Direito em Movimento - Volume 18 - Número 3 - Edição Especial

182 Direito em Movimento, Rio de Janeiro, v. 18 - n. 3, p. 176-198, 2020 - Ed. Especial ARTIGOS nities deprived of law courts - so that they might feel the civilising effect (and practical benefits) of enjoyment of rights and fair process - , in the past not everyone saw law in this way. But even today, Aboriginal communities, Amazonian Indians and First Nations peoples more generally often remain fearful of those who ex- tend the reach of law, seeing it more as an instrument of colonial repression rather than a resource through which rights may be enforced. Civil justice is frequently invisible in the minds of ordinary citizens who, whenever they hear law mentioned, invariably think of criminal justice. First Nations peo- ple, as with Cornishmen in 12 th century England, may well prefer to run away from the law rather than have access to it.This is in part because many Indigenous people, particularly in New Zealand and Australia,may not trust the law or lawyers, especially as they are overrepresented in prison. You may have heard stories about the ‘Stolen generations’, the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent forcibly removed by Austra- lian federal and state government agencies, and also by Church missions, that right up until the 1970s as part of a policy of assimilation, intended to erase their Aboriginality (LAVARCH, 2017; RANGIAH, 2019-2020). When I visited the Australian outback on a cultural immersion tour to learn about how the Arabunna people experienced law, I was told how, in the mid- 1990s,amining company nurtured conflict between the Arabunna andDieri Ab- original communities about which had custodial rights over the land in order to facilitate a billion-dollar expansion of its RoxbyDownsmine. 13 And,in early 2020, RioTinto destroyed a sacred, ancient Aboriginal site dating back 46,000 years. 14 One hears similar stories told about the inhuman treatment of Brazi- lian Indians, particularly the Guarani and Yamomami, threatened by defo- restation of Indigenous territory caused by large-scale mining, agricultural and livestock activities that degrades or destroys the natural environment. My main observation here is that history, politics and culture are vital to understanding both the demand (latent and actual) for IJ. Itinerant judges 13 See FOE (1995). 14 See BBC (2020).