report of Canada's Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), a national Indigenous policy vision and prescription centred on the regional agreement. [22]
When Canadian governments reluctantly began the regional agreement era, they did so in a mood of minimal concession-giving. They had no idea they were embarking on the first real `Made in Canada' constitutional process in the country's history of white settlement. It would be hard to overstate the impact. What was a country of mostly European settlers, unsure of their identity and culture beside the powerhouse of American creative power and PT Barnum-style bombast, has become a country knowledgeable about and engaged with every corner of its complex natural endowment and the peoples and traditions native to those places. Unwittingly, the Indigenous peoples with the environment movement (the latter, in much of Canada, is an outgrowth or aspect of Indigenous politics) have transformed the `garrison mentality' of some shivering redcoats occupying the edge of the earth into a pride and culture of place. [23] The arts are flourishing, and supposedly undemonstrative Canadians have become proud of wearing or showing off their flag, itself only a little more than 30 years old.
But old habits die hard. Down south the Canadian politicians and constitutional experts are still locked in the same endless series of loveless embraces, still trapped in the small moves of an old game for great stakes, the future of a country the United Nations repeatedly ranks No. I in terms of global living conditions.24 The same men and women who, however absentmindedly, sponsored the regional agreements now falling into place across the country, have been unable to learn from those agreements' admirable mix of principle and pragmatism, recognition and accommodation, innovation and toleration. It is ironic that one of the important items holding Quebec and Canada together at this moment is the commitment of Cree and Inuit, signatories of the first Canadian regional agreement, to keep their regions within Canada even if Quebec secedes. [25] Perhaps the tragedy is that Canadians are belatedly dealing with Indigenous peoples in a spirit with which they might have usefully dealt earlier with Quebec. [26]
Three large and well-documented political settlements, or regional agreements as we say in Australia, are Alaska's North Slope, Greenland, and Canada's Nunavut. The first two may be dated to 1971 and 1979, although for those who were involved, dates earlier or later may seem more critical with benefit of hindsight. Nunavut is the most difficult to date. We may settle for 1993 when the twin laws, the Nunavut Act creating the new territorial government and Nunavut Land Claims Agreement Act enacting the claims settlement, passed together through Parliament in Ottawa.
These three settlements were very different. In Alaska, the politics of land claims, like Alaskan politics in general, were rambunctious, nowhere more than on the North Slope. [27] There the Inupiat, as the region's Inuit are known, fundamentally enriched the ultimate terms of the Alaska-wide settlement, ANCSA, by their hard politicking. But that settlement was only a start. Their gusto in challenging state and national laws or policies which offended them, and their willingness to throw themselves into making better policies, having laws changed by courts or legislatures, often designing entire new regional, national, and even international institutions -- from the Eskimo Whaling Commission to Inuit Circumpolar Conference, with a coastal management regime along the way -- make one wonder if such skillful and determined people need any conventional `protections' whatever. [28]
Inupiat felt pressured. After all, the great Arctic oil project looming on their shores and a pipeline pumping deadly oil through their ecosystems were presented to Americans as a near patriotic obligation, national heroism, Yankee inventive flair. Furthermore, it would help the country face national enemies, so the hype said. The impacts of change on Inupiat society were massive, alarming, and almost any way they turned they would invite more uncertainty. [29] Nor were change and hardship new to Inupiat. [30] Nonetheless, they had the courage to tackle many issues all at once, and despite the roller-coaster ride, they transformed the material and social conditions of their whole region, 88,000 square miles (the same size as Australia's State of Victoria), and its Inuit people (of c. 6000-7000 in the mid-1980s). [31]
High politics were not entirely new to them. Earlier the US atomic energy authority had the bright idea of creating a harbour in Inupiat territory, Project Chariot, by taking out a chunk of shoreline with nuclear blasts in the vicinity of a traditional Inuit village. The forces whom Inupiat and others mobilised across the USA stopped that.
Seeing plainly the threats to their homeland with oil development, they acted on many fronts. They involved themselves in state politics, as well as national ones, and then set up the North Slope Borough under state law (which they had already helped to design for their purposes). The Borough seized powers and funds wherever it could find them in order to transform the `third world' living conditions of most Inupiat. They fought so many landmark court actions that one loses count, but won rights and tax revenues and oil revenues which underpinned their material projects. Barges from Seattle were towed through the Bering Strait into the Arctic Ocean carrying pre-fab two-storey houses with two-car garages to replace ramshackle home-made shelter. On a visit we noted that one half of such a Barrow garage typically held a station-wagon for shopping and running about the village, while the other held a creamy walrus-hide umiaq, the wood-framed whaleboat used by Inupiat in their traditional whale hunts. Some experts believe the successful aggression of Inupiat leaders is rooted in the traditions of their whaling crews and the ancient year-round mess hall rivalries. They have devoted vast funds to schooling and rebuilding language and culture. There were failures, too. Some consultants apparently vanished with large sums intended to set up the Inupiat university. Much money has gone into social and other assistance and rehabilitative services. Like any region hit by sudden and massive change such as oil has brought, there is no lack of social problems. What is clear, however, is that whatever change may bring, a vigorous Inupiat culture will flourish and guide the regional affairs of Alaska's North Slope. There is now a movement to create North Alaska as the 51st state of the USA, an Inuit state.
If Alaska's North Slope politics embody a genius for opportunism and risk, albeit driven by deep Indigenous conviction and determination, Greenland may seem to some the model of careful planning, phased change, and orderly transfer of power. Indeed, that was how Danish officials presented it, or so it seemed to North American ears. The difference may not be so great in reality. When the Nazis' invaded Denmark in 1940, Greenland was suddenly on its own. As for Denmark's old empire, the UK military moved into the Faroes and the US into Iceland and Greenland to deny them to Hitler, Greenland's long period of carefully controlled development, stimuli, and isolation from the world ended abruptly in contact with bumptious GI lifestyles and consumerism. Rousseau's `noble savage' theories had much influence on the 18th century Danish court, and the evolution of Danish policy was often touchingly well-intentioned, often off-target, and often producing unforeseen results. [32] Nevertheless, in the post-war years it became clear that despite having to rebuild itself after wartime occupation, Denmark had a strong moral commitment to Indigenous improvement. Gigantic building plans and the virtual re-shaping of an Arctic island of scattered small dwellings into a modern European country of concentrated population and apartment high-rises were realised. These shocks, and the large temporary Danish male work force needed to carry them out, produced social chaos in Inuit society.
