Indigenous sovereignty is on the rise. Can it shape the course of history? (2024)

Time has long worked against Indigenous peoples. TheEnglish-speaking epochs of the last 200 years - the Pax Britannica andAmerican Century - share the same dramatic opening scene: a global coupdisplacing millions of people and thousands of societies from theMi'kmaq in New Foundland to the Mori in New Zealand.

Property, sovereignty and even history itself are said to originatewith these Anglo-Saxon triumphs. History and time are appropriated asthe sole possessions of the white men who inherited the earth. For theruling class, their passage marks the steady advance of civilisation,modernity and progress. Rapturous booms and tumultuous busts arepunctuated by bloody wars recast as heroic conquests. All throughout theland, alabaster monuments memorialise these triumphs and tragedies.

For Indigenous peoples, the same dates, statues and eras markmassacres, epidemics and expulsions. Generations rue the insidiousdevastation of occupation. Songs and stories reverberate to the rhythmsand dreams of a halcyon freedom receding into legend as our last elderswho bore witness pass onto the next world.

The history of the English-speaking world, brought crashing downupon Aboriginal peoples is a shared nightmare lurking in the collectivesubconscious of the survivors. From reservations, ghettoes and schoolswhere the first peoples of these lands were sent to assimilate or die,we look out upon a world built on the premise that in it we have noplace.

Nowhere is this history more palpable than Australia. The FirstNations under the Southern Cross and the Emu in the Sky have called theAustralian continent home for more than 60,000 years, making them one ofthe world's longest-standing cultural groups with an unbrokenconnection to their ancestral lands.

Brutal onslaught

They endured one of colonisation's most brutal onslaughtsjustified by settlers who openly questioned their humanity and oftenspeculated that their diverse and vibrant societies were "theconnecting link between man and the monkey tribe."

In Australia, unlike the rest of the Commonwealth and the UnitedStates, treaties were never signed between First Nations and the Crown.Instead, the British - seasoned colonisers by this point in time - wroteoff Aboriginal peoples as savage wanderers who did not have sufficienthumanity to merit title to their homelands. The entire continent wasexpropriated under the doctrine of terra nullius - a legal principlethat said Indigenous territories were empty and free for the taking.

Despite Australia's relentless disavowal of Indigenouspresence, Aboriginal peoples never gave up hope. A sign in front of theAboriginal Tent Embassy established in 1972 on lawns facing Canberraparliament reads: Sovereignty never ceded. Through decades and evencenturies of survival and struggle, the first Australians have wonremarkable victories recognising their personhood, land rights and rightto self-determination in the face of a profound history ofdehumanisation.

Yet the stubborn and punitive Australian state continues to denytheir rightful and enduring sovereignty.

Last week over 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leadersgathered at the community of Mutitjulu situated at the eastern base ofthe sacred Uluru rock formation. There, in a community that still bearsthe scars of the controversial and punitive 2007 Northern TerritoryIntervention when soldiers invaded aboriginal communities, delegatesworked long into the night to chart a path forward for aboriginalpeoples in Australia. On Friday, in The Uluru Statement from the Heart,a majority rejected symbolic constitutional recognition and assertedtheir unextinguished sovereignty.

Sovereignty a 'spiritual notion'

"This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tiebetween the land, or 'mother nature', and the Aboriginal andTorres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attachedthereto, and must one day return thither to be united with ourancestors." The statement continues, "This link is the basisof the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has neverbeen ceded or extinguished, and coexists with the sovereignty of theCrown."

The statement demands a permanent First Nations voice be enshrinedin the constitution, perhaps in a model similar to New Zealand'sMori seats or Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution, and calls for theformation of a commission for Makaratta - an Indigenous Yolgnu word fortreaty.

While a great political fight lies ahead, the Uluru referendum andstatement mark a historic moment - not just for Australia, but also forIndigenous peoples and the planet. After decades of struggle andadvances won in small and often unnoticed increments, Indigenoussovereignty has arrived in full bloom as a global aspiration and forcefor human good.

It protects the lands, waters and natural resources that all livingthings require to survive. In December 2012, First Nations, Inuit andMetis peoples across Canada launched the ongoing Idle No More movementto protect the environment and assert Indigenous sovereignty.

In 2014, the Te Paparahi o Te Raki Inquiry of the Waitangi Tribunalin Aotearoa/New Zealand - a truth and justice-seeking commission foundedin direct response to the 1970s Mori Renaissance - found that the Ngpuhiiwi, the largest tribe in New Zealand, never gave up their sovereignty.

Legal victory

This year, in a path-breaking Waitangi treaty settlement, theWhanganui iwi won a 140-year battle to recognise the legal personhood oftheir ancestral Whanganui River. And in the United States, an Indigenouscoalition led by the Standing Rock Sioux spearheaded a captivatingglobal movement to assert their Indigenous and treaty rights against theDakota Access Pipeline.

The powerful and prayerful Indigenous demand for sovereignty in thename of water that gave birth to life and land that provides for peoplehas encircled the world from Standing Rock to Uluru.

"The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of thecolour line," wrote WEB Du Bois in an address To the Nations of theWorld adopted by the 57 delegates attending the First Pan-AfricanConference in London in 1900. At Uluru and beyond, Indigenous peopleshave insisted that the problems of the 21st Century will be the problemsof sovereignty and the environment.

As the American superpower convulses in a self-inflicted crisis ofgreatness and greed, many, with good reason, have declared this theChinese century. But in the wake of Standing Rock and Uluru, withrallying cries of Tino Rangatiratanga and Mni Wiconi, when we envision aplanet that is left better rather than blighted for generations afterus, this may also be the Indigenous century.

As humanity faces global crises of state and environment thatdemand new, creative and compassionate coalitions and ideas to rescueour planet and species from the precipice of disaster, the Indigenouscentury is just in time.

- Guardian News & Media Ltd

Julian Brave NoiseCat is an enrolled member of the Canim Lake BandTsq'escen in British Columbia. He is a graduate of ColumbiaUniversity and received a Clarendon Scholarship to study global andimperial history at the University of Oxford.

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