Imperialism and Indigenous Experience

Imperialism and Indigenous Experience

• Imperialism shapes what it means to be an Indigenous person
• Writing about experiences with imperialism and colonialism matters to the Indigenous world.
• Writers like Salman Rushdie and Ngugi wa Thiong'o share the landscapes and cultures of those affected by European imperialism.
• Imperialism still damages Indigenous communities and constantly reinvents itself.
• Indigenous people must challenge and comprehend the history, sociology, psychology, and politics of imperialism and colonialism.
• Lived experiences of imperialism and colonialism give another perspective to understanding "imperialism."

Key Concepts

• Discusses imperialism, history, writing, and theory in how Indigenous ideas are shared
• Decolonization requires researchers to critically consider the assumptions, reasons, and values that shape research methods.
• Imperialism and colonialism created tools specifically for dealing with Indigenous Peoples.
• The Doctrine of Discovery designed by the Catholic Church, is a principle enshrined in law which could potentially apply if humans colonize a new planet.
• Colonizers designed education to destroy Indigenous cultures, values, and appearances through Indian boarding schools, residential schools, and village day schools.
• Colonization involved social policies to dismantle Indigenous families, such as systems that resulted in stolen children in Australia. New tools are needed to decolonize and revitalize Indigenous knowledge.

Figureheads of Imperialism

• Christopher Columbus symbolizes the legacy of suffering and destruction, setting a modern timeframe of 500+ years.
• James Cook's expeditions in the South Pacific introduced capitalism, Western political ideas, Christianity, and diseases.
• The French are remembered for their arrogant deaths.
• Military personnel, imperial administrators, priests, explorers, missionaries, colonial officials, artists, entrepreneurs, and settlers followed Columbus and Cook, devastating societies and communities.

Defining Imperialism

• Imperialism and colonialism are key concepts used across disciplines, often with assumed meanings. Colonialism is one expression of imperialism.
• Four ways of describing European imperialism since the fifteenth century include:
  • Economic expansion
  • Subjugation of others
  • An idea or spirit with many forms
  • A discursive field of knowledge
• Economic explanations of imperialism were advanced by J. A. Hobson in 1902 and by Lenin in 1917 seeing it as integral to Europe's economic expansion.
• Hobson attributed 19th-century imperialism to Europe's inability to buy what was produced and the need to shift capital to secure new markets.
• Lenin linked economic expansion to imperialism but argued that exporting capital was to rescue capitalism.

Subjugation and Exploitation

• The second use focuses on the exploitation and subjugation of Indigenous peoples.
• Economic explanations do not account for the devastating impact on Indigenous peoples when their lands were invaded.
• The British developed more sophisticated 'rules of practice,' which led to forms of subjugation and subtle nuances.
• In New Zealand, all Māori tribes lost the majority of their lands, but not all had their lands confiscated.
• Indigenous nations signed treaties, while others did not and identities were worked out to serve the interests of the colonizing society.
• The specificity of imperialism helps explain the different ways Indigenous peoples have struggled to recover histories, lands, languages, and basic human dignity.

Imperialism as a Global Ideology

• Links imperialism to the spirit of European global activities and states it is more than just economic and political
• Places imperialism within the Enlightenment, signaling the transformation of economic, political, and cultural life in Europe.
• Imperialism was a mode through which European states expanded their economies, made new discoveries, and developed their sense of Europeanness.
• The imperial imagination allowed nations to envision new worlds and wealth and was realized through science, economic expansion, and political practice.
• Understandings of imperialism and colonialism are based on membership within colonized societies or on their interest in understanding imperialism from local contexts.
• There is a need to understand how people were brought within the imperial system and its impact despite apparent independence.

Impact and Decolonization

• It is important to understand those challenges who belong to colonized communities to partly understand the need to decolonize and recover a sense of humanity.
• Colonialism was imperialism's outpost which secured ports, access to raw materials, and efficient transfer of commodities.
• Colonial outposts preserved an image of what the West or 'civilization' stood for but Europeans needed to be kept under control as well.
• Wealth and class status created settler interests which came to dominate the politics of a colony, to be a realization of the imperial imagination.
• The constant reworking of one's understanding of imperialism and colonialism informs Indigenous cultural politics and critique.
• Drawing upon a notion of authenticity, of a time before colonization in which Indigenous people had authority over their lives.
• Critique demands an analysis of how Indigenous people were colonized and the meaning of the past, present, and solution of combining pre-colonized and colonized time.
• Globalization and conceptions of a new world represents challenges for Indigenous people.
• Post-colonial discussions stir Indigenous resistance to the idea that colonialism is over.
• Research within late-modern late colonialism brings a new wave of exploitation.

The Ethics of Research Today

• Researchers enter communities with goodwill and patents, extracting blood for genetic analysis.
• Acts are justified for the 'good of mankind' even if they mean researchers gather traditional herbal and medicinal remedies and remove them for analysis.
• The global hunt for new knowledges, materials, and cures through international agreements threatens Indigenous communities.
• Research ethics, protection of Indigenous knowledge, and understanding international agreements are on the agenda of Indigenous meetings.

Classifying Humanity

• Ideas about what counted as human were encoded in imperial and colonial discourses.
• Imperialism allowed concepts of what counts as human to be applied systematically through races and typologies.
• In conjunction with imperial power these systems shaped relations between imperial powers and Indigenous societies.
• Imperialism dehumanized and structured it into a framework to determine an individual's worth.

