Is there any place in North America where no human has set foot? Where is it?

Question

I read an article in Outside magazine years ago that stated that there were valleys in Northern Canada that had never, ever been seen by a human being. No human had ever walked there. Ever. Is this true? I'd like to go to a place that has never, ever, been seen by a human being. Somewhere reasonable, not an unexplored part of Antarctica, but somewhere a man with an average income could actually get to with some effort and time. I've been facinated by this ever since I read that article in Outside. I wonder how they knew that no human had ever been to those valley's in Northern Canada. Maybe is was not true. Anyway, if anyone has any information on this, please share it with me.

Answer 1

Geography at the Millenium

Speech by Dr Bill Jonas, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner to the Institute of Australian Geographers, 28 September 1999

I would like to begin by acknowledging the Eora people, the traditional owners, custodians and kinsfolk of the land where this conference is being held.

At a recent meeting of the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, the Commissioners' declared that the rights of Indigenous people raised the most significant human rights issues in this country at this time. At a meeting in Canberra two weeks ago, the country's Indigenous leaders stated that a substantial number of issues must be the subject of negotiation between Aboriginal people and the Commonwealth Government before reconciliation could become a reality. These issues comprised a statement of Indigenous rights. Any nation which is to enter the new millennium with maturity and dignity must allow for the exercise and enjoyment of human rights by all of its citizens and clearly, this means that Australia must pay special attention to the rights of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

Geography and Geographers, with their very special perspective on the world, can contribute in the human rights arena and I will say something about this today.

I want to focus this address on one specific Indigenous right, and this is Native Title. In the time-honoured tradition of geography I will use this as a case study from which we can make at least some generalisations. I believe that at this time, Indigenous rights and Native Title provide an area where geographers can make an important contribution at different levels and in ways which may advance the discipline and provide benefits to Indigenous people on the ground. I also believe that the growing dialogue between geographers and anthropologists about Indigenous issues is of great significance, and I will begin by referring to the work of a specific anthropologists, work which I hold in the highest regard.

Some years ago when I was on the Australian Heritage Commission we asked this anthropologist, Dr Deborah Bird Rose to write an essay on Aboriginal Australian's concepts of landscape, and wilderness, two subjects which of course are still dear to the hearts of many geographers. The resulting essay, 'Nourishing Terrains', is, I believe one of the finest pieces of writing to ever deal with these issues and it should be on the reading lists of all students of geography, anthropology, ecology, environmental studies and even English literature in this country.

In the cases of wilderness, Rose points out that this is a concept which has been imported into Australia, mostly from Europe and especially North America where, by and large it refers to areas which are remote from humans. She quotes David Brower, first executive director of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth, who jokingly says that wilderness is a place 'where the hand of man has not yet set foot.' But, as Rose points out:

A definition of wilderness which excludes the active presence of humanity may suit contemporary people's longing for places of peace, natural beauty, and spiritual presence, uncontaminated by their own culture. But definitions, which claim that these landscapes are 'natural' miss the whole point of the nourishing Australian Terrains. Here on this continent, there is no place where the feet of Aboriginal humanity have not preceded those of the settler. Nor is there any place where the country was not fashioned and kept productive by Aboriginal people's management practices. There is no place without a history; there is no place that has not been imaginatively grasped through song, dance and design, no place where traditional owners cannot see the imprint of sacred creation (p18).

In other words, in Australia there is NO wilderness.

I was expanding on this theme of 'no wilderness in Australia' to a colleague of mine once. He was also leading light in the Wilderness Society. He became very angry with me. While eventually conceding, or at least saying that he could see the point I was making, he nevertheless declared, in a very cross manner: 'but the average person in the street doesn't see it like that.' And he was right. The average person does not see it like that and I suspect that most geographers don't see it like that. But we must remember that the average person in the street, and again I suspect most geographers, did not see Terra Nullius for what it was until the High Court's Mabo judgement only seven years ago.

