Australia's Aboriginal Communities - Beyond Hope?

[vison]

The issues around population figures are manifold and complicated. In Canada there are quite compelling political reasons for the First Nations to exaggerate the numbers, since many native tribes have never signed treaties or settled land claims. Some of the claims for the prairies and the north simply won't stand up to scrutiny.

It is true that diseases introduced by Europeans raced ahead of them into huge tracts of the Americas. Even so, archaeological evidence for large populations is hard to find for the era preceding the entry of Europeans. At this time it is 'politically correct' to go with the larger numbers but they are by no means universally accepted as correct.

As well, Columbus was certainly not the first European to reach the Americas. The incursions of the Vikings are well documented, some 400 years before Columbus. I once read an interesting article wherein the author wondered why the Vikings didn't introduce disease and the conclusion he reached was simply that no one knows if they did or not.

It seems that our view of the Americas as being completely isolated from the rest of the world is faulty. On the west coast there was at least a limited trade culture with Asia.

The subject of "where did the native populations of the Americas come from" is fraught with political implications. Some natives insist that they were always here. But recent DNA studies show something quite different, of course. The land bridge over the Bering Sea seems less and less likely to the the only or even the main route for migration from Aisa. It also seems that humans have lived in the Americas for much longer than was previously supposed, some estimates put it at over 75,000 years.

The Aboriginals of Australia have certainly lived there for at least 60,000 years, making them unique in the world as having the longest record of continuous habitation. Scientists are unable to work out how they got there, never mind when they got there.

[Jnyusa]

All of what you say is true, vison. And I do quite agree with Faramond that it is important to separate out the various factors contributing to the demise of these cultures.

There was also conquest and cultural annihilation among the natives themselves before Europeans landed here. On the east coast of Nicaragua I was dealing with tribes whose culture had been effectively expunged 1000 years ago by the Maya. Their language today is a derivative of the Mayan language - what their original language was no one knows - and it is quite inadequate to their needs, expecially given that their coast was settled by the English while the west coast was settled by the Spanish and it is Spanish-speaking people who today control the whole country. So they grow up in families speaking broken Miskito, hear English in the marketplace, learn Spanish at school, but don't speak any of those languages with fluency. They are trying now to negotiate through organizations like the OAS and are really hampered by an inability to communicate their modern needs in any language.

Yet these people still live among us, and I think it is very damaging to a country economically to have an underclass that is a permanent drain on resources.

Lord M., reparations are financial compensation for some loss that occurred because of activities now considered criminal.

They might take more than one form. The reparations paid by the German government to the Jews involved a one-time lump sum for property loss and loss of life (of family members), then, if the person was employed in Germany at the time of their exile, they are payed an annual subsidy for life based on their age, profession, etc. at the time when they left.

In slavery reparations, what has been suggested is that we pay the current value of what was promised but not given at the time of emancipation. Former slaves were promised 40 acres and a mule. This was actually given to about 10% of them. One Black economist (and I really wish I had saved this article because I've had so many occassions to quote it) calculated that the unpaid 90% invested over the subsequent 100+ year period would have created wealth three times greater than the sum of all welfare payments made to Blacks during the same time period. (The article was written in about 1998 I believe.) In other words, the Black community would likely be economically self-sufficient today, instead of being a drain on public coffers (and I am thinking here primarily of the criminal justice system and not the welfare system).

It's a lot of money, but what was true 100 years ago remains true today. If the transfer is made as property, as wealth that can be invested, it will generate its own income and 100 years from now we will be in a much better economic situation than we are today.

The way the welfare system is structured right now, a recipient is not permitted to own any property whatsoever, not even a life insurance policy. I understand the logic of this - one should exhaust one's own assets first. But Welfare payments are current income; property is future income. It is in fact the denial of property that causes welfare to become intergenerational.

We can't give back the Americas to the Indians of course. What happened to them was tragic but that was then and this is now. The people who actually live here today also have a valid claim. But, first of all, the goal is to make all members of society productive. That is my starting point. Second, I favor lump sum payments over long term income commitments because of their investment value to the economy as a whole.

