Struggling to Be Themselves

By Michael S. Serrill

Elijah Harper, a Cree-Ojibway Indian and legislator in the province of Manitoba, became a hero to Canadian Indians and Inuit two years ago when he brought the machinery of national constitutional reform to a halt. His decisive no in the Manitoba legislative assembly not only doomed a complex pact designed to put the Canadian confederation on a new footing but also sent the country's political leadership back to the drawing board. Spurred in part by the Manitoban's stubborn stand, federal and provincial leaders agreed for the first time that a revised constitution must recognize native peoples' "inherent right to self-government."

But native rights lost ground when a broad majority of Canadians rejected the new constitution last week. Ovide Mercredi, chief of the Assembly of First Nations, warned of new confrontations as indigenous peoples sought redress through roadblocks and public protests instead. Still, Canada's attempts to codify native self-government was the latest sign that the struggle for political recognition by native peoples across North and South America is bearing some fruit. From the Yukon to Yuma to Cape Horn, indigenous peoples are using new strategies to recover some of the land, resources and sovereignty they lost in the past 500 years. They have negotiated, sued, launched international campaigns, occupied land and, in a few cases, taken up arms to press their cause, marking in their own way the quincentennial of Christopher Columbus' arrival in the New World -- an event Native Americans rank as the greatest single disaster in their history.

History cannot be reversed, but historic change seems to be in the making. In Canada the commitment to native self-determination followed another major step: the creation of a self-governing entity called Nunavut out of the vast Northwest Territories, effectively turning a fifth of Canada's 4 million-sq.- mi. territory over to 17,500 Inuit. In the province of Quebec, persistent agitation by 10,000 Inuit and Cree Indians against the second phase of an $11 billion hydroelectric project at James Bay, which would flood thousands more acres of Indian and Inuit lands, has placed the enterprise's future in doubt.

In South America large areas of the Amazon Basin have been reserved for the exclusive use of Brazilian, Ecuadorian, Peruvian and Venezuelan Indians. The rights of tribes to conduct their own affairs, form their own councils and receive royalties for mining activities on Indian lands are gradually being recognized.

In the U.S., Indian tribes are trying to get government to honor promises of autonomy that go back 150 years. Some tribes fund the effort with dollars earned from gambling operations on Indian land, where state writ generally does not apply.

The fate of 40.5 million indigenous people -- 37 million in Latin America, 2 million in the U.S. and 1.5 million in Canada -- has become a focus for discussion at the U.N. and in the councils of the European Community. Environmental groups have declared native peoples to be model conservators of the earth's increasingly fragile ecology. Native activism is entering a multinational phase. Over the past year, representatives of dozens of tribes in the hemisphere have held dozens of meetings to discuss common action to regain land and at least a measure of self-government. In some cases, they have called for recognition of their right to preserve their cultural identities.

Such assertiveness cannot come too soon for most of the Americas' original inhabitants, whose plight, more often than not, is desperate. The U.S.'s poorest county, according to the 1990 census, is the one encompassing the Pine Ridge Reservation of the Oglala Sioux in South Dakota, where 63% of the people live below the poverty line. Death from heart disease occurs at double the national rate; from alcoholism, at 10 times the U.S. average. Similarly, in Canada, aboriginals, as they are called, are among the poorest of the poor, afflicted by high rates of alcoholism and suicide. In Latin America the descendants of the Maya, Aztecs and Incas have been relegated to the lowest rung of society.

Neglect is not the worst that native peoples have suffered. "For centuries governments have often treated the rights of indigenous people with contempt -- torturing and killing them in the tens of thousands and doing virtually nothing when others murder them," charges Amnesty International in a report issued last month. The depth of discrimination, poverty and despair makes some of the recent strides by the Americas' native peoples all the more remarkable:

CANADA. Sixty miles north of Vancouver, a group of 700 Sechelt Indians, self- governing since 1986, have established themselves on 3,000 acres of waterfront and forest land. They own a salmon hatchery and earn revenue from a gravel-quarrying business; the profits have helped build a community center and provide social benefits, including low-cost housing for the elderly. The Sechelt gained autonomy by giving up their claim to an additional 14,250 acres of British Columbia, for which they have asked $45 million in compensation. Though other natives have criticized the deal, Chief Thomas Paul, 46, says the settlement "will give us a large economic base to make us self-sufficient."

Canada's rejected constitutional changes would have given the natives a "third order of government," with status analogous to the federal and provincial governments. Indians would have gained full jurisdiction over such natural resources as oil and gas, minerals and forests, their own local or regional administrations, justice and education systems, and the administration of much of the $4.5 billion in federal social-welfare funds that flow to the tribes.

Such sweeping guarantees would have been an enormous step forward, but in practical ways Canada is already engaged in enormous land settlements and a broad transfer of local power to native peoples. In many cities as well as in the northern territories, administrative powers and tax money can be turned over to the natives, and Justice Minister Kim Campbell promised after the vote that this will be done. Although some Indians were just as glad the constitutional changes failed, both yes and no voters insisted that the referendum last week did not mean a permanent rejection of native rights.

