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By Root 994 0

While British colonial law did hold a modicum of respect for aboriginal land rights,469 you know already the centuries-long tale of death and displacement following European colonization of the New World. Between 1492, when Christopher Columbus found Haiti (and misnamed its inhabitants “Indians”), and 1923, when the last Indian Reserve Treaty was signed in Canada, North America was a place where white settlers shot, diseased, and connived aboriginal people off their land. Millions of deaths and four centuries of lopsided treaties later, their descendants are boxed into tiny scattered fragments of land, often enveloped by private property. These treaties, no matter how unfair by today’s standards, extinguished their land claims. They have no hope of another. Reservations can grow, but only by buying out their neighbors, if they’ll sell, at market value. Even if surrounded by public lands, with their claims extinguished they have no legal standing to sue for a new treaty.470

ANCSA deeded about forty million acres of property to Alaska Natives. The modern land claims agreements in Canada ceded joint or total control of just over one billion more,471 with dozens of smaller claims still pending. In contrast, the sum total of all aboriginal reservations in the lower United States is about seventy million acres, which, if you could sweep all the bits together, might add up to the area of Colorado. Reservation populations may be growing, but their borders are not. There will not be another Nunavut.

President Keskitalo’s Argument

I was in Tromsø sitting with Aili Keskitalo, president of the Norwegian Sámi Parliament. She was describing the plight of her Sámi people (Lapps472), the aboriginal occupants of northern Europe. The petite thirty-eight-year-old mother leaned forward in her chair, speaking quietly but blue eyes blazing.

“Our language. Our symbols. Our traditional knowledge. They are threatened. In some areas, to a very large extent. We need to have a say in how the natural resources are exploited!”

I nodded. Once again my climate-change project was going down the tubes. When was she going to talk about crusty snow and starving reindeer? But then, while explaining how her parliament was very busy yet politically toothless, with no vote in Oslo, she unknowingly connected the dots for me.

“The climate change, it makes the oil, the gas, the mineral resources in the North more accessible. So the need to get control over the resource management is even more important, because of the climate change.” She sat back in exasperation. “If you have no representation, how can you have an influence on resource management?”

If there was ever a moment when my perspective suddenly broadened on the future of the northern countries I was traveling, that was probably it. We talked some more, so I could assemble in my own head what was already so obvious in hers. Everything is linked. Shrinking ice, natural resource demand, and political power were all tugging on each other. My scientist’s training had wrongly led me down the path of dissect, isolate, and rank. This works well for a focused problem, but is not always best for gaining a synoptic understanding of the world.

Northern aboriginal people don’t like being portrayed as hapless victims of climate change. Nor are they waiting for their central governments to come in and solve their problems. Quite the opposite. After numerous interviews with aboriginal leaders,473 the resounding message I’ve heard is a desire for more autonomy, more control, more say over what happens or does not happen on these lands. The damages inflicted by climate change—already coming into view—only intensify their sense of urgency. More control affords more resilience, more adaptability, to deal with the consequences. The people I’ve met are not hoping that outside task forces will be dispatched to save them from climate change. They want the power—and yes, the resource revenues—to save themselves.

With this new understanding in view, I could see why president Keskitalo was pissed off. In the three countries