Grant Indigenous People the Gift of Respect
Editorial: By Eugene Lapointe

What do indigenous peoples typically seek from their national governments and from the general public? Despite its apparent broad nature, I believe that I can answer this potentially complex question quite simply - respect. They seek to be respected by their national governments and by the electorate that puts those governments into office.

At first sight, my assertion may appear a little simplistic because, surely, indigenous peoples seek much more - control over the lands and the waterways that are their historical patrimony, unfettered access to the wildlife resources that inhabit that patrimony, authority over any external exploitation of their lands by oil and gas or mining interests not to mention the restoration of traditional rights that, all too often, have been violently taken away from them.

However, I will insist that all of these concerns flow from respect or, more accurately, from the lack of respect that has frequently been shown to indigenous peoples by national governments, multilateral development institutions and extractive industries. If a government respected the indigenous peoples living within its national borders, then it would never try to open that people's territory up to oil and gas exploration without first conducting extensive consultation with that people, asking how they believe this development should be controlled and granting them substantive control over the nature and course of that development. It goes without saying, in this context, that if the relevant indigenous peoples give the thumbs down to development proposals, that should be the final word in the matter. Consultation is meaningless if the right of the consulted party to reject the proposal is not totally respected.

Sad to say, relations between national governments and indigenous peoples have, all too often, been typified by a lack of respect by the former party. Similarly, multilateral development institutions such as the World Bank and the Inter American Development Bank have, all too often, concluded that the wise, over-educated solons that populate their offices need pay no heed to native peoples. To the contrary, the wisdom is all theirs, accumulated at the elite educational institutions of the Western world. Why need they listen to "natives" - a noun pronounced with a distinct sense of looking down the nose hauteur.

I suspect that many of us know exactly why these multilateral organizations need to spend much more time with native peoples - because all too often the so-called development projects that they have funded have proved to be environmental disasters that have left a legacy of pollution, crime and degradation in their wake while affording little or no economic, educational or cultural benefit to the peoples whose lands were so badly desecrated. That said, I must give credit where credit is due - I applaud the World Bank and other commercial institutions for recognizing their past sins, even at this late stage, and adopting the Equator Principles to govern the financing of future projects. If these principles can be put into practice - and we all know how high sounding rhetorical commitments can prove hollow in the implementation - they could serve to reverse many decades of bad practice in the developing world by those same multilateral institutions that, supposedly, exist to help less fortunate countries.

However, I would be remiss if I were to suggest that native peoples and their lands have been threatened only by the forces of banking and industry. Far too often, those same Non Governmental Organizations that profess to be protectors of the environment and of native peoples have proved themselves arrogant and have decided that they can identify native interests much better than natives themselves. Take, for example, last year's Canadian seal hunt, an activity that has provided a livelihood for Canadian Inuit for many years. Before the hunt could even begin, a host of left-wing, ecological NGOs vacated their offices in Washington DC and decamped north to protest the hunt and, hopefully, to halt it. Did it not occur to any of them to consult the Inuit first? As I mentioned earlier, everything flows from respect or, in this case, from the lack of it.

When the government of the United Kingdom lectures African nations that they must stop their native peoples from eating bush meat, does it not occur to Whitehall that it is projecting a picture of itself as an interfering school mar'm who is quite convinced that she knows what is best for her childish pupils? How do residents of Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa feel when they are told by NGOs that, despite their excellent elephant conservation programs, they may not sell the ivory from culled elephants to finance those same conservation programs? A decision, I should point out, that is made not in Gabarone, Harare, Windhoek or Pretoria but in London and Washington.

No one knows better how to manage native lands and how to manage the wild flora and fauna on those lands than native peoples themselves. They have lived off these lands for centuries and never experienced any problems with the sustainability of their lifestyles until they lost full control over those lands and wildlife. I say to governments, industry, banks and NGOs alike - grant indigenous people the one free gift that it is in your power to give. Give the gift of respect and then leave them alone to get on with managing their resources as they have proved they can do since time immemorial.