However, the Danes had long encouraged forms of local administration and consultation, invested in education and language development (not least through the state Lutheran church which many credit with saving the Inuit language), created jobs and maintained retail supplies through a state monopoly, the KGH, and by accident as much as design fostered a fluently bilingual Indigenous mixed-blood elite with some advanced education who played an increasingly important role in representing Indigenous views to the Danes and in Indigenising Danish administration. The determination of Denmark to `de-colonise' Greenland, formally made at the United Nations in New York, had the same unexpected effects as elsewhere in Indigenous politics. While some acquired modern Danish culture and ways quickly, some also imbibed oppositional and radical politics in Denmark's cities and universities. While the Danish state was filling Greenland towns with fine Copenhagen-style flats and furnishings, by no means congenial to all huntergatherers dragged in from isolated fjords and islands and instalIed in them, young Greenlanders were learning about liberation movements opposing Europe's imperialist past around the world.
The Danes did not flinch. When confronted with expert advice that the out-of control social problems of Inuit Greenlanders were due to change outside their culture control and powerlessness in general, Copenhagen prepared to transfer power. The means were to be found, to be agreed. Some fancied heightened municipal governments, the age-old divide-and-rule option so beloved of Indigenous affairs ministries the world over. But the political movement would not be stopped. After going through long and careful processes in the 1970s, with seven elected Greenlanders negotiating with seven Danish MPs the details of the Home Rule plan under chairmanship of a constitutional lawyer, a stormy day in early 1979 saw a strong Greenland voter turnout ratify home rule, 2-1. Elections were held and in May 1979 a cabinet of Inuit Greenlanders took office in a parliament of Inuit Greenlanders. [33]
Many Danes were sceptical and worse about Greenland home rule. Nonetheless, it has seen an Indigenous people demoralised by outsiders in the 1960s now a proud and sophisticated nation of c. 60,000 persons, a country within the Danish realm where it is likely to remain. Nobody coming into contact with present-day Greenland can come away without awe for the way Denmark built up the country after the war in a spirit of providing equal opportunity and preparing its people for urbane citizenship in perhaps the most forbidding landscape on earth, or awe for the verve and vigour with which Inuit Greenlanders have been developing their unique society. They took it out of the EU, not least as a statement of the foreignness to Inuit of European industrial society, but they have made it a vigorous player on the margins of European politics and an example to the world . [34]
When a Danish dog-sled expedition in the 1920s spent years in Canada's Eastern Arctic, the region known today as Nunavut, nobody would have imagined the scattered hunting camps of decentralised oral Inuit cultures found there in snowhouses or tents would emerge as a unified political movement seeking a selfgoverning territory covering one-fifth of Canada half a century later. [35] Now, another 20 years beyond that, it is all coming to pass. [36] It may be unwise for outsiders to predict cultural and political change in Indigenous communities.
At the beginning of the 1960s the Canadian government `with bipartisan support' decided to divide the Inuit east of the Northwest Territories from the Mackenzie Valley so that the `backward' Inuit would not hold back the go-ahead resource development-fired economy of that western region. The plan foundered in minority government manoeuvrings in the House of Commons. In the late 1970s and 1980s, it was the Inuit east which asserted itself, which set and led the political agenda of the NWT. It is the Inuit east, Nunavut, which is now set to become Canada's first self-governing province-like region of neither French nor British background. [37]
Wartime US and Canadian airstrips and post-war military, radar, and weather presences brought critical outside attention to Inuit. The Canadian government decided to get serious about the Arctic, creating a Northern Affairs department in 1953. Nearly thirty Inuit starvation deaths in one 1950s winter shocked the minimalist approach in administration towards its opposite, all-pervasive welfare state paternalism.38 Concentration of the population in permanent villages and schooling the young in English broke the back of Inuit culture, although trips `on the land' or sea or sea ice are cherished by all, often the essential and regular therapy for frazzled Inuit land claims negotiators, politicians, and other professionals. The development of NWT self-government from 1967 when Yellowknife was established as the capital, complete with legislature, province-like ministries, and all the trimmings, seemed to Inuit a loss of their direct connection to Ottawa from which their regional affairs had been administered. Not only were they quickly alienated from the NWT government as were the Dene and Metis in the west, but their preoccupation with marine issues and species distinguished them from other NWT Indigenous peoples. They were different; they all spoke a strong language; they were sure they were not getting the attention and material benefits of those Westerners; and they didn't want any part of a land full of traditional enemy Indians, or white men filling towns and running everything in a region, ie, the Mackenzie, which was a virtual extension of redneck Western Canada. No, they would put more trust in Ottawa, paternalist or not. However strongly wooed by the NWT government and even its Indian cabinet ministers; no matter how many Inuit ministers in that cabinet; no matter how many benefits sent their way -- they were different. The Nunavut people are often misunderstood: because they are a majority in every community where they live (as are most other Inuit), and a large majority in all but one of those places, and because there has been very limited white presence, they tend to be secure in a certain way. When Southern Canada's press were nosing around ahead of the 1982 referendum on whether or not to divide the NWT to create Nunavut, reporters smugly told their southern papers and stations that there was general Inuit apathy and no interest in the Nunavut issue. On the day of the vote the Inuit turned out in the highest-ever voter turnout, and voted 4-1 to divide the NWT and create Nunavut.39
The Federal government had made clear beforehand that the referendum meant nothing, it would feel no obligation to act, etc, all of this the usual Canadian obfuscation which is supposed to avoid setting precedents which Quebec could use for secession. But the 4-1 result was too clear for any more doubts, the more so as enough Indigenous people in the west voted for change, too, to provide an overall majority against retaining the united NWT. Furthermore, the west had a very low turnout, indicating indifference. From then forward, Nunavut was everyone's policy. A Nunavut Constitutional Forum of Inuit leaders was created to consult the people in their villages and the experts in their towers chaired by a white lawyer (who was MLA for a Nunavut riding and the NWT's Minister for Aboriginal Rights and Constitutional Development). Its ostentatious transparency saw all meetings open to media and public, and its proposals were boasted about as the first-ever `Made in Canada' constitution recognised by white men since the Vilkings had landed c.1000 AD, this for an area one-fifth of Canada's expanse and a mere 21,000 people. [40] The Prime Minister wanted Nunavut kept out of the national constitutional conferences beginning between himself, Premiers, and Indigenous leaders, but it was such an infectious concept that soon the Prime Minister, Premiers and others were talking it up. [41]
Meanwhile, the Nunavut claims negotiations proceeded, taking 17 years till completion in 1993. Along the way the Inuit had to stand firm on many issues. Their most important political victories were the inclusion of marine areas as `land', and insistence that the management boards over territory, planning, development, resources, etc. have decision-making power, only to be varied by Federal ministers under rare and special circumstances carefully written into the law. Having won these concessions for themselves, of course, these breakthroughs were now part of Canadian policy and of benefit to all other Indigenous claimant groups.
In all three regions -- Alaska, Greenland, Nunavut -- land, sea, and resource rights were the fundamental and flashpoint issues. It was these issues which gave the negotiations and political movements their special passion, because it was territory, after all, and the control of that territory, which were the defining and only real `definition' these peoples had. The white man had re-written laws and territorial boundaries around them for centuries, but their essence was their territory of land and sea.
