Indigenous Peoples

Indigenous peoples are the descendants of the original inhabitants of a territory who retain distinct social, cultural, and political institutions despite the establishment of settler states around them. The United Nations declined to adopt a single binding definition, but the working description drafted by Special Rapporteur José Martínez Cobo in the early 1980s — historical continuity with pre-colonial societies, distinctness from the dominant population, and self-identification — remains the standard reference point.¹ Current estimates place the global indigenous population at roughly 476 million people across more than 90 countries.

For conservatives, indigenous questions engage first principles: the sanctity of contract and treaty, the authority of long-settled institutions, property rights, and scepticism toward bureaucratic management of whole peoples.

Key Takeaways

• No binding international definition exists; the Martínez Cobo description (continuity, distinctness, self-identification) is the accepted reference.
• In North America, the Crown’s treaty relationship dates to the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which recognized indigenous title and reserved lands against private purchase.
• The conservative approach stresses honouring treaties as binding contracts, dismantling paternalist bureaucracy, and restoring property rights and economic agency.
• Critics of that approach argue that collective rights and land restitution, not individual property, are the remedy history requires.

History And Context

The legal architecture of indigenous-state relations in the English-speaking world begins with the Royal Proclamation of 1763, issued by George III after the Seven Years’ War. The Proclamation reserved western lands to the Indian nations under Crown protection and forbade private purchase of their territory, establishing the principle that only the Crown could treat for indigenous land. That principle flowed into the numbered treaties across the Canadian West (1871–1921) and into American jurisprudence through Chief Justice John Marshall’s trilogy of rulings (1823–1832), which described tribes as domestic dependent nations under federal protection.

The subsequent record turned darker. Canada’s Indian Act of 1876 placed First Nations under federal wardship, banned ceremonies such as the potlatch from 1884, and underwrote the residential school system whose history the Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented in its 2015 final report.² In 1982, section 35 of Canada’s Constitution Act entrenched existing aboriginal and treaty rights, and in 2007 the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, with Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand voting against before each later endorsed it.

The Conservative Position

The conservative case begins with the rule of law: treaties are solemn contracts between the Crown and indigenous nations, and a government that will not keep its oldest promises cannot ask citizens to trust its newest ones. Burkean conservatism extends its respect for inherited institutions to indigenous ones — hereditary governance, customary land tenure, and religious practice are precisely the kind of prescriptive institutions Burke defended against rationalist remaking. On this view the Indian Act, which replaced functioning indigenous orders with a federal bureaucracy empowered to manage individual lives, is a textbook case of administrative-state overreach.

A practical program follows: restore ownership. Tom Flanagan, Christopher Alcantara, and André Le Dressay proposed in Beyond the Indian Act (2010) converting reserve lands held by the Crown into fee-simple title held by First Nations and their members, arguing that people who cannot own, mortgage, or sell their homes are shut out of the main engine of prosperity.³ Conservative governments have paired this with support for resource-revenue partnerships, on the argument that mining, forestry, and pipeline agreements have created more band employment than decades of transfer payments.

Differing Positions

Many indigenous scholars and leaders reject the property-first program as assimilation in a new key. Taiaiake Alfred and others argue that indigenous nationhood rests on collective, inalienable relationships to land, and that converting territory into marketable parcels would complete the dispossession colonialism began.⁴ Critics also note that Flanagan’s earlier book, First Nations? Second Thoughts (2000), disputed the premise of parallel nationhood itself, and they read the later property agenda in that light. On this side of the argument, the remedies history requires are the ones the state resisted longest: implementation of the UN Declaration, land restitution, and self-government with real fiscal capacity — honouring the spirit of the treaties, not merely their text.

Between the poles, a working consensus has emerged in places. Opt-in reforms such as the First Nations Land Management regime, under which signatory First Nations replace Indian Act land provisions with their own land codes, have drawn support from band governments and policy writers on both sides of the dispute — evidence that self-determination and market institutions are not always the opposites the debate assumes.

References

1. José R. Martínez Cobo, Study of the Problem of Discrimination against Indigenous Populations (United Nations, 1983).
2. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report (TRC, 2015).
3. Tom Flanagan, Christopher Alcantara, and André Le Dressay, Beyond the Indian Act: Restoring Aboriginal Property Rights (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).
4. Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (Oxford University Press, 1999).