The U.S. government should sit down with the remaining Native Americans, and there are a lot less of them than there are elderly people on permanent subsidy, and they should negotiate out a year that will be their starting point, agree on which property might be considered 'taken illegally' - i.e. in violation of treaty - figure out the existing population's fair share of what was taken, and pay it. Period.

There have been some reparations offered by the government already but they were not the result of negotiation and have not been accepted. In order for it to work there has to be voluntary commitment on both sides.

It is a misconception that unexpected costs are damaging to the economy. There is a tendency to prefer continuation of the expected cost because the known is more comfortable than the unknown. But the outcome depends as much on future benefit as it does on current cost, and people need to be educated as to how that analysis is done.

The example I like to use is the example of Citicorp writing off their Latin American debt. All the reports one saw in the news indicated that this would be suicide, and the government was concerned because Citicorp is arguably the most important bank in the U.S. But their stock climbed after the write-off, and the reason is that their revenue/asset ratio soared once the non-performing debt was eliminated.

So ... it's not an issue that should be decided on the basis of emotion, neither guilt nor resentment, but on the basis of economic expedience. IMO.

Jn

[axordil]

I just wanted to make it clear that I don't oppose the idea of reparations, Jny.

But you know, you can't write off the conquest of the Aztecs, one of the more bloodthirsty imperial powers of history, to cultural differences with the Spanish about the purpose of conflict. I remain unconvinced there are any morally superior options when it comes to a culture built around human sacrifice of prisoners of war versus one (about to be) built around ruthless colonialism.

It's a lot more complicated than that, and technology is in the mix, not so much the guns as the armor, steel weapons, and use of the horse.
Of course, more important than all of these in this particular case was the curious mental state of the Aztec emperor vis a vis the status of the Spanish as semi-divine beings...which Cortez figured out fast and used skillfully.

The bastard.

Be that all as it may, one-time payments have the virtue of clearing consciences. My question is, are they the best method of reparations in terms of actually accomplishing something for the recipients?

[Jnyusa]

Ax, I meant to reply to your comment about horses and gunpowder earlier because, yes, the psychological advantage conferred by these weapons was significant.

I remain unconvinced there are any morally superior options ...

Well, I didn't exactly say that one option was morally superior to the other, though one doesn't have to go very far out on a limb to say that carrying conquest all the way to genocide is morally inferior.

And I don't know enough about the Aztecs to say whether they were erratic retaliators or not; but the Maya it seems were annihilators just like the Europeans. So it's definitely not a question of all Indigenous People being morally superior to all European people.

What I will say is that there is not only one option, as most of us have been taught. It is not true that all cultures embark on a campaign of annihilation when they reach a certain developmental stage. And one of the two known options does seem to be more effective than the other if the populations acknowledge a vested interest in cooperation.

Since we know almost nothing about the long history of these people we really don't know how some of them hit on this particular conflict strategy. It might be that they started out trying to annihilate each other and learned better over time. Or maybe they were never inclined to annihilation or warfare of any sort and what they had to learn was retaliation to keep their borders intact. We just don't know.

Be that all as it may, one-time payments have the virtue of clearing consciences. My question is, are they the best method of reparations in terms of actually accomplishing something for the recipients?

We can't just dump a briefcase full of money on the table and walk away.

The strategy for bootstrapping these populations out of their current poverty is something that would have to be worked out together with investment bankers and legislative aides and so forth. Everyone who does long term planning does it that way, with professional advice and a genuine plan. I didn't mean to imply that a big chunk of change would solve the problem all by itself.

But I think that the direct answer to your question is Yes. Rather than doling out subsidies forever and hoping for a savings ethic and a banking system and astuteness toward financial markets and economic growth to materialize out of nowhere, you have to provide for the institutions and the money that goes in them all at the same time. People have to be given property of sufficient magnitude to make a genuine plan feasible, and they have to be allowed to self-determine what that plan will be.