THE U.S. On the Ak-Chin Indian reservation south of Phoenix, Arizona, self- government and self-sufficiency are taken for granted. The Ak-Chin broke away from the paternalistic U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, the federal agency that still controls much of Indian life from cradle to grave, in 1961 when the tribe insisted on farming its own lands rather than leasing them out to non- Indians for negligible revenues. Today the 600-member tribe takes in profits of more than $1 million a year by growing crops on 16,500 acres. About 175 Ak-Chins work on the land or in community government; the tribal unemployment rate is 3%. The Ak-Chins accept federal funds only for housing loans. To become even more self-sufficient, the tribe has plans to start manufacturing operations and perhaps casinos.

On paper at least, the 2 million Indians and Eskimos in the U.S. have had more autonomy -- and have had it longer -- than their Canadian or Latin * American counterparts; in 1831 the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the tribes were "domestic dependent nations" entitled to limited self-government. That status was largely fiction for the next 140 years, however; not until 25 years ago did an Indian-rights movement begin agitating to claim what had been guaranteed. Since then the movement has scored some notable gains:

-- In 1971 Congress awarded the 60,000 native peoples of Alaska $962 million and 40 million acres to settle their land claims. Natives have used the funds to invest in companies involved in everything from timber to broadcasting.

-- In 1988 the Puyallup Indians in Tacoma, Washington, received $66 million and 300 acres of prime land in the port of Tacoma based on an 1854 treaty. The tribe will build a marina and container-shipping facility on the land -- and will celebrate each member's 21st birthday with a $20,000 gift.

-- In 1990 the Shoshoni-Bannock people of the Fort Hall reservation in Idaho secured their right to use 581,000 acre-feet of water flowing through the Snake River under an 1868 treaty. The tribe will use the water for farming and sell any excess.

Ever since passage of the 1975 Indian Self-Determination Act, the tribes can take back from federal authorities the administration of education and other social programs; as a result, Indian governments now control about 40% of the Bureau of Indian Affairs' $1.9 billion budget. Self-government without development, however, has merely given many Indians the responsibility to administer their own poverty: they still have the shortest life-spans, highest infant-mortality rate, highest high school dropout rate and most extensive health problems of any U.S. ethnic group.

In some places that situation is changing slowly with the spin of roulette wheels. Empowered by a series of court decisions and a 1988 federal law, about 140 Indian tribes across the country operate 150 gambling operations. Revenue has grown from $287 million in 1987 to more than $3.2 billion and is making some tribes rich.

LATIN AMERICA. The protest was unlike anything Ecuadorians had ever seen. In June 1990, responding to a call from the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador to demand title to their lands, more than half a million native Ecuadorians marched out of their isolated villages to block roads, occupy churches and city halls, and stage noisy demonstrations. The sudden upheaval, which lasted a week and virtually shut down the country, < shocked the European and mixed-race elites that have ruled Ecuador for centuries -- but it also produced results. Last May, then President Rodrigo Borja agreed to hand over legal title to more than 2.5 million acres of Amazon land to 109 communities of Quichua, Achuar and Shiwiar peoples in the eastern province of Pastaza.

"We believe in our capacity to organize, not in the government's goodwill," says Valerio Grefa, leader of the Indians of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Similar sentiments have stirred tribes from Mexico to Chile and have even inspired some armed guerrilla movements that make the struggle for Indian rights part of their ideology. After initial anger and confusion, governments have begun to respond. In Peru, Amazonian Indians have reclaimed 5 million acres of traditional lands, using $1.3 million in assistance from Denmark. Colombia's 60 Indian tribes have won title to more than 2.5 million acres.

In Brazil, with 240,000 Indians in a population of 146 million, the government last year set aside 37,450 sq. mi. for 9,500 Yanomami, a fragile Amazon tribe whose way of life had been virtually destroyed by migratory gold miners. In the past 2 1/2 years, Brasilia has created 131 reserves covering 120,000 sq. mi. in 19 states that are home to 100,000 Indians. It is a beginning -- but it does not come close to ending the threat to the tribes, whose lands are frequently invaded by aggressive miners and ranchers and who receive little help from the Indian-protection agency.

Cycles of destruction and rebirth are hardly unknown to the Americas' native peoples. The Aymara people of Bolivia have a word for times of war, enslavement and privation: pachakuti, or the disruption of the universe. But pachakuti also contains the assumption that the cosmic order will be restored, ushering in a period of peace and harmony, or nayrapacha. Though their struggle has a far way to go, the native peoples of the two continents are hoping that nayrapacha is within their reach.

With reporting by Nancy Harbert/Albuquerque, Ian McCluskey/Rio de Janeiro and Courtney Tower/Ottawa