Class 11 History Chapter 6 Displacing Indigenous Peoples Notes in English

1Why This Chapter: Native Peoples, Then and Now

1.1 What This Chapter Covers

This chapter tells parts of the history of the native peoples of America and Australia. A different chapter, Theme 8, already covered the Spanish and Portuguese colonisation of South America, so this chapter does not repeat that. From the eighteenth century, more of South America, Central America, North America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand came to be settled by immigrants from Europe. This pushed many native peoples out into other areas. These European settlements were called colonies. Once the European inhabitants of a colony became independent of their European “mother-country”, that colony became a “state” or country.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people from Asian countries also migrated to some of these lands. Today, Europeans and Asians together form the majority in these countries, and the number of native inhabitants is very small: they are hardly seen in the towns, and people have largely forgotten that they once occupied much of the country. Even so, the names of many rivers and towns still come from native words: Ohio, Mississippi and Seattle in the USA, Saskatchewan in Canada, Wollongong and Parramatta in Australia.

1.2 How Native Histories Went Missing, and Came Back

Till the middle of the twentieth century, American and Australian history textbooks described how Europeans “discovered” the Americas and Australia, and hardly mentioned native peoples except to call them hostile. Native peoples were, however, studied by anthropologists in America from the 1840s. Much later, from the 1960s, native peoples were encouraged to write their own histories, or to dictate them, which is called oral history.

Today, it is possible to read historical works and fiction written by native peoples themselves, and visitors to museums in these countries can see galleries of “native art” and special museums that show the native way of life. The National Museum of the American Indian in the USA has been curated by American Indians themselves.

2European Imperialism and the “New World”

2.1 From Trade to Colonies

The American empires of Spain and Portugal did not expand after the seventeenth century. From that time, other countries, namely France, Holland and England, began extending their trading activities and establishing colonies in America, Africa and Asia. Ireland, too, was virtually a colony of England, since its landowners were mostly English settlers.

From the eighteenth century, profit was always the reason for establishing colonies, but the actual style of control varied a great deal by region:

Region	How European control worked there
South Asia	Trading companies such as the East India Company turned themselves into political powers, defeated local rulers and annexed territory. They kept the older, well-developed administrative system, collected taxes from landowners, and later built railways, dug mines and set up big plantations.
Africa	Europeans traded only on the coast (except in South Africa), and only ventured into the interior from the late nineteenth century. After that, European countries agreed among themselves to divide up Africa as colonies.
America, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa	The word “settler” is used here: for the Dutch in South Africa, the British in Ireland, New Zealand and Australia, and Europeans generally in America.

2.2 Naming the “New World”

Europeans gave new names to the lands they reached, and these names are still used today. The Geographical Dictionary lists over a hundred place-names in the Americas and Australia that begin with “New”.

Name	Where it came from
“America”	First used after the travels of Amerigo Vespucci (1451-1512) were published
“Canada”	From kanata (“village” in the Huron-Iroquois language), as heard by the explorer Jacques Cartier in 1535
“Australia”	A sixteenth-century name for land in the Great Southern Ocean (austral is Latin for “south”)
“New Zealand”	Named by Tasman of Holland, the first European to sight the islands, in 1642 (zee is Dutch for “sea”)

3North America: The Land and Its First Peoples

3.1 The Land

The continent of North America extends from the Arctic Circle to the Tropic of Cancer, and from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. West of the Rocky Mountains lie the deserts of Arizona and Nevada, then further west the Sierra Nevada mountains; to the east are the Great Plains, the Great Lakes, the valleys of the Mississippi and the Ohio, and the Appalachian Mountains. Mexico lies to the south. Forty per cent of Canada is covered with forest, and oil, gas and mineral resources across the region explain the many big industries in the USA and Canada. Wheat, corn and fruit are grown extensively, and fishing is a major industry in Canada.

Mining, industry and extensive agriculture have been developed only in the last 200 years, by immigrants from Europe, Africa and China. But people had been living in North America for thousands of years before Europeans even learnt of its existence.

3.2 The Native Peoples of North America

The earliest inhabitants of North America came from Asia over 30,000 years ago, crossing a land-bridge across the Bering Straits, and moved further south during the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago. The oldest artefact found in America, an arrow-point, is 11,000 years old. The population began to increase about 5,000 years ago, once the climate became more stable.

These peoples lived in bands, in villages along river valleys. They ate fish and meat, and cultivated vegetables and maize. They often travelled long distances hunting bison (the wild buffalo that roamed the grasslands); this became easier from the seventeenth century, once natives began riding horses bought from Spanish settlers. But they only killed as many animals as they needed for food.