I think that a similar plan is appropriate for getting people off welfare, and some interesting studies have been done on wealth management at the University of Wisconsin. In a word, l'apetit vien a manger.

The answer I usually get is that these people needs jobs more than they need property. Thing is, jobs come from capitalization. Who's going to start businesses on an Indian reservation? As we have seen, only the Indians themselves have an interest in doing that, and when they've done it they've been successful. But the investment capital has to be there first. Money always precedes physical capital into the marketplace.

Same goes for African American neighborhoods that are decimated by unemployment and corresponding loss of tax base. Community Development Loan Associations are the only way, imo, to have a prayer of restoring those communities.

Thing is, and this is where racism enters the picture, our whole strategy so far has been aimed at keeping investment capital out of the hands of minorites (and women, btw). Don't want them actually owning things, now do we? So I think that before an approach like this is likely to be given serious attention, there really does have to be a change of mentality. We have to wake up to the fact that racism is self-destructive and these pockets of destitution drag the whole economy down. It's not just what we have to pay out to avoid massively shameful circumstances but also the growth foregone when we exclude some segments of the population from participating in the game.

Jn

[Túrin Turambar]

My issue with reparations (and the reason why I asked what exactly was meant by reparations in the first place) is that I cannot really see them changing anything. Take Australia’s aborigines for example – they would take the money, spend it in the same way that they spend their welfare payments, and they’d still be on welfare. Quite often there is simply neither the expertise nor the will to start a business. This is a generalization, and some communities have managed it, but on the whole I see one-off payments as being a waste. They wouldn't go down well with the electorate either - it would be fuel for the radical right.

[Jnyusa]

Lord M. Take Australia’s aborigines for example – they would take the money, spend it in the same way that they spend their welfare payments, and they’d still be on welfare.

If there's no tribal hierarchy that can do planning and make decisions on behalf of the community then this kind of scheme is unlikely to work. Not for this kind of objective anyway. This has to be community development, not individual expenditure.

This is kind of a whole sub-field of development economics - how to structure planned transfers of this sort. The problems parallel the problems of land reform which have been studied pretty extensively.

There was a land reform done in El Salvador in the 1980s that had exactly the result that you describe - within a year most of the value created had evaporated and the Indians were right back where they started, landless and impoverished.

There are some inherent problems with any scheme we choose, but there are inherent problems with the stock market, too, and that doesn't stop us from spinning the wheel.

Jn

[vison]

I seem to recall that the government of the US and the government of the state of Alaska paid a lot of money for rights to the North Slope oil. Millions of dollars were paid out and that money is long gone, the native tribes still living in miserable poverty, etc.

Truthfully, these seem to be nearly unsolveable problems to me, I just get frustrated trying to think of some way someone could do something constructive. Somehow these people have to find their pride again and I wonder how that could be aided.

Perhaps something like the Grameen bank would work, but even there you are dealing with "simple" poverty, not poverty combined with alcoholism and decades of abuse and neglect and the loss of culture, etc.

[narya]

I seem to recall that the government of the US and the government of the state of Alaska paid a lot of money for rights to the North Slope oil. Millions of dollars were paid out and that money is long gone, the native tribes still living in miserable poverty, etc.

Not really. Did you see my earlier post, and the articles in the link?

[axordil]

The choices as I can glean them so far:

1) Do the same nothing we've been doing, and have the same problems (until the cultures in the worst shape do, in fact, go extinct)

2) Devise a method of giving reparations to individuals (and run the risk of it being frittered away in a vacuum).

3) Devise a method of giving reparations to existing tribal entities (and run the risk of it being sucked into corrupt examples of same in job lots).

4) Create new tribal corporate entities (development corporations et al). Risks are functionally identical to 3) above.

I can see 3 and 4 working; as Narya pointed out, they CAN be made to work. Are there more "outside the box" ideas floating around out there?

