The winds of change… Not till the 1920s did things begin to improve for the native peoples of the USA and Canada. The Problem of Indian Administration , a survey directed by social scientist Lewis Meriam and published in , only a few years before the USA was swept by a major economic depression that affected all its people, painted a grim picture of the terribly poor health and education facilities for natives in reservations. White Americans felt sympathy for the natives who were being discouraged from the full exercise of their cultures and simultaneously denied the benefits of citizenship. This led to a landmark law in the USA, the Indian Reorganisation Act of , which gave natives in reservations the right to buy land and take loans.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the US and Canadian governments thought of ending all special provisions for the natives in the hope that they would ‘join the mainstream’, that is, adopt European culture. But the natives did not want this. In , in the ‘Declaration of Indian Rights’ prepared by them, a number of native peoples accepted citizenship of the USA but on condition that their reservations would not be taken away and their traditions would not be interfered with. A similar development occurred in Canada.
In the government announced that they would ‘not recognise aboriginal rights’. The natives, in a well- organised opposition move, held a series of demonstrations and debates. The question could not be resolved till , when the Constitution Act accepted the existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the natives. Many details remain to be worked out.
Today, it is clear that the native peoples of both countries, though reduced so much in numbers from what they had been in the eighteenth century, have been able to assert their right to their own cultures and, particularly in Canada, to their sacred lands, in a way their ancestors could not have done in the 1880s. Karl Marx ( - ), the great German philosopher, described the American frontier as ‘the last positive capitalist utopia…the limitless nature and space to which the limitless thirst for profit adapts itself’. – ‘Bastiat and Carey’, Grundrisse D ISPLACING I NDIGENOUS P EOPLES T HEMES IN W ORLD H ISTORY Indians under British rule Taxed arbitrarily; seen as not equal (rationalisation – not ready for responsibility of representative government) Natives in America and Not seen as citizens; not equal Australia (rationalisation ‘primitive’ as in no settled agriculture, provision for the future, towns) African slaves in America Denied personal liberty; not equal (rationalisation – ‘Slavery is part of their own social system’, black people are inferior)