Land, Livelihood, and Lessons from History: The Baka and the Weight of Precedent

Last week, we wrote about the Baka community; a local indigenous forest community located in the Mintom, Dja Et Lobo Division-Southern Region of Cameroon. We asked you to join your voices to petition the government and the powers that be to implement land reform policy that will protect the culture and livelihood of the Baka people. We gave you reason why protection of the Baka people, their heritage, and culture could benefit us all. We wanted to explore if the demands of the Baka people were something unheard of.

In the process, we looked into Indian reservations in the United States and concluded that those had a lot in common with what the Baka community is basically demanding from the government. The difference is that in this case, Indian reservations were a creation that was imposed on Native American Indians. For the most part, Indian Reservations were a bad deal. The irony here is that the Baka people are rather negotiation for what really is a bad deal but their powerlessness leaves them no choice. Without our voices, they might even end up having no deal which is worse than a bad deal.

The Indian reservation system established tracts of land called reservations for Native Americans to live on as white settlers took over their land. In the case of the Baka people, they are being pushed out of their ancestral residences to make way for “industrial agricultural development.”

In 1785, the Treaty of Hopewell was signed in Georgia—the largest state at the time—placing the native Cherokees under the protection of a young United States and setting boundaries for their land. But it wasn’t long before European settlers intruded on Cherokee land. The Cherokees cried foul and revolted against the white settlements. To reestablish peace between the Cherokees and the settlers, the Treaty of Holston was signed in 1791 in which the Cherokees agreed to give up all land outside of their established borders. Not only did the federal government want Native Americans to give up their land, they also encouraged them to become farmers and Christians. In the early 19th century, settlers moved into southern Cherokee territory en masse and wanted their government representatives to claim the land.

In 1887, the Dawes Act was signed by President Grover Cleveland allowing the government to divide reservations into small plots of land for individual Indians. The government hoped the legislation would help Indians assimilate into white culture easier and faster and improve their quality of life. But the Dawes Act had a devastating impact on Native American tribes. It decreased the land owned by Indians by more than half and opened even more land to white settlers and railroads. Much of the reservation land wasn’t good farmland, and many Indians couldn’t afford the supplies needed to reap a harvest. Prior to the Indian reservation system, women Indians farmed and took care of the land while men hunted and helped protect the tribe. Now, men were forced to farm, and women took on more domestic roles.

After a review of life on Indian reservations known as the Meriam Survey, it was clear the Dawes Act was severely detrimental to Native Americans. The law was ended in 1934 and replaced with the Indian Reorganization Act with the goals of restoring Indian culture and returning surplus land to tribes. It also encouraged tribes to self-govern and write their own constitutions and provided financial aid for reservation infrastructure.

It is important to understand that any attempt to assimilate the Baka people into our way of life by forcing them out of the forest will prove to be disastrous for them and for other communities that practice a different lifestyle and culture. We can see what happened in the case of the Native American Indians.

We cannot define the prosperity of the Baka people by our own standards. The fact about prosperity is that it is built on property rights. That the Baka medicine and tourism economies of the Baka people are now under threat is a demonstration of what happens when property rights are weak or non-existent. You now see why their specific demands of property rights to:-

230 hectares on which they plan to create a “living museum”, 5,000 hectares on which to live, 55,000 hectares which they can exploit for their livelihood (farming and hunting) is not unfounded.

We guess you can stop reading here and play a little role by signing the petition created by Greenpeace, a non profit organization that uses non-violent creative action to pave the way towards a greener, more peaceful world, and to confront the systems that threaten our environment.

Follow this link to sign the petition as a first step to lending your voice to the fight of the Baka people.

Support local communities in Cameroon! Act to stop Sudcam from stealing land from the indigenous people >> https://bit.ly/2EGuHqX

P.S

“The vast majority of land on reservations is held communally. That means residents can’t get clear title to the land where their home sits, one reason for the abundance of mobile homes on reservations. This makes it hard for Native Americans to establish credit and borrow money to improve their homes because they can’t use the land as collateral--and investing in something you don’t own makes little sense, anyway.

This leads to what economists call the tragedy of the commons: If everyone owns the land, no one does. So the result is substandard housing and the barren, rundown look that comes from a lack of investment, overuse and environmental degradation. It’s a look that’s common worldwide, wherever secure property rights are lacking—much of Africa and South America, inner city housing projects and rent-controlled apartment buildings in the U.S., Indian reservations” (Forbes).

- TeamPoise

Additional Information gathered from

History.com and Forbes.com