Written by: Manaswi Sapkota - 26004, Grade X
Posted on: 19 May, 2023
Indigenous injustice, something that is experienced by a whole bunch of people from different indigenous communities. Understanding what indigenous injustice is isn’t hard, it is simply indigenous people being treated unjustly. The reasoning behind these injustices is what's hard to grasp.
Indigenous injustice is one of the major reasons for landlessness and poverty among people. Many indigenous people have been evicted from their original lands and have been relocated to less productive land. This has been hurting these people because they have to abandon their traditional way of living causing them to face malnourishment and poverty. In fact, the 15% of extremely poor people in the world consists of indigenous people. Due to this reason they are also the targets of unemployment, and are stripped of their basic human rights such as healthcare, education, etc.
Indigenous people also face a lot of social injustice as they are often discriminated against and ostracized. Their passports are often held by the authorities over small easily solvable issues, this generally goes against their human rights. Indigenous women are also more likely to die during childbirth due to lack of proper and safe healthcare. Similarly, indigenous children are also deprived of education leading to high illiteracy rates. Even when they do receive education they are often discriminated against at school, especially by their peers mostly due to their clothing, food and tradition.
The major reason for the occurrence of these injustices is due to the lack of enforcement of laws designed to protect indigenous people. In many countries there are no laws to begin with but even in places that do have laws, they are often not enforced properly leading to indigenous people being beaten and mistreated on a regular basis. An example of shaky law is the case of Colten Boushie, an indigenous man killed by a white farmer at the age of 22 under the guise of self defense. This case had evidence tampered with hence leading to the farmer being free while Colten’s family begged for justice. This is a classic case of law not doing its work.
Even though laws and regulations exist, the government itself refuses to enforce them leading to terrible consequences for the indigenous people. How, you could ask, for example big mining corporations work on indigenous lands without permission and simply disregard any sort of protest even going as far as to bribe people to keep their mouths shut. A case related to this is the one of Máxima Acuña Atalaya, a farmer in Peru who stood up against a big mining company and she was taken to court for it. Eventually the charges against Máxima were dropped due to insufficient reasonings and such. She was mentally pressured by the company and the law failed to protect her from this harm. These mining cases are often overlooked as they evidently help the country economically but they affect the indigenous community terribly.
In conclusion, indigenous injustice is a prevalent issue around the world affecting millions of people on a daily basis. To resolve this issue, it is important that we understand the major issues and work together as a society to fix it. We need to make sure laws are enforced and everyone feels protected and safe. Of course it is not possible to completely change everyone’s views but it is possible to make a change, so we should at least try.
Reference:
FirstPeoples.org - the Challenges We Face. www.firstpeoples.org/the-challenges-we-face.htm.
Amnesty International. “Indigenous Peoples - Amnesty International.” Amnesty International, 23 Jan. 2023, www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/indigenous-peoples/#:~:text=Discrimination%20is%20the%20reason%20why,internal%20displacement%20than%20other%20groups.
