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                                                                                THE AMERICAS, Page 52

Struggling to Be Themselves


By MICHAEL S. SERRILL -- With reporting by Nancy Harbert/
Albuquerque, Ian McCluskey/Rio de Janeiro and Courtney Tower/
Ottawa


    Elijah Harper, a Cree-Ojibway Indian and legislator in the
province of Manitoba, became a hero to Canadian Indians and
Inuit two years ago when he brought the machinery of national
constitutional reform to a halt. His decisive no in the Manitoba
legislative assembly not only doomed a complex pact designed to
put the Canadian confederation on a new footing but also sent
the country's political leadership back to the drawing board.
Spurred in part by the Manitoban's stubborn stand, federal and
provincial leaders agreed for the first time that a revised
constitution must recognize native peoples' "inherent right to
self-government."

    But native rights lost ground when a broad majority of
Canadians rejected the new constitution last week. Ovide
Mercredi, chief of the Assembly of First Nations, warned of new
confrontations as indigenous peoples sought redress through
roadblocks and public protests instead. Still, Canada's attempts
to codify native self-government was the latest sign that the
struggle for political recognition by native peoples across
North and South America is bearing some fruit. From the Yukon
to Yuma to Cape Horn, indigenous peoples are using new
strategies to recover some of the land, resources and
sovereignty they lost in the past 500 years. They have
negotiated, sued, launched international campaigns, occupied
land and, in a few cases, taken up arms to press their cause,
marking in their own way the quincentennial of Christopher
Columbus' arrival in the New World -- an event Native Americans
rank as the greatest single disaster in their history.

    History cannot be reversed, but historic change seems to
be in the making. In Canada the commitment to native
self-determination followed another major step: the creation of
a self-governing entity called Nunavut out of the vast Northwest
Territories, effectively turning a fifth of Canada's 4
million-sq.-mi. territory over to 17,500 Inuit. In the province
of Quebec, persistent agitation by 10,000 Inuit and Cree Indians
against the second phase of an $11 billion hydroelectric project
at James Bay, which would flood thousands more acres of Indian
and Inuit lands, has placed the enterprise's future in doubt.

    In South America large areas of the Amazon Basin have been
reserved for the exclusive use of Brazilian, Ecuadorian,
Peruvian and Venezuelan Indians. The rights of tribes to conduct
their own affairs, form their own councils and receive royalties
for mining activities on Indian lands are gradually being
recognized.

    In the U.S., Indian tribes are trying to get government to
honor promises of autonomy that go back 150 years. Some tribes
fund the effort with dollars earned from gambling operations on
Indian land, where state writ generally does not apply.

    The fate of 40.5 million indigenous people -- 37 million
in Latin America, 2 million in the U.S. and 1.5 million in
Canada -- has become a focus for discussion at the U.N. and in
the councils of the European Community. Environmental groups
have declared native peoples to be model conservators of the
earth's increasingly fragile ecology. Native activism is
entering a multinational phase. Over the past year,
representatives of dozens of tribes in the hemisphere have held
dozens of meetings to discuss common action to regain land and
at least a measure of self-government. In some cases, they have
called for recognition of their right to preserve their cultural
identities.

    Such assertiveness cannot come too soon for most of the
Americas' original inhabitants, whose plight, more often than
not, is desperate. The U.S.'s poorest county, according to the
1990 census, is the one encompassing the Pine Ridge Reservation
of the Oglala Sioux in South Dakota, where 63% of the people
live below the poverty line. Death from heart disease occurs at
double the national rate; from alcoholism, at 10 times the U.S.
average. Similarly, in Canada, aboriginals, as they are called,
are among the poorest of the poor, afflicted by high rates of
alcoholism and suicide. In Latin America the descendants of the
Maya, Aztecs and Incas have been relegated to the lowest rung
of society.

    Neglect is not the worst that native peoples have
suffered. "For centuries governments have often treated the
rights of indigenous people with contempt -- torturing and
killing them in the tens of thousands and doing virtually
nothing when others murder them," charges Amnesty International
in a report issued last month. The depth of discrimination,
poverty and despair makes some of the recent strides by the
Americas' native peoples all the more remarkable:

    CANADA. Sixty miles north of Vancouver, a group of 700
Sechelt Indians, self-governing since 1986, have established
themselves on 3,000 acres of waterfront and forest land. They
own a salmon hatchery and earn revenue from a gravel-quarrying
business; the profits have helped build a community center and
provide social benefits, including low-cost housing for the
elderly. The Sechelt gained autonomy by giving up their claim
to an additional 14,250 acres of British Columbia, for which
they have asked $45 million in compensation. Though other
natives have criticized the deal, Chief Thomas Paul, 46, says
the settlement "will give us a large economic base to make us
self-sufficient."

    Canada's rejected constitutional changes would have given
the natives a "third order of government," with status
analogous to the federal and provincial governments. Indians
would have gained full jurisdiction over such natural resources
as oil and gas, minerals and forests, their own local or
regional administrations, justice and education systems, and the
administration of much of the $4.5 billion in federal
social-welfare funds that flow to the tribes.

    Such sweeping guarantees would have been an enormous step
forward, but in practical ways Canada is already engaged in
enormous land settlements and a broad transfer of local power
to native peoples. In many cities as well as in the northern
territories, administrative powers and tax money can be turned
over to the natives, and Justice Minister Kim Campbell promised
after the vote that this will be done. Although some Indians
were just as glad the constitutional changes failed, both yes
and no voters insisted that the referendum last week did not
mean a permanent rejection of native rights.

    THE U.S. On the Ak-Chin Indian reservation south of
Phoenix, Arizona, self-government and self-sufficiency are taken
for granted. The Ak-Chin broke away from the paternalistic U.S.
Bureau of Indian Affairs, the federal agency that still
controls much of Indian life from cradle to grave, in 1961 when
the tribe insisted on farming its own lands rather than leasing
them out to non-Indians for negligible revenues. Today the
600-member tribe takes in profits of more than $1 million a year
by growing crops on 16,500 acres. About 175 Ak-Chins work on the
land or in community government; the tribal unemployment rate
is 3%. The Ak-Chins accept federal funds only for housing loans.
To become even more self-sufficient, the tribe has plans to
start manufacturing operations and perhaps casinos.

    On paper at least, the 2 million Indians and Eskimos in
the U.S. have had more autonomy -- and have had it longer --
than their Canadian or Latin American counterparts; in 1831 the
U.S. Supreme Court declared that the tribes were "domestic
dependent nations" entitled to limited self-government. That
status was largely fiction for the next 140 years, however; not
until 25 years ago did an Indian-rights movement begin agitating
to claim what had been guaranteed. Since then the movement has
scored some notable gains:

    -- In 1971 Congress awarded the 60,000 native peoples of