The Lies Told of Indigenous Peoples So They Could Be Killed and Their Land Taken

True psychopaths, people who are not inhibited by moral constraints, are few and far between.  When we encounter abhorrent behavior, it is usually because those responsible have made a moral decision that justifies what they have done.  What is of particular interest here is what colonialists told themselves that justified killing indigenous peoples they encountered in order to take their land. 

Colonialism and its legal justification dates back to the Treaty of Tordesilas in 1494 in which the Pope legitimized the claiming of non-Christian lands under what came to be called the Doctrine of Discovery.  This doctrine essentially assumed that non-Christian lands had no governance worth recognizing until Christian colonists “discovered” them and laid claim to them.  The great propagator of the notion that all white men are created equal, Thomas Jefferson, would proclaim as Secretary of State in 1792 that this Doctrine of Discovery was International Law and would be applied in lands colonized by the United States.  American Natives would therefore have no right of ownership to any of the lands they had inhabited for thousands of years.  This would be further confirmed by the Supreme Court in Johnson v. M’intosh (1823).  The court ruled that all land was originally owned by the country that had “discovered” it.  In this case it was the US federal government which inherited it from the British discoverers.  The Doctrine of Discovery would be applied everywhere as the US advanced westward into new territories. 

The legal framework for appropriating lands in which others had lived was established, but what provided the justification for using violence in taking control of them?  It seems claiming people were less than fully human was necessary.  Initially being non-Christian would justify rape, pillage, and murder.  As time went on, more nuanced justifications would be developed.

David Graeber and David Wengrow provide some perspective on these considerations in their book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

“…it’s important to understand a little of the legal basis for dispossessing people who had the misfortune to be living in territories coveted by European settlers.  This was, almost invariably, what nineteenth century jurists came to call the ‘agricultural argument’, a principle that has played a major role in the displacement of untold thousands of indigenous peoples from ancestral lands in Australia, New Zealand, sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas: processes typically accompanied by the rape, torture and mass murder of human beings, and often the destruction of entire civilizations.”

“Colonial appropriation of indigenous lands often began with some blanket assertion that foraging peoples really were living in a State of Nature—which meant that they were deemed to be part of the land but had no legal claims to own it.  The entire basis for dispossession, in turn, was premised on the idea that the current inhabitants of those lands weren’t really working.”

“The argument goes back to John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690), in which he argued that property rights are necessarily derived from labour.  In working the land, one ‘mixes one’s labor’ with it; in this way it becomes, in a sense, an extension of oneself.  Lazy natives according to Lock’s disciples, didn’t do that.  They were not, Lockeans claimed, ‘improving landlords’ but simply made use of the land to satisfy their basic needs with the minimum effort.”

To the Europeans in their crowded lands, working the land meant raising crops and herds of animals.  Such an arguable conclusion had vast and terrible consequences.

“James Tully, an authority on indigenous rights, spells out the historical implications: land used for hunting and gathering was considered vacant, and ‘if the Aboriginal peoples attempt to subject the Europeans to their laws and customs or to defend the territories that they have mistakenly believed to be their property for thousands of years, then it is they who violate natural law and may be punished or “destroyed” like savage beasts’.”

This conclusion can only be reached if one is of the mind to assert that the humans involved were in fact nothing more than “savage beasts.”

“What to a settler’s eye seemed savage, untouched wilderness, usually turns out to be landscapes actively managed by indigenous populations for thousands of years through controlled burning, weeding, coppicing, fertilizing and pruning, terracing estuarine plots to extend the habitat of particular wild flora, building clam gardens in intertidal zones to enhance the reproduction of shellfish, creating weirs to catch salmon, bass and sturgeon, and so on.” 

Greed and ignorance are powerful tools in rationalizing decisions.