The Politics of Sustainable Development: Reconciliation in Indigenous Hinterlands: Paper for International Research Project, University of Tromso

• Main Author: Jull, Peter
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2002
• Subjects: Indigenous peoples; Reconciliation; Self-determination; Indigenous self-government; Tromso; inuit; sami; University of Tromso
• Online Access: https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:11293/jull1102.pdf; https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:11293

The subject of this paper is the process of resistance and political activism involving indigenous peoples in national hinterlands previously invisible to national governments. Sami, Inuit, and other peoples of Northern Eurasia and North America, as well as Australia's Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders, have been shaping new political institutions and political cultures in large regions through their defence of homelands and culture, their search for more power in their lives, and more power in the protection, management, and development of land and sea territories. This has been a negotiation, sometimes implicit and visible in hindsight, sometimes explicit. Over recent decades it has brought many changes and will bring many more in coming years. Some governments have been reluctant to recognise this process or understand its dynamics, benefits, or requirements, so progress has had a stop-go character, resulting in much unnecessary and damaging delay and conflict. The best way forward is for national governments to recognise indigenous political communities and their rights, by accommodating, joining with, or reconciling with those communities through designing with them political, legal, and administrative arrangements for the protection of territory and its sustainable resources and livelihoods; and assuring to indigenous peoples their associated imperatives of culture, language, and self-government. The underlying assumptions are that indigenous peoples are important and must survive, and that at least 'first world' national governments are responsible enough, ultimately, to act on as well as talk about sustainable development.