Items19The creator’s order
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Benito JuárezBorn 21 Mar 1806A Zapotec who spoke no Spanish until he was 12, Juárez became Mexico's first Indigenous president and drove the Reform Laws separating church and state. Those same liberal laws broke up communal landholdings, which dispossessed many Indigenous villages, a contradiction historians still debate.0i - 2
Whina CooperBorn 9 Dec 1895Te Rarawa leader Whina Cooper founded the Māori Women's Welfare League in 1951 and at 79 led the 1975 land march from Northland to Parliament under the slogan "not one more acre". The march helped create pressure for the Waitangi Tribunal, set up the same year.0i - 3
Matiu RataBorn 26 Mar 1934As New Zealand's Minister of Māori Affairs, Rata, of Ngāti Kurī, carried the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 that created the Waitangi Tribunal to hear treaty breaches. Its powers were extended back to 1840 in 1985, opening the historical settlements that followed; he later founded the Mana Motuhake…0i - 4
Ada DeerBorn 7 Aug 1935Ada Deer led the Menominee campaign that reversed the federal "termination" of her tribe, winning the Menominee Restoration Act of 1973 and helping end termination as US policy. In 1993 she became the first woman to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs.0i - 5
Neville BonnerBorn 28 Mar 1922A Jagera man, Bonner became the first Aboriginal member of Australia's federal parliament in 1971, as a Liberal senator for Queensland. He crossed the floor dozens of times, including against his own party on Aboriginal issues, and was dropped from the party ticket in 1983.0i - 6
Charles Perkins (Aboriginal activist)Born 16 Jun 1936An Arrernte and Kalkadoon man, Perkins led the 1965 Freedom Ride exposing segregation in rural New South Wales, which fed the 1967 referendum counting Aboriginal people in the census. He became the first Aboriginal head of a federal department, Aboriginal Affairs, and was outspoken against…0i - 7
Eddie MaboBorn 29 Jun 1936A Meriam man from Mer in the Torres Strait, Mabo led the ten-year case in which the High Court in 1992 rejected terra nullius and recognised native title. He died months before the judgment; the Native Title Act 1993 that followed set up claims nationally, though critics say its thresholds are hard…0i - 8
Ole Henrik MaggaAfter the Alta dam protests, the linguist became the first president of Norway's Sámi Parliament in 1989, an elected body with advisory and later administrative powers, and then first chair of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2002. Norway's Finnmark Act on land management followed in…0i - 9
Wilma MankillerBorn 18 Nov 1945The first woman elected Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, from 1985 to 1995, Mankiller expanded tribal health clinics and community self-help projects and negotiated self-governance compacts letting the nation run federal programmes itself. Tribal enrolment and revenue grew sharply during her…0i - 10
Elijah HarperBorn 3 Mar 1949An Oji-Cree member of Manitoba's legislature, Harper held an eagle feather and withheld the unanimous consent needed to fast-track ratification of the Meech Lake Accord in June 1990, because First Nations had been left out of it. The accord died, and Indigenous peoples were included in the next…0i
