January 2019 Protecting Indigenous Cultural Rights 241
laws, rulings, and policies. Indeed, Associate Justice Pollack’s concurrence
suggests that the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court could have been more aggressive
and ruled on the merits. In New Zealand, the creation of specialized courts
serves to demonstrate another possible mechanism to adjudicate indigenous
land claims. Nevertheless, the role of the Māori Land Court is complicated by
its legacy aiding European confiscation of Māori land. Although the Land
Court is now statutorily required to protect Māori interests in Māori land and
the Grace cases demonstrate its contemporary commitment to doing so, the
court’s history suggests that specialized adjudicatory bodies are not inherently
better for indigenous people. Instead, the legal, political, and cultural forces
that shape jurisprudence are critical to outcomes.
VII. CONCLUSION
The experiences of the Ainu in Japan, the Native Hawaiians in the State
of Hawaiʻi, and the Māori of New Zealand reveal similar dilemmas that courts
face between recognizing the rights of indigenous groups and addressing
questions of land development that supposedly benefit the majority
population. The Nibutani Dam Decision reveals that explicit constitutional
recognition of indigenous rights is not always necessary for courts to
recognize indigenous protections. Courts can infer that indigenous rights
should be protected through other constitutional guarantees and a nation’s
treaty commitments. Nevertheless, explicit constitutional recognition of
indigenous rights puts developers and government agencies on notice and
leads to quicker recognition by courts of indigenous rights. Ultimately, this
gives litigants the benefit of knowing that courts must acknowledge their
rights and leads to rulings that halt construction before it begins. In addition,
the importance of explicit constitutional recognition is also preferable to the
patchwork of rights and restrictions on government power found in New
Zealand’s unwritten constitution.
Because the Nibutani Dam Decision is the only court decision of its
kind, it is difficult to assess whether it will force Japan’s government agencies
to acknowledge indigenous rights and halt development projects when
plaintiffs raise claims of violations of indigenous rights. Therefore, Ainu
activists might consider seeking a constitutional amendment that explicitly
protects indigenous rights. However, constitutional amendments are
controversial in Japan and the strongest political block, the conservative
Liberal Democratic Party, is unlikely to support indigenous rights or any
further recognition of the Ainu beyond the 2008 resolution.