[vison]

I seem to recall that the government of the US and the government of the state of Alaska paid a lot of money for rights to the North Slope oil. Millions of dollars were paid out and that money is long gone, the native tribes still living in miserable poverty, etc.

Not really. Did you see my earlier post, and the articles in the link?

I hadn't, but I have now. Thanks.

[PrinceAlarming]

Are there more "outside the box" ideas floating around out there?

Some of these might be outside of the box that the box is in:

Destroy the remaining native people.

Allow Native Americans, Australians, Africans, and South Americans, et. al. to invade and colonize their respective oppressors.

Institute a global breeding program that will ensure a similarity in the color of skin within 20 years. (I mean, we're all going to be the same color eventually. It'll be nice, really, different shades of mocha and such.)

Wipe everyone's memory. Replace it with episodes of Sesame Street and Dr. Seuss books.

Terraform and colonize Mars.

[Túrin Turambar]

The promised report into sexual abuse in indigenous communities has been released, and it is worse than I even I imagined .

Basically:

• It isn’t only black-on-black abuse, but also white-on-black. White workers living in remote areas (like miners) will often hire 12-15 year-old aboriginal girls for sex in exchange for alcohol or drugs (or even simply care and affection). The girls usually seek the miners out rather than visa-versa.
• In other cases, fathers sell their teenage daughters to white workers in exchange for alcohol and drugs.
• Hardcore pornography is widely viewed by all members of the community, including young children. Afterwards, groups of men go out and rape women, children, old people and animals.

An exceprt:

HG was born in a remote Barkly community in 1960. In 1972, he was twice anally raped by an older Aboriginal man. He didn't report it because of shame and embarrassment. He never told anyone about it until 2006, when he was seeking release from prison where he had been confined for many years as a dangerous sex offender. In 1980 and 1990, he had attempted to have sex with young girls. In 1993 he anally raped a 10-year-old girl and in 1997 an eight-year-old boy (ZH). In 2004, ZH anally raped a five-year-old boy in the same community.

This is on top of a series of other reports that have come out recently. There was one on people dying from sniffing petrol, and another report on the inter-tribe violence that resulted from people of many different groups being forced to live together in the same communities. Most recently, another report found that many aboriginal people in remote communities cannot speak English, and often can only speak tribal languages shared by a few hundred people.

An article here.

So, the big question – is there any viability in these communities at all? If not, do we clear them out at gunpoint and force the people into what would essentially amount to concentration camps?

This question applies for Canada and Alaska as well – at what point do you strip people of their liberty in an almost totalitarian fashion for their ‘own good’? Would that ever work? Can the situation get any worse?

[Jnyusa]

Any change in Government Policy to the indigenous people now can only mean more intervention.

Yes, I agree that this is the case.

By the way, what do you mean by reparations?

They make an assessment of the value of the land in the time period when it was taken, then amortize forward at appropriate interest rates and pay to 'the victim' the lump sum that results. It's like a back-dated purchase of the land, with the time value of money built in.

In the case of the African Americans, the base rate that would be used is the 1860 value of forty acres and a mule, because this was the contract guaranteed to freed slaves by the federal government. However, it was only actually paid to ~10% of those entitled. So reparations would be the amortized value of the other 90%.

The calculation is not the problem. Figuring out how to fairly distribute it is the problem.

I am in favor of this kind of solution because (1) it's not a handout but a just payment; (2) it transfers an asset rather than dribbling income into a community, so the community has an opportunity to build investments, and there are psychological advantages to the transfer of assets; (3) my prediction is that it would have the same effect on the valuation of the giver's assets and the estimates of investment potential as the cancellation of bad debt has had in the past, that is, the net effect is positive even though you take a hit in the short run.

[Túrin Turambar]

In the case of the African Americans, the base rate that would be used is the 1860 value of forty acres and a mule, because this was the contract guaranteed to freed slaves by the federal government. However, it was only actually paid to ~10% of those entitled. So reparations would be the amortized value of the other 90%.

