Chapter 6 — Displacing Indigenous Peoples

According to the chapter, the earliest inhabitants of North America came from Asia over 30,000 years ago on a land-bridge across the Bering Straits. During the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago they moved further south. The oldest artefact found in America — an arrow-point — is 11,000 years old.

The Trail of Tears refers to the forced removal of the Cherokee people ordered by US President Andrew Jackson after he defied Chief Justice John Marshall's 1832 ruling that the Cherokees had sovereignty over their territory in Georgia. Of the 15,000 Cherokee people forced to march west, over a quarter died on the way.

Chief Justice Marshall ruled that the Cherokees were 'a distinct community, occupying its own territory in which the laws of Georgia had no force', and that they had sovereignty in certain matters. President Andrew Jackson refused to honour this judgement and ordered the army to evict them.

In 1854, responding to a request to sign a treaty ceding their land, Chief Seattle wrote that the idea of buying or selling the sky or the land was strange to his people. He stated that every part of the earth was sacred to his people, that the shining water in streams was the blood of his ancestors, and that if they sold the land, the buyer must remember and teach children that it is sacred.

Native peoples did not feel the need to 'own' land, fish, or animals and obtained goods through gifting rather than buying. European settlers, by contrast, treated land as private property to be bought, sold, and used for maximum agricultural or commercial profit. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, considered natives 'uncivilised' because they grew crops for their own needs and not for sale.

The Meriam Report was a survey of Indian administration directed by social scientist Lewis Meriam and published in 1928. It painted a grim picture of the terribly poor health and education facilities available to natives living in reservations in the USA.

The Indian Reorganisation Act of 1934 was a landmark US law that gave natives in reservations the right to buy land and take loans. It followed public sympathy for natives who were being discouraged from exercising their cultures while simultaneously being denied the benefits of citizenship.

Terra nullius is a Latin term meaning 'belonging to nobody'. The Australian government used it to classify the entire continent as unowned land, which was used to justify the takeover of aboriginal territories without any treaties. The Australian High Court's 1992 Mabo case declared terra nullius legally invalid and recognised native claims to land from before 1770.

In 1968, anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner delivered a lecture entitled 'The Great Australian Silence', referring to the long silence of historians about the aborigines and their displacement. This lecture helped trigger a wider effort from the 1970s to study and record native cultures and their histories.

According to the chapter, aborigines began arriving in Australia over 40,000 years ago, possibly even earlier. They came from New Guinea, which was connected to Australia by a land-bridge. In the late 18th century there were between 350 and 750 distinct native communities, each with its own language.

The chapter states that in the 19th and 20th centuries, nearly 90 per cent of Australian aborigines died through exposure to germs, loss of their lands and resources, and in battles against settlers. In 2005, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples together made up only 2.4 per cent of Australia's population.

In 1982, Canada's Constitution Act accepted the existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the natives. This followed a 1969 government announcement that they would 'not recognise aboriginal rights', which provoked a well-organised opposition by native peoples involving demonstrations and debates throughout the 1970s.

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