By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

European Colonialism In The New World

From the first arrival of English traders in North America, the English were prone to be suspicious, standoffish, and supercilious toward various Indian groups. Individual merchants attempted to cheat Indians whenever they thought they could get away with it, and double-dealing was a frequent fact of life regarding treaties with the Natives. Sometimes, outright frauds, such as the Walking Purchase, were perpetrated to strip Indians of their land claims. Settlers took advantage of their higher population concentrations, political organization, access to firearms, literacy, and desirable products to gain the upper hand in negotiations with the Indians throughout the colonial period.

Continuous encroachment and occasional lousy behavior sparked periodic conflicts with the Indians, which might result in a massacre of settlers, but that usually turned out worse for the Indians. While colonial governments attempted to maintain a separation of the two peoples and a political status quo, in the long run, overwhelming the colonial population meant that the Indians were inexorably pushed over the Appalachians. In the South, the US government signed treaties with the Five Civilized Tribes. At the same time, in the north and west, the Iroquois and other tribes were slowly driven before the encroaching settlement by squatting, land purchases, and occasional open warfare.

The discovery of gold in North Carolina and Georgia in the 1820s put tremendous pressure on the southern governments to “remove” the Indians across the Mississippi, where, for a generation, it was naively believed they would find a permanent home. The election of Andrew Jackson in 1830 saw the triumph of the Indian-removal party, which precipitated the series of forced migrations on the southern tribes that came to be known as the Trail of Tears. Meanwhile, the purchase of greater Louisiana in 1803 sped up the Americanization of the greater Mississippi River basin. The rapid advance of technology led to massive overland migrations in the 1840s and ’50s, which now began to reach the US West Coast, meaning that the remaining Indian population was increasingly surrounded, isolated, and continually harassed by settlers and soldiers alike.

The discovery of gold in California in 1849 brought a tremendous influx of ruffians and adventurers into California, and after these provoked a handful of skirmishes with the local Indian population, a series of “wars” erupted that were often little more than Indian-hunting expeditions. It took some fifteen or twenty years for the massacres and bloodshed to be controlled by the US federal government, partly due to the Civil War draining resources from Indian protection operations. Still, by that time, most of the Indian population of California had scattered or been assimilated. The Civil War saw an uptick in violence across the West, and several massacres and forced marches resulted.

On the Great Plains, some of the last remaining groups of “free” Indians survived by hunting buffalo—until the advance of firearms technology in the early 1870s saw the entire American bison population wiped out in a few years. After this, a few decades of desultory warfare saw the last Indian groups subdued by the US Army, and the reservation system was forced on the Amerindians. Many Indian children were forced to go to public schools where the goal was to “kill the Indian,” i.e., to remove all vestiges of Indian language and culture from the student, replacing it with the dominant English-speaking Christian and Western ideology.

This is hardly a glorious track record, and there is much about it to lament. That said, we have sought to demonstrate that there are virtually no grounds—at any time in the five-hundred-year history of European settlement in the New World—for declaring European policies or actions against the Amerindians to be “genocidal.” This is—at best—a metaphor; at worst, an inexcusable exaggeration that diminishes the victims of actual genocide. Nor is there historical justification for arguing that the United States or any Western Hemisphere country is fundamentally illegitimate because it was “stolen” from Indigenous peoples. Even if some land was stolen or conquered in war, much of it was purchased and sold voluntarily. Such a simplistic view also ignores inescapable realities such as demographic reality and the necessity of switching from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural lifestyle after introducing firearms.

Another thing that this lamentable history does not justify is the accusation that either Europeans or their culture was particularly depraved in comparison with other global cultures. Most Western Hemisphere countries with substantial Native populations in 1491 are today majority Indian or mestizo. The same holds throughout the Old World to an even greater extent. All this gives the lie to the myth of settler colonialism as a consistent policy or systemic feature of European civilization. Looking at global history, it is abundantly clear that Europeans were no more prone to violence, hierarchy, patriarchy, or slavery than any other people on Earth. The last few centuries have demonstrated nearly the opposite: Western civilization has been the overwhelming force behind the triumph of human rights in modern global society. This includes the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, gay rights, and minority rights—in short, every form of equality that most modern people hold dear. This human rights revolution was made possible through the advance of European learning and technology—the same learning and technology lamented so bitterly by those who criticize European expansionism and colonization.

In a further irony, the theoretical framework that paints Europe as particularly depraved is a brainchild of the European scientific and Enlightened self-criticism tradition. Only in the West has radical self-criticism evolved to the fine heights we see today. Already in the nineteenth century, the European penchant for self-criticism reached new heights with the spread of Marxism; unfortunately, nearly every modern theory that is critical of Europe continues to use an outdated Marxist paradigm of “inevitable struggle between two opposing groups” as its basis. Critical race theory is a direct descendant of this line of thinking as it evolved in the 1960s and ’70s. Any theory that posits that Europeans are a priori worse than any other historical group is likely to be based upon this hoary reasoning and should be exposed by critically minded historians for the lazy, derivative wish fulfillment that it is. Until we do so, policies that treat underprivileged groups as victims rather than as potential success stories will continue to fail our societies and prolong tragic achievement gaps among Indigenous populations and certain other minority groups.

 

 

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