Strategies for Change: How Indigenous Peoples Have Pursued Justice

Learning Goal: I can analyze strategies Indigenous peoples around the world have used to pursue social justice through legal challenges, political organizing, protest, art, and media, and evaluate how effective those strategies have been. 

Colonization used courts, legislation, and violence to take Indigenous land and silence Indigenous voices. Indigenous peoples have used those same fields, courts, legislatures, and the internet, to answer back. The three examples below happened a world apart, in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, but each shows a different strategy at work: a legal challenge, a grassroots movement, and a protest that used ceremony and viral media at once.

A Courtroom Overturns a Legal Fiction

In May 1982, Eddie Koiki Mabo and four other Meriam people, David Passi, Sam Passi, James Rice, and Celuia Mapo Salee, filed a case in Australia's High Court. They wanted the court to recognize what their families on Mer, an island in the Torres Strait, had always known: the land was theirs before Britain ever arrived. Australian law rested on terra nullius, the claim that the continent belonged to no one when Lieutenant James Cook landed in 1770. Proving otherwise took ten years, four thousand pages of testimony, and the deaths of two of the five plaintiffs, including Mabo himself, five months before the ruling. On June 3, 1992, the High Court agreed: Australia was never terra nullius. Parliament passed the Native Title Act the following year, giving Indigenous peoples across the country a legal path to claim land. A legal challenge can rewrite the law itself, but it moves on the timeline of courts, not people.

A Facebook Conversation Becomes a Movement

In November 2012, four women in Saskatchewan, Nina Wilson of Kahkewistahaw First Nation, Sylvia McAdam of Big River First Nation, Jessica Gordon of Pasqua First Nation, and settler ally Sheelah McLean, were talking on Facebook about Bill C-45, a federal omnibus budget bill that weakened environmental protection and the rules governing reserve land leases. They organized one teach-in at Station 20 West in Saskatoon. Within weeks, the hashtag #IdleNoMore carried the movement across Canada and around the world, filling shopping malls with round dances and drumming. Bill C-45 still became law that December. But the movement did not stop when the bill passed. It put Indigenous sovereignty, treaty rights, and land into public conversation in a way that, as founder Sylvia McAdam put it, means "Canada will never quite be the same again." Grassroots organizing does not always stop the law it opposes, but it can permanently shift what a country is willing to ignore.

A Haka Reaches 700 Million Screens

On November 14, 2024, 22-year-old Te Pāti Māori MP Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke stood up in New Zealand's Parliament, tore her copy of the Treaty Principles Bill in half, and led a haka, joined by co-leaders Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. The bill would have let a referendum redefine the Treaty of Waitangi, the 1840 agreement between the Crown and Māori. Video of the haka passed 700 million views within two weeks. Parliament voted the bill down 112 to 11 on April 10, 2025. Five weeks later, Parliament's Privileges Committee suspended the three MPs, 21 days each for Waititi and Ngarewa-Packer and seven for Maipi-Clarke, the longest suspensions in the Parliament's 221-year history. Protest and media can move fast enough to shape a live vote, but the people who use them can pay a real, personal price for it.

References

1. AIATSIS. "The Mabo Case." aiatsis.gov.au

2. National Museum of Australia. "Mabo decision." nma.gov.au

3. Idle No More. "Idle No More is founded by 4 women." idlenomore.ca

4. CBC Indigenous. "5 Years after Idle No More, founders still speaking out." cbc.ca

5. Al Jazeera. "New Zealand parliament suspends Maori MPs who performed protest haka." aljazeera.com

6. Wikipedia. "Treaty Principles Bill." en.wikipedia.org