Western Nations and Indigenous Peoples

All Western states founded outside of Europe face the same unique dilemma: a set of indigenous populations that resided on the land before Western peoples found nations there. These peoples go by many names. In Canada, they are commonly called First Nations, while in the US one may hear them called both Indian and Native American. In New Zealand, the Maori are cohesive enough to go by a single term, and in Australia, the first inhabitants are called Aboriginals. These were the first peoples of the landmasses and they continue to inhabit them, but they did not build the nations which exist there today.

European pioneers arrived and settled these lands, building unique nations and cultures informed by their European heritage. America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and other nations did not exist before the West founded them, they belong to the West. We fight to keep these lands and preserve our nations.

However, today many of the aforementioned indigenous populations fight against the pioneer nations with the backing of numerous corporate, political, and ideological interests. Just this year Canada agreed to pay First Nations families and peoples 17.35 billion US dollars in compensation after a tribunal ruled that the Canadian government had systemically underfunded welfare systems on First Nations Reserves for decades. This money, the tax dollar of Canada’s founding stock, is being transferred to a population that recently engaged in the slanderous lie that Canada was hiding mass graves of First Nations children.

We are in the midst of a political fight for the Western peoples to retain our nations and our demographic majorities within them, but Indigenous populations are not populations that can be repatriated elsewhere and so a different solution is needed: autonomy.

Many Western nations already have some form of an “indigenous autonomy” framework in place. In the United States this is the reservation system, in Canada there are reserves, Australia once had an active policy of supporting the voluntary relocation of aboriginal communities to land they still held, and in New Zealand, many Maori have grouped together around the pieces of land which they either individually or collectively own.

All of these systems provide the base for proper autonomy and political self-determination for indigenous populations.

Indigenous populations should receive the maximum amount of autonomy possible: the ability to organize their own governments which rule over their own lands and determine every facet of policy within their borders, except that which is crucial to the functioning of the nation as a whole. What might be termed “reserve powers.”

These reserved powers, retained by the national governments would be those related to foreign policy, immigration and nationality, the currency, the armed forces, and the constitutional makeup of the nation.

Though this is far from the only type of autonomy and it may occasionally be necessary for policymakers to explore alternatives in order to come up with satisfactory compromises and solutions.

The Canadian territory of Nunavut is operated as a First Nations-dominated and governed territory for the Inuit peoples who reside there. In Greenland, the native people have an extremely high degree of autonomy as a nation within the Kingdom of Denmark. The Nunavut option may be viable for a territory like Hawaii which is already a state with a large native Hawaiian population—simply declaring that the state is “for Hawaiians” rather than requiring a change in the territory’s constitutional status.

Regardless of the type of autonomy on offer what is important is that much of the land required to make autonomy viable is already in indigenous hands. The land bases for these proposed autonomous communities already exist. Indian reservations in the United States have a total area roughly the size of the state of Idaho (about the size of the nation of Austria). In Canada First Nations reserves have a land area comparable in size to Armenia. In New Zealand Maori land holdings are roughly the size of East Timor or Kuwait, and in Australia, Aboriginal land and native titles cover an area roughly the size of Angola.

Nationalist governments and indigenous leaders of the future could, should, and must sit down to determine the powers, borders, and boundaries of autonomous entities for indigenous populations. Indigenous persons living outside of these entities would not be forced to relocate to them but could be incentivized to do so through the promise of financing to assist in such relocations and the establishment of businesses and institutions therein.

The process will not be simple in all cases, but rather than attempting to strip Western peoples of our sovereignty through failed initiatives like the Indigenous Voice vote in Australia, we can come up with a compromise that grants autonomy to native peoples and guarantees the sovereignty of Western nations.