The outcomes on environment, land, sea, and resources are detailed in references already footnoted. These give rise to more confusion when summarised than they are worth in understanding. (Not one of the many references we have ever seen in Australian media reports or parliamentary speeches on the Nunavut land quantum and categories has been correct, for instance.) In each of the three cases discussed, Inuit failed to obtain the absolute and complete land ownership they wished. However, in practice they have won enough ownership and enough other forms of control (including general management of the full territory originally claimed and now included under their new political jurisdictions) while through their various new funded bodies they have been able to pursue further issues, so that there have been few complaints on that score. The bigger, more decisive issue has been how Inuit leaders themselves choose between absolute protection and development. In East Greenland where local opposition to oil exploration on land was overridden in the name of the all-Greenland need for more unconditional revenues; in Nunavut where various mining projects divided leaders (some claims bodies already operating before completion of the final settlement); and in the North Slope where the range of a great caribou (reindeer) herd includes an area rich in oil potential, the Indigenous peoples themselves have had to debate and resolve basic issues, At what point do the revenues to build a new hospital become more valuable than one community's fears about tankers leaking in sea mammal hunting grounds? There are no answers, but what the North American regional agreements ensure is that Indigenous peoples themselves will make key choices, and however small they may be in population, they will always have professional experts on their own staffs and others sitting in management and regulatory bodies with them to ensure that decisions are taken in light of the most up-to-date available information.
The movements which have shaped North American regional agreements and all other `first world' Indigenous policy evolution are political. We may look for particular genealogies and precedents, and search documents and history, [42] but those do not contain the real answers to our questions. If political systems become too concerned with tradition, with the integrity of past forms, with the perfection of their old ways, they are like the Scandinavians today: unable to follow the dictates of conscience and modernity over the threshold of politico-constitutional innovation to achieve Indigenous rights reform. [43] Given their high reputation and record of social reforms in the past, of course, one may hope or even expect that Norway, Sweden, and Finland will find some way forward despite their repeated failures after promising starts in recent decades.
De-colonisation was `in the air' after World War II. The experience of Axis racism in war and then the United Nations' idealism for inter-racial and multi-cultural peace drove public opinion, especially in `first world' countries with all-pervasive news media, high education levels, and liberal democratic debate. Majority attitudes changed. Minority Indigenous peoples became better educated and better travelled; they would no longer accept second -- or third -- class status in countries with official ideologies of equality and opportunity. The long post-war boom provided hope and expansion in many things, just as it also brought resource and other interests into previously `remote' Indigenous territories. The constant TV news images of handovers of British power to dark-skinned peoples around the world, and the US civil rights movement, not to mention the interest in progressive or radical politics and literature which went hand in hand with bulging old and quickly built new universities, transformed national identity. Where laws had grown musty, they needed to be replaced. Ideas and ideals for society were no longer vested in small power elites.
Just as Chief Justice Marshall had to innovate in his famous Indigenous rights cases in the early 19th century USA to make tradition bend to accommodate morality and exotic conditions, so governments from the 1950s had to find new answers to questions ot race relations and territorially-based minorities. Each country had its own bundle of materials to work with, but the motives were similar across cultures and legal systems. It was like Inuit and North Australian Aborigines: the one lacked trees and the other, snow or turf, but both used available materials to make shelters for their families. The Danes were able to make much of the `blue water' doctrine because Greenland was across the sea, and as an ancient society with coherent governance back to c.800 AD, with various Germanic tribes long integrated into one Danish people, nobody felt threatened at acknowledging Greenland Inuit as `different'. Alaskans and Congress did some considerable innovating, and surely history will find that the role of Washington state's Senator Henry Jackson in devising the ANCSA scheme to indoctrinate Inuit in capitalist corporation culture was more bizarre than cleverly innovative.
As for the Canadians, all the fine legal tradition and treaties and Royal Proclamation about which so much is written and to which so much is attributed today -- that is fanciful. Those traditions were dead in government. Canadians were awash in equality thinking, more committed to the American Bill of Rights than any fine Canadian past, and often astonished on learning that they simply didn't have those rights American took for granted. Social attitudes, political embarrassment, Indigenous demands, the evident hypocrisy of public policy -- those are what drove Canadian governments and experts to re-discover useful instruments in old law, just as Sami and some Scandinavians have been digging into the 1751 Lappecodicilen and very old court records from which to construct a `traditional' Nordic solution for Sami rights. Each country will use its own materials, but those who believe that such recent creative archaeology was an ongoing tradition or process are wrong.
The difference between Australia and Canada is not a basic one of law and history; rather, it is Canada's longer public debate over recent decades and somewhat earlier modern-day breakthroughs. For instance, Canada's `Mabo' decision came in 1973, 20 years before Mabo. The most significant historical and structural difference between the two countries is exclusive federal jurisdiction in Indian and Inuit affairs in Canada. That has meant that national debate is inescapable (as in Australia now with national native title legislation and national race discrimination law), that small Indigenous lands have been protected from development interests in provinces (Canada's `states'), and that the government most subject to international scrutiny and influence is also the government in charge of Indigenous affairs. [44] Indeed, one important way to read regional agreements policy was the use of Federal power in Northern Canada to do what provincial governments would not permit in Southern Canada, a very large factor in Ottawa's policy thinking at the time. Ottawa also hoped, without much hope, to set positive precedents for the rest of Canada; what is truly amazing to some of us is that such hope has not proven as far fetched in emerging Indigenous-government relations and policy thinking as we feared.
Regional agreements in North America have ended the social and political isolation of some Indigenous peoples and large regions vis-a-vis the national public and political institutions. Instead of being treated as marginal and defective people subject to patronising social concern and the occasional art show for their `primitive' work, agreements have involved lengthy processes of formal entry into the social and political culture, and the economy, of nation-states. These peoples negotiate the taking up of new responsibilities and roles, they have their own ancient rights and identity recognised, and they celebrate entry as full equals in contemporary society. It is a sort of collective citizenship ceremony. It fundamentally changes the way people think about each other and treat each other. The spirit of excitement and optimism, of `getting on with the job' in communities after such agreement processes, especially when compared with the frequent passive resistance, mistaken for apathy, of the welfare era of white paternalism -- what Jeremy Beckett and others call `welfare colonialism' [45] strikes visitors familiar with former times. However serious the social problems bequeathed by past social disruption and ill-conceived development policies, towns like Barrow, Alaska, or Nuuk, Greenland, or Kuujjuaq, Quebec, have a compelling energy which brightens any fear for the future.
This psychological change from colonial rule of one people by another to a partnership of peoples is ultimately more important than any specific clauses in an agreement. After all, the essence of each agreement and its related instruments is that it provides legal security to a people for their basic rights, territories, and livelihoods; the means to make decisions for themselves in a range of important local matters; and mechanisms for conducting relations and resolving problems with the national majorities and senior government or governments of the country. As time passes and experience or invention reveals new or better ways to do things, then means exist for reform, as in any other public policy process in a democratic country.
