Aboriginal Protection Society

The Aborigines' Protection Society was a London society that existed from 1837 to 1909 and aimed to protect the " indigenous people " of the British Empire. The focus was on the one hand on the health and well-being of the indigenous peoples ruled by the colonial power , on the other hand on sovereignty and religious rights. In 1909 she merged with the Anti-Slavery Society to form the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society (now Anti-Slavery International ).

To pursue its goals, the Society published annual reports, tracts and pamphlets, and a magazine called The Aborigines' Friend or Colonial Intelligencer . She also raised funds to buy homes for disenfranchised or dispossessed peoples. In 1870 she acquired an island for a tribe of the Canadian Mi'kmaq on Prince Edward Island , which gives the name to the Lennox Island First Nation that lives there today. The Society brought the Zulu leader Cetshwayo into contact with the Queen and Maori at the Lord Mayor's negotiating table.

One of the driving forces, Dr. Thomas Hodgkin (1798–1866), was an admirer of William Penn and the Quakers to which he belonged. After the British philanthropists succeeded in eliminating slavery in 1807 and enforcing the Emancipation Act in 1833 , they continued their struggle for legal equality for colonial peoples. In order to be able to convince the British institutions of their plans, society needed knowledge of the peoples concerned, for whom it wanted to campaign. So she began to publish ethnological publications or to support their publication, especially since both Hodgkin and his colleague James Prichard were ethnologically well-versed scientists. As a result, some of the men, including Hodgkin, turned away from society in 1842 and founded the Ethnological Society of London the following year . The effect of the missionaries was a thorn in the side of many of them, who immediately forced changes in their culture on the peoples they preferred to study, since the missionaries were primarily concerned with baptism. After Hodgkin's death in 1866, no member of the Aboriginal Protection Society dealt with anthropological issues.

For the indigenous people, society was often the only way to gain access and be heard at court or in parliament, the press or the colonial administration.

Prior to the founding of the Aborigines' Protection Society, there were three other societies in Britain that worked on ethnographic issues in a broader sense. Among them, the British and Foreign Aborigines' Protection Society was most focused on philanthropic rather than scientific subjects.

James Heartfield, who published a monograph on the society in 2011, nonetheless comes to the conclusion that their well-meaning activities ultimately legitimized the Empire regiment. It also pursued a policy of segregation.

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• Aboriginal Protection Society: Report on the Indians of Upper Canada (London 1839).
• Aborigines Protection Society: Canada West and the Hudson's-Bay Company a political and humane question of vital importance to the honor of Great Britain, to the prosperity of Canada and to the existence of the native tribes: being an address to the Right Honorable Henry Labouchere , Her Majesty's principal secretary of state for the colonies (London, 1856).

literature

• Kenneth D. Nworah: The Aborigines' Protection Society, 1889-1909: A Pressure-Group in Colonial Policy , in: Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 5.1 (1971) 79-91.
• William E. Unrau: An International Perspective on American Indian Policy: The South Australian Protector and Aborigines Protection Society , in: Pacific Historical Review 45,4 (1976) 519-538.
• Brian Willan: The Anti-Slavery and Aborigines 'Protection Society and the South African Natives' Land Act of 1913 , in: The Journal of African History 20 (1979) 83-102.
• James Heartfield: The Aborigines' Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa, and the Congo, 1836-1909 , Columbia University Press, 2011.
• Ronald Rainger: Philanthropy and Science in the 1830's: The British and Foreign Aborigines' Protection Society , in: Man 15,4 (1980) 702-717.

Web links

• Documents and newspaper articles on the Aborigines' Protection Society in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Remarks

1. ^ Aborigines' Protection Society: Transactions, 1837-1909 , archive.org, July 14, 2014.
2. ↑ ProQuest Database: Aborigines' Protection Society ( Memento from September 9, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ).
3. ↑ Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, Emma C. Spary: Cultures of natural history , Cambridge University Press 1996, p. 353.
4. ↑ George W. Stocking Jr: What's in a Name? The Origins of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1837-71) , in: Man 6,3 (1971) 369-390, here: p. 369.
5. ^ Bernard V. Lightman: Victorian Science in Context , University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 217.