Settler Colonialism: Native Peoples of America and Australia

1. Settler colonies within European imperialism

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• Spain and Portugal's American empires stopped expanding after the seventeenth century; France, Holland and England then extended trade and founded colonies in America, Africa and Asia. Ireland was virtually a colony of England — its landowners were mostly English settlers. Profit drove all colonisation, but the nature of control varied:

Variant	Chapter example	Mechanism
Settler colony	America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland	European immigrants settle, displace natives; colonies become 'states' on independence
Direct imperial rule	British India (East India Company)	trading company becomes political power, defeats rulers, annexes territory, keeps the old administrative system, collects taxes; later railways, mines, plantations
Semi-colony	China (19th–early 20th c.)	Britain, France, Germany, Russia, America and Japan meddle without taking over state power, exploiting resources and compromising sovereignty

• 'Settler' is used for the Dutch in South Africa, the British in Ireland, New Zealand and Australia, and Europeans in America; official language English (Canada also French). In Africa, Europeans traded on the coast (except South Africa) and entered the interior only in the late nineteenth century, then agreed to divide Africa among themselves.
• European-given names: America — after Amerigo Vespucci's published travels; Canada — kanata, 'village' in Huron-Iroquois, as heard by Jacques Cartier (1535); Australia — Latin austral, 'south'; New Zealand — named by Tasman of Holland (first sighting 1642), zee = Dutch 'sea'; over a hundred place-names begin with 'New'. Native names survive in Ohio, Mississippi, Seattle, Saskatchewan, Wollongong, Parramatta.
• Recovering native histories: till the mid-twentieth century US and Australian textbooks began with European 'discovery', mentioning natives only as hostile. Natives were studied by anthropologists from the 1840s (a discipline developed in France; some anthropologists predicted natives would 'die out'). From the 1960s, oral history — natives writing or dictating their own histories; today native-written history and fiction, galleries of native art, and the National Museum of the American Indian, curated by American Indians themselves.

2. The native peoples of North America

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• The earliest inhabitants came from Asia over 30,000 years ago on a land-bridge across the Bering Straits, moving south during the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago. Oldest artefact: an arrow-point, 11,000 years old; population grew from c. 5,000 years ago as the climate stabilised.
• They lived in bands, in villages along river valleys, eating fish and meat and cultivating vegetables and maize; they made long journeys for bison — easier from the seventeenth century, when they began riding horses bought from Spanish settlers — but killed only as many animals as they needed.
• No extensive agriculture, no surplus — hence no kingdoms or empires (unlike Central and South America); quarrels over territory were rare since control of land was not an issue: they took food and shelter from the land without feeling any need to 'own' it.
• Gift economy: goods were obtained not by purchase but as gifts within formal alliances and friendships; wampum belts (coloured shells sewn together) were exchanged after treaties.
• Numerous unwritten languages; belief that time moves in cycles; each tribe transmitted its own origin-history orally; skilled weaving and crafts; they could 'read the land' — climates and landscapes — as the literate read texts.

3. Encounters and mutual perceptions

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• Seventeenth-century European traders on the north coast came for fish and furs (unlike the gold-hungry Spanish in the south) and found natives friendly, expert hunters. Along the Mississippi the French met regular native exchange-gatherings. Europeans traded blankets, iron vessels, guns and alcohol — alcohol was new, and native addiction to it let Europeans dictate the terms of trade (Europeans in turn picked up tobacco). Timeline pegs: Cabot–Newfoundland 1497; Cartier–St Lawrence 1534; Virginia 1607; Quebec 1608; Plymouth 1620.
• Gifts vs commodities: to natives, exchanged goods were gifts in friendship; to Europeans they were commodities for profit, priced by a distant 'market' the natives could not comprehend. Natives were saddened by European greed — hundreds of beavers slaughtered for fur, with fear that the animals would take revenge; the Hopi account (Lee Brown's 1986 talk) recalls awaiting returning 'turtles' and meeting armoured conquistadores who dropped a trinket into an extended hand — a sign of coming hard times. Native folk tales mocked Europeans as greedy and deceitful.
• The European gaze: the eighteenth-century definition of 'civilised' — literacy, organised religion, urbanism — made natives 'uncivilised'. Rousseau admired the 'noble savage'; Wordsworth (who, like Rousseau, never met a native) allowed them only limited imagination and emotion; Thomas Jefferson spoke of a race whose 'extermination' was justified — words that 'would lead to a public outcry today'; Washington Irving, who had actually met natives, called them great mimics who distrusted whites — 'the white men… are prone to treat the poor Indians as little better than animals.'
• Settlers followed traders: from the seventeenth century, Europeans persecuted for their sect of Christianity (Protestants from Catholic lands and vice versa) migrated for a new life. Moving inland, they cut forests with iron tools to lay farms. Where natives saw tracks in a forest, Europeans imagined cornfields; Jefferson's 'dream' was a country of European small farms, and natives who grew only for need and thought owning land wrong were, to him, 'uncivilised'.

