Page 148 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol III

indigenous peoples 967

when they did so, they were summarily executed in 1929.
Stalin’s actions halved the Buryat population.The Tuva also
resisted collectivization in the 1930s, but the Terror of
1937 led to the murder of the nationalists.The declaration
of the Tuva region as an autonomous province in 1944 did
not help. The Tuva were put into boarding schools and
“Russianized,” while Stalin encouraged Russian colonists
to diminish the population of indigenous peoples.
Only the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 has im-
proved the political situation of some of the indigenous
peoples of Siberia and Central Asia. In Central Asia, some
of the previously indigenous people saw themselves trans-
formed almost overnight into national groups, such as in
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
Unfortunately, many of these new nations are still ruled
by autocrats, often old Communist apparatchiks from the
pre-independence era.
The Chinese Communist state instituted similar poli-
cies to the Soviet Union in Xianjiang after 1949 and Tibet
after the 1950 invasion. The process of “Sinification” of
the western borders of China appears to have accelerated
in the last few decades of the twentieth century as increas-
ing prosperity and overpopulation in the eastern sections
brings more Han Chinese westward. The Chinese state
has defined any resistance by ethnic minorities especially
in the West as “terrorism,” thus providing for a police or
In this photo from the early twentieth
even military response.The fate of indigenous peoples in
century, an Aymara Native American in
China has only worsened over the past century.
Bolivia poses in traditional dress. Such
depictions of indigenous peoples were quite
Indigenous Movements in
common during this time period.
Pacific and the Americas
Indigenous peoples in the Pacific and Latin America
fared somewhat better in the second half of the twenti- In 1997, the Japanese Diet finally passed a law that
eth century as they got better organized. In the early encouraged Ainu culture.The 1899 law, which encouraged
twentieth century the Maori established a Young Maori Ainu to cultivate land, and policies favorable to the Ainu in
Party, which triumphed in the 1935 elections allied with the 1960s had not brought an end to discrimination.The
the Labour Party. In 1980 New Zealand established the Ainu are still the poorest population within Japan and now
Waitangi Tribunal to examine land claims dating from the Ainu are asking for compensation to right past wrongs.
the nineteenth century onward. Finally, in 1995 Queen Crucial to the successes of indigenous peoples espe-
Elizabeth apologized publicly for the wrongs committed cially in Latin America has been International Labor Or-
against the Maori. ganization Convention 169,which recognizes indigenous