Class 11 History Chapter 6 Displacing Indigenous Peoples Important Questions with Answers in English

Q. What is a colony?

Answer: A colony is a territory settled and controlled by people from another country. When the European inhabitants of a colony became independent of their European ‘mother-country’, the colony became a ‘state’ or country.

Q. What is meant by oral history?

Answer: It is history that a community narrates or dictates from memory and tradition instead of writing it down itself. Native peoples were encouraged to record their history this way from the 1960s.

Q. Give one place name derived from a native word in North America and one in Australia.

Answer: Ohio, Mississippi or Seattle in the USA and Saskatchewan in Canada; Wollongong or Parramatta in Australia.

Q. What were Wampum belts, and what were they used for?

Answer: Belts made of coloured shells sewn together, which native tribes exchanged with each other after a treaty was agreed to.

Q. Name the 1928 survey on the condition of natives in reservations and the social scientist who directed it.

Answer: The Problem of Indian Administration, directed by Lewis Meriam.

Q. What does terra nullius mean?

Answer: It is the term the Australian government always used for the land of Australia, and it means ‘belonging to nobody’.

Q. In which year was the USA’s continental expansion complete, leaving no ‘frontier’?

Answer: 1892.

Q. Who delivered the lecture ‘The Great Australian Silence’, and in which year?

Answer: The anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner, in 1968.

Q. What do the native peoples of Australia call the deep past?

Answer: The ‘Dreamtime’, in which the distinction between past and present is blurred.

Q. What does the word ‘native’ mean, and how did Europeans use it?

Answer: ‘Native’ means a person born in the place he or she lives in. Till the early twentieth century the term was used by Europeans to describe the inhabitants of countries they had colonised, which is why it carried a sense of inferiority that the word itself does not have.

Q. What was the ‘Trail of Tears’?

Answer: It is the name given to the forced removal of the Cherokees from their land in Georgia to the Great American Desert, ordered by President Andrew Jackson after he refused to honour Chief Justice Marshall’s 1832 judgment. Of the 15,000 people forced to go, over a quarter died along the way.

Q. Why was Chinese immigration restricted in both the USA and Australia?

Answer: Chinese workers had been recruited in thousands to build the American railways, and later Chinese immigrants provided cheap labour in Australia as they had in California. Unease about being dependent on non-whites led the governments of both countries to ban Chinese immigrants, and in Australia the fear that ‘dark’ people from South and Southeast Asia would come in large numbers kept an official policy of exclusion in place till 1974.

Q. How did European control in South Asia differ from European activity in Africa before the late nineteenth century?

Answer: In South Asia trading companies such as the East India Company turned themselves into political powers, defeated local rulers, annexed their territories, kept the older administrative system, collected taxes from landowners, and later built railways, dug mines and set up big plantations. In Africa, except in South Africa, Europeans traded only on the coast and ventured into the interior only in the late nineteenth century, after which the European countries agreed among themselves to divide Africa up as colonies.

Q. Why did the native peoples of North America feel no need to ‘own’ land?

Answer: They were content with the food and shelter the land gave them and had no economic need for more, since they grew crops for their own use and not for sale. Goods came to them as gifts through formal alliances and friendships rather than by purchase, so land too was something used rather than owned.

Q. What was the ‘Gold Rush’, and what did it lead to?

Answer: In the 1840s traces of gold were found in California, and thousands of eager Europeans hurried to America hoping for a quick fortune. It led to the building of railway lines across the continent, for which thousands of Chinese workers were recruited, and the USA’s railway was completed by 1870 and Canada’s by 1885.

Q. Who are the Torres Strait Islanders?

Answer: They are a large group of indigenous people living in the north of Australia. The term ‘Aborigine’ is not used for them, as they are believed to have migrated from elsewhere and to belong to a different race. Together with the aborigines they made up 2.4 per cent of Australia’s population in 2005.

Q. Which two decisions came out of the agitation over aboriginal rights in Australia?

Answer: First, to recognise that the 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 the children who had been separated from their families.

Q. Why did plantation owners in the southern USA buy slaves from Africa?

Answer: The climate of the southern region was too hot for Europeans to work outdoors, and the experience of the South American colonies had shown that natives who were enslaved died in large numbers. Plantation owners therefore bought slaves in Africa instead.

