This episode explores the history of colonial era in the US, the effects this had on the native peoples, and some of the ways the related perspectives became foundational in our understandings of race in America.
Transcript: Settler Colonialism and Native Americans
Will: An essential part of justifying conquest and settlement was making moral claims that the land was available to be used. So how is the Native American story different when it comes to diversity and inclusion and anti-racism?
Penny: Welcome to the Diversity and Inclusion for All project. I'm here today again with two of my colleagues, Eric Washington and Will Katerberg. And we are discussing again different topics and issues that helps us understand race in America.
Welcome to the Diversity and Inclusion for All project supported by Calvin University and the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship. Together, we'll listen to key perspectives, build our knowledge, inform our thinking, and get a little better equipped to engage our world.
Today, we're looking through the lens of immigration and a very complicated set of issues that feeds into understanding immigration in America, our history, and our today, and how race and racism fits into this picture and how understanding some of the immigration debates in some of our history helps us understand also the history and where we are in terms of race and racism in America today. So we're going to start by focusing a little bit on this term that I've just recently actually learned: settler colonialism. And for this topic in particular, Will Katerberg is our expert guest. He has written a book, Immigration Debates in America, which we will link in our description and is available in the learning package related to this topic. But Will, I wonder if you can just start us off and help us understand what settler colonialism is?
Will: Settler colonialism is a distinct kind of colonialism in which an indigenous population is replaced by an invasive settler society. And that settler colonial society develops a distinctive identity and asserts sovereignty over the region. If you think about colonialism and imperialism, you can think of different types. Historians of world history sometimes describe classic imperialism, where an invading group takes control over a territory and over its native population or indigenous population and uses that indigenous population as a source of labor. In those kinds of settings, the invading population doesn't settle permanently. The people who come, whether soldiers or merchants or government officials, come for a period of time and intend to retire back to their home country. A second form of imperialism is settler colonialism. Examples would be places like the United States and Canada or Australia. There the people going to go and intend to stay. They expect their children and their grandchildren and subsequent generations to be living in that new world. So Europeans migrating to what became the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and places like that. In those places, typically the native population or indigenous population largely died out due to disease, epidemics, starvation, disrupted economies, and war, and often ended up being segregated. And they often weren't really used as labor since the settlers were interested in controlling land.
There's a third variation where the place that's colonized by the settlers remains contested because the native population doesn't largely die out. The classic example of that would be South Africa, which was settled by British and Dutch settlers, or Algeria, which was settled by the French. There, because the peoples of Africa were part of the same large disease pool …pool as others in Africa, Europe and Asia, the European invaders didn't bring diseases that new diseases that wiped out the indigenous people. So you have a large indigenous population and a smaller but growing minority population of European settlers. So that would be a case where you have settler colonialism, but the indigenous population is not replaced.
Penny: We're interested in understanding some new things about race in America by looking at our history and in particular in this episode, looking at settler colonialism and perhaps some of the insights from that era, from understanding that era better as it relates in particular to the Native Americans or the peoples who were here as those settlers were coming in. What do we need to know about settler colonialism in the United States that will help us understand race in America?
Will: An essential part of justifying conquest and settlement was making moral claims that the land was available to be used. Now, when someone pointed out that there were people there already, the argument was that the land wasn't being used in productive ways. You know, people who are hunters and gatherers and fishers rather than farmers who live in proper, quote unquote, civilized societies were considered to be temporary rather than using the land. But that was the empirical and moral claim that the land wasn't being used. It was functionally empty because there was no civilized society there. This starts to bring us to where racism, as we think about it today, comes in. Europeans did not recognize indigenous groups in North America, Central America, and South America as “civilized.” And this reflects racial prejudices and those racial prejudices evolved and hardened over time and often became woven into law. The moral and empirical arguments that were used to say that this land wasn't being used, it was empty and therefore available increasingly were buttressed with racism, that native peoples were, by their nature, not as advanced, were barbaric and so on, and that too justified either going to war with them in wars of conquest or pushing them on onto reservation territories.
Penny: You had to kind of believe: we settlers are better and have the right to use this land the way we want to. And those other people who are culturally inferior, I should be able to do what I want and that I'm more important than they are. And I mean, that's kind of part of racism, too, right from the very beginning, this idea that my culture, my way of doing things, what I want to do with the land is more important than what you're doing.
