Historical Injustice Against Indigenous People And Forest Dwellers Of Indi Success Or Failure

The Indian Act was created under the provisions section 91 of the Constitution Act of 1867 (Moss, 1990). The act was implemented to define who an “Indian” is and the rights that come with the title. These rights pertain to status, bands and reserves for

Why are Indigenous people in Australia still disadvantaged with regard to health care and services?

One should get to know a person before judging them because impressions are not always accurate. In the novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Junior experiences racism on the Spokane Indian reservation and at Reardan, where Junior attends school. Racial discrimination makes the Indians on the reservation lose their sense of self-worth and they feel as if they deserve to be treated this way. At Reardan, Junior is in an atmosphere where his white classmates and teachers make racist jokes and nicknames targeting him. In the novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie explains how prejudice and discriminatory behaviour endorses negative relationships between people. This can be observed through Junior’s

For several hundreds of years, Aboriginals have been impacted by the Indian Act in many ways. They have dealt with numerous challenges that have changed their lives forever. Laws were created by the Canadian government with the purpose of controlling Natives and assimilating them into Canadian culture.For multiple years,

In the seventeenth century, European people begin to settle in the North America. They started to invest in the natural resources in the eastern America using the best resource they found in the land, captured Native Indians. Many poor European people migrated to North America for opportunity to earn money and rise of their social status. They came to the America as indentured or contracted servants because the passage aboard was too expensive for them. By the time many Native Indians and indentured servants die from the hard labor and low morality rate, masters of the plantation purchased more slaves from Africa to profit themselves. The “Virginia Servant and Slave Laws” reveal the dominant efforts of masters to profit from their servants and slaves by passing laws to treat slaves as their properties and to control servants and slaves by suppressing the rebellion using brutal force. Masters and rich planters sought to earn more profit from mercantilism, or trade, economic system by violating the civil rights of Native Indian, African, and poor European people and this thought and practice still exist today as a form of racism and segregation in America.

When the settlers invaded the Indian’s homeland, they weren’t happy about it. They were very angry. Some were forced out of their homeland, and others decided to stay because they were afraid to leave. The people who stayed were put into reservations. Reservations still exist today; it is land that is reserved for Indians under a treaty or an agreement. The Indians didn’t want to be put into reservations, but they had no other option but to agree with the government. I looked into the reservations and they still exist today. The Indian Country Today states that there is a housing crisis in Indian country. Despite the Indian Housing Authority's (IHAs) recent efforts, the need for adequate housing on reservations remains acute. I think that it is horrible what they’re going through after all of these years, you would think that they’re living conditions would have gotten better, but sadly it hasn’t improved.

In Chapter 6, Wilkins discusses how the disclaimer clauses. These clauses keep states from exercising authority on Indian land (180). They are an “important but often overlooked tool in the arsenal available to tribes to assert their own sovereignty against state threats” (177). A specific example of a disclaimer clause is Wisconsin’s territorial disclaimer of 1836 which prohibited territories or states from having any authority on Indian land (180). In Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Council (1959) it was declared that Indian tribes actually have a higher status than states (179). This was a major victory for Indians in their fight for sovereignty. United States v. Rickert (1903) was also a win for sovereignty in that the Court prohibited South Dakota from taxing Indian land (185).After the verdict in Seminole Tribe v. Florida (1996), the balance of power between state and federal government leaned towards the states. Before this, negotiations with tribes had been conducted at the federal level and not with states (187). This was against the idea of sovereignty because now the states had more power over the tribes and could abuse that power for personal gain.