Q. What did the ‘frontier’ mean to the Americans?

Answer: 1. A moving line, not a fixed border. The ‘frontier’ was the western edge of European-American settlement in the USA. It was a shifting one: as settlers moved west it moved with them, and the natives living beyond it were forced to move back each time.
2. A promise of land and a new life. Canada and the USA came into existence at the end of the eighteenth century occupying only a fraction of their present land. Over the next hundred years the USA acquired territory by purchase, buying land in the south from France in the Louisiana Purchase and Alaska from Russia, and by war, winning much of the southern USA from Mexico. To younger sons from Britain and France who would inherit nothing at home, to Germans, Swedes and Italians who had lost land to big farmers, and to Poles who found the prairie like the steppes of home, the frontier meant land of their own at a low price.
3. A place where nobody asked the natives. Nobody thought of asking the people already living on that land whether they agreed to any of it. Karl Marx described the American frontier as ‘the last positive capitalist utopia… the limitless nature and space to which the limitless thirst for profit adapts itself’.
4. Its end. In 1892 the USA’s continental expansion was complete, the area between the Pacific and the Atlantic was divided into states, and there no longer remained a frontier to pull settlers west. Within a few years the USA was setting up colonies in Hawaii and the Philippines, so the search for new space simply moved overseas.

Q. Explain the different images Europeans and native Americans had of each other and of nature.

Answer: How Europeans saw the natives. In the eighteenth century western Europeans defined ‘civilised’ people in terms of literacy, an organised religion and urbanism, and by that measure the natives appeared ‘uncivilised’. Rousseau admired them for being untouched by the corruptions of ‘civilisation’, a view summed up in the popular term ‘the noble savage’. Wordsworth wrote of them as living ‘amid wilds’ with only limited powers of imagination and emotion, although neither he nor Rousseau had ever met a native American. Thomas Jefferson spoke of them in words the chapter says would cause a public outcry today.
The exception. Washington Irving had actually met native people, and wrote that they were taciturn only with white men whose goodwill they distrusted, that among themselves they were great mimics who entertained themselves at the expense of the whites, and that white men treated ‘the poor Indians as little better than animals’.
How natives saw the Europeans. Many native folk tales mocked Europeans and described them as greedy and deceitful. The natives were saddened by their greed for furs, which had led them to slaughter hundreds of beavers, and were uneasy in case the animals took revenge for the destruction.
Two views of exchange. To the natives the goods exchanged were gifts, given in friendship. To the Europeans, dreaming of becoming rich, fish and furs were commodities to be sold at a profit in Europe. Prices varied from year to year with supply, and the natives, who had no sense of a ‘market’ in faraway Europe, could not understand why they were given a great deal one year and very little the next.
Two views of nature. Natives and Europeans saw different things when they looked at the same forest. Natives identified tracks invisible to the Europeans; Europeans imagined the forest cut down and replaced by cornfields. Jefferson’s ‘dream’ was a country populated by Europeans with small farms, and the natives, who grew crops for their own needs and thought it wrong to ‘own’ land, could not understand this, which in Jefferson’s view made them ‘uncivilised’.

Q. Describe the way of life of the native peoples of North America before the Europeans came.

Answer: How they came, and when. The earliest inhabitants came from Asia over 30,000 years ago on a land-bridge across the Bering Straits, moved further south during the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago, and began to grow in number about 5,000 years ago when the climate became more stable. The oldest artefact found in America, an arrow-point, is 11,000 years old.
Where and how they lived. They lived in bands, in villages along river valleys. They ate fish and meat and cultivated vegetables and maize, and travelled long distances after bison, the wild buffalo of the grasslands, which became easier from the seventeenth century once they rode horses bought from Spanish settlers. They killed only as many animals as they needed for food.
Why there were no kingdoms. They did not attempt extensive agriculture and produced no surplus, so no kingdoms and empires arose as they had in Central and South America. There were occasional quarrels between tribes over territory, but by and large control of land was not an issue.
Gifts, not trade. Making formal alliances and friendships and exchanging gifts was an important feature of their tradition, and goods were obtained as gifts rather than by purchase. Wampum belts of coloured shells sewn together were exchanged after a treaty was agreed to.
Their skills and beliefs. Numerous languages were spoken and none was written down. They believed that time moved in cycles, and each tribe passed on its own account of its origins and earlier history 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 literate people read a written text.