Reclaiming Humanity

• It is a struggle to assert and claim humanity has been a consistent thread of anti-colonial discourses on colonialism and oppression.
• Struggles are found within humanism, the appeal to human rights, and the connections between being and being capable of creating history, knowledge, and society.
• Processes of dehumanization were hidden behind justifications for imperialism and colonialism.
• Criticisms include essentializing nature, accepting binary categories of Western thought, supporting cultural relativity, claiming an impossible authenticity, and inverting the colonizer/colonized dynamic without fixing relations of power.
• Colonized peoples have been compelled to define what it means to be human because of understanding what it means to be not fully human/savage.
• Constructions of colonial relations were built around the binary of colonizer and colonized but consist of several relations.
• Decolonization is seen as violent and transformative of the world order.
• Interdependence of relations are the nature of imperial social relations, the activities of Western science, the establishment of trade, the appropriation of sovereignty, and the establishment of law

Colonialism and Disorder

• Albert Memmi stated that Indigenous societies were dismissed through a series of negations like they were not civilized
• Imperialism and colonialism brought disorder to colonized peoples, disconnecting them from their histories, landscapes, languages, social relations, and ways of thinking.
• The disciplinary carving of the Indigenous world with bones, mummies, artwork, languages, beliefs and behaviours
• In order to see the process you need only stand in a museum, library, bookstore, and ask where Indigenous peoples are located. Fragmentation is a consequence of imperialism.

Rewriting History

• The struggle for self-determination has involved rethinking history as Indigenous peoples and critiquing how the Other has been excluded
• Every issue has been approached with a view to rewriting and righting our position in history to tell their own versions, in their own ways, for their own purposes.
• In order to to bring back into existence a world fragmented and dying approach these worlds are not the same as history which causes many accounts that will not add up
• Writing or literacy are used by Westerners to put breaks between the past and the present; the beginning of history and the development of theory and have now immersed themselves in rules they have made which causes the overwhelming silence of the indigenous people
• Indigenous people and groups alike assume it is not possible to theorize one's own existence.

Examining Colonial Concepts

• Colonized people think that history is important and respond to Western academies heavily drawing from French thoughts.
• Critiques look at ideas about history as an Enlightenment and Modernist project, and feminist perspectives see history as a form of domination.
• Western concepts of history:
  • Totality: the possibility to include all known knowledge into a coherent whole. In order for this to happen, classification systems, rules of practice and methods had to be developed to allow for knowledge to be selected and included in history.
  • Universal: assumes there are fundamental characteristics of human subjects & societies and historical interest
  • Chronology: about developments over time, charts human progress. Important because allows events to be located
  • Development: assumes societies move forward in stages like an infan
  • Self-actualization: states there is a potential to reach total control of faculties. There is an oder for Human development
  • Coherent narrative: assemble all facts in order to tell the truth
  • Discipline: 'facts' speak for themselves and historians put them together without theoretical explanation or interpretation
  • Binary Categories: linked chronologically where there is a period of beginning.
  • Patriarchial: women incapable of attaining higher orders of development.

Colonial Worlds

• Literacy used to judge the development and progress of a society to a stage where history begins.
• Hegel viewed human subject capable of creating history and that his machine works through a system already operating
• Ideas are often on a sense of otherness between 'us' and 'them, where subjects are made by fully human people because of their race.
• Modernists embedded important ideas between emergence of rational individual with the industrial state. For Indigenous peoples, the critique of history isnt unfamiliar because of what has now been claimed as a new postmodern term and the politic view between different communities stories
• Historians has been through systems of knowledge and reclassified as oral traditions under colonialism.
• Indigenous peoples struggled against a Western view while being complicity.

Schooling and Imperialism

• Schooling is directly implicated in the West
• Early schools redefined the world and Indigenous people were positioned in it as sky and earth parents. Christianity said some deserve salvation in order to become children of god which caused maps to now show the outside with the empire Indigenous are now force moved because of high sickness and mortality rates. Indigenous attempts to reclaim land, knowledge have involved these past accounts from before those with authority who say it will fix things History is about power and the people who continue to dominate others and makes them not important

Why Revisit History?

• Revisiting history is significant because it creates a decolonization that will show the intersections with people, cultures, etc.
• Colonial experiences trap within a project of modernity and needs something to fix the modern Alternative theories are that one knows so much about other things which allows to have the pedagogical implementation to do things This in turn requires a theory or approach that can understand the act and gives reason to complain

Indigenous Scholarship

• Books are dangerous because its about not reinforcing their culture and values
• If books only talk about others it means they don't talk about them Much of academia has not said about the existence of Indigenous peoples and if they do its on terms I don't recognize Patricia Grae says books make others negative and insensitive, if that's considered good

Representation

• Leonie Pihama speaks that Maori struggle to gain a voice and have descriptions heard and have their descriptions validated for their realities. Representation gives the impression of the truth and orientates me to a world academics are in. The 'I' actually excludes someone and tells the individual they only belong in the third world These things present problems when viewing text and have trouble recognizing

Dangers of Western Writing

• Indigenous writers become invisible and unimportant while Western writers is reinforced writing is not innocent because we maintain discourse sometimes we tell stuff which causes us more harm building off previous tests can enable ones to legitimate hostile views empire writer comes about from all this because the center does not have to be at tht