Those who were actually promised the ten acres and the mule must be getting on a bit in years by now

In all seriousness, that’s one issue I have with reparations. It makes sense to me to pay reparations to those to whom wrongs were actually done, but I’m not so sure about compensating their descendants. It seems to create too many uncertain legal obligations. Where does it stop? To use an extreme example, I’m the descendant of dispossessed indigenous people myself – my family’s land was seized by the Normans in 1066. Obviously, a thousand years and half the globe is probably enough separation to void any claim I might have, but is, say, two hundred years and a few hundred miles?

Also, there’s the fact that many indigenous people are working taxpayers, and it seems really odd that their taxes should go to paying reparations. Finally, there’s the (as you pointed out) very real problem of distribution. For example, what about people of mixed descent?

More practically, though, the money would (in the case of First Nations and Aboriginal peoples) largely end up getting drunk. This would be quite counterproductive.

Overall, I’m now less interested in how to address past wrongs (although that will need to be done, somehow) but in how to fix future ones. It matters less to me what happened to these people’s forefathers than what is happening to them right now, and what will, if nothing is done, happen to their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

[Jnyusa]

Lord M., apologies first of all for answering a post that is a few months old. For some reason this thread opened for me to the first page instead of the second (must have clicked on the title by accidents instead of th page) and I thought you post asking about reps was the last one in the thread.

Yes, I don't know what the right approach would be for the Aboriginals of Australia. And I don't think that reparations as such would fly for the Native Americans of the US, because we basically owe them the whole country. But in the case of the African Americans there was a very specific promise made to people of my grandparent's generation and we are still living within a time period in which that promise could be kept.

Naturally the future is more important than the past, but sometimes the only way to create a new future is to acknowledge what harms were caused in the past and make an effort to repair them. I think that the worst thing we can do to US culture is to pretend that slavery no longer matters. In some ways it matters even more today than it did 100 years ago, so profoundly did it affect the course of our economic development, fiscal policy, and, as a practical matter imo, the direction of our judicial system.

[Túrin Turambar]

This issue has popped up in the news again, and sadly, there’s little good to tell.

As part of the intervention plan that the Howard Government pushed in 2007, many impoverished indigenous people from Central Australia were moved to new houses in camps around Alice Springs. Apparently this has done little to deal with the social problems that plagued them while they lived in remote areas:

CRISIS meetings are being held across Alice Springs this week as the Northern Territory government confronts a crime rate in the city that has risen to "unacceptable" levels.

The Minister for Central Australia, Karl Hampton, will meet indigenous leaders on Friday to address the high crime levels, while a group of more than 100 local businesses will meet with the Alice Springs council to discuss a campaign to stop crime.

The Action for Alice group, formed by business owners in a bid to crack down on break-ins and alcohol-fuelled crime committed by indigenous people staying in camps in the city's outskirts, have called on the NT government to introduce a zero-tolerance approach to crime, a nightly curfew for anyone aged under 18, the end of alcohol restrictions and the construction of a "rehabilitation farm" for problem drinkers.

Mr Hampton described the group's campaign as "divisive" in the community, but told The Australian the increase in crime can be partly attributed to the annual flow of people coming to the regional centre from smaller communities after Christmas.

Former Howard Government Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough has come out and called the Intervention ‘just another failed policy’:

ARCHITECT of the controversial Northern Territory intervention Mal Brough has declared the radical policy he masterminded to end a crisis in Aboriginal Australia a comprehensive failure, amid escalating violence and dysfunction in Alice Springs.

The Howard government indigenous affairs minister said his policy, introduced in mid-2007, needed to be dramatically advanced in order for it to deliver lasting social change.

But he claimed the Gillard government had left it "stagnant", allowing dysfunction to grow.

"The intervention isn't working," Mr Brough told The Weekend Australian.
"Because it wasn't the Labor Party's policy, they just adopted it for political reasons. They failed to take it to the next level.