This evolving experience of peoples and institutions in its practical and moral dimensions in Canada and elsewhere is encapsulated in a recent and, one may safely predict, globally significant series of lectures by James Tully at Cambridge. [46] Professor Tully spent several months in Australia in 1997 and made important contributions to discussions here. [47] The sort of clarity and management of race relations which is emerging in the Canadian regional agreements may be precisely the thing now dangerously lacking in Australia, one problem like several others usefully `unpacked' by McKenzie Wark in The Virtual Republic. [48] As Wark puts it:
The demand that immigrant Australia make amends for a past, the benefits of which most immigrants inherit, is a just demand. What it lacks, in culture if not in the common law, is a zone of indifference within which such a demand can be heard. [49]
The sort of futile slanging, paranoia, and ethnocentric triumphalism heard in elite halls addressed by former Chief Justice Gibbs or the cowed and confused rallies of Pauline Hanson, not to mention the daily contributions of lobby groups and self-seeking politicians, provide no room for cool resolution, as Wark points out. [50] The provision of mechanisms for resolving disputes quietly and peacefully is central to Canada's regional agreements, as is the natural resource administration shared by Inuit Greenland and Denmark under Greenland's home rule. In Canada, Greenland, and Alaska, significantly, Indigenous leaders met and negotiated with the top levels of national government to create the climate for forums out of which came the formats and mechanisms for resolution of native title and regional `political settlements'. [51]
The Native Title Act and the National Native Title Tribunal it created have been quietly working across Australia since the beginning of 1994 and have countless noble small and local tales of racial accommodation or reconciliation, although these have been unable to compete on the front pages or evening news with disputes like the Century project or Hindmarsh Bridge. Unfortunately, in the past two years the Federal government has not only discontinued but has been rolling back major elements of the emerging political reconciliation with Indigenous peoples which had been gathering pace under the Hawke and Keating governments but which date back to earlier Coalition and Labor governments. The Indigenous social package, for instance, seems to have been a casualty, although it promised movement towards the very sort of regional and national political settlements of which we have been writing. [52] Although an attempted return to the past is naive it also makes the racial peace and quiet governments say they seek all the more unlikely. [53] Indeed, to date Mr Howard has achieved something which no amount of Aboriginal politics had ever done before: non-stop media coverage at home and increasing world coverage of Indigenous rights issues in Australia. In 1969 Canada's first Trudeau government blundered similarly with Indian policy proposals.
Whether we like the term or not, `regional agreements' or some form of regional political accommodation seems destined for the north, centre, and west of Australia. These are areas where Indigenous peoples remain at home in land and sea territories, and where outsiders are few or isolated in separate communities. In those regions, Australians would now have to discriminate actively against Indigenous citizens to prevent the natural drift to local and regional management, supply, and problem-solving. The white man has failed to solve Indigenous ills, let alone soothe Indigenous grievance. Politically, bureaucratically, and functionally, the only sensible (and just) way forward is to let Indigenous peoples do things themselves. The ideology of resistance to Indigenisation of Indigenous administration is a problem of white neurosis, not of black politics.
Too often we highlight the formal history, the accession to political equality of Indigenous peoples in North America. [54] In this commentary we have perhaps confused some readers with talk of `heroic' times, although any reader of Dark Age epics such as Beowulf will feel the darkness more than the occasional warmth of the feasting halls. While the regional agreement outcomes have been celebrated in law and constitution, not to mention proud official glossy booklets for the eyes of foreigners, we perhaps should tell the story another way.
The tale begins when a group of people who do not think much about politics or capital cities, or about their region as more than a collection of more or less related camps or villages or families, receive a sudden shock. They learn that they are about to have a mine or offshore drilling rig or military base or road transform their locale, opening it to outsiders, threatening pollution or other interference with traditional livelihoods (say, fishing or reindeer herding). Or perhaps they have a chunk of radioactive space junk and the world press land on them, or a tanker run aground and start leaking oil into their food fishing or sea mammal hunting grounds. Or some smiling outsiders turn up and smilingly move them all around and put them in new houses or new central villages -- `for their own good', of course -- and take away their livelihoods and put their children in school where they are allowed to speak only an alien language. The local people are upset, apart from some youth who think a little excitement is just what the place needs, or a few older chaps who fancy they could make some good money trading with the newcomers. They learn that the government has allowed the newcomers -- who may be an arm of government themselves -- to do as they wish.
The local people become really upset when, on plaintively demanding remedies to limit damage to local livelihoods, they are told they have neither legal nor political rights to dispute `higher' authority. While preparing to pump out or sell off or open up the land or sea or resources of the area, the government also tells them that their locales are too poor to justify the sorts of facilities and public services they want, although perhaps the company will toss in a community hall or skating rink as a goodwill gesture. Some companies, whether commerce or infantry, even arrange a Christmas gala to have their men photographed with local children -- not their rude elders, of course -- gratefully smiling on receipt of small wrapped gifts or large soft toys, just the sort of thing to illumine a company report or promotional video. Meanwhile, the government blandly tells them that the new project will bring local jobs and many benefits. [55]
Then begins a weary time. Local people have to turn to each other and rally in a way never seen before. They discuss many things, and become aware of their larger shared interests and identity. They stress the ways in which they and their lifestyle and economy and culture differ from those of the newcomers. Their sense of shared culture and regionalism develops. Ethnicity and culture have little to do with it -- that is, Shetlanders and Aborigines, Torres Strait Islanders and Inuit, Sami and Orkneymen, European or non-European will all respond similarly to outside threats. These politics of the grass roots -- Inuit call them `lichen roots' -- develop full-scale political movements. Although the initial focus may be `inappropriate' or ill-conceived or environmentally damaging intervention from outside, the sense of powerlessness is quickly recognised as being the source of many problems. As local representatives travel and meet support groups, or attend meetings, they become aware that despite their weakness they have many potential friends among the country's majority ethnic group, even if they have to smile at the way city folk romanticise their hard life of fjord or following of herds. They also see that they have been overlooked in sharing out the national wealth and living standards.
From the point of view of a region or people beginning thus, there is nothing glorious or even `political' about their movement, at least not in the beginning. It is only when outsiders or the media begin labelling it, or when some of the more able youth home from church or state boarding schools or colleges begin to contribute their grasp of `the way the system works', that such a sense develops. What keeps the movement going, however, is not the media skill of one or other charismatic youth, or the fairness of demands in the public eye, but authentic local issues of society and economy. Talent and street smarts all help, but the movement goes much deeper. Capital city politicians who try to buy off or `whiz' one or other leader soon find that the movement isn't easily co-opted or decapitated.