Q. Trace the Cherokee case from the dispute in Georgia to the Trail of Tears.

Answer: 1. The dispute. Officials in the state of Georgia argued that the Cherokee tribe was governed by state laws but could not enjoy the rights of citizens. This was despite the fact that of all the native peoples the Cherokees had made the most effort to learn English and to understand the American way of life.
2. The judgment of 1832. The US Chief Justice, John Marshall, announced that the Cherokees were ‘a distinct community, occupying its own territory in which the laws of Georgia had no force’, and that they had sovereignty in certain matters.
3. The President’s refusal. President Andrew Jackson had a reputation for fighting against economic and political privilege, but he refused to honour the Chief Justice’s judgment and ordered the US army to evict the Cherokees from their land and drive them to the Great American Desert.
4. The Trail of Tears. Of the 15,000 people forced to go, over a quarter died along the way, and the removal is remembered by that name.
5. How it was justified. Those who took the land said the natives did not deserve to occupy land they did not use to the maximum, called them lazy for not using their craft skills to produce goods for the market, and blamed them for having no interest in learning English or dressing ‘correctly’. A visiting Frenchman wrote that ‘primitive man will disappear with the primitive animal’.

Q. What were ‘reservations’? How did the natives resist, and how did the resistance end?

Answer: What a reservation was. As settlement expanded the natives were pushed westward and given land elsewhere that was said to be ‘theirs in perpetuity’. In practice they were often moved again whenever a mineral such as lead or gold, or oil, was found on their land. Many tribes were forced to share land originally occupied by one tribe alone, which led to quarrels between them. In the end they were locked off in small areas called ‘reservations’, which often was land with which they had no earlier connection.
The resistance. They did not give in without a fight. The US army crushed a series of rebellions between 1865 and 1890, the years the chapter’s timeline calls the American Indian Wars. In Canada there were armed revolts by the Metis, people of native European descent, between 1869 and 1885, remembered as the Red River Rebellion.
How it ended. After these defeats the natives gave up armed resistance. Chief Seattle had already put the other kind of resistance into words in 1854, asking the President how one could buy or sell the sky and the warmth of the land, and saying that every part of the earth was sacred to his people.
What was said about them at the time. From the 1840s the subject of anthropology, developed in France, was introduced in North America out of curiosity about the differences between native ‘primitive’ communities and the ‘civilised’ communities of Europe. Some anthropologists argued that, just as there were no ‘primitive’ people left in Europe, the American natives too would ‘die out’.

Q. How did the Gold Rush change North America’s industry, and what did it cost the native peoples?

Answer: The rush itself. In the 1840s traces of gold were found in California, and thousands of eager Europeans hurried to America hoping to make a quick fortune.
Railways. This led to the building of railway lines across the continent, for which thousands of Chinese workers were recruited. The USA’s railway was completed by 1870 and Canada’s by 1885.
A different kind of industry. In England the Industrial Revolution happened partly because small peasants were losing land to big farmers and moving into factory jobs. In North America industries developed for a different reason, to manufacture railway equipment so that rapid transport could link distant places, and to produce machinery that would make large-scale farming easier. Industrial towns grew and factories multiplied in both the USA and Canada. In 1860 the USA had been an undeveloped economy; in 1890 it was the leading industrial power in the world.
The cost to the natives. Vast areas were cleared and divided into farms, and by 1890 the bison had almost been exterminated, ending the life of hunting the natives had followed for centuries. In 1892 continental expansion was complete and no frontier remained, and within a few years the USA had itself become an imperial power with colonies in Hawaii and the Philippines.

Q. Why was the history of the Australian native peoples left out of history books?

Answer: 1. History was written as though it began with ‘discovery’. Till the middle of the twentieth century Australian textbooks described how Europeans had discovered Australia and hardly mentioned the native peoples except to suggest that they were hostile to Europeans. Henry Reynolds later condemned exactly this in his book Why Weren’t We Told?
2. The natives were treated as objects of study rather than as people with a history. Anthropology had been introduced to compare ‘primitive’ communities with ‘civilised’ ones, and some anthropologists argued that the natives would simply ‘die out’. A people expected to disappear was not thought to need a history.
3. There was no written record of the kind historians used. Their past was not kept in documents. It survived in stories, painting and carving, and historians who wrote the country’s history from the settlers’ side did not draw on it.
4. Silence was convenient. Australia had taken the land without any treaty, terming it terra nullius, and a history that described the native peoples would have raised the question of how their land had been taken.
5. When it changed. In 1968 the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner electrified his audience with a lecture called ‘The Great Australian Silence’, on the silence of historians about the aborigines. From the 1970s university departments were set up to study native cultures, galleries of native art were added to museums, and natives began writing their own life histories.