Will: Yes. And I think that's right. And it was justified on both grounds of civilization, that is, indigenous peoples in places like what became the US, Canada, and Australia were culturally and socially inferior, was combined with the argument that because they were heathen, that is not Christian, they could be pushed out of the way. They're standing morally didn't count. They didn’t legally didn't count. It's important to recognize that those same ideas could be used elsewhere. So when the English conquered Ireland in the early modern era, they used many of the same arguments against the Irish as uncivilized. And because the Irish Catholic rather than Presbyterian or Anglican, that is Protestant, there were similar kinds of justification. And some scholars have seen some loose parallels between how the English conquered Ireland and treated the Irish and the lessons they learned and then took with them when they came to the Americas in the sixteen hundred and seventeen hundreds. What are the essential differences between the Irish, of course, and indigenous peoples in the Americas is race. That is to say, things like skin color. People of Irish background could melt and become part of the dominant society in a way that Native Americans, who looked different, couldn't do nearly as easily.
Penny: Yeah, I definitely want to come back to that later point. It seems like really combining a feeling of religious right and superiority and cultural superiority -- That's part of racial superiority. It's like it gets all mixed up and combined together, and especially right from the beginning of settlement in the United States that's part of that picture. And I wonder, it seems like it's really all about money and power and economy. Is racism always about money and power?
Will: To take a classic example from textbooks of colonial history throughout the Americas, it's often said that was that the Spanish came for God, glory, and gold. They came for glory in the sense that as the Spanish were finishing the process of conquering the Iberian Peninsula and pushing out Muslims and Jews, well, that's where the Americans provided a new opportunity for glory, for fame, fortune for soldiers. And gold is obvious. People are attracted by the potential for wealth, by gold and silver explicitly, but also by land by making money on plantations that grew with a variety of different kinds of crops. And then, of course, there also was God - the opportunity to do missions among heathen people, so-called heathen peoples. And those three typically interacted with each other. And one could be used to justify the other.
Penny: Is it true that very often in different contexts, when the “other” people converted to Christianity, then you actually needed to fall back on really racist ideas in order to keep them enslaved or to keep them “other” or to keep them on reservations. It seems like on one hand, some of us settlers want to say they're doing this for for God and for a missionizing kind of thing. But then when they win their converts, they say… they need something else. They need racism to be able to keep those others still in their place. It feels like that's both very disturbing, but probably a lot. That happened a lot.
Will: Yes. A classic example of that in American history is the case of the Cherokee and what's often referred to as the Trail of Tears. So the Cherokee living in what is now places like Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina adapted to Europeans in many ways by the late seventeen hundreds and early eighteen hundreds. Developing a written version and printing presses of their own language. Many of them learning English. Many of them being educated in European or European American ways. They began farming and building homes in European ways. At least many did. Some of them built plantations and held African-American and African slaves. And so they were civilizing, many of them also becoming Christian. And then gold was discovered in parts of the region where they were living, notably in Georgia. And at that point, you know, Georgians and people in Tennessee, in North Carolina, by which I mean white people who'd never been fully comfortable and only grudgingly accepting of the ongoing presence of groups like the Cherokee, insisted that they be pushed out. It took several decades before this finally happened. But in the eighteen thirties, the Cherokee, most of them were forcibly removed from the American south and sent to what was then known as the Indian Territory, which largely corresponds to what is now the state of Oklahoma.
Eric: Like recent things that have occurred that have historical relevance to the relationship between African-Americans and indigenous folk, Native Americans, especially as it pertains to the freedmen rolls, will mention the Trail of Tears. Also on the Trail of Tears, you had enslaved African-Americans who are on the trail of tears and who were dispossessed as enslaved people from North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama that made that trek to what is now Oklahoma. They remained enslaved. Some of them receive freedom before 1865. But 1865 comes along and they… they're free. And you have a lot of African-Americans who then settle in their own towns in Oklahoma. And really, that's the basis of even black Wall Street.
Penny: One take away, I'm kind of gleaning from our brief conversation about slavery, colonialism, and how the settlers interacted and sort of saw themselves up against Native Americans at the time, is that cultural racism and actual race racism were really part of the justification for everything that the settlers or the big reasons why the settlers were doing what they were doing or how they at least justified it to themselves. And I'm just kind of wondering, how do we deal with that today? I feel like we can't go back and we're not going to go back and and create a completely different country or a completely different economy. What can we do that sort of recognizes that in a meaningful way?
Will: One of the things you can see a lot of universities and churches and businesses and sometimes town and city governments do is regularly acknowledging that the land on which they live or the land in which their businesses or other institutions literally sit once belonged to native people. So acknowledging that the land was taken is one thing you can do. Acknowledging history and acknowledging that it's not old history, that the story is not just history. It's still within the living memory of many people. So Native American children today, adults were often forced to attend residential schools in Canada, the United States, and this history continued into the 1950s and 60s.
