Aborigines' Protection Society

The Aborigines' Protection Society (APS) was an international human rights organisation, founded in 1837,[1] to ensure the health and well-being and the sovereign, legal and religious rights of the indigenous peoples while also promoting the civilization of the indigenous people[2] who were subjected under colonial powers.[3]

Foundation

The foundation of the Society was prompted by a group centred on Thomas Hodgkin, with experience from around the world: Saxe Bannister (Australasia), Richard King (North America), John Philip (South Africa).[4] The founders were, on King's account, William Allen, Thomas Fowell Buxton, Henry Christy, Thomas Clarkson, Hodgkin, and Joseph Sturge.[5] Buxton, after the 1832 British abolition of the slave trade, had taken an interest in particular in the Cape Colony.

The Quaker background and abolitionism were significant in the setting-up of the Society.[6] The Quaker Meeting for Sufferings set up a committee on the issue in 1837, at Hodgkin's prompting, and in 1838 backed Buxton's Select Parliamentary Committee by publishing under its own name extracts from the evidence it had taken. It appeared as Information Respecting the Aborigines in the British Colonies; it was drafted by John Hodgkin but then rewritten by his brother Thomas, to sharpen the effect and reduce the references to missionary activity.[7][8][9] The Report of the APS in 1838 put the case that colonisation did not inevitably have detrimental effects on indigenous peoples, as conventional wisdom had it, even to the point of their extinction: if the effects were negative, that was a criticism of the plan and regulation for the colony.[10]

The principles of the APS combined "equal rights", i.e. legislation not based on race, with "racial amalgamation". There was no commitment therefore to preserving the indigenous peoples as encountered.[11]

Early strains

The Society remained active for about 70 years.[4] But the differing views of Buxton and Hodgkin on how to proceed caused some fundamental divisions in the early years. Hodgkin was interested in a forum for both scientific discussion (of early ethnology, a discipline that hardly yet existed separately from the study of language), and protective activities based on lobbying. Buxton shortly became caught up in the activist drive that led quickly to the Niger expedition of 1841, the failure of which was a huge personal blow and also drove missionary considerations into the background for a time. Hodgkin was unhappy with Buxton's published criticism of Elliott Cresson, and the general British disregard for Liberia as an abolitionist project. King issued a prospectus for the new Ethnological Society of London in 1842, following Hodgkin's view that the humanitarian and scientific objectives should from then on be pursued separately.[12]

Activity from 1840

In 1842 the purpose of the APS was restated: "to record the history, and promote the advancement, of Uncivilized Tribes".[13]

On Buxton's death in 1845, Samuel Gurney took over as President. Finances improved, and from 1847 Hodgkin had an assistant as Secretary on the payroll for a period, the activist Louis Alexis Chamerovzow.[14] Chamerovzow published on the rights of Māori in 1848, and worked on Charles Dickens as opinion-former,[15] with some success (as Dickens wrote to George Payne Rainsford James).[16] He was a perceptive analyst of the difficulties in reconciling the interests of indigenous people and settlers.[17]

In 1870 the APS bought Lennox Island (Prince Edward Island) on behalf of a community of the Mi'kmaq people.[18]

Publications

The Society published tracts, pamphlets, Annual Reports and a journal entitled The Aborigines' Friend, or Colonial Intelligencer, from 1847.[14][19] Hodgkin's concerns over the indigenous peoples in the Hudson's Bay Company territory in western Canada were pursued both by correspondence with Sir George Simpson, and in the pages of the Intelligencer.[20] In 1889 Henry Richard Fox Bourne became its editor, and took over as Chair of the APS.[21] He was a critic of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, and used the Intelligencer to accuse it for the first time of "atrocities".[22]

Merger

The Society continued until 1909 when it merged with the Anti-Slavery Society to form the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society (now Anti-Slavery International).[1]

