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Section 5.1: Introduction

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    107052
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    Land Acknowledgement

    Background in America

    American Indians have been on this continent much longer than any other racial or ethnic group. According to the Bering Strait theory, sometime between 17,000 and 30,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers from Siberia came across the frozen Bering Strait, or across a land bridge formed during the Ice Age, in search of game. Over the millennia, they became the people we call Native Americans or American Indians. They are the Indigenous people of the North and South American continents (Dunn, 2010). However, this theory has been challenged from both from a philosophical angle (Deloria, 1995) and from new research uncovered from an evolutionary genetic approach (Daley, 2016; Ewen, 2017). 

    Pre-European Contact

    It is difficult to determine how many Native Americans existed in the United Stated prior to European contact. Emmanuel Domenech (1860) estimated that the Native American population pre-European contact was between 16 to 17 million people. Years later, a more generally accepted scientific estimate was provided by James Mooney (1928) in which he estimated that the North American "aboriginal" population was 1.2 million at the onset of European contact. A more recent estimate has been provided by Matthew Snipp (1986) in which he places the pre-European contact population from 2 to 5 million. The population figures discussed are only estimates and some scholars suggest that the Indigenous American population pre-European contact was larger than the last estimate Snipp (1986) provided.

    "Indians"

    Native American culture prior to European settlement is referred to as pre-Columbian: that is, prior to the coming of Christopher Columbus in 1492. Mistakenly believing that he had landed in the East Indies, Columbus named the Indigenous people “Indians”, a name that has persisted for centuries despite being a geographical misnomer and one used to blanket 500 distinct groups who each have their own languages and traditions.

    Post-European Contact

    Race and ethnicity have torn at the fabric of American society ever since the time of Christopher Columbus, when Indigenous peoples populated what now the United States. By 1900, the Indigenous population dwindled to about 240,000, as tens of thousands were killed by white settlers and U.S. troops and countless others died from disease contracted from people with European backgrounds. Scholars have stated that this mass killing of Native Americans amounted to genocide (Wilson, 1999).

    European colonization of the Americas was detrimental to the Indigenous populations and took a specific form--settler-colonialism.

    Let us compare and contrast colonialism to settler-colonialism.

    Colonialism is the act of taking land by a foreign group or nation, most frequently through force, and then settling in the newly acquired territory which displaces the original Indigenous people to those lands. Often, a primary goal of such colonization is to source and exploit natural resources in a region for the profit of the colonizing country/group. Typically, local inhabitants (Indigenous peoples) are forced to work the colonized land in exploitative and dangerous conditions. Local inhabitants are forced to engage the colonizing group's will, demands, and priorities as the consequence of resisting was death or imprisonment.  Typically, colonizing nations were equipped with arms (guns) and brought germs that local inhabitants had no immunity to. Once colonists thoroughly exploited local natural resources, it was common for colonizing groups to abandon lands, leaving local inhabitants without resources and compromised.

    In the United States, settler-colonialism is the specific type of colonization practiced. The goal of settler-colonization is the complete removal of Indigenous peoples (and their culture) in order to take the land for use by settlers, permanently. Once lands were colonized, European settlers moved into the lands and further expanded these settlements. This results in the continued and permanent displacement of Indigenous communities from their ancestral homelands.

    In the case of the Indigenous peoples of North America, war, famine, forced removal, lack of immunity to European diseases, and the exploitation of this lack of immunity as intentional "biological" warfare, such as blankets infected with diseases, decimated the Indigenous population (Snipp, 1989).