The Struggle For Indigenous Land Rights

Native Americans are entitled to the same Constitutional protections that guard other citizens from federal government infringement. Plenary power and the accompanying seizure and use of indigenous land bases have violated the rights of Native Americans and demonstrated the inability of the federal government to manage Indian affairs. The United States should give ownership and control of original, non-privately owned land bases back to tribes. This course of action would end treaty violation, compensate tribes for land takings, prevent bureaucrats from implementing policies that obstruct the ability of Native Americans to participate in their

Many people have tried to close the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous people in many different and inspirational ways. Eddie Mabo was a moving man that, from his works has changed the lives of many aboriginal/indigenous people today. I believe that Eddie Mabo has influenced modern society with his beliefs and values of the Indigenous people and their rights. Eddie Mabo fought for the rights of the people of Mer Island, so they would not lose their home, memories and life.

Hello and welcome to ST Leo’s justice group my name is charbel saliba and I will be talking to you about aboriginal dreaming and land rights. The quote I said earlier was a spiritual view of life based on the dreaming which cannot be separated from the land; that is why the aboriginal people’s connection towards the land is inexorable. The two are intertwined; to separate them would be impossible, one would not work without the other thus they are just as important. The land is used as a physical link between human beings and all that is unseen and eternal. It creates a

You won't believe how and where the native americans live. I believe the native american people deserve their land back. My reason is that they live in poor conditions, live in the middle of nowhere and they have had theft on their land. Also their families have failed and their societies

July 11th 1990, marked the beginning date of the Oka Crisis in Quebec Canada. It lasted until September 26th 1990 resulting in one fatality of a local police officer. The violent clash was triggered by something as simple as a golf course extension and as complicated as native burial traditions. It had drawn world attention, catapulting native land rights into the mix. The Oka Crisis is just one of many conflicts between the Aboriginals and the Canadian government. A major issue that has been of much debate in the 20th century has been Native sovereignty. The demand sounds simple, allow Aboriginals of Canada to govern themselves; however, coexisting with the Canadian government makes this idea extremely complicated. Roger Townshend states

Case by case indigenous Australians begin to gain access to the land that was taken from them.

To what extent has Canada affirmed collective rights for Aboriginals? Has Canada done their job properly by confirming collective rights for one of our main collective groups in Canada? From looking into some of the issues involving our Aboriginal peoples with the Government, it’s clear that the government has done a very weak job of affirming their rights. The government hasn’t completely affirmed the rights of our Aboriginals through the Indian Act, the issue on housing of the Attawapiskat peoples, and the land claims/rights of the Lubicon Cree.

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.

In 1967, a landmark event occurred for the Indigenous Community of Australia. They were no longer declared Flora and Fauna This means that Aboriginal people would be considered a part of the landscape and not humans in their own right.. In 1967, a Referendum was held by all members of Australian society voting on the issue of allowing Indigenous Australian to be a part of the census and thereby able to vote and be counted as part of Australia’s population. This achieved not only citizenship for Aboriginal people, but put the issue of Indigenous Rights on both the political and social platforms. This essay will look at the lead up to the Referendum, how Aborigines and their supporters communicated their belief in their rights to the

Each example given has also shown how self-determination was and continues to be a major struggle for Aboriginal people. Beginning with the Whitlam government, the Land Rights Act was going to be the national recognition that Aboriginal people had been waiting for, however the swift dismissal of the government and subsequent changes to the bill meant that an uninformed government would dictate claims of Aboriginal land rights. This was continued in the Heritage Protection Act for Western Australia in which no monitoring of abuses of power within the authoritative ministry was assessed; hence damage to heritage sites for the development of industries occurred. Finally the Racial Discrimination Act although making racial discrimination illegal has clearly been violated by the government in the Northern Territory interventions and hence is not valued by Australia despite the international commitments made to recognising Indigenous rights. Although legislation has been introduced to recognise Indigenous rights, there seems to always be a catch. A final reoccurring theme in the legislation discussed is the uninformed views of the non-Indigenous government as decisions are made on behalf of Aboriginal people; hence two major statements were discussed that precisely define Aboriginal self-determination by Aboriginal

Aboriginal Land Rights Aboriginal Australians have always had an eternal bond with the land. For the 50,000 years or more, they have occupied the continent; the land provided not only the basic needs, but also the spiritual beliefs. In the Dreaming, the forms of the land, mountains, rivers, landscapes and animals took shape and the spirit of ancestors resided in places that became sacred sites to the Aboriginal people. The land to these people were their most precious commodity. When white settlement began in Australia in 1788, the concept of terra nullius {the land belonging to no-one} was adopted by the British.

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).

The land is a pivotal medium through which the Dreaming is communicated. Hence, when the High Court of Australia ruled that Australia’s land was occupied at the time of British settlement and overturned the notion of ‘Terra Nullius’, deeming it legally invalid, the opportunity was granted for Indigenous Australians to re-establish spiritual links with the land and their cultural

There have been many significant cases that have dealt with the issue of jurisdiction. Among these cases was the Sparrow case of 1990. The Court determined that “Aboriginal Rights were constitutionally protected, and that those rights can only be extinguished with First Nations consent.” Moreover, the Court ruled that “Aboriginal rights could only be limited with justifiable reasons and that Aboriginal rights have to be interpreted in a generous and liberal manner.”

According to the Cornell University Law School’s ‘Legal Information Institute’, self-determination ‘denotes the legal right of people to decide their own destiny in the international order’. As a major concept of international law, self-determination gives people the right to control their own fates under certain fundamental criteria, and can be claimed by a minority that bases its lifestyle on an ethnic identity that is distinguishable from regular society, with a strong desire for cultural preservation. It has been considered to be a framework with the ability to guide legislative reforms within Australia, with an underlying ‘rights- based’ approach to Indigenous Issues. Self-determination is considered to be an important aspect of the legal system in regards to Indigenous Peoples, as it provides them a process of choice, to guarantee the practice of Indigenous social, cultural and economic needs.