Dispossession

I first saw this on Kai Chang's blog. It says it all, doesn't it?


















It has to be said, though, that while Israeli settler-colonialism (and its racialized logic of dispossession) is as bad as its white South African cousin, neither are as bad as the white American version. And I say that as a white American who descends from settlers who got "Indian grants" in 1880s California, after the U.S. military and various vigilante groups had grabbed the land through a series of outright massacres and dirty tricks. (I only found out about the "Indian grants" in the last year, from my mother.) The point is that the land theft that took place in the U.S. was even worse because it involved a more thorough process of genocide--reducing the indigenous population north of the Rio Grande by around 95% in less than three hundred years. See this documentary.

A good summary of the genocidal (and ecocidal) consquences of the conquest of what became the USA is provided in the essay "Beyond Pipe Dreams: What the West Was Not" by Scott William Hoefle, in The Journal of Peasant Studies (30:10). Here is an excerpt:

"According to the first US census in 1851, there were some 388,229 Native Americans in the United States, and as late as 1981 the total number of indigenous people north of the Rio Grande at the time of European contact was estimated at only 1 million inhabitants [Hawgood, 1967, The Times, 1981]. More recent calculations, based on new archaeological evidence from the eastern United States, put the original figure for the Native American inhabitants much higher, at between 2.5 million and 5 million. As there were only 237,196 Native Americans left at the time of the 1900 census, it is clear that around 95 per cent of the indigenous population died from introduced diseases, was killed off or assumilated: the result is that Native American depopulation is now considered to have been one of the world's worst demographic disasters [Butzer, 1994; Hine and Faragher, 2000; Kunitz, 1994; Livi-Bacci, 1992].


As almost all US frontiers were defined on the basis of exclusion, very few Native Americans were assimilated into the general population. When disease did not kill Native Americans fast enough, first colonists and then the professional army would attack Native American villages at dawn and slaughter all inhabitants without mercy. There is some debate as to whether the frontier phalanx of Scots and Irish settlers were the main perpetrators, or whether the professional US army was the main agent of genocide [Leyburn, 1962; Bellesiles, 2000]: irrespective of who was responsible, genocide was the result and intention. The ideology of 'the only good Indian is a dead Indian' and of substituting 'indolent natives,' who were considered to be racially inferior, with productive settlers was espouses by political and military leaders [Faragher, 1998; Hine and Faragher, 2000]."