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See also

References
  1. Aborigines' Protection Society: Transactions,1837-1909 Archived June 18, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
  2. Nworah, Kenneth D (1971). "The Aborigines' Protection Society, 1889-1909: A Pressure-Group in Colonial Policy". Canadian Journal of African Studies. 5 (1): 79–91. JSTOR 484052.
  3. ProQuest Database: Aborigines' Protection Society
  4. Patrick Brantlinger (2003). Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930. Cornell University Press. p. 87. ISBN 978-0-8014-8876-4. Retrieved 24 April 2012.
  5. King, Richard (1867). "Obituary of Thomas Hodgkin, M.D.". Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London. 5: 341–345. ISSN 1368-0366. JSTOR 3014240.
  6. George W. Stocking, Jr., What's in a Name? The Origins of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1837–71), Man, New Series, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Sep., 1971), pp. 369-390; Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2799027; PDF, at p. 372.
  7. Louise Henson (2004). Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. p. 86. ISBN 978-0-7546-3574-1. Retrieved 28 May 2012.
  8. Amalie M. Kass and Edward H. Kass, Perfecting the World: The life and times of Dr. Thomas Hodgkin, 1798–1866 (1988), p. 373–4.
  9. Society of Friends. Meeting for Sufferings. Aborigines' Committee (1838). Information respecting the aborigines in the British colonies [microform] : circulated by direction of the Meeting for Sufferings : being principally extracts from the report presented to the House of Commons, by the select committee appointed on that subject. Canadiana.org. London : Darton and Harvey.
  10. William Binnington Boyce (1839). Notes on South-African Affairs. J. Mason. pp. 177–8. Retrieved 24 April 2012.
  11. Damon Ieremia Salesa (14 July 2011). Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire. Oxford University Press. pp. 142–3. ISBN 978-0-19-960415-9. Retrieved 29 May 2012.
  12. Kass and Kass, p. 393, and pp. 402–3
  13. Jane Samson (1998). Imperial Benevolence: Making British Authority in the Pacific Islands. University of Hawaii Press. p. 182 note 85. ISBN 978-0-8248-1927-9. Retrieved 24 April 2012.
  14. Kass and Kass, p. 377.
  15. Elaine Freedgood (15 October 2010). The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. University of Chicago Press. p. 87. ISBN 978-0-226-26163-8. Retrieved 24 April 2012.
  16. Charles Dickens; Graham Storey; Madeline House; Kathleen Tillotson; Nina Burgis (18 August 1988). The Letters of Charles Dickens: 1850-1852. Oxford University Press. pp. 22–3. ISBN 978-0-19-812617-1. Retrieved 24 April 2012.
  17. Peter Karsten (18 March 2002). Between Law and Custom: "high" and "low" Legal Cultures in the Lands of the British Diaspora--the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, 1600-1900. Cambridge University Press. p. 258. ISBN 978-0-521-79283-7. Retrieved 24 April 2012.
  18. Richard Butler; Thomas Hinch (26 October 2007). Tourism and Indigenous Peoples: Issues and Implications. Elsevier. pp. 225–. ISBN 978-0-7506-6446-2. Retrieved 27 April 2012.
  19. Heartfield, James (2011). The Aborigines' Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa, and the Congo, 1836-1909. London/New York: Hurst/Columbia University Press. p. 306. ISBN 978-1-84904-120-1.
  20. Warren, P. (2007-08-01). "39. Thomas Hodgkin. 1798-1866. Health advocate for Manitoba". Clinical and Investigative Medicine. 30 (4): S48. doi:10.25011/cim.v30i4.2799. ISSN 1488-2353.
  21. Laurel Brake; Marysa Demoor (2009). Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland. Academia Press. p. 67. ISBN 978-90-382-1340-8. Retrieved 24 April 2012.
  22. Robert M. Burroughs (2011). Travel Writing and Atrocities: Eyewitness Accounts of Colonialism in the Congo, Angola, and the Putumayo. Taylor & Francis. p. 161 note 22. ISBN 978-0-415-99238-1. Retrieved 24 April 2012.
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