In this situation, the regional movement is clawing and scrabbling for the best deal it can get. There are so many loose ends, and the industry and government have so many experts and lawyers. It can be often baffling and overwhelming. That is how a regional agreement feels from the inside. If some of us, along with the young political leaders of agreements made or political settlements reached, have made it sound grand, or a logical extension or expansion of the constitutional system, we have been deceitful. It is that, of course, but only in retrospect. The region which has gone through such an experience does not forget quickly, People have a new kind of confidence, and a cold eye for the pretension of nation-state power; at the same time, they have a sense of participation in a larger whole, and a sense of the connection between their region and the rest. One might call it integral federalism. They have earned their right to belong, and they will demand the best, now and in the future.
As in all living communities, some Indigenous consciences, artist and spiritual leaders remain opposed or look askance at the agreements reached by and for their people, guaranteeing continuing scrutiny and articulation of values essential for the community's collective health and future.
Before a regional agreement, local people are dependent on begging for grants from others, meeting the criteria of outsiders with very different agendas from their own. Once an agreement is signed and implementation underway, people can at last solve their own problems, make their own decisions, and rely on their own hired staff to carry out local and regional policies and changes. The two groups of Inuit who signed the Quebec agreement of 1975 and achieved Greenland home rule in 1979 now look back to see that the signings of agreements and first implementation are merely important steps among many others. The agreement itself is a threshold, not an end point. The signing was a step which enabled them to acquire the means to take many more steps, to work together as a people and political community to shape their own future and solve their own ills. This has been a major factor in ultimately persuading Northern Hemisphere governments to devolve or transfer power to Indigenous peoples: after many decades or centuries of failed local or regional Indigenous policies, the white man is at last ready to let the people most affected try solving their own problems and meeting their own needs, albeit within the continuing framework of the existing nation-state. As Senator Charlie Watt often says, the man who led the Quebec Inuit movement before, during, and after signing the 1975 regional agreement, his people did not get nearly as much as they wanted, but they got sufficient `tools' to work for their other goals in their own way. That moment of realisation and confidence, more than any idyllic vista or utopian contents in agreements, may be the most important dynamic in successful outcomes. Of course, it only comes when enormous scepticism and even fear is overcome within a regional community which may have had to undergo painful reorganisation or re-creation of its representative and decision-making structures.
Regional agreements strengthen the nation-state. They provide for the closer and more effective management of territory and resources, and more responsible and active guardianship of the natural environment. They remove ethnic and regional grievances, promote social justice, and return problem-solving power to the people with the problems to solve. In no case have regional agreements fragmented or disunited an existing nation-state; in all cases they have promoted harmony and reconciliation.
In no case has a regional agreement satisfied everyone or all points. It is a living and flexible framework within which life goes on. Changes are made, new problems faced, old problems resolved, new ways of doing things tried, and improvements made with the benefit of experience or new knowledge.
It is probably unfair to expect much coherence in the regional agreement debate at this moment in Australia. The uncertainty posed by hostile governments and hostile legislation, as well as attacks on the courts and attempts to change their personnel, as well as cutbacks to the very Indigenous organisations whose personnel might provide leadership, make everything volatile. Indigenous peoples and their allies are trying to shore up or devise whatever immediate security seems possible. It may be difficult to interest people in larger concepts, longer-range processes, wider arrangements. However, when the present storm passes, those needs will return with a rush. When they do, the experience of regional agreements in North America will illustrate many practical possibilities and provide some inspiration.
* Extracts from the Canadian Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples will appear in (1998) 3(1) AILR.
* See also Nisga'a Agreement (summary) by Doug Sanders in (1996) 1(3) AILR.
[1] Peter Jull is Adjunct Associate Professor, Centre for Democracy, University of Queensland. He worked in national, provincial, and territorial constitutional secretariats of Canadian heads of government, with a personal specialisation in Indigenous and hinterland issues, 1966-1980. Donna Craig is the Director, Environmental Law Centre, Macquarie University, Sydney.
[2] Editeur officiel du Quebec, 1976: The James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, Quebec. See respectively Cree and lnuit perspectives in C Scott, 1992: Political spoils or political largesse? Regional development in northern Quebec, Canada and Australia's Northern Territory, Discussion Paper No. 27, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian National University, Canberra; and Makivik News, Special 20-year Anniversary Issue of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, Makivik Corporation, Montreal, November 1995.
[3] eg, BJ Richardson, D Craig & B Boer, 1995: Regional agreements for Indigenous lands and cultures in Canada, Australian National University North Australia Research Unit, Darwin, P Jull, 1991: The Politics of Northern Frontiers, Australian National University North Australia Research Unit, Darwin: G Osherenko & OR Young, 1989: The Age of the Arctic: Hot Conflicts and Cold Realities, Cambridge University Press; OT Brantenberg, J Hansen & H Minde (eds), 1995: Becoming Visible: Indigenous Politics and Self-Government, The Centre for Sami Studies, University of Tromso, Norway; ATSIC, 1995 ATSIC Regional Agreements Seminar, Cairns, 29-31 May 1995, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), Canberra; A Harris (ed), 1995: A Good Idea Waiting to Happen: Regional Agreements in Australia, Proceedings from the Cairns Workshop July 1994, Cape York Land Council, Cairns, Qld.; HREOC, 1995: `Regional Agreements', Volume 1, Indigenous Social Justice, Volume 1: Strategies and Recommendations, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Social Justice Commissioner, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Sydney, pp 19-31 (and accompanying Volume 2: Regional Agreements, of background resources); P Sullivan, 1997: `Regional Agreements in Australia: An Overview Paper', Issues paper No. 17, Land, Rights, Laws: Issues of Native Title, ed. Anne Pyle, Native Title Research Unit, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra; K Coates (ed), 1992: Aboriginal Land Claims in Canada: A Regional Perspective, Copp Clark Pitman, Toronto; PJ Usher 1996. `Contemporary Aboriginal Land, Resource, and Environment Regimes: Origins, Problems, and Prospects', For Seven Generations, The Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996) incl. Background Reports, etc, CD-ROM, Public Works and Government Services (Publishing), Ottawa; Minority Rights Group, 1994: Polar Peoples: Self-determination and Development, edited by MRG, Minority Rights Publications, London; and two articles by Keith Crowe, in 1990, `Claims on the Land', Arctic Circle, Vol 1, No 3, 14-23, and in 1991, `Claims on the Land 2', Arctic Circle, Vol 1, No 4, 30-35; K Cameron & G White, 1995: Northern Governments in Transition: Political and Constitutional Development in the Yukon, Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, Institute for Research on Public Policy, Montreal. Copies of all agreements and often follow-up evaluation reports and much other material is available free of charge from the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND), Ottawa.