They did not attempt extensive agriculture, and since they did not produce a surplus, they did not develop kingdoms and empires the way Central and South America did. There were occasional quarrels between tribes over territory, but by and large, control of land was not an issue: they were content with the food and shelter the land gave them, without feeling any need to “own” it. An important part of their tradition was making formal alliances and friendships, and exchanging gifts: goods were obtained not by buying them, but as gifts.

Numerous languages were spoken across North America, though none of them were written down. Native peoples believed time moved in cycles, and each tribe carried accounts of their own origins and earlier history, passed on from one generation to the next. They were skilled craftspeople who wove beautiful textiles, and they could “read the land”: understanding climates and landscapes the way a literate person reads a written text.

3.3 Naming the Native Peoples

English uses several different terms for the native peoples of the “New World”, and an exam can ask you to match the term to its meaning:

4Two Ways of Seeing the Same Land

4.1 First Encounters: Trading, Not Yet Taking

In the seventeenth century, European traders who reached the north coast of North America after a difficult two-month voyage were relieved to find native peoples friendly and welcoming. Unlike the Spanish in South America, who were overcome by the abundance of gold, these adventurers came to trade in fish and furs, helped willingly by natives who were expert hunters. Further south, along the Mississippi, the French found that natives held regular gatherings to exchange handicrafts unique to one tribe, or food not available in other regions.

In exchange for local products, Europeans gave natives blankets, iron vessels (sometimes used instead of clay pots), guns (a useful supplement to bows and arrows), and alcohol. Alcohol was something natives had not known before, and they became addicted to it, which suited the Europeans, since it let them dictate the terms of trade. In turn, Europeans acquired an addiction to tobacco from the natives.

4.2 Mutual Perceptions

In the eighteenth century, western Europeans defined “civilised” people as literate, urban, and belonging to an organised religion. To them, the natives of America appeared “uncivilised”. To some, like the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, such people were to be admired precisely because they were untouched by the corruptions of “civilisation”; a popular term for this was “the noble savage”. The English poet William Wordsworth, in a poem, described natives as living “amid wilds” with only limited powers of imagination and emotion, though neither he nor Rousseau had ever actually met a native American.

Not every European view was hostile. Washington Irving, who had actually met native people (unlike Wordsworth or Rousseau), wrote that they were “taciturn” only around white men whose goodwill they distrusted, but were “great mimics” and entertained themselves at the expense of whites among their own company, and he criticised white men for treating “the poor Indians as little better than animals”.

4.3 Two Ways of Seeing Land Itself

From the seventeenth century, groups of Europeans persecuted for their religion (Protestants in Catholic countries, or Catholics where Protestantism was official) began leaving Europe to start new lives in America. As long as there was vacant land this was not a problem, but gradually Europeans moved further inland, near native villages, using iron tools to cut down forests and lay out farms.

Natives and Europeans quite literally saw different things when they looked at the same forest: natives identified tracks invisible to Europeans, while Europeans imagined the forest cut down and replaced with cornfields. President Thomas Jefferson’s “dream” was a country of small European-owned farms. Natives, who grew crops only for their own needs and not for sale or profit, thought it wrong to “own” land at all, which, in Jefferson’s view, only made them “uncivilised”.

5The Frontier Moves West

5.1 The USA and Canada Take Shape

The countries known as Canada and the United States of America came into existence at the end of the eighteenth century, occupying only a fraction of the land they cover today. Over the next hundred years they extended their control to reach their present size. Large areas were acquired by the USA through purchase: land in the south from France (the “Louisiana Purchase”) and Alaska from Russia, and through war, winning much of southern USA from Mexico. It did not occur to anyone that the consent of the natives living in these areas should have been asked.

5.2 New Farms, New Crops, and a Fenced Landscape

The landscape of America changed drastically in the nineteenth century. Some migrants from Britain and France were younger sons who would not inherit their fathers’ property, and were eager to own land in America themselves. Later waves came from Germany, Sweden and Italy, people who had lost their land to big farmers at home and wanted farms of their own, while people from Poland were drawn to the prairie grasslands, which reminded them of the steppes back home, and were excited to buy huge properties cheaply. Settlers introduced crops like rice and cotton, which could not grow in Europe and could therefore be sold there for profit. To protect their huge farms, wolves and mountain lions were hunted to extinction, and settlers felt fully secure only once barbed wire was invented in 1873.

