A Short History of Colonialism: Part 1

This is Navajo Tom Torlino “as he entered the [colonial boarding] school in 1882” and “as he appeared three years later” from Souvenir of the Carlisle Indian School, 1902. Photos like this one were taken by the colonial boarding schools to propagandize their success in “civilizing” the indigenous peoples.

Disclaimer: As a white person, I can only do my best to honor the indigenous people who have been brave and vulnerable in sharing their stories, experiences, and opinions by learning as much as I can and sharing what I’ve learned for the education and empathy of us all. I’m grateful to all the indigenous people I have had the opportunity to learn from, and I’m grateful to all our readers who take the time to understand the realities of colonialism and how it has impacted the children and communities we serve.

Why is it important for us to know the history of colonialism? There are so many great reasons, but for a lot of us, perhaps the most important reason is because we want to help. In order to help, we need to know what is needed. And to know what is needed, we need to know what happened.

A conversation about colonialism is a sensitive one. There are so many people who have been hurt by colonialism. Yet there are some people who strongly believe that colonialism also had its virtues, or at the very least, its successes. Portland State University political scientist Bruce Gilley “praises” colonialism for its producing economic growth.1 But the vast majority of experts argue that colonialism has been more or less an atrocity. 

Margaret Kohn and Kavita Reddy of the University of Toronto describe colonialism as “a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another.”2 Daron Acemoğlu, professor of applied economics at MIT, and James Robinson, professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, do not only agree with Kohn and Reddy but further explain the economic realities once-colonized peoples face. They write, “The immense economic inequality we observe in the world today didn’t happen overnight, or even in the past century. It is the path-dependent outcome of a multitude of historical processes, one of the most important of which has been European colonialism.”3

So now here is a short, humble history of colonialism. 

In the late 1400s, Europeans from different countries—especially England, Spain, and France—started exploring the coasts of Africa and the Americas, hoping to “discover” new lands and riches. And they were absolutely delighted with all that they found. 

By the 1500s, European kings were anxious to commission ships and sailors from their countries to colonize the new lands they had “found” to “claim” them for their country. Despite the explorers’ having met indigenous people in all of the “new” lands, the Europeans did not see the indigenous people as human beings like them. They saw them as animals—as property free for the taking (and guilt-free for the killing). They saw their land the same way—as property free for the taking. 

Aimé Césaire, poet and politician from Martinique, explains that this mindset led the colonizers to behaving with an ironic inhumanity: “The colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal.”4 

The Europeans only saw their fellow Europeans as their rivals in establishing “civilized” life in Africa and the Americas, and eventually in Asia, Australia, and the Islands of Polynesia. For them, these beautiful, bountiful lands only promised unhindered glory and wealth—all they had to do was “tame” them.

Tragically, “taming” meant killing generations of indigenous people, and enslaving the ones they did not kill. It meant criminalizing indigenous religions and cultures. It meant uninhibitedly ravaging the nature the indigenous peoples had loved and nurtured for all their lives and for all their ancestors’ lives. 

Pocahontas, Disney, 1995. This line is poignant and feels true of colonists, and as a child (and still as an adult) I adored the beauty and adventure of this film. Nevertheless, this Disney retelling of the story of Pocahontas entertains a host of problematic representations that paint over the painful realities of colonization in the Americas, especially regarding the life of Pocahontas. 5

So the European settlers forced their beliefs, ideals, and ways upon these lands and their peoples. 

As the Europeans colonized these lands, they raised up European architecture, European politics, European education, European religions, European medical systems, European etiquette—erasing the intentionally and conscientiously cultivated artistry, ingenuity, elegance, and reverence of the indigenous peoples. They destroyed and suppressed the idigenous architecture, the indigenous politics, the indigenous education, the indigenous religions, the indigenous etiquette. This is not to say that European ways were altogether “bad,” but that indigenous ways that were (and are) not “bad”—they were made “bad.” 

This is colonialism. 

Sadly, colonialism cannot simply be remembered as an event, as a boundaried space in time, as a moment with a beginning and an end: it is a scar that bleeds. 

Indigenous people of American and Polynesian descent still strive to know and pass on their cultures; they still ache over the violence others have done to the sacred nature of their lands (See Note 1). Peoples of African descent in North America still lament the suffering their ancestors endured as slaves; they still wonder where they came from, who they came from. They all have witnessed and inherited so much loss. 

Some indigenous peoples eventually gained freedom from their European oppressors politically—the Ghanians in 1957, the Ivorians in 1958, the Senegalese in 1958, the Camaroonians in 1960—but they still live in the wake of colonialism. In a lot of ways, colonialism has cut them off at the knees. 

In these once-colonized countries, poverty lurks around every corner. Their small businesses are undercut by multinational corporations. Many multinational corporations go into their countries and hire people but then pay unfair wages, or else they establish a trade agreement that is not fair, or else they go into their countries and abuse their natural resources. Further, human trafficking—labor and sex—still thrive in these countries because, well, it’s still easy for a lot of people to not see other people as human beings. 

Even though the peoples of these countries are no longer under colonial rule, they have been left vulnerable, and there are still people who are happy to take advantage of them for their own personal gain. 

NOTES

1. Indigenous Hawaiian Mele Maikalanimakalapuaa (@melemaikalanimakalapuaa) and Indigenous Inuk Shina Nova (@shinanova) create videos to educate others about their cultures and the pain they and their people have faced (and I highly recommend checking them out!).

REFERENCES

1. Césaire, Aimé, “Discourse on Colonialism,” Monthly Review Press (1972), Joan Pinkham (trans.), <http://web.sonoma.edu/users/s/shawth/discourse>.

2. Kendhammer, Brandon, “A controversial article praises colonialism. But colonialism’s real legacy was ugly,” The Washington Post (2017), <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/09/19/colonialism-left-behind-a-long-legacy-most-of-it-bad/>.

3. Kohn, Margaret and Kavita Reddy, "Colonialism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/colonialism/>.

4. Acemoğlu, Daron and James Robinson, “The economic influence of colonialism,” VoxEU (2017), <https://voxeu.org/article/economic-impact-colonialism>.

5. Bodenner, Chris, “Does Disney’s Pocahontas Do More Harm Than Good? Your Thoughts,” The Atlantic (2015), <https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/06/pocahontas-feminism/397190/>.