4. The expansion of the USA and Canada

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• Canada and the USA came into existence at the end of the eighteenth century as fractions of their present size, reaching it over the next hundred years: the Louisiana Purchase from France (1803), Alaska bought from Russia, and much of the south won in war from Mexico. No one thought the natives' consent was needed. The western 'frontier' kept shifting, and natives were forced back with it.
• Immigrant land-hunger: British and French younger sons who would inherit nothing; Germans, Swedes and Italians who had lost land to big farmers; Poles happy on prairie grasslands that recalled their steppes. They cleared land, introduced rice and cotton (unsuitable to Europe, hence profitable exports), hunted wolves and mountain lions to extinction, and felt secure only after barbed wire (1873).
• Slavery and the Civil War: the hot south, where enslaved natives had died in large numbers, ran on plantation slavery with Africans; protests ended the slave trade but existing slaves remained enslaved. The non-plantation north condemned slavery; the Civil War (1861–65) ended in abolition — though segregation ended only with the twentieth-century civil-rights struggle.
• Canada: won by Britain from France in 1763; French settlers' repeated demands for autonomy were settled only by the Confederation of 1867 (autonomous states). Other pegs: Quebec Act 1774; Canada Constitutional Act 1791; Canadian Union 1840; Canada Indians Act 1876.

5. Dispossession: treaties, Trail of Tears, reservations

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• Natives were induced or forced to sign treaties selling land at very low prices; 'Americans' (the chapter notes the term meant the European people of the USA) often cheated — taking more land or paying less than promised.
• The Cherokee case (Georgia): the Cherokees — who of all native peoples had tried hardest to learn English and American ways — were subject to state laws without citizens' rights. In 1832 Chief Justice John Marshall ruled the Cherokees were 'a distinct community, occupying its own territory' where Georgia's laws had no force, with sovereignty in certain matters. President Andrew Jackson — reputed fighter against privilege — refused to honour the judgment and sent the army to drive the Cherokees to the Great American Desert: of 15,000 forced out, over a quarter died on the 'Trail of Tears' (1838).
• Justifying rhetoric: natives did not use land 'to the maximum', were 'lazy', would not produce for the market, learn English, or dress 'correctly' — so they 'deserved to die out'; a visiting Frenchman: 'Primitive man will disappear with the primitive animal.'
• Reservations: natives were pushed westward to lands promised 'theirs in perpetuity' — then moved again whenever lead, gold or oil was found; several tribes were forced onto one tribe's land, breeding quarrels; they were locked into 'reservations', often land with no earlier connection to them.
• Resistance and the counter-voice: the US army crushed rebellions 1865–90; in Canada the Metis (of native-European descent) mounted armed revolts 1869–85 (Red River Rebellion), then gave up. Chief Seattle's 1854 letter to the US President, asked to sell land: 'How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land?… Every part of the earth is sacred to my people.'