Q. Explain the different terms used in English for the native peoples of the ‘New World’.

Answer: aborigine. The native people of Australia. The word comes from the Latin ab, meaning from, and origine, the beginning.
Aboriginal. An adjective, though it is often misused as a noun.
American Indian, Amerind, Amerindian. The native peoples of North and South America and the Caribbean.
First Nations peoples. The organised native groups recognised by the Canadian government. The Indians Act of 1876 used the term ‘bands’, but from the 1980s the word ‘nations’ is used.
indigenous people. People belonging naturally to a place.
native American. The indigenous people of the Americas, and the term now commonly used.
‘Red Indian’. The brown-complexioned people whose land Columbus mistook for India.
A related point worth adding. ‘Native’ itself means a person born in the place he or she lives in, but till the early twentieth century Europeans used it for the inhabitants of countries they had colonised. Names of native tribes are also given to things unconnected with them, such as Dakota for an aeroplane, Cherokee for a jeep, Pontiac for a car and Mohawk for a haircut.

Q. Explain how European imperialism from the eighteenth century took different forms in different regions.

Answer: The common motive. From the eighteenth century it became obvious that the prospect of profit was what drove people to establish colonies, but there were significant variations in the nature of the control that was established.
Who was expanding. The American empires of Spain and Portugal did not expand after the seventeenth century. From that time France, Holland and England extended their trading activities and set up colonies in America, Africa and Asia. Ireland too was virtually a colony of England, as its landowners were mostly English settlers.
1. South Asia: trade turning into government. Trading companies such as the East India Company made themselves into political powers, defeated local rulers and annexed their territories. They retained the older, well-developed administrative system and collected taxes from landowners. Later they built railways to make trade easier, excavated mines and established big plantations.
2. Africa: the coast first, the interior late. Europeans traded on the coast, except in South Africa, and only in the late nineteenth century did they venture into the interior. After this some of the European countries reached an agreement to divide up Africa as colonies for themselves.
3. The settler colonies. The word ‘settler’ is used for the Dutch in South Africa, the British in Ireland, New Zealand and Australia, and the Europeans in America. Here Europeans came in large numbers to live on the land and farm it themselves. The official language in these colonies was English, except in Canada, where French is also an official language.
Why the difference mattered to the natives. Where Europeans came to trade or to administer, local society continued in an altered form. Where they came to settle, the land itself was what they wanted, so the people already living on it had to be moved. That is why the histories in this chapter, of America and Australia, are histories of displacement rather than of conquest alone.

Q. Describe the stages by which the native peoples of the USA lost their land.

Answer: 1. Treaties and cheating. As settlement expanded, the natives were induced or forced to move after signing treaties selling their land. The prices paid were very low, and there were instances when the Americans cheated them by taking more land or paying less than promised.
2. The law offered no protection. In Georgia, officials argued that the Cherokee tribe was governed by state laws but could not enjoy the rights of citizens, even though the Cherokees had made more effort than any other tribe to learn English and understand the American way of life.
3. A judgment that was ignored. In 1832 Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the Cherokees were ‘a distinct community, occupying its own territory in which the laws of Georgia had no force’. President Andrew Jackson refused to honour it and sent the army to drive the Cherokees to the Great American Desert. Of 15,000 forced to go, over a quarter died on the ‘Trail of Tears’.
4. The justification. Those who took the land argued that the natives did not deserve land they did not use to the maximum, called them lazy for not producing goods for the market, and blamed them for not learning English or dressing ‘correctly’. They deserved to ‘die out’, it was argued, and a visiting Frenchman wrote that ‘primitive man will disappear with the primitive animal’.
5. Land ‘in perpetuity’, taken again. Pushed westward, the natives were given land said to be theirs in perpetuity, but were moved again whenever lead, gold or oil was found on it. Many tribes were forced to share land originally occupied by one tribe, which set them quarrelling among themselves.
6. Reservations. Finally they were locked off in small areas called ‘reservations’, often land with which they had no earlier connection.
7. Resistance and its defeat. The US army crushed a series of rebellions from 1865 to 1890, and in Canada the Metis staged armed revolts between 1869 and 1885. After that they gave up.
8. The last blow. By 1890 the bison had almost been exterminated, ending the life of hunting the natives had followed for centuries, and by 1892 the frontier itself had gone. The population figures make the scale plain: in the USA in 1820 there were 0.6 million natives against 9.0 million whites, while in Spanish America in 1800 there had been 7.5 million natives against 3.3 million whites.

Q. Describe the ‘winds of change’ that improved the position of native peoples in the USA, Canada and Australia in the twentieth century.