[4] From time to time on one or other Indigenous issue, some groups may erupt and shut highways or railways, and block work (often logging), or order government officials and teachers out of their communities. There is much ongoing politically-motivated vandalism which goes largely unreported. Indigenous peoples have found that passive resistance to official truculence or brutality in disputes can be as effective a weapon in the media age as any active techniques. Only a few non-Indigenous lives have been lost in modern-day skirmishes to date, a truly astonishing fact.
[5] An editorial in The Australian, October 28, 1997 (`Mandela experience a path to consider') supported comparative studies in Indigenous policy, eg, with Canada, New Zealand, and USA, adding that `the Howard Government, like the Keating, Hawke and Fraser administrations before it, should be prepared to learn from international experience.' Meanwhile, Pauline Hanson's attack in Federal Parliament on Canada's Nunavut regional agreement and its alleged dangers for Australia (1 October 1997), however fantastic, is not unique among Australian public figures for its degree of confusion or ignorance.
[6] For an evaluation of that early experience, see T Berger, 1985: Village Journey: The Report of the Alaska Native Review Commission, Hill and Wang, Now York. For how Alaska Natives made the most of regional opportunities, see GA McBeath & TA Morehouse, 1980: The Dynamics of Alaska Native Self-Government, University Press of America, Lanham, Maryland. For Alaskan state Indigenous-white political interaction generally, see GA McBeath & TA Morehouse, 1994: Alaska Politics & Government, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. A recent survey is F Korsmo, 1994: `The Alaska Natives', Polar Peoples: Self-determination and Development, edited by Minority Rights Group, Minority Rights Publications, London, 81-104. The important Venatie case promises to strengthen substantially Alaskan Native self-government and territorial rights, see `Alaska', pp 28-30, The Indigenous World, 1996-1997, International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, Copenhagen.
[7] North America is taken here to include Greenland.
[8] Some minimal and tightly controlled contacts and exchange visits were carried on even through the Cold War, but only the perestroika era brought real outside understanding of the 20th century history of the Russian hinterland. For a good account of the opening see J Dahl et al, 1990: Indigenous Peoples of the Soviet North, International Working Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA), Copenhagen. IWGIA's periodical magazine, Indigenous Affairs (formerly IWGIA Newsletter), and annual, The Indigenous World, carry regular reports in English on Russia's Indigenous peoples, policy, and politics.
[9] The ICC's members are the Inuit of Greenland, Canada, Alaska, and Russia; the Sami Council's are Sami of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.
[10] Each Indigenous regional agreement is fought vehemently by outside Indigenous groups who say that it is a `sell-out', hoping thereby to show their purer virtue and increase the benefits they may obtain when/if they eventually make a settlement. Indian groups have greatly assisted Inuit ratification vote campaigns by violently opposing the various lnuit land claims and self-government agreements, for instance leading Inuit to close ranks proudly and record massive turn-outs and `yes' votes dangerously approaching unanimity in many places.
[11] Notably BJ Richardson, D Craig & B Boer, 1995: Regional agreements for Indigenous lands and cultures in Canada, Australian National University North Australia Research Unit, Darwin.
[12] `The white man' is an historical social term used in Indigenous communities around the world for the impact of Europeans on non-European peoples, It is deliberately used here in that sense, and is not a verbal gender faux pas.
[13] It is hardly surprising that the Viking heroes who are best known today are those like Saint Olaf and Olaf Tryggvason who were careful to give `their' poets the best seats in the ship heading into battle, and plenty of gold and wine in the hall to keep them merry. Olaf Tryggvason's youthful shipmate, drinking buddy, and fellow raider and pillager, Prince Vladimir, would surely not have won a lasting image, great monuments, richly embroidered tales, let alone sainthood, had he not embraced the Byzantine Empire in its full Orthodoxy to help him create Rus.
[14] Peter Jull worked with the Inuit and non-Inuit who had negotiated the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement and was much involved in the many problems resulting from that first Canadian modern regional agreement.
[15] eg P Tennant, 1993: `Negotiating Treaties: The Opportunities and the Options', Paper for the Northern Territory Aboriginal Constitutional Conference, Tennant Creek, NT, August 23-27 1993; and P Jull, 1995: `Politics & Process: The Real World of Regional Agreements in the Northern Hemisphere', ATSIC Regional Agreements Seminar, Cairns, 29-31 May 1995, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), Canberra, 17-47.
[16] For reflections on the Australian case, see `International Perspectives' pp 203-219, Second Report, 1994, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner (Michael Dodson), Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, Sydney; and from the same Commissioner, `International Connections', pp 41-48, Indigenous Social Justice, Vol. 1, Strategies and Recommendations, Submission to the Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia on the Social Justice Package ... , 1995.
[17] Dr Terry Fenge, 1994: `The Nunavut Agreement: the environment, land and sea use and Indigenous rights' in P Jull et al. (eds), Surviving Columbus: Indigenous Peoples, Political Reform and Environmental Management in North Australia, Australian National University North Australia Research Unit, Darwin, 31-37.
[18] For the Nunavut region, Federal officials kept insisting that land claims and self-government be utterly separate processes, despite Inuit and Federal ministers knowing that they could not be separated. Nor did either side ever try to avoid using leverage in one forum to win points in the other. At the end, in June 1993, the two subjects were passed through Parliament together as two government Bills, presumably allowing both opinions to feel vindicated.
[19] British Columbia Treaty Commission Agreement, First Nations Summit, Government of Canada, and Government of British Columbia, Victoria, 1993. See also Nisga'a Treaty Negotiations Agreement-in-Principle, issued jointly by the Government of Canada, Province of British Columbia, & Nisga'a Tribal Council, Vancouver, 15 February 1996.
[20] T Berger, 1977: Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland: the Report of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, Minister of Supply and Services, Ottawa; and P Jull, 1992: An Aboriginal Northern Territory: Creating Canada's Nunavut, Discussion Paper No. 9, Australian National University North Australia Research Unit, Darwin; and P Jull, 1997: `Them Eskimo Mob: International Implications of Nunavut, revised 2nd edition', For Seven Generations, The Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996) incl, Background Reports, etc, CD-ROM, Public Works and Government Services (Publishing), Ottawa.
[21] One cannot drive around Canada or `go bush' in the way one can in Australia. Essentially Canada is a ribbon development along the US border from which Indigenous nations and hinterlands reach north towards the North Pole. National Geographic, September 1997 (Vol 192 No. 3) has a pull-out wall map of Northern Canada with historical survey on the back, this as part of a feature article with many photos of Nunavut, the largest Canadian regional agreement -- `A dream called Nunavut', by M Parfit, pp 68-91.
[22] Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, five volumes, Ottawa, 1996. The core material on regional agreements is `Restructuring the Relationship', Volume 2, published in two parts. The report is available on CD-ROM as For Seven Generations, The Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996) including Background Reports etc. Public Works and Government (Publishing) Ottawa, 1997.
