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What is people's opinion on indigenous land usage and special rights? I feel a sense of cognitive dissonance, where I find myself supporting such policies as I highly value preserving and promoting indigenous culture. But there remains a tension between indigenous land rights and the liberal notion that land usage shouldn't be based on ethnicity and that the resources should benefit all of society. Particularly now with the extreme electricity prices, where people are literally dying and is being weaponised by Russia, I wonder whether indigenous people should have the right to prevent building power plants on "their" land. A related issue is exceptions to societal rules, eg. wrt animal welfare where they might get dispensation for the laws that apply to animals for the rest of society. Or in other cases laws applying to rights of their children. It's a conflict between the rights of the individual animal or member of the indigenous group, compared to the rights of the indigenous group as a whole to live according to their traditions, which I find difficult to navigate and reconcile.
Indigenous land usage (here I take to mean reservations and the like) has resulted in some serious issues in how it is current functions in many countries. This is mainly because they tend to take a really wishy-washy middle of the road solution where the native reservations are both simultaneously mostly autonomous but also theoretically subject to federal law, and receive significant federal funding and support. The delineation of authority and responsibility is really poorly defined, especially in the context of contemporary politics where any serious federal government involvement is seen as highly circumspect and often gets accusations of colonialism.
Many of the issues with this system is exemplified with 'First Nations' politics in Canada. Many of the Indian reservations in Canada have huge problems, including persistent problem with clean drinking water. The Canadian government provides funding to the reservations for their water infrastructure, which is then largely managed by the reservation itself. The problem is that many of the 'First Nations' governments are heavily corrupt and very little of the money actually ends up doing what is supposed to. They also heavily resist any audits of their financials. So the end result is that the Canadian government continues to funnel money into reservations with no oversight, then get blamed for the water problems in the reservations and accused of racism/discrimination, or they can step in forcefully and manage it from top-down, in which case they will be accused of overriding the autonomy of 'First Nations' and accused of racism/discrimination. A similar situation also occurs with the high rates of child abuse in these communities - don't intervene and get blamed for not doing enough to help native children, or remove these kids from abusive homes then get accused of cultural genocide.
The system should go in either direction, I don't really have a strong preference which. Either 1) the native reservations should be given more autonomy from the federal government and become all-but-independent, with little support or control from the Federal government, managing their own affairs (then don't get blamed when shit goes bad), or 2) they should be given no special legal status and be subject to the exact same laws, oversight and status as every other Canadian (well, Québécois weird legal system is a discussion for another time). The middle half-arsed solution currently creates a lot of ambiguity and opportunities for abuse. For 1) I'm thinking something akin to the British Overseas Territories, or France's weird setup with New Caledonia.
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