Answer: In the USA. Not till the 1920s did things begin to improve. The Problem of Indian Administration, a survey directed by the social scientist Lewis Meriam and published in 1928, painted a grim picture of the terribly poor health and education facilities for natives in reservations, and it appeared only a few years before the Great Depression. White Americans felt sympathy for natives who were being discouraged from the full exercise of their cultures while at the same time being denied the benefits of citizenship, and this led to a landmark law, the Indian Reorganisation Act of 1934, which gave natives in reservations the right to buy land and take loans.
The attempt to end special provisions. In the 1950s and 1960s the US and Canadian governments thought of ending all special provisions for the natives in the hope that they would ‘join the mainstream’, that is, adopt European culture. The natives did not want this. In the ‘Declaration of Indian Rights’ of 1954 a number of native peoples accepted citizenship of the USA on condition that their reservations would not be taken away and their traditions would not be interfered with.
In Canada. In 1969 the government announced that it would ‘not recognise aboriginal rights’. The natives, in a well-organised opposition move, held a series of demonstrations and debates. The question was settled only in 1982, when the Constitution Act accepted the existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the natives, and many details remain to be worked out even now.
In Australia: a change of mind. In 1968 people were electrified by W.E.H. Stanner’s lecture ‘The Great Australian Silence’, on the silence of historians about the aborigines. From the 1970s there was an eagerness to understand natives as communities with distinct cultures and their own ways of understanding nature and climate, rather than as anthropological curiosities. Henry Reynolds’ book Why Weren’t We Told? condemned the practice of writing Australian history as though it began with Cook’s ‘discovery’.
In Australia: what was done. University departments were set up to study native cultures, galleries of native art were added, museums were enlarged with dioramas and rooms explaining native culture, and natives began writing their own life histories. This came at a critical time, because much of those cultures would otherwise have been forgotten. From 1974 multiculturalism became official policy, giving equal respect to native cultures and to the cultures of immigrants from Europe and Asia, and the policy of keeping ‘non-white’ people out of the country ended the same year.
Land and apology. From the 1970s, as ‘human rights’ began to be heard at the UNO, Australians realised with dismay that their country had no treaties with the natives at all. In 1992 the High Court, in the Mabo case, declared terra nullius legally invalid and recognised native claims to land from before 1770. A National Enquiry into the separation of aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families followed in 1995, and on 26 May 1999 ‘A National Sorry Day’ apologised for the children ‘lost’ from the 1820s to the 1970s.
Where it stands. Though reduced so much in numbers from what they had been in the eighteenth century, the native peoples of these countries have been able to assert their right to their own cultures and, particularly in Canada, to their sacred lands, in a way their ancestors could not have done in the 1880s.

Q. Compare the taking of native land in the USA and Canada with the taking of native land in Australia.

Answer: The one difference to lead with. The USA, Canada and New Zealand made treaties with their native peoples formalising the European takeover of land, however unequal those treaties were. Australia made none at all, because its government had always termed the land terra nullius, belonging to nobody, and land that belongs to no one needs no agreement to take.
How land was taken in the USA and Canada. Natives were induced or forced to sign treaties selling their land at very low prices, and were sometimes cheated by being paid less or losing more land than was promised. A judgment in their favour, Marshall’s of 1832, was simply ignored by President Jackson, and the Cherokees were driven out on the Trail of Tears. Land given ‘in perpetuity’ was taken back whenever lead, gold or oil was found, and the natives were finally confined to reservations.
How land was taken in Australia. The story began nearly 300 years later and had many points of similarity, but there was no treaty process at any stage. Most early settlers were convicts who, once free, had no way back to Britain and so felt no hesitation about ejecting natives from land they took over for cultivation. Some natives were employed on farms under conditions of work so harsh that it was little different from slavery.
The scale of loss. In the USA the bison were exterminated and the hunting life ended; in Australia nearly 90 per cent of the native people died in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from exposure to germs, from the loss of their lands and resources, and in battles against the settlers.
What resistance was possible. In North America there was armed resistance: the American Indian Wars of 1865 to 1890 and the Metis revolts of 1869 to 1885. In Australia natives also died in battles against the settlers, but the chapter names no organised war like these; the Daruk people’s response to the settlement at Sydney was avoidance, broken only by what the historians of Creating a Nation call an official kidnapping.
How each country reckoned with it. The USA moved through the Meriam survey of 1928, the Indian Reorganisation Act of 1934 and the Declaration of Indian Rights of 1954; Canada through the struggle over the 1969 announcement to the Constitution Act of 1982. Australia, having no treaties to build on, had to overturn the legal idea itself, which the High Court did in the Mabo case of 1992, and then to apologise, which it did on National Sorry Day in 1999.