"It has become stagnant and buried in bureaucracy. It is no longer working.

"Without radical changes, it is yet another failed approach.

"You are now seeing the concentration of human suffering. Serious action has to be taken where the fringe-dwellers are killing themselves and their kids.

"You need a zero-tolerance approach now."

In the past week, The Australian has detailed the impact of sharply rising crime rates in Alice Spring, triggering crisis meetings in the city between government and community leaders.

This is despite the intervention imposing tough new restrictions on the sale of alcohol in Alice Spring and measures to transform the city's overcrowded and dysfunctional town camps, by investing in new houses, fixing other houses and forcing residents to pay their rent. Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin said this week tackling the situation in Alice Springs was at the top of her priority list.

She said the government's program to transform the city's derelict indigenous town camps as part of the intervention was in its infancy but she was already looking at wide measures to improving people's living conditions.

"We are putting in place the largest ever investment that's ever been attempted, not just in the Alice Springs town camps, where the situation of course was and continues to be a really huge priority for us, but also in Alice Springs itself," she said.

Mr Brough said he supported an extreme proposal for a large prison farm to be built outside Alice Springs, where drinkers could be rehabilitated through craft-learning, trade schools and manual work.

He said it should be compulsory for substance abusers to be sent to such a facility, and insisted it should not be set up as a prison but as a well-funded centre that changes lives.

"The drug and alcohol dependencies need to be dealt with, but not in a voluntary way," he said.

"If this continues you will see the destruction of Alice Springs and the destruction of a generation of kids."

He said the prison farm idea was not draconian and was not about incarcerating people.

"It has to have all the clinical-style elements. It needs thorough and complete rehabilitation -- it's about changing lives, not punishing people," he said.

This proposal was first put forward by Adam Giles, member for the Territory seat of Braitling, which takes in parts of Alice Springs.

Mr Brough, who lost his seat in parliament in the 2007 election, said if he had seen the intervention through he would have moved it to a new stage and talked honestly with communities about their ongoing viability.

"We needed to be honest with people where they live in places with no economic future," he said. "We need to stop lying to them and telling them that miraculously things would improve in their backyard."

He said his plan was a staged approach to get people to move where there was economic opportunity rather than perpetuating the "myth" that economies could be created where there were no real job opportunities.
Meanwhile, senior ALP figure and indigenous leader Warren Mundine called for traditional Aboriginal manhood ceremonies to be formally linked to the school system and curriculum.

This would ensure that if communities wanted their children to undergo the ceremonies they would need to ensure they completed school, he said.

Mr Mundine flagged the proposal at last week's indigenous leadership conference in Brisbane, where leaders agreed it needed to be explored.
Mr Mundine told The Weekend Australian cultural ceremonies should not happen in isolation from mainstream education.

"We need to engage formal education in what is happening in their traditional lives. We need to tie manhood ceremony procedures with economic outcomes, so you don't go through the full manhood ceremony until you are 18 and you've finished school," he said.

Under current practice many of these ceremonies occur when children are younger than 18.

Mr Mundine said the breakdown in Alice Springs showed that the problems were deeply entrenched and the government must continue its program of welfare and work reform.

The problems in the town were illustrated last weekend when a prolonged brawl broke out during a match at an Alice Springs cricket ground. Despite the fighting, players and spectators went about their business without paying a second's attention.

The Northern Territory intervention -- introduced in June 2007 by the Howard government and worth $1.2bn over three years -- set out to bring about immediate change by effectively declaring a state of emergency in some 73 indigenous communities.

It introduced alcohol controls, compulsory quarantining of welfare payments and land acquisitions to allow for proper tenancy management to occur.

I have to admit that I find the idea of a huge prison farm for black people troubling on many levels, but to be honest, can the situation be any worse? At any rate, something needs to be done – if the Federal Government doesn’t act, then the Territory Government probably will, sooner or later. And if it doesn’t act fast enough, then the issue will be left in the hands of local authorities in Alice Springs, with who-knows-what results.

