reservation

reservation, tract of land set aside by a government for the use of one or more aboriginal peoples. In the early 21st century, reservations existed on every continent except Antarctica but were most numerous in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Most of the reservations in these countries, as well as those in many others, trace their origins to the colonial policies of the 19th and early 20th centuries. However, some reservations were not created until the second half of the 20th century or later.

Although the specific circumstances of their formation, history, and living conditions vary, some characteristics are relatively common among reserves created during the 19th and early 20th centuries. For instance, they were generally created through treaty agreements or by colonial decree and consistently represented an area much smaller than, and often at a great distance from, a given group’s traditional territory. In addition, early reserves were usually placed on economically marginal land—that is, in areas that were very dry, wet, steep, or remote. Finally, their formation was typically accompanied by the creation of pass laws that prohibited indigenous residents from traveling outside the reservation. These and other rules, such as those prohibiting the possession of weapons, were designed to pacify resident populations and to prevent the formation of inter-reserve coalitions.

Upon creation of a reserve, governments generally guaranteed that the land therein would belong to a cultural group in perpetuity. However, encroachment by colonial settlers and land speculators usually began within a decade of a reserve’s creation. Usually within two decades, and often much sooner, these groups would demand that the land be “opened” to outside ownership, arguing that the aboriginal residents were not developing it in accord with Western notions of productivity.

The territories in question were almost always opened eventually, although the legal mechanisms for doing so varied from place to place. In some cases laws were passed that caused a certain amount of reserve land to be allotted to each indigenous adult or household, with the remainder made available to those who were not aboriginal. Another method required that indigenous residents prove a certain degree of genetic relatedness to the original signatories of a treaty. Persons with less than the required degree of relatedness, or blood quantum (often, though not exclusively, the equivalent of having a grandparent or great-grandparent from the group), were then disenfranchised of their land. As with allotment, any “surplus” land made available through this mechanism would subsequently be opened for sale to outsiders. These and other schemes reduced the size of most reservations considerably, in some cases by more than 50 percent. When combined with the pass laws noted earlier, land cessions often rendered reserves too small to support the traditional economies of the resident hunting-and-gathering, horticultural, and pastoral cultures. This typically pushed native peoples toward the adoption of colonial forms of food production, thus quickening the pace of cultural assimilation.

When compared with neighbouring off-reserve areas, reservations have historically tended to be underdeveloped in terms of infrastructure, social services, housing, and economic opportunity. In a notable example from the United States, census data show that rural electrification programs reached some 90 percent of rural off-reserve homes by 1950 but that the same proportion of reservation homes did not have electrical service until 2000. Similar decades-long lags in development are found in many reserves around the world.

In some reservation communities—but by no means all—out-migration among those seeking an education or employment has combined with slow local development to foster high rates of poverty, substance abuse, and violence. However, a number of forces also counter these tendencies, most notably the efforts of a wide variety of indigenous professionals and activists who work to improve the economic, physical, and social health of their communities. In addition, many who out-migrate continue to consider a given reservation to be their true home and help to support its residents by providing them with financial and other forms of assistance.

The conditions on reserves formed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries are less uniform than those found on older reserves, primarily because their creation took place under a wider variety of circumstances than existed in the past. In many of these more recent cases, especially in developing countries, a region was not designated as a reserve until after significant environmental degradation had taken place through mining, timbering, or other extractive enterprises. In such situations, activists often raised concerns that the corporations that profited from these undertakings would be able to avoid the costs of environmental rehabilitation. In contrast, many governments that are comparatively wealthy have refused to create new reserves per se but have shifted the governance of areas with large aboriginal populations to regional boards on which indigenous groups hold a guaranteed plurality or majority. Examples of the latter approach include the 1999 creation of Nunavut, a Canadian province with a predominantly Inuit population, and changes in 2006 to the governance of Finnmark, a region of Norway with a large Sami population.