Population Mobility and Indigenous Peoples in Australasia and North America

For population analysts, two of the most difficult issues to grapple with are Indigenous populations and mobility.

Indigenous peoples in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States comprise those descendents of the original inhabitants of these lands.

One impact of colonisation on these peoples has been their widespread dispersion and spatial redistribution.

They are now located in major cities and the remotest of localities, either within traditional homelands, or far from them.

No systematic analysis exists of the geographic movement of these peoples, either historically or in contemporary times.

With contributions from leading scholars, this book draws together relevant research findings to produce the first comprehensive overview of Indigenous peoples' mobility.

Chapters draw from a range of disciplinary sources, and from a diversity of regions and nation-states.

Within nations, mobility is the key determinant of local population change, with implications for service delivery, needs assessment, and governance.

Mobility also provides a key indicator of social and economic transformation.

As such, it informs both social theory and policy debate. For much of the twentieth century conventional wisdom anticipated the steady convergence of socio-demographic trends, seeing this as an inevitable concomitant of the development process.

However, the patterns and trends in population movement observed in this book suggest otherwise, and provide a forceful manifestation of changing race relations in these new world settings.