6. Gold Rush, railways, industry and the end of the frontier

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• Gold traces found in California in the 1840s set off the Gold Rush (timeline: 1849); thousands of Europeans rushed over, and continental railways were built with thousands of Chinese workers — the USA's completed by 1870, Canada's by 1885 (Andrew Carnegie: 'The old nations creep on at a snail's pace; the Republic thunders on at the speed of an express').
• North American industry grew for reasons opposite to England's (where dispossessed small peasants fed factories): here it grew to make railway equipment and machinery for large-scale farming. Industrial towns and factories multiplied. In 1860 the USA was an undeveloped economy; by 1890 it was the world's leading industrial power.
• By 1890 the bison had been almost exterminated, ending centuries of native hunting life. In 1892 continental expansion was complete — the 'frontier' that had pulled settlers west no longer existed — and within a few years the USA acquired its own colonies in Hawaii and the Philippines: it had become an imperial power.
• The limits of settler democracy: the settlers' 'democratic spirit' and the constitutional 'right to property' defined US identity — but voting rights and property rights were only for white men. Daniel Paul (Canadian native, We Were Not the Savages, 2000) noted that Thomas Paine had used the Indians as models of how society might be organised — natives 'sowed the seeds' of Europe's own democracy movement. Karl Marx called the American frontier 'the last positive capitalist utopia… the limitless nature and space to which the limitless thirst for profit adapts itself.' The chapter parallels three rationalisations of inequality: Indians under British rule ('not ready' for representative government), natives of America/Australia ('primitive' — no settled agriculture or towns), African slaves ('slavery is part of their own social system').

7. Australia: the aborigines and the Dreamtime

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• The 'aborigines' (a general name for many different societies) arrived over 40,000 years ago (possibly earlier) from New Guinea, then connected by a land-bridge. In their own traditions they did not come to Australia — they had always been there; past centuries are the 'Dreamtime', hard for Europeans to grasp because the distinction between past and present is blurred.
• In the late eighteenth century there were 350–750 native communities, each with its own language (about 200 still spoken). The Torres Strait Islanders of the north are a distinct indigenous group — not called 'Aborigine', being believed to have migrated from elsewhere and to belong to a different race. Together the two groups were 2.4% of Australia's population in 2005.
• Terminology box: aborigine (Latin ab + origine, 'from the beginning'); 'Aboriginal' is an adjective often misused as a noun; First Nations peoples — organised native groups recognised by the Canadian government (the Indians Act 1876 said 'bands'; 'nations' from the 1980s); 'Red Indian' — from Columbus mistaking the land for India. Tribal names were given to unrelated things: Dakota (aeroplane), Cherokee (jeep), Pontiac (car), Mohawk (haircut).

8. British settlement and its costs

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• Chronology: Dutch sight Australia 1606 · Tasman lands on Tasmania 1642 · Cook reaches Botany Bay 1770 (named New South Wales) · British penal colony and Sydney founded 1788. Cook's first reports praised native friendliness; feeling reversed sharply after Cook was killed by a native — in Hawaii, not Australia — a single incident used to justify later violence.
• Convict settlement: Portugal had abandoned settling Brazil with convicts after native reprisals; Britain used convicts in the American colonies until their independence, then in Australia. Freed convicts, barred from returning to Britain, had to make a life there — and felt no hesitation ejecting natives from land they took for cultivation.
• The Daruk view of Sydney (1790 description): a thousand hungry newcomers strained local food resources; large-scale destruction of sacred places and tree-felling without evident purpose was 'inexplicable'; the Daruk avoided the settlement — brought back only 'by an official kidnapping' (Creating a Nation).
• Costs: in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries nearly 90% of the natives died — from exposure to germs, loss of land and resources, and battles with settlers.
• Settler economy: less varied than America's — vast sheep farms and mining stations, later vineyards and wheat; the basis of prosperity (a name once suggested for the new capital: 'Woolwheatgold' — it became Canberra, from kamberra, 'meeting place', established 1911). Natives worked farms in conditions 'little different from slavery'; Chinese immigrants then supplied cheap labour (as in California) until both countries banned Chinese immigration (Australia: coolie immigration 1851, stopped by law 1855). Until 1974 government policy kept 'non-white' people out — the fear-driven White Australia stance. Other pegs: self-government 1850; gold rushes 1851–1961; Federation of six states 1901; two million European migrants 1948–75.

9. The winds of change: twentieth-century recognition

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USA and Canada:

• 1928 — The Problem of Indian Administration (survey directed by Lewis Meriam): grim picture of health and education on reservations.
• 1934 — Indian Reorganisation Act (USA): natives on reservations gained the right to buy land and take loans.
• 1950s–60s — both governments tried ending special provisions so natives would 'join the mainstream' (adopt European culture); natives refused. 1954 'Declaration of Indian Rights': natives accepted US citizenship on condition reservations were not taken and traditions not interfered with.
• Canada announced in 1969 it would 'not recognise aboriginal rights'; after organised native demonstrations and debates, the Constitution Act 1982 accepted existing aboriginal and treaty rights.