[23] The late Northrop Frye, professor of English at Victoria College, University of Toronto, coined the term `garrison mentality' among his many guiding insights into Canadian life and culture. See pp 225-6, The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination, Anansi, Toronto, 1971.
[24] The best constitutional history survey is Peter Russell's Constitutional Odyssey: Can Canadians become a sovereign people? (2nd ed), University of Toronto Press, 1993.
[25] See, for example, P Russell & B Ryder, 1997: Ratifying a Postreferendum Agreement on Quebec Sovereignty, Commentary No. 97 (October 1997), CD Howe Institute, Toronto. Some Quebec intellectuals have persuaded themselves that they are the `real Indians', usurping Indian and Inuit rights to self-determination, and that Anglophobe Canadians are the bad old British redcoats, eg as related in SG Baines, 1996: Social Anthropology with Aboriginal Peoples in Canada: First Impressions, Serie Antropologia 1997, Departamento de Antropologia, Universidade de Brasilia, Brasilia.
[26] Many Canadian Indigenous people and communities, and their non-Indigenous supporters, would disagree strongly or even furiously with me in my up-beat assessments here, seeing only the many problems remaining in their areas and unwilling to give any credit for distant governments always dragging their feet. However, in context with other countries, an overview gives another perspective. The other side of the Canadian coin is given later in this article.
[27] See GA McBeath & TA Morehouse, 1980: The Dynamics of Alaska Native Self-Government, University Press of America, Lanham, Maryland; GA McBeath, 1981: North Slope Borough Government and Policymaking, Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of Alaska, Anchorage; and GA McBeath & TA Morehouse, 1994: Alaska Politics & Government, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.
[28] See MMR Freeman, 1989: `The Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission: Successful Co-Management under Extreme Conditions', Co-Operative Management of Local Fisheries: New Directions for Improved Management and Community Development, ed. E Pinkerton, University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 137-1 53; E Brower & J Stotts, 1984: `Arctic Policy: The Local/Regional Perspective', in United States Arctic Interests: The 1960s and 1990s, ed. WE Westermeyer and KM Shusterich, Springer-Verlag, New York, 319-344; and S Anjum, 1984: `Land-use Planning in the North Slope Borough', National and Regional Interests in the North: Third National Workshop on People, Resources, and the Environment North of 601, [ed, D Leamann), Canadian Arctic Resources Committee, Ottawa, 269-289.
[29] SZ Klausner & E Foulks, 1982: Eskimo Capitalists. Oil, Politics and Alcohol, Allanheld Osman, Totowa, New Jersey.
[30] See Volume 5: Arctic, ed. D. Damas, Handbook of North American Indians, Smithsonian, Washington, DC, 1984, pp 278-284, RF Spencer, `North Alaska Eskimo: Introduction'; 320-337, RF Spencer RF, `North Alaska Coast Eskimo'; 646-656, NA Chance, `Alaska Eskimo Modernization'; & 657-661, ES Burch, `The Land Claims Era in Alaska'.
[31] See pp 29-43, in P Jull, 1986: Politics, Development and Conservation In the International North, Canadian Arctic Resources Committee, Ottawa.
[32] For a good survey see HJC Schuurman, 1976: Canada's Eastern Neighbour. a view on change in Greenland, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Ottawa. Also, in Volume 5: Arctic, ed. D Damas, Handbook of North American Indians, Smithsonian, Washington, DC, 1984, pp 556-576, F Gad, `History of Colonial Greenland'; 577-594, R Gilberg, `Polar Eskimo'; 595-621, I Kleivan, `West Greenland Before 1950'; and 700-717, H Kleivan, `Contemporary Greenlanders'.
[33] For the life and times of home rule, ignore the article title and see LT Rasmussen, 1987: `Greenlandic and Danish Attitudes to Canadian Arctic Shipping', Politics of the Northwest Passage, ed. Franklyn Griffiths, McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal, p 134-159 [notes 290]. Also P Jull, 1979; Greenland -- Lessons of self-government and development, Special issue of Northern Perspectives Vol. VII, No. 8. Canadian Arctic Resources Committee, Ottawa. Also I Foighel, 1979: `Home Rule in Greenland 1979' with English translation of the Greenland Home Rule Act, Nordic Journal of International Law, Vol. 48, Nos. 1-2, 1979, 4-14.
[34] For recent surveys see Premier LE Johansen, 1995: `Greenland -- The Home Rule Experience', in A Harris (ed), A good Idea Waiting to Happen -- Regional Agreements in Australia, Proceedings from the Cairns Workshop July 1994, Cape York Land Council, Cairns, Qld, 19-23; M Nuttall, 1994: `Greenland: Emergence of an Inuit Homeland'. Polar Peoples: Self-determination and Development, edited by Minority Rights Group, Minority Rights Publications, London MRG 1994, 1-28; JE Ashlee, 1997: Greenland 1996: Notes on Selected Issues of Interest to Canada, Working Paper Series 97-01, Circumpolar Liaison Directorate, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Ottawa; TOK Berthelsen, 1995: `Greenland Home Rule', Indigenous Affairs, No. 1/1995 (January-March), International Working Group for Indigenous Affairs, Copenhagen, 1420: F Breinholt-Larsen, 1992: `The quiet life of a revolution: `Greenlandic Home Rule 1979-1992', Etudes Inuit Studies, Vol 16, Nos. 1-2, 199-226; J Hicks, 1994: `Greenland: Home Rule at the Crossroads', Arctic Circle, Fall/Winter 1994, 16-29; R Petersen, 1987: `Home Rule in Greenland', Self Determination and Indigenous Peoples: Semi Rights and Northern Perspectives, International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, Copenhagen, 104-120; and F Harhoff, 1994/95: `Palestinian Self-Government Viewed from a Distance: An International Legal Comparison Between Palestinian Self Government and Greenland's Home Rule', Palestinian Yearbook of International Law, Vol VIII, 1994/95, 55-77.
[35] Knud Rasmussen, 1927: Across Arctic America, Putnam, New York. See also P Lauritzen, 1983: Oil and Amulets: Inuit: A People United at the Top of the World, Breakwater, St. John's [translated, revised, and updated version of Danish Olie og amuletter: / Knud Rasmussens slaedespor. Copenhagen, 1979].
[36] A mistake made by many people viewing the regions discussed here and others, including the author in footnote 42 below, is to view them as culturally united and natural regions. This is simply untrue, as a conversation with older Inuit in any of the regions mentioned, or Yukon Indians, or Quebec Cree or lnuit, reveals. Au contraire! Unity and political cooperation had to grow, had to be cultivated. This process is discussed in later sections of this article.