[vison]

There was a sort of heartening article in the Sun yesterday about some First Nations communities here dealing with social problems by reverting to their customary tribal laws and not using "European Law". Where it has been tried it has had some success.

Whereas European Law and modern social worker ideas have failed utterly.

[Hachimitsu]

I agree with Vison on this. I has worked. Also, frankly I am getting the feeling that the Aboriginal communities are being treated a bit like children with no opportunity for self-determination for the Aboriginal people. Moving them from one place to another? That doesn't sound the greatest. Canada has had that approach, as if First Nations people can't help themselves and had to be looked after by the Federal government. (Because of that, some places can't even get clean water. Why that isn't put under provincial responsibility like all the rest of the water quality only God knows.)

Are the different Aboriginal groups all mixed together? It would be difficult to have tribal laws insititutions if all the groups are mixed together. Who's laws would take precedence and which group members would over see it?

Also, what are the economics of the area this particular aboriginal group is living in? I know some communities in Canada, once they were able to build their own economy and basically got confidence through self determination social problems improved immensely. In some cases it could be through casinos, tourism and even oil. One reserve did it though illegal cigarette manufacture, but to me, the benefits outweighed the illegality. First Nations solving the problems of First Nations, with only some assistance of the government. Rather then the government making decisions for them.


Why are the people drinking and taking drugs in the first place? (It's sort of a rhetorical question.)

A prison for drinkers is absolutely the worst way to go. Rather then trying to fix the root problem, they are just trying to control the symptoms.

A manhood ceremony linked with education could be a step in the right direction.

[Túrin Turambar]

I just want to say that I haven’t ignored Wilma’s questions – I’ve been trying to think of answers for them but haven’t been able to.

Obviously white settlers in Australia took most of the productive land, as they did in Canada and the U.S. So indigenous communities in Australia are mostly found in marginal areas with little prospect for wealth-creation. While they stay in these remote areas, the aborigines are perpetually poor and dependent on government support. The problems we are seeing in Alice Springs today are the result of attempts to move them to where they might be able to get jobs and participate more fully in non-indigenous society. And yes, in most cases people from different nations with no shared language have been thrown together, although that has always been in the case – many of the remote communities were like that in the first place.

[Hachimitsu]

The problems we are seeing in Alice Springs today are the result of attempts to move them to where they might be able to get jobs and participate more fully in non-indigenous society.

Participating in non-indigenous society. I was sort of afraid of that.Usually I am all for mixing of ethnic groups and many First Nations people in North America do mix with non-First Nations people. But I think, considering that the First Nations people were here first, I think they need to have some kind of home base within their homeland you know what I mean? Especially as most of their homeland was taken, and they were left with no economic prospects or opportunity for self determinism within their own home (I am not good at explaining this). I think in part that is what leads to the drinking, drugs and extremely high suicide rates. I think the attitude in North America at some point was trying to help, but their approach was more like an ethnocide (I am thinking that is the best word to use, although it may be considered inflammatory to some).

I think to some small degree North American governments have realized that, and the First Nations people have also got some really good lawyers to fight for them, so a FUBU (For Us, By Us) solution could slowly come about. Like the new Canadian territory Nunavut. Last I heard is primarily run by a First Nations government, and I know somewhere they are working on a First Nations college/University (last I heard there were some issues in it's development).

In Australia is there some kind of aboriginal rights card? In Canada there is a program like that, and in the US for the tribes that are economically successful they share out the wealth, if one can prove a certain degree of relation in the tribe. This gets to be very important in sharing out oil wealth.

About areas that are not productive, I know some places have had casinos put in (which can be controversial) to kick up tourism, and it the casino itself brings in a lot of money for the reserve. (Some consider it a stereotype.) Has that been tried In Australia? Are there any successful reserves?

I could talk more about this but my knowledge on this is weak. I know there are at least a couple of board members who have some first nation background and hopefully they can shed some light on this.