Terra Nullius is the legal equivalent of seeing wilderness where in fact there is a society; seeing atomism where in fact there is a collectivism; seeing no law where, in fact, law has governed men and women for thousand and thousands of years. The ideological basis of terra nullius was uncovered in the Mabo decision.

The view was taken that, when sovereignty of a territory could be acquired under the enlarged notion of terra nullius, for the purposed of the municipal law that territory (though inhabited) could be treated as a 'desert uninhabited' country. The hypothesis being that there was no local law already in existence in the territory, the law of England became the law of the territory (and not merely the personal law of the colonists). Colonies of this kind were called 'settled colonies'. Exhypothesi, the indigenous inhabitants of a settled colony had no recognised sovereign, else the territory could have been acquired only by conquest or cession. The indigenous people of a settled colony were thus taken to be without laws, without a sovereign and primitive in their social organisation. P36 Mabo.

The High Court in Mabo also uncovered the discriminatory practices which were veiled by the legal fiction of terra nullius.

It would be a curious doctrine to propound today that, when the benefit of the common law was first extended to Her Majesty's indigenous subjects in the Antipodes, its first fruits were to strip them of their right to occupy their ancestral lands. Yet the supposedly barbarian nature of indigenous people provided the common law of England with the justification for denying them their traditional rights and interests in land, as Lord Sumner speaking for the Privy Council said In re Southern Rhodesia

The estimation of rights of aboriginal tribes is inherently difficult. Some tribes are so low in the scale of social organisation that their usages and conceptions of rights and duties are not to be reconciled with the institutions or the legal ideals of civilised society. Such a gulf cannot be bridged. It would be idle to impute to such people some shadow of the rights known to our law and then to transmute it into the substance of transferable rights of property as we know them. P39

The recognition of native title by the High Court in 1992 was a recognition that law did govern Aboriginal society when sovereignty was acquired by the British in 1788 and that Indigenous law was a subtle and elaborate system which provided a reasonably stable order of society.

With the overturning of terra nullius the requirement that Indigenous laws be 'reconciled with the institutions or the legal ideas of civilised society' was also abandoned. In deciding whether to recognise Indigenous law it was no longer necessary to find that the Indigenous relationship to land bore a resemblance to those already known to the common law. In fact to do so was discriminatory.

The theory that the indigenous inhabitants of a 'settled' colony had no proprietary interest in the land thus depended on a discriminatory denigration of indigenous inhabitants, their social organisation and customs. As the basis of the theory is false in fact and unacceptable in our society, there is a choice of legal principal to be made in the present case. This Court can either apply the existing authorities and proceed to inquire whether the Meriam people are higher 'in the scale of social organisation' than Australian Aborigines whose claims were 'utterly disregarded' by existing authorities or the Court can overrule the existing authorities, discarding the distinction between inhabited colonies that were terra nullius and those which were not. P40

The course which the court chose to take in Mabo is well known and represented a major advance in the struggle for recognition by Indigenous Australians. Native title, whilst recognised by the common law, has its origins in and is given its content by the traditional laws acknowledged by and traditional customs observed by the indigenous inhabitants of a territory.

Native title has brought an end to terra nullius, and with this a kind of peace. But it has also signalled a new battle. The struggle now is not so much against the non-recognition of Indigenous culture but rather a struggle over the meaning and value that non-Indigenous law should give it. It is my role, as Social Justice Commissioner, to ensure that the principles of equality guide the outcome of this struggle. So long as the common law continues to recognise that traditions and customs of Indigenous people and give them a meaningful place within Australian society tody native title exists as a declaration of justice. Where however, the common law applies tests and rules which reduce native title to a right that cannot be enforced then Indigenous culture will again have no place within Australian society.

A disturbing trend in some of the recent Court decisions is the characterisation of native title as a bundle of rights rather than a title to land. Under the 'bundle of rights' approach, native title rights are no more than the activities which evidence an observance of traditional customs and laws. If the present claimants hunt and fish on the land as their predecess