Amerindian or Indigenous?

Sep 03, 2008 Editorial

September is “Amerindian Heritage Month”. Surely one aspect of the heritage of any people would be to allow them to name themselves. Three years ago, when the “Amerindian Bill’s amendment was being debated in Parliament, almost all the organizations representing the peoples affected insisted that they, and the act, should be referred to as “Indigenous Peoples”. The government disagreed and they have remained as “Amerindians”.

So what’s in the names “Amerindian” and “Indigenous”? Simply put, “Amerindian” is one of the misnomers Columbus bequeathed on the individuals living on “New World” he ran into, when he was trying to get to India in 1492.

It represents all that the ensuing 500 years of colonialism created; it represents genocide so extensive that it makes the Jewish Holocaust appear trivial; it represents an underdevelopment and peripherilisation so complete that the descendants of those original peoples are at the bottom of the social ladder in every country in which they survived; it represents racism and injustice.

But the Government insisted that the “Amerindians” can call themselves by whatever name they choose, so what was the problem with renaming the bill? After all, our Constitution refers to them as Indigenous Peoples” in several places.

The truth is that across the globe, the various peoples who were “discovered” by the Europeans after 1492 have had some measure of success in rectifying the historical injustices that were done to them. These rectifications have been codified into the law of several countries (including several in the Commonwealth) but more importantly, into some international Treaties and Covenants onto which Guyana has signed.

And this is the crux of the matter. If the Government had labeled its review of the “Amerindian Act” as the “Indigenous Peoples Act”, it feared that it would be making it easier for local activists.

But in this stance, the Government is only delaying the inevitable and is giving itself a black eye to the international community. After all, even in a domestic challenge, the courts will have to take cognizance of several Commonwealth decisions that recognize “aboriginal title”.

One expert has pointed out, “Aboriginal title is a collective right to land and resources derived from occupation and use of the same, prior to acquisition of sovereignty by the British crown.

It is considered to be a unique (sui generis) form of property insofar as it does not conform to traditional feudal estates in land known under the common law, which flows from the crown, but rather is based upon pre-sovereignty occupation and indigenous peoples’ own laws and customs. It is capable of recognition and enforcement under the common law because that law considers, absent competing and better title, occupation to be proof of possession and possession to be proof of ownership.”

In terms of mineral rights, which is at the heart of the efforts to restrict Indigenous peoples’ rights today, the expert continued, “With regard to mineral rights, a recent South African Constitutional Court case provides support for the indigenous position on ownership of the subsoil.”

In Alexkor Ltd and the Republic of South Africa v. The Richtersveld Community and Others, the Court held that a dispute between indigenous people as to the right to occupy a piece of land has to be determined according to indigenous law “without importing English conceptions of property law.”

The Court further observed that it was “satisfied that under the indigenous law of the Richtersveld Community communal ownership of the land included communal ownership of the minerals and precious stones.”

The Court also found that “failure to recognize and accord protection to indigenous law ownership while, on the other hand, according protection to registered title constitutes racial discrimination in violation of Constitutional guarantees.”

So this month as we commemorate “Amerindian Heritage Month” we as a nation ought to reflect on the irony that even as we parade our Indigenous Peoples to the world (in grass skirts even!) and pronounce on how high their representatives have risen in government, they are yet refused to give effect to their right to name themselves.

Happy Indigenous Peoples Month!