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Indigenous Peoples and Real Estate Valuation.

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Indigenous Peoples and Real Estate Valuation

Edited by Robert A. Simons, Rachel Malmgren, and Garrick Small

Published by Springer Science + Business Media, LLC, New York, 2008, 289 pages

$129.00, hardcover

* Who exactly are indigenous people?

* How can unintended consequences get in the way of well-intentioned efforts to redress past land-related injustices done to indigenous people?

* Is there a metaphysical aspect to land ownership?

* Are you a property modernist, or are you a property culturist?

Indigenous Peoples and Real Estate Valuation deals with these and other questions. This compilation is a jointly-sponsored project of the Appraisal Institute Education Trust, The Appraisers Research Foundation, and the American Real Estate Society. Two of the editors, Professor Simons and Ms. Malmgren, are associated with Cleveland State University, and the third, Professor Small, teaches at the University of Technology in Australia.

The book's twelve chapters are authored by scholars with a range of international backgrounds, including the United States, Australia, South Africa, Nigeria, and Ghana. The editors themselves contributed chapters. The essays deal with various problems and issues that have resulted from the clash of modern Western culture, and its notions of the proper relationship to property, with the world's traditional cultures and the property notions of the world's indigenous peoples.

Among the issues covered are the implementation of a modern land-tenure system, the settling of indigenous land claims via compensation or restitution, and the valuation of properties sacred to tribal religions taken through eminent domain.

In the chapter "Indigenous Land Claims in Canada: A Retrospective Analysis," Simons and Pai address the threshold question, what are indigenous peoples? They cite the following definition by Ceccherini (page 77):

Indigenous peoples are the descendants of the original inhabitants of any land (UN 1992). Indigenous people are people sharing the same language, race, religion, culture and customs, occupying a specific territory long before a foreign State began to rule the...

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