[37] See P Jull, 1992: An Aboriginal Northern Territory: Creating Canada's Nunavut, Discussion Paper No. 9, Australian National University North Australia Research Unit, Darwin; J Merritt et al, 1989: Nunavut: political choices and manifest destiny, Canadian Arctic Resources Committee, Ottawa; D Purich, 1992, The Inuit and Their Land.-- The Story of Nunavut, Lorimer, Toronto; T Fenge, 1993: Political Development and Environmental Management in Northern Canada: The Case of the Nunavut Agreement, Discussion Paper No. 20, Australian National University North Australia Research Unit, Darwin, October 1993; MO Dickerson, 1992: Whose North? Political Change, Political Development, and Self-Government in the Northwest Territories, Arctic Institute of North American and University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver; and Agreement Between the Inuit of the Nunavut Settlement Area and Her Majesty in right of Canada, final text as signed by Prime Minister et al in lqaluit, May 25 1993.
[38] FJ Tester & P Kulchyski, 1994: Tammarnlit (Mistakes): Inuit Relocation in the Eastern Arctic, 1939-1963, University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver; H Brody, 1975: The People's Land, Whites and the Eastern Arctic, Penguin, Harmondsworth; R Paine (ed), 1977: The White Arctic -- Anthropological Essays on Tutelage and Ethnicity, (Social and Economic Paper No. 7, Memorial University of Newfoundland), University of Toronto Press, Toronto.
[39] Those figures have been bettered since in a second referendum. lnuit voter turnouts greatly exceed those of any other Canadians, even when they are not voting on their regional agreement, Nunavut.
[40] The successive editions of its principal report are Building Nunavut: a working document with a proposal for an Arctic Constitution [1983], Nunavut Constitutional Forum, reprinted in National and Regional Interests in the North, Proceedings of 3rd National Workshop (1 983), Canadian Arctic Resources Committee, Ottawa, 141-170; and Building Nunavut -- Today and Tomorrow, Nunavut Constitutional Forum, Ottawa, 1985.
[41] See P Jull, 1981, pp 45-48, `Aboriginal Peoples and Political Change in the North' Atlantic Area', Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol 16, No. 2, 41-52; & P Jull, 1980: `Canada's Native Peoples and the Constitution', IWGIA Newsletter, No. 24, International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, Copenhagen, April 1980, 47-54.
[42] eg M Ivanitz, 1997: `The Emperor Has No Clothes: Canadian Comprehensive Claims and Their Relevance to Australia', Regional Agreements paper No. 4, Land, Rights, Laws: Issues of Native Title, ed, Penelope Moore, Native Title Research Unit, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra.
[43] F Korsmo, 1996: `Claiming Territory: The Sami Assemblies as Ethno-Political Institutions', Polar Geography, 1996, 20.3, 163-179. For the Norwegian case in detail see OT Brantenberg et al. (eds), 1995: Becoming Visible: Indigenous Politics and Self Government, Centre for Sami Studies, University of Tromso, Norway; for Sweden: F Korsmo, 1993: `Swedish Policy and Saami Rights', The Northern Review, No. 1 1 (Winter 1993), 32-55. For all three countries see also the recent Sami issue of Indigenous Affairs, 2/1996 (April-June).
[44] The best account of Indigenous rights evolution, and an insight into the tenacity of Indigenous peoples in maintaining their fight against injustice is P Tennant, 1990: Aboriginal Peoples and Politics: The Indian Land Question in British Columbia, 1849-1989, University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver.
[45] J Beckett, 1987: Torres Strait Islanders: custom and colonialism, Cambridge University Press, Beckett draws attention to the work of Robert Paine and others writing on Canadian Inuit in this regard, eg R Paine (ed), 1977: The White Arctic: Anthropological Essays on Tutelage and Ethnicity, (Social and Economic Paper No. 7, Memorial University of Newfoundland), University of Toronto Press, Toronto.
[46] James Tully, 1995: Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity, Cambridge University Press.
[47] Eg, J Tully, 1997: `A Fair and Just Relationship between Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal Peoples: The Vision of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples', Research School of the Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra (and Department of Political Science, University of Victoria, British Columbia). Copies available from the academic and cultural affairs office of the Canadian High Commission, Canberra.
[48] McKenzie Wark, 1997: The Virtual Republic: Australia's Cultural Wars of the 1990s, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. This book confronts the current impasse in social and cultural diversity thinking in Australia and complements Tully's work.
[49] Ibid, 51. For full overview see G Stokes, 1997: The Politics of Identity in Australia, Cambridge University Press.
[50] Gibbs is quoted at some length in `PM rejects Mandela reconciliation offer', The Australian, 27 October 1997, and Pauline Hanson's speech in Parliament and accompanying press release of 1 October, 1997, both attacking regional agreements. (For an abridged response to Hanson, see P Jull's `Canada's traditional learning curve', Brisbane CourierMail 31 October 1997.) The logic of Gibbs and Hanson and others is clear enough. If Torres Strait Islanders and Aborigines are really so alienated and bitter that they will threaten to destroy Australia the moment they have the chance, they must have been very badly treated by white Australians in the past. So much for `the fair go'. And are such fearful white Australians not simply projecting their own rejection of others? That is, since we don't accept `the blacks', they will not accept us!
[51] By `political settlement' we mean the overall resolution of a traditional sense of grievance of a region or people, covering legal and territorial issues, or political and social and other questions, as the case may be.
[52] The three Indigenous social justice reports all appeared within a few weeks of each other in early 1995 and are Going Forward: Social Justice for the First Australians A Submission to the Commonwealth Government from the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, Canberra; Recognition, Rights and Reform: A Report to Government on Native Title Social Justice Measures, Native Title Social Justice Advisory Committee, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), Canberra; and Indigenous Social Justice, Vol. 1, Strategies and Recommendations, Submission to the Parliament ... by Mick Dodson, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Canberra (with Vol 2, Regional Agreements, and Vol 3, Resource Materials). This is surveyed in P Jull, 1996: `An Aboriginal Policy for the Millennium: The Three Social Justice Reports', Australian Indigenous Law Reporter, Vol. 1 No. 1, 1-13, and `Australia', The Indigenous World, 1995-96, International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA), Copenhagen, 126-133.
[53] After his election in 1984, Conservative Prime Minister Mulroney attempted to roll back Canada's Indigenous political reform in the period from March 1987 to August 1990 when simultaneous outbursts of Indigenous anger across the country, centred on the police and military siege at Oka, and much public sympathy, forced a return to what has been an era of growing negotiation and `reconciliation', or mutual accommodation, stretching back to the I960s.
[54] Eg P Jull, 1994: `Emerging Northern Territory Constitutions in Canada: National Policy, Settler Hegemony, Aboriginal Ethno-Politics, and Systems of Governance', Constitutional Change in the 1990s, ed R Gray, D Lea & S Roberts, Northern Territory Legislative Assembly Sessional Committee on Constitutional development and Australian National University North Australia Research Unit, Darwin.
[55] See P Jull, 1986: Politics, Development and Conservation in the International North, Canadian Arctic Resources Committee, Ottawa.
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