@noreenismail3832

2 months ago

The history of settler-colonialism

The treatment of the Indigenous people on the land now known as the United States is just as horrifying. The primarily British Europeans who settled here — just like the Europeans who settled in Africa and the rest of the Americas — overall did not care that there were people already living on the land. The majority did not want peace and harmony between cultures; they wanted the land for themselves. They did not want to share the abundant resources; they wanted to generate wealth to fill their own pockets. Most had no respect for Indigenous cultures or histories; they wanted to enforce their own instead. These colonizers did not care that land was considered sacred and communal. Most believed that everything, including the earth, was meant to be bought and sold.

Unlike the colonial occupation of much of the African continent, however, the Europeans who settled in the United States never left. This is called settler colonialism, a distinct form of colonialism that seeks to replace, often through genocide and forced assimilation, an Indigenous population with a new settler population. A settler is defined as any non-Indigenous person living in a settler-colonial state like the United States, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. Understanding settler colonialism allows us to see colonialism not as a singular event, but an ongoing process of violence against and erasure of Indigenous people.

The Europeans who first settled along the East Coast of the United States believed it was their Manifest Destiny, or God-granted right, to claim territory for themselves and their posterity. As they spread across the entirety of the continental U.S., they pushed the Indigenous populations — who had lived on and tended to the land for millennia — farther and farther west. Native Americans were moved to reservations — parcels of land that were barren and far from economic opportunities. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson, hailed by President Donald Trump and commemorated on the U.S. $20 bill, signed the Indian Removal Act, which led to the forced removal, relocation, and mass death of thousands of Indigenous people. In 1838, the Cherokee were forced west by the U.S. government, which seized control of their land. Forced to walk thousands of miles, an estimated 4,000 Cherokees died on what would later come to be called the “Trail of Tears.” 

How colonialism shaped the world

It may be easy to brush colonialism off as a relic of the past, but we are all living in a world shaped by these histories of brutal and violent conquest. The wealth and prosperity of what were once the most powerful colonial nations in the world can be attributed to the theft of land, resources, and people from former colonies.
Walter Rodney’s book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa asserts that systemic poverty on the continent can be directly linked to European exploitation and resource extraction. After Haiti’s liberation from France, the island nation was ordered to pay $21 billion in reparations to cover the cost of France’s losses during the Haitian Revolution in exchange for its independence. This calculation included the cost of lost slaves. Haiti, the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, made its final payment to France in 1947. Here in the United States, Native reservations have extraordinarily high poverty, alcoholism, unemployment, and suicide rates. These are the effects of what Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, a social worker and professor, describes as historical trauma: intergenerational emotional and psychological damage.

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