This week, there was a confluence of events that brought to the fore the issue of Indigenous Peoples land rights. First off was Patrick Harding, a past President of the Guyana Gold and Diamond Miners Association (GGMDA) who complained it was “unfair” for Indigenous Peoples to be given title for land they occupied. Harding asked: “Why aren’t we getting the equal treatment? Why aren’t these lands titled and given to us? Miners have been there before; it is on their strength the Amerindians settling on the lands.” Minister of Indigenous Peoples’ Affairs Sydney Allicock quickly retorted that Amerindians had been occupying the land long before mining activities started in the 1890’s.
The next event was the wrap up of Amerindian Heritage Month at the Umana Yana, where Minister within the Indigenous Peoples Affairs Ministry, Valerie Garrido-Lowe, expatiated on the contributions of Stephen Campbell in securing official recognition of Indigenous Peoples land rights in Guyana. It was Campbell who attended the 1965 Independence Conference in London and ensured the official Agreement for the Independence of Guyana, (Annex C) required the independent government provide legal ownership or rights of occupancy for Amerindians over: “areas and reservations or parts thereof where any tribe or community of Amerindians is now ordinarily resident or settled and other legal rights, such as the rights of passage, in respect of any other lands they now by tradition or custom de facto enjoy freedoms and permissions corresponding to rights of that nature. In this context, it is intended that legal ownership shall comprise all rights normally attaching to such ownership.”
But even here, most Guyanese like Harding are ignorant about Britain transferring sovereignty over Guyana’s 83,000 square miles to the new independent state encumbered by the rights to title of the Indigenous Peoples for lands they occupied. They also refuse to acknowledge that modern norms of justice are evolving to amend the inequities imposed by the positivistic legal stance of British jurisprudence as they – and other European countries – expanded their empires.
For instance, while most Guyanese would now baulk of the irony of Columbus “discovering” the “New World”, they do not follow through with the corollary of Europeans going on to assume “sovereignty” over the land and only, at best, conceding paternalistically that the Indigenous Peoples had ownership over the land if they had legal systems to assert such ownership. So what happened when, as in Guyana, Indigenous Peoples saw “ownership” in a totally different light as “symbiotically with” rather “dominion over” the said lands, they were out of luck. They were only granted rights to use the land to give expression to their culture.
Annex C of the Independence Agreement was enabled by several “Amerindian Acts” that initially insisted on “occupation from time immemorial” by Indigenous Peoples to acquire title but in 2006, the criteria were loosened in Article VI of the new Act. However, from the beginning and to date, all the concessions on ownership insisted that the Indigenous Peoples did not have rights to the minerals below the ground. And it was because of this that Harding could have said, “They (the Indigenous Peoples) don’t want lands for culture or whatever; they want lands that people mine, and that’s a fact… We are Guyanese just like the Amerindians.”
But while it is indubitably true that miners and Indigenous Peoples are “all Guyanese”, Handing’s dismissive statement about the former’s “culture or whatever” is symptomatic of the stubborn imbibed colonial mentality that arbitrarily defined reality for others from the master’s perspective and interests.
Why do we have to continue with this restriction on ownership of land what was supposed to be equivalent to freehold? And why is mining for gold not part of the culture of Indigenous Peoples? Did they not wear gold ornaments? In South Africa, the courts have now awarded rights to minerals in granted lands to Indigenous Tribes. Will Guyana be following suit?
