YOU HAVE A HOME AT THE UNITED NATIONS

JOHN SCOTT, UNITED NATIONS CONVENTION ON BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY

Not many United Nations staff would know that the Mohawk¹ – the indigenous peoples of the north eastern United States, built our UN headquarters building, but ironically were not allowed inside.
Indeed indigenous peoples² have been appealing to the international community since before the United Nations existed, for recognition of their rights as peoples.
In 1923, Haudenosaunee Chief Deskaheh travelled to Geneva to speak to the League of Nations and defend the right of his people to live under their own laws, on the own land and under their own faith.
Even though he was not allowed to speak and returned home in 1924, his vision nourished the generations that followed.
Other indigenous peoples, including the Maori peoples of New Zealand (Atearoa) and the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, also appealed around this time to the Crown of England and the international community for recognition of their rights and also for the acknowledgement of the many human rights abuses they were experiencing.
In Australia, for instance, Aboriginal peoples were massacred with impunity, up until the 1930s. When the great flu returned with the troops after World War I, in country areas Aboriginal peoples who tried to seek help from government health clinics were shooed away like rabbits and left to die. This was a terrible time for Aboriginal Australians. From the late 1800s until the 1967, we were not recognized as citizens in our own land. We were counted along with the fauna and flora. This was the time of the ironically called “Aboriginal Protection Acts”. Under this legislation Aboriginal peoples were rounded up like cattle and detained in church missions and government reserves. It is also fair to say that some Aboriginal peoples went voluntarily to missions and reserves for protection, because during this time there was frontier violence in which many Aboriginal peoples were killed, shot or poisoned. Our numbers had already been drastically reduced with the arrival of the British and the introduction of diseases (to which Aboriginal peoples had little or no immunity) including smallpox, measals, flu, as well as alcohol and opium. Under the Aboriginal Protection Acts, Aboriginal children, of mixed race, were routinely removed and institutionalised or fostered to white families, with a belief that this was in their best interest. Why? Because at this time, the accepted doctrine of the settlers was that Aboriginal peoples were inferior and therefore would naturally die out in a generation or so. The official government policy towards Aboriginal peoples was to “smooth the pillow of the dying race”.
In the 1950s, when the Aboriginal population stabilized and it became obvious that we would not die out, the government adopted a policy of assimilation. One particular government minister naively proposed to the parliament, to give him authority over Aboriginal peoples so that we could breed them out of existence, by marrying Aboriginal women to white men to produce children that would become progressively whiter and eventually, along with their skin colour, loose their Aboriginality.
To implement this policy of assimilation, Aboriginal children born on missions and reserves were commonly separated from their families at the age of five and placed in boys and girls dormitories. They were provided a basic education until about year 5 level and around the age of 12 were rented out to cattle and sleep stations as cheap labour.
Under the Protection Acts, Aboriginal peoples were not allowed to leave or enter another reserve, get a job, get married, or hold a bank account without the permission of the Chief Protector who was usually a local policeman. They were also not allowed to practice their language or culture and received physical punishment for doing so. Nor were they allowed to drink alcohol. They were treated as imbeciles or children – wards of the State. Yet the State failed miserably in its fiduciary duty to act in their best interests. Although Aboriginal men could enrol and fight for their country (and many did) in the various wars, when they returned home, they discovered that they were no longer treated as equals, as they were in the trenches. They could no longer have a beer with their mates, their comrades in arms.
These circumstances, the continuing struggle for rights, and interestingly enough the civil rights movement, which began in the United States, provided impetus to for Australia’s own civil rights movement. We refer to them as the freedom rides.
In the 1960s, Aboriginal peoples and their non-indigenous supporters, academics and university students, rode on buses into country towns were segregation was a part of life and challenged the status quo. My Aunty Evelyn Scott, who in the 1990s became the second Chair of the National Reconciliation Council, was a freedom rider.
In 1967, Australians voted to change the constitution to give the federal government power to legislate over Aboriginal Australians and to include them as citizens in our own land. Ironically although Aboriginal peoples actively lobbied, in the run up to the referendum, they were not allowed to vote until 1969.
97% of Australians said yes to Aboriginal peoples becoming citizens in our own land and like in To Kill a Mocking Bird, the world slowly began to change.
I was 9 years old and the product of a father of Aboriginal descent and a mother of Irish descent. However, the missions and reserve continued as late as the early 1980s, when the last of these institutions were handed over to Aboriginal control as local community councils. Of course, racism and discrimination continued to varying degrees and Australia did not implement the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination (CERD, 1967) until 1975.
Ironically, many Aboriginal peoples, who maintained their connection to their lands by working on cattle and sheep stations, were thrown off these properties, when the land owners were required to pay them equal wages. Just as the powers that be cried out to the women suffragettes – equal wages would destroy the country, the same argument was used against equal wages for Aborigines. Up until this time if was common for Aboriginal peoples to be paid in rations such as sugar, flour and tea for their hard work.
In 1992, the High Court of Australia, recognized for the first time in the Mabo case, that the country was not empty when the British arrived and native title may continue to exist. This decision effectively over turned the doctrine of possession and settlement referred to as terra nullias³, resulting in the establishment of the Native Title Act.
The Native Title Act allowed Aboriginal groups, who had maintained continuous connection to their traditional territories or “country”, access to a legal process to claim back some of their lands and waters. This only applied to unused crown lands and not to private property. It applied partially to leasehold lands. Successful claims were made particularly difficult, as the official government policies for generations, focussed on removing Aboriginal peoples from our traditional territories and relocation to other places, in a deliberate effort to sever ties to country, culture and language.
This period was also the time of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody⁴ and the National Inquiry into the Forcible Removal of Aboriginal Children from their Families (the official report by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission is called the Bringing Them Home Report) and the National Reconciliation Process.
However, the incoming conservative government elected in 1997, amended the Native Title Act and raised the bar of evidence and also attempted to discredit the Bringing Them Home report. Hence the Native Title Act, to date has delivered very little outcomes to Aboriginal peoples and our struggle continues...