Penny: If you're interested in learning more about land acknowledgment, I encourage you to listen to our two episodes on land acknowledgment. One is called Introducing Land Acknowledgment. What is it? And the second one is called Whose Wisdom Do You Trust?
How to Go About Land Acknowledgments?
Will: The other thing I think you can do is begin to think about what might be just recompense. Not just for current or recent history, you know, that's part of memory, but also for the older history and what kind of financial compensation or what kind of programs for people living on reservation territories or native peoples who don't live on reservation territories…what kind of just recompense might there be for indigenous peoples?
Eric: You know, from an African-American perspective, I mean, due-recompense is something that is that is always before African-Americans in terms of unjust acts that that that have occurred in in history on the soil. But there there there was controversy about recompense. We're talking about recompense. People who have been enslaved by Native Americans and call themselves Freedmen. Many of them were locked out of recompense records. Records were lost and folks were unable to prove that they had a claim to recompense as being connected to Native American groups, that that that went into the Indian territory. I think just this year there was a case, the Cherokee Supreme Court set a new precedent that made it much easier, but but lessen some of those real tight specifications about freedmen getting claims for recompense. I think that I think that case was back either back in January or February. But here it is where you have these these histories that run parallel. And in this case, they're basically intertwined.
Will: In the 1890’s, American Congress passed an allotment bill. And the idea was that land held collectively by Native American communities, reservation lands would be allotted to individuals. That is to say, they would be broken up instead of groups like the Cherokee holding the land in common. Now, individual Cherokee would own the land in the same way that other Americans did. The idea was to get the land out of the hands of Indians, groups like the Cherokee and into the hands of white people. So they set up these allotment processes whereby Indian men say groups like Cherokee men, Cherokee women and Cherokee children could make land claims they would receive their land, and any land that was left over would be open for settlement by white Americans. It raised the question of what did people who've been part of these Cherokee communities as black slaves? What was their status? Should they receive allotment land, too? And what about people whose descent was mixed, partly of Cherokee blood, partly of African-American blood? And so it became a whole conflict defined increasingly by race, by blood, in ways that was unfamiliar, that were unfamiliar to most Native American communities until that time.
Penny: So it's kind of interesting, race is used to justify the white settlers taking and using land and saying what I want to do with it is more important than what you want to do with all those things. And then later, race is also used to try to give recompense. And it's just it's so complicated. So were there some African-American slaves, former slaves of Cherokee, who did get land allotments?
Will: I think on the margins, I don't remember the history in detail enough, I suspect on the margins where they were probably of mixed blood. But as Eric says, the general story is that they were denied access to the land and they were judged not to be part of the Cherokee communities. And so racism and racial thinking becomes part of Cherokee communities. Partly earlier, of course, when they were in when some Cherokee were and other Native American groups were enslaving African-Americans, but also as a result of this allotment process.
Eric: Yeah, and it goes back to the creation of these all-black towns in… in Oklahoma.
Will: So equality for African-Americans or Asian-Americans, just to give two examples, would mean full participation in American society, of full inclusion to all the rights and status and standing in American society. That, of course, would also mean their full participation in settler colonialism. And so a growing number of Native American scholars have simply pointed out the irony that one of the common flaws in visions of multiculturalism and inclusion for immigrants of African, Asian, or Latin American descent means that they participate in the ongoing story of settler colonialism when it comes to indigenous peoples, that is Native Americans. And this has become a growing part of the conversation for people who think about multiculturalism and inclusion. What does it mean? What does multiculturalism and inclusion mean for indigenous peoples? So how is the Native American story different when it comes to diversity and inclusion and anti-racism?
Penny: Thank you for helping me understand a little bit at least what settler colonialism was and how different ideas about other races, especially Native Americans, really played a role in in the beginnings of the United States, as it's known today, and that the taking of that territory. I think one thing that just, you know, looking to the future, I had someone recently who said: When people in the past went to settle a new, quote unquote, settle in the country, they actually arrived and wanted to know, how can I make this into my own? And they didn't ever ask the question, how can I fit in with what's already here? And I wonder if just moving forward, we need to be thinking a little bit more that way when we engage across those lines, when we go into new places to not be thinking, what can I get out of this engagement or from these people or from this country or from this land, but actually a little more, how can we be neighbors and how can I fit in and what can I learn from them? And I think that's one of the things with the land acknowledgment movement and some reconciliation ecology movements now, too, is that people are looking to the cultures and the rich cultural heritage and knowledge of our native, indigenous or native populations and saying, well, we made a lot of mistakes. Let's fess up. But what can we do now to kind of recognize that, admit it, tell the truth, maybe do some recompense? And also, what can we learn from these rich cultures and these other traditions?
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