5.3 Slavery in the South

The climate of the southern region was too hot for Europeans to work outdoors comfortably, and the experience of South American colonies had already shown that enslaved natives died in large numbers. Plantation owners therefore bought slaves from Africa instead. Protests by anti-slavery groups led to a ban on the slave trade, but Africans already enslaved in the USA, and their children, remained slaves.

The northern states, whose economy did not depend on plantations, argued for ending slavery as an inhuman practice. In 1861-65, a war was fought between states that wanted to retain slavery and those supporting abolition; the latter won, and slavery was abolished. It was only in the twentieth century, however, that African Americans won the battle for civil liberties, and segregation between “whites” and “non-whites” in schools and public transport finally ended.

5.4 Canada’s Own Political Problem

Canada faced a different, urgent problem that pushed the question of natives even further down the agenda: in 1763, Canada had been won by the British from France after a war, and French settlers repeatedly demanded autonomous political status. This was resolved only in 1867, by organising Canada as a Confederation of autonomous states.

6The Native Peoples Lose Their Land

6.1 Treaties, Cheating, and the Cherokee Case

As settlement expanded in the USA, natives were induced or forced to move after signing treaties selling their land, usually for very low prices, and there were instances where Americans cheated them by taking more land, or paying less, than promised.

Even high officials saw nothing wrong in depriving natives of their land. In the state of Georgia, officials argued that the Cherokee tribe was governed by state laws but could not enjoy the rights of citizens, despite the Cherokees having made more effort than any other tribe to learn English and understand the American way of life.

In 1832, US Chief Justice John Marshall announced an important judgment: the Cherokees were “a distinct community, occupying its own territory in which the laws of Georgia had no force”, with sovereignty in certain matters. President Andrew Jackson, otherwise known for fighting economic and political privilege, refused to honour this judgment, and ordered the US army to evict the Cherokees from their land and drive them to the Great American Desert.

Those who took the tribes’ land justified it by arguing that natives did not deserve land they did not use “to the maximum”. They criticised them as lazy for not producing goods for the market with their craft skills, and for not learning English or dressing “correctly” (meaning, like Europeans). “Primitive man will disappear with the primitive animal,” wrote a visiting Frenchman.

Activity 2: Population, USA 1820 vs Spanish America 1800 (in millions)
	USA, 1820	Spanish America, 1800
Natives	0.6	7.5
Whites	9.0	3.3
Mixed Europeans	0.1	5.3
Blacks	1.9	0.8
Total	11.6	16.9

6.2 Reservations, Resistance, and Chief Seattle

Natives pushed westward were given land “theirs in perpetuity”, but often moved again if lead, gold or oil was found on it. Many tribes were forced to share land originally occupied by one tribe alone, which led to quarrels between them. They were locked into small areas called reservations, often land with which they had no earlier connection at all.

Natives did not give up without a fight: the US army crushed a series of rebellions between 1865 and 1890, and in Canada, the Metis (people of mixed native-European descent) staged armed revolts between 1869 and 1885. After that, resistance largely ceased.

7Industry, Rights and Winds of Change

7.1 The Gold Rush and the Growth of Industries

In the 1840s, traces of gold were found in California, sparking the “Gold Rush”, as thousands of eager Europeans hurried to America hoping for a quick fortune. This drove the building of railway lines across the continent, for which thousands of Chinese workers were recruited. The USA’s railway was complete by 1870, Canada’s by 1885. “The old nations creep on at a snail’s pace,” said Andrew Carnegie, a poor Scottish immigrant who became one of the USA’s first millionaire industrialists, “the Republic thunders on at the speed of an express.”

Unlike England, where industry grew out of small peasants losing land to big farmers, North American industry developed to manufacture railway equipment and machinery for large-scale farming. In 1860, the USA had been an undeveloped economy; by 1890, it was the world’s leading industrial power.

By 1890, the bison had almost been exterminated, ending the way of life natives had followed for centuries by hunting it. In 1892, the USA’s continental expansion was complete: the land between the Pacific and Atlantic was divided into states, and there was no “frontier” left to pull settlers further west. Within a few years, the USA was setting up its own colonies in Hawaii and the Philippines: it had become an imperial power itself.

7.2 Constitutional Rights, But Only for Some

The “democratic spirit” that had been the settlers’ rallying cry in the 1770s came to define US identity against the monarchies and aristocracies of the Old World, and the US constitution’s “right to property” was something the state could not override. But both this democratic right (to vote for Congress and the President) and the right to property applied only to white men.

7.3 The Winds of Change… in the USA and Canada

Not until the 1920s did conditions begin improving for the native peoples of the USA and Canada. A 1928 survey directed by social scientist Lewis Meriam, The Problem of Indian Administration, painted a grim picture of terribly poor health and education facilities on reservations, just before the USA was hit by the Great Depression.

