Mind 79‘natural’ human condition both to criticize the societies of their day and to cele-
brate ‘innocence’ and ‘simplicity’ – a core of deep human goodness – in peoples
whom we would now call hunter-gatherers. In one context, these newly discovered
tribes were savages whose conditions gave them no rights to life, liberty or prop-
erty. In another, they became symbols for the human potential for goodness, equal-
ity and freedom.
These paradoxes point to the cynicism of the colonial project. The explorer
Ralph Standish wrote in 1612 about the ‘savages’ he had met at the Cape of Good
Hope.^6 Given their want of human achievements, it was, he said, ‘a great pittie that
such creatures as they bee should injoy so sweett a country.’ The countries of the
new worlds were indeed ‘sweett’ to the farmers who wanted to make them their
own. Inca and Aztec silver provided wealth for the impecunious monarchy of
17th-century Spain; extensive grasslands and forest offered at least a hope of wealth
to the landless settlers who had reached the expanding edges of European empires.
In each place colonists claimed as their own, they concocted justifications for dis-
possessing people and taking their territories. To say that those they encountered
were not human was the most general – and, in its way, the simplest – device for
depriving hundreds of cultures and millions of human beings of their rights.
6
When Anaviapik and Ulajuk raised the question of how southerners have seen the
Inuit, they expressed a concern that must have puzzled, alarmed and at times
oppressed many, if not all, hunter-gatherers. They have experienced the attitudes
of settlers and settler governments towards them. They have felt the consequences
of the judgement that they, the original inhabitants, are not entitled to their own
lands, languages and ways of life. They know that this judgement is somehow con-
nected to a refusal by the colonists to see that hunter-gatherers have minds – a
refusal that sits at the centre of the history of colonial misrepresentation.
The indigenous peoples of Canada have been forced to respond to a strong
implication in modern legal theory that they do not qualify as fully human. This
version of frontier racism has arisen in legal arguments about ‘aboriginal title’,
the rights indigenous peoples may or may not have to their own systems, terri-
tories and resources. The legal and political actions that lie behind these contests
over title are referred to in Canada as ‘land claims’. For a century, various abo-
riginal peoples have had to make these claims. After his election in 1968, Prime
Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau maintained a long colonial tradition by insisting
that the nation’s Indians should be assimilated into the mainstream of national
life. In 1971, Trudeau announced a change of policy from adamant rejection to
circumspect acceptance of a land-claims process.^7 This shift resulted from a
judgement in the Supreme Court of Canada in what is known as the Calder case
- an action brought by the Nisga’a people, who argued that they had aboriginal