Land Rights: Oxford Amnesty LecturesTimothy Chesters Indigenous peoples and governments, industrialists and ecologists all use - or have at some stage to confront - the language of land rights. That language raises as many questions as it answers. Rights of the land or rights to the land? Rights of the individual or rights of the community? Even accepting that such rights exist, how to arbitrate between competing claims to land? Spanning as they do a wide range of intellectual territory, and their spheres of interest or activity ranging geographically from the Niger Delta to Papua New Guinea, from Quebec to the Eastern Cape, the contributors to this volume move across a range of different, and at times contradictory, approaches to land rights. Marilyn Strathern explores the divergent anthropologies of land, specifically regarding the equation of land and property. Cree lawyer and spokesman Romeo Saganash and Frank Brennan, an Australian lawyer and priest, explore the legal framework for land claims. The UN's International Decade of the Rights of Indigenous People recently ended in the failure of negotiating govemnents to accommodate, within international law, a 'collective' right to land. It is only by acknowledging this collective right to self-determination, both argue, that governments can come to terms with their indigenous populations and their own colonial past. Against the pleas of Brennan and Saganash, the Kenyan Richard Leakey, whose own history and politics is indissociable from that past, questions the whole notion of 'indigeneity'. The campaigner Ken Wiwa speaks too of the difficulties of redressing historical injusticeis, especially in a region - the Niger Delta - where the indigenous Ogoni have no written record of their losses. Finally William Beinart, a historian and advisor to the South African government, outlines some of the practical difficulties of land reform in that country. |
Contents
| 1 | |
Intangible or Tangible Property? | 13 |
2 Indigenous Peoples and International Human Rights | 47 |
A NonIndigenous Australian Perspective on Land Rights Land Wrongs and SelfDetermination | 77 |
4 If this is your Land where are your Stories? | 124 |
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Land Rights:Oxford Amnesty Lectures: Oxford Amnesty Lectures Timothy Chesters No preview available - 2009 |
Common terms and phrases
Aboriginal agricultural Anthropological areas argues Australian Beinart Brennan British Ciskei claims clan collective human rights collective rights colonial context Court creativity cultural dense settlements dispossession Dr Leakey draft Declaration draft UN Declaration Eastern Cape economic farm fences genous groups Human Rights Council indi indigenous Australians indigenous communities indigenous leaders individual rights intangible intellectual property international human rights international law Islands issues justice Ken Wiwa Kenya land ownership land reform land rights living Maasai Mabo Mabo v Queensland Marilyn Strathern Melanesian ment MOSOP native title Niger Delta Nigeria Ogoni owners Oxford Amnesty Lectures Papua New Guinea political problems property rights Queensland recognize response rights and self-determination rights of indigenous rural Saganash self-determination social society South Africa story tangible terra nullius territories Thornhill tion traditional Transactions and Creations Trobriand United Nations University wealth WGDD Wiwa yams