Our struggle did not continue alone. The reconciliation process became a popular public movement and many Australians supported social justice and human rights for Aboriginal Australians. Symbolic of this was a public march of one million Australians across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1998. An impressive gathering of both indigenous and non-indigenous Australians indeed.
In 2007, with the election of a new incoming Australian government, the Prime Minister made an official apology to Australia’s indigenous peoples. Tears flowed from all of us, as the Government, on behalf of all Australians said “sorry” and Aboriginal peoples accepted. This was a hugely symbolic gesture, which will help all Australians to move forward together.
Of course, the world does not change over night and the social statistics of Aboriginal Australians continues to be well below the rest of the population⁵, and to a degree, racism and discrimination continue, perhaps not so much overtly but certainly indirectly and structurally.
The new Government also decided to adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples⁶ and this should happen soon.
This is the story of Aboriginal Australia and it is my story.
I tell it here, as one example of an indigenous struggle. Indigenous peoples remain diverse and our historic and political circumstances are also diverse. There are great differences also between indigenous experiences in the developed world and the developing world. Yet we have common elements, common characteristics and a common struggle that has manifested at the international level.
Through the Working Group on Indigenous Populations⁷, which eventually morphed into the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues⁸ and the establishment of important human rights mechanisms such as the Special Rapporteur on Indigenous people and the recently established Specialist Mechanism of the Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples, indigenous peoples continue to struggle for equity, social justice and human rights.
Many indigenous peoples remain marginalised, their cultures denigrated and continue to suffer appalling social statistics, and most recently, have become the human face of climate change.
It is ironic that those who are least responsible for the global crises of climate change will bare the brunt of not just of climate change but also of many climate change solutions⁹.
Largely because of their attachment to their traditional lands and waters and the plants and animals therein, but also because extreme poverty.
So despite significant advances, our struggle will continue – it is not something one wins in a generation or can retire from. We were here in the beginning and we are here now and will be here unto the end of time.

¹ The Mohawk are part of an ancient confederacy referred to as the Haudenosaunee made up of six indigenous nations. This confederacy became a model for the formation of the constitution of the United States of America.

² Indigenous peoples number more than 400 million peoples from more than 70 countries. Although there is no definition, there are common characteristics such as being “first peoples” and collection ownership and rights.

³ Latin for empty land

⁴ Aboriginal peoples were dying in custody at 10 times to rate of non-indigenous peoples.

⁵ i.e. Aboriginal Australians continue the have the poorest health statistics dying 20 years earlier than other Australians, as well as the poorest education retention and attainment rates, unemployment rates and continue to live in over crowded housing, with poor infrastructure.

⁶ The previous Australian government along with only 3 other governments in the world (USA, Canada and New Zealand), refused the sign the Declaration, when it was adopted by the General Assembly on 13th September, 2007.

⁷ Established in 1982 and chaired for many years, by the champion of indigenous peoples, Mrs. Erica Irene Daes.

⁸ Established in 2000 with a secretariat in New York.

⁹ Such as biofuels and proposed REDD schemes.