The Effectiveness of the Law in Achieving Justice for Indigenous People In relation to Australia, the term ‘Indigenous peoples’ refers to two distinct cultures of people who inhabited the land prior to European settlement – The Aboriginals and the Torres Strait Islanders. This population declined dramatically over the 19th and early 20th century due to the introduction of new diseases from European settlement, Government policies of dispersal and dispossession, the era of protection, assimilation and integration causing a cultural disruption and disintegration of the Indigenous peoples. In the 20th century the recognition and protection of Indigenous peoples land rights and human rights have been

Imagine living in a world that consistently devalues your existence and is heavily populated with individuals who are quick to use and abuse your resources, but are slow to share the wealth that is accumulated from those resources. How would you feel? Unfortunately, certain populations do not have to visualize the disparity that is pictured above. This is because inequity is one of the most demoralizing social issues that plague America today. The worst thing about inequity is the fact that it continues to disproportionately burden individuals who are categorize as being minority in today’s society.

The over-representation of Indigenous people in the criminal justice system is a large problem in society and reasons as to why this may be occurring need to be examined (Walker & McDonald, 1995; AIC, 2013). Indigenous Australians make up less than three per cent of the overall Australian population, however Indigenous people are over-represented in Australian prison populations, with imprisonment rates that are around 12 times those of the rest of the Australian population (AIC, 2013). Rates of over-representation are even higher in juvenile detention, with a 10-17 year old Indigenous person being around 24 times more likely to be in detention than a non-Indigenous person of the same age (AIC, 2013; Cunneen & White, 2011). Indigenous Australians overrepresentation in the criminal justice system is usually due to offences pertaining to violence and public disorder (ABS, 2010; Hogg & Carrignton, 2006). This is endorsed by the fact that Indigenous Australians currently make up 40 per cent of those imprisoned for assault offences (AIC, 2013). The over representation of Indigenous Australians in the criminal justice system may be attributed to a variety of reasons, known as risk factors (AIC, 2013).

Under the custom of Native American tribes that lived in what would become Vermont, land was used by the community, and not owned by individuals or families. They believed that land was a living being, and that people should live in harmony with the land, not dominate it. In contrast, the European settlers thought that people have a moral right to rule over the land. (Hands on the Land, page 70) Samuel D. Champlain in 1609 was the first explorer to sail through the lake between Vermont and New York, that he would be named after. He represented the French, who were the first to want to claim the land.

Before the contact with the Europeans, Indigenous peoples had their own form of justice system, and there was never an issue with their way of administering punishment till the Europeans came. According to Belanger (2014), Native peoples make up a disproportionate amount of people in the prison. He explained that after the contact, there was the creation of the North West Mounted Police (NWMP), which had good relationship with the Indigenous peoples, but changed and became a source of oppression to them. He further explained the creation of the RCMP by the Canadian government, in which “one of is first actions was to raid the six nations in Brantford, Ontario.” (Belanger, 2014, p. 253)

Indigenous people have faced tremendous amounts of trauma throughout history. Indian Policy has been set out throughout history in order to assimilate and colonize Indigenous people, specifically in the Indian Act, the Bagot Commission, Enfranchisement and the White Paper. All of these policies had been developed with the hopes of civilizing Indigenous people. The Indian Act set out to control and civilizes Indigenous people. This is done by keeping track of who is and is not a status Indian, as well as direct assimilation by attempting to strip Indigenous people from their cultures and transition them into mainstream Canada. The Bagot Commission had good intentions however; their recommendations were nothing short of dissatisfying for Indigenous people. They believed Indigenous people needed parenting and treated them as children. Their main goal was to have Indigenous people integrated into European culture. Indigenous people were given the option of enfranchisement. This gave them to ability to sell their land in return for full Canadian citizenship. European people did not respect the value that the lands held for Indigenous people. Lastly, the White Paper (formally withdrawn) would have had many implementations of Indigenous people. They would lose their special status in an attempt to assimilate Indigenous people.

Canadian citizens understand genocide to be a terrible thing that other countries have done, or are doing. The eradication of an entire population of civilian women, men, and children along with their culture and national sovereignty is something we condemn in our media. When we see genocide happening elsewhere, we debate when we should step in with economic sanctions or military action when it is time to put a stop to a crime against humanity. Rarely, if ever, do we examine our own history long enough to understand that Canada was created by people who committed genocide against the people who were already living here.

spiritual and respectful of the land upon which they lived. They were skilled in the ways