[“Marginalization was a federal policy in both Canada and the United States for 150 years. The purpose has always been to get people out of the way so that industry could exploit natural resources and claim them as their own. The Declaration of Independence refers to “Indian savages” three times, while the document itself failed to apply to Native peoples. (Charlie Hill joked, “You’d think they would at least change it to ‘Native American savages.’ ”)
In Canada, it was against the law for Native peoples to form a political organization, so as to limit their ability to fight back. Until 1951, Canada defined a “person” as any individual “other than an Indian.”
The interests of corporations were always considered paramount. As of this writing, 25 percent of First Nations reserves in Canada have no drinkable water. Eighty communities are currently under long-term water-boil advisory, some of which have been in effect since the 1960s. In nearly every case, the water supply was contaminated by private industry extracting resources at any cost. Likewise, in the United States, 40 percent of the Navajo Nation lives without water after reckless mining interests poisoned the groundwater with uranium by-products.
Canada and the United States both justified their jurisdiction over Native lands by invoking the Doctrine of Discovery. Originally devised in the fifteenth century, it had the blessing of the pope and served as the basis upon which Holland, England, France, Portugal, and Spain colonized foreign lands. It stated that if a Christian explorer found a country without Christians—even if it was already inhabited by millions of people—ownership of the land automatically reverted to the host country of the Christian explorer.
Canada still invokes the Doctrine of Discovery as a legal defense whenever industrial resource projects are challenged in court by Native nations. When the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) was ratified by the international community in 2007, it deemed the Doctrine of Discovery illegitimate and a violation of international law. It compared it to the codes that had once justified slavery on legal grounds. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States were the only countries that refused to ratify UNDRIP. Canada held out for several years until government lobbyists secured an amendment—Article 46—stating that they would support UNDRIP so long as they would not have to honor it. At the core of every pipeline dispute today is the contested Doctrine of Discovery and the debate over who actually holds title to the land.”]
Kliph Nesteroff, We Had A Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story Of Native Americans And Comedy
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