Sympathy for natives who were losing their culture while being denied full citizenship led to a landmark law, the Indian Reorganisation Act of 1934, giving reservation natives the right to buy land and take loans. In the 1950s and 60s, US and Canadian governments tried ending special provisions for natives, hoping they would “join the mainstream”, but natives did not want this. In 1954, the “Declaration of Indian Rights” accepted US citizenship on the condition that reservations and traditions would not be interfered with.

Today, though reduced greatly in numbers from what they were in the eighteenth century, native peoples of both countries have been able to assert their right to their own cultures, and, particularly in Canada, to their sacred lands, in ways their ancestors in the 1880s could not.

8Australia: Settlement and Displacement

8.1 The Aborigines and Their Long History

As in the Americas, human habitation in Australia has a long history. The “aborigines” (a general name for many different societies) began arriving over 40,000 years ago (possibly even earlier) from New Guinea, connected to Australia at the time by a land-bridge. In native tradition, they did not “come” to Australia; they had always been there; the deep past is called the “Dreamtime”, a concept in which the distinction between past and present, so clear to Europeans, is blurred.

In the late eighteenth century there were between 350 and 750 native communities in Australia, each with its own language (200 of these are still spoken today). A separate, large group of indigenous people living in the north are called the Torres Strait Islanders; the term “Aborigine” is not used for them, as they are believed to have migrated from elsewhere and belong to a different race. Together, native peoples made up 2.4 per cent of Australia’s population in 2005. Australia is sparsely populated, and even now most towns lie along the coast (where the British first arrived in 1770) because the central region is arid desert.

8.2 First Contact and Its Reversal

The story of settlers, natives and land in Australia has many parallels with the Americas, though it began almost 300 years later. Captain Cook’s and his crew’s initial reports about their encounters with natives were enthusiastic about their friendliness. But British feeling reversed sharply once Cook was killed by a native, not in Australia, but in Hawaii. As often happened elsewhere, this single incident was used by colonisers to justify subsequent violence toward entirely different peoples.

The Daruk people could not foresee that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nearly 90 per cent of them would die: from exposure to European germs, from the loss of their lands and resources, and in battles against the settlers. The British had already tried settling convicts in America until it became independent, and continued the same practice in Australia (an earlier attempt to settle Portuguese convicts in Brazil had been abandoned after violent reprisals from natives there). Most early Australian settlers were convicts, allowed to live freely once their jail term ended, on condition they did not return to Britain, and with no other option for making a life, they felt no hesitation about ejecting natives from land they wanted for cultivation.

8.3 Building a Colony on Taken Land

Australia’s economic development under European settlement was less varied than America’s: vast sheep farms and mining stations came first, followed by vineyards and wheat farming, which became the basis of the country’s prosperity.

Natives were employed on farms, often “under conditions of work so harsh that it was little different from slavery.” Later, Chinese immigrants provided cheap labour, as in California, but unease about depending on non-white labour led both countries’ governments to ban Chinese immigration. Until 1974, the popular fear that “dark” people from South or Southeast Asia might migrate to Australia in large numbers meant there was an official policy to keep “non-white” people out, later called the “White Australia” policy.

8.4 The Winds of Change… in Australia

In 1968, people were electrified by a lecture from anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner, “The Great Australian Silence”, on historians’ own silence about the aborigines. From the 1970s, as was happening in North America, there was a new eagerness to understand natives as communities with distinct cultures and their own understanding of nature and climate, not as “anthropological curiosities”. Underlying it all was the question Henry Reynolds later put in a powerful book, Why Weren’t We Told?, which condemned the practice of writing Australian history as though it began with Captain Cook’s “discovery”.

Since then, university departments have studied native cultures, museums have added galleries of native art, and natives have begun writing their own life histories. From 1974, “multiculturalism” became official Australian policy, giving equal respect to native cultures and to the different cultures of European and Asian immigrants.

From the 1970s, as the term “human rights” began to be heard at meetings of the UNO and other international agencies, Australians realised with dismay that, unlike the USA, Canada and New Zealand, Australia had no treaties with natives formalising the European takeover of land. The government had always called the land terra nullius: “belonging to nobody”.

There was also a long and agonising history of children of mixed native-European blood being forcibly captured and separated from their native relatives. Agitation around these questions led to two important decisions: first, to recognise that natives had strong historic bonds with land that was “sacred” to them, and that this should be respected; second, that while past acts could not be undone, there should be a public apology for the injustice done to these children.