Australia:

• 1968 — anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner's electrifying lecture 'The Great Australian Silence' — historians' silence about the aborigines. From the 1970s natives were studied as communities with distinct cultures; Henry Reynolds's Why Weren't We Told? condemned writing Australian history as beginning with Cook's 'discovery'. University departments, native-art galleries, museum dioramas, native-written life histories followed. (Judith Wright, poet-champion of aborigine rights, 'Two Dreamtimes'.)
• 1974 — 'White Australia' policy ends; Asian immigrants admitted; multiculturalism becomes official policy.
• Australia — unlike the USA, Canada and New Zealand — had no treaties with natives: the land had been declared terra nullius, belonging to nobody. There was also the long history of forcible separation of mixed-blood children from native relatives.
• 1992 — the High Court in the Mabo case declares terra nullius legally invalid and recognises native claims to land from before 1770.
• 1995 — National Enquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children; 26 May 1999 — 'National Sorry Day', a public apology for the children 'lost' from the 1820s to the 1970s.

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Exam angles

Prelims:

• Terms: terra nullius, Dreamtime, reservations, frontier, wampum belts, Metis, First Nations (Canada; 'bands' 1876 → 'nations' 1980s), aborigine vs Torres Strait Islanders, 'noble savage' (Rousseau).
• Chronology anchors: Cook at Botany Bay 1770 → penal colony/Sydney 1788 → Louisiana Purchase 1803 → Marshall judgment 1832 → Trail of Tears 1838 → California Gold Rush 1849 / Australian gold rushes from 1851 → Civil War 1861–65 → Canadian Confederation 1867 → US railway 1870 / Canadian 1885 → bison near-extermination 1890 → 'end' of frontier 1892 → Federation of Australia 1901 → Meriam report 1928 → Indian Reorganisation Act 1934 → Canada Constitution Act 1982 → Mabo 1992 → Sorry Day 26 May 1999.
• Pairings: John Marshall–1832 Cherokee judgment ('a distinct community') · Andrew Jackson–defied it, Trail of Tears · Chief Seattle–1854 letter · Lewis Meriam–1928 report · Stanner–'The Great Australian Silence' (1968) · Henry Reynolds–Why Weren't We Told? · Judith Wright–aborigine-rights poetry · Daniel Paul–We Were Not the Savages · Marx–frontier as 'capitalist utopia'.
• Name-origin matches: America–Amerigo Vespucci; Canada–kanata ('village', Huron-Iroquois); Australia–austral ('south'); New Zealand–zee (Dutch 'sea'); Canberra–kamberra ('meeting place').
• Trap statements: terra nullius was ended by the High Court (Mabo, 1992), not legislation; White Australia policy ended 1974; Cook was killed in Hawaii, not Australia; Chinese labour built the transcontinental railways of both the USA and Canada — and was later banned in both Australia and America; imperialism-type matching — India (direct rule), America/Australia (settler), China (semi-colony).

Mains:

• Competing notions of civilisation: gift exchange and sacred, unowned land vs the settlers' 'bourgeois mentality' of buying and selling everything — use Chief Seattle's letter and the natives' question about buying air and water.
• Typology of imperialism: settler colony vs direct imperial rule (India) vs semi-colony (China) — a GS-I compare-and-contrast staple; profit common to all, mechanisms different.
• Frontier and American capitalism: how the Gold Rush, railways, machine-based agriculture and industry converted dispossession into industrial primacy (1860–1890), ending in overseas empire (Hawaii, Philippines).
• Limits of settler democracy: vote and property for white men only; the chapter's parallel rationalisations for natives, African slaves and Indians under British rule; Paine's debt to native models (Daniel Paul).
• Historiographical silence and its breaking: from 'discovery' textbooks and 1840s anthropology ('natives will die out') to 1960s oral history, native-curated museums, Stanner and Reynolds.
• Paths of redress compared: legislative (USA 1934), constitutional (Canada 1982), judicial-symbolic (Australia — Mabo, Sorry Day); what recognition has restored and what it has not.