You Know Who Else Colonized Land From ‘Indigenous Peoples’? Native Americans

By Casey Chalk

The ‘settler’ argument exacerbates racial tensions by projecting a historical narrative that white persons are always aggressors, never victims.

Hundreds of years before Christopher Columbus and his three ships arrived in the New World, a Native American civilization conquered neighboring tribes and expanded its political and cultural influence across what is now the central and southern United States.

Historians believe its great metropolis and ceremonial complex at Cahokia in present-day Illinois was, in the 12th century, comparable in size to contemporaneous London. The Mississippians, as they are called, were not the only indigenous American people to conquer others’ land — the Aztecs, Incans, Mayans, and Mohawks did much the same, all before Europeans arrived.

Washington Post-contributing David Moscrop, however, thinks only white North Americans of European descent should be labeled “settlers.” In a Feb. 27 op-ed, Moscrop argues:

To be a settler is to exist in relation to indigenous peoples whose land was stolen and on which settlers now live, work, love and laze about. It’s not just your ancestors. It’s you, here, today. It’s your benefiting from and recreating a system of colonialization through extraction, marginalization, abuse and violence.

Moscrop is speaking specifically of an ongoing debate in Canada about the rights of indigenous communities, although his argument implicitly extends to and has been made often about the United States. He cites writer Chelsea Vowel, who explains that “settler colonialism … essentially refers to the deliberate physical occupation of land as a method of asserting ownership over land and resources.”

And who are those perpetrating “settler colonialism”? The “non-indigenous peoples living in Canada who form the European-descended sociopolitical majority.” In effect, if you are a person of European descent living in North America, your very existence perpetuates an oppressive system of colonial aggression against indigenous peoples.

Indigenous Peoples Were ‘Settlers’ Too

Moscrop and Vowel’s “settler” argument has many problems. The first, as I said above, is that the very indigenous peoples who were colonized or displaced by European settlers were themselves responsible for fighting other people groups and settling their land.

Indeed, it would be difficult to find examples of any people group on the face of the Earth who have not been responsible for fighting, defeating, and colonizing others. Perhaps some Pacific Islanders who sailed to and settled on uninhabited islands are innocent, although even they often diverged into opposing, warring tribes. The history of humanity has been defined by the movements and wars of various peoples, sometimes light-skinned playing the role of aggressors against dark-skinned, sometimes the reverse, and sometimes dark against dark and light against light.

This observation is not intended to downplay or excuse European aggression against indigenous peoples. Rather, we should acknowledge that history has always been defined by people groups moving to escape drought, starvation, poverty, or persecution, and people groups opportunistically taking others’ land or possessions. This is a sad human reality, and one we should seek to mitigate. But acting as if one demographic — namely white, European-descended people — are uniquely guilty of this, while non-white people are not, is both ignorant and prejudicial.

Europeans Weren’t Just Looking to ‘Colonize’

full story at https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/05/you-know-who-else-colonized-land-from-indigenous-peoples-native-americans/