Displacing Indigenous Peoples

This chapter opens Section IV, Towards Modernisation, of Themes in World History. The section introduction and Timeline IV (c. 1700–2000) come first; Theme 6, Displacing Indigenous Peoples, follows; and Theme 7, Paths to Modernisation (Japan and China), completes the book.

• Links within this book: Theme 2 (Rome) and Theme 3 (the Mongols) showed empires conquering settled peoples; here settlers replace the native population. Section III’s introduction recorded the voyages and the catastrophic fall in American populations from disease. Theme 7 traces modernisation in Japan and China.
• Links to Indian history: NCERT’s own box compares Indians under British rule with natives and enslaved Africans; Activity 4 compares New Delhi and Canberra (both chosen in 1911). India’s debates on tribal land rights (the Fifth and Sixth Schedules, the Forest Rights Act 2006 — Beyond NCERT) make the comparison live.
• UPSC — be realistic: GS1 world history starts in the 18th century, so this section is in syllabus territory: the American and French revolutions and the Industrial Revolution are named in the Section IV introduction and have been asked in Mains (2015, 2019). The native peoples themselves are rarely asked directly, but they matter for essays and GS1/GS2 themes of colonialism, indigenous rights, citizenship and multiculturalism.

• Section IV: industrialisation (Britain first, but no single model) and revolutions from 1776 and 1789 that made subjects into citizens; empires as settler colonies, direct rule or semi-colonies; civic versus ethnic nationalism.
• Native North Americans: bands and villages, hunting (bison), fishing, maize; gifts, alliances, wampum; time as cycles; no wish to ‘own’ land, air or water.
• Encounters: furs for blankets, iron, guns and alcohol; ‘noble savage’ (Rousseau) versus ‘uncivilised’ (Jefferson); Washington Irving’s first-hand respect.
• Dispossession: US expansion by purchase and war; Marshall’s 1832 ruling for the Cherokee ignored by Jackson; the Trail of Tears (over a quarter of 15,000 died); reservations; wars 1865–90; bison nearly exterminated by 1890.
• Change: Meriam survey 1928, Indian Reorganisation Act 1934, Declaration of Indian Rights 1954, Canada’s Constitution Act 1982 recognising aboriginal and treaty rights.
• Australia: arrival 40,000+ years ago; Dreamtime; 1788 penal colony; ~90% died in the 19th–20th c. (NCERT); terra nullius; Stanner 1968, multiculturalism 1974, Mabo 1992, inquiry on separated children 1995, National Sorry Day.

From the 18th century more of South, Central and North America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand were settled by European immigrants, pushing native peoples out. Settlements were called ‘colonies’, which became ‘states’ when independent; later Asians migrated too. Today Europeans and Asians are the majority and natives few — yet many place names are native: Ohio, Mississippi, Seattle (USA), Saskatchewan (Canada), Wollongong, Parramatta (Australia).

European imperialism. The Spanish and Portuguese empires in America did not expand after the 17th century; France, Holland and England extended trade and colonies in America, Africa and Asia (Ireland was ‘virtually a colony’ of England, its landowners mostly English settlers). Profit drove colonisation, but control varied: in South Asia trading companies became rulers, kept the old administration and taxed landowners, then built railways, mines and plantations; in Africa Europeans traded on the coast (except South Africa) and only in the late 19th century moved inland and divided the continent among themselves. ‘Settler’ is used for the Dutch in South Africa, the British in Ireland, New Zealand and Australia, and Europeans in America.

Land. North America runs from the Arctic Circle to the Tropic of Cancer and from the Pacific to the Atlantic: the Rocky Mountains, the Arizona–Nevada desert and the Sierra Nevada in the west; the Great Plains, Great Lakes, the Mississippi and Ohio valleys and the Appalachians in the east; Mexico to the south. Forty per cent of Canada is forest; oil, gas and minerals underlie big industries; wheat, corn, fruit and fishing are major — mining, industry and extensive farming developed only in the last 200 years, by immigrants from Europe, Africa and China.

The native peoples. NCERT writes that the earliest inhabitants came from Asia over 30,000 years ago across a land-bridge at the Bering Straits, moved south in the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago, and that the oldest artefact, an arrow-point, is 11,000 years old; population grew from about 5,000 years ago. They lived in bands and villages along river valleys, ate fish and meat, grew vegetables and maize, and travelled far for bison (easier from the 17th century, when they rode horses bought from Spanish settlers), killing only what they needed. Without surplus they did not form kingdoms or empires as in Central and South America. Quarrels over territory occurred, but control of land was not generally an issue: they took food and shelter from the land without wishing to ‘own’ it. They made formal alliances and friendships and exchanged gifts; spoke many unwritten languages; saw time as moving in cycles, with origin stories passed down; wove fine textiles; and could ‘read the land’.

In the 17th century European traders on the north coast found the natives friendly and welcoming. Unlike the Spanish in South America, obsessed with gold, they came for fish and furs, with the help of skilled native hunters. Along the Mississippi the French found regular native gatherings for exchanging crafts and foods. Europeans gave blankets, iron vessels, guns and alcohol — new to the natives, who became addicted, which (NCERT says) let Europeans dictate terms. Europeans in turn acquired an addiction to tobacco.

Mutual perceptions. Eighteenth-century western Europeans defined ‘civilised’ by literacy, organised religion and urbanism, so natives seemed ‘uncivilised’. Rousseau admired such people as untouched by civilisation’s corruptions — the ‘noble savage’. Wordsworth, who had never met a native American either, wrote that people living close to nature had little room for imagination or refined feeling. Washington Irving, who had met them, disagreed (see the box). Thomas Jefferson, third US President, wrote of ‘this unfortunate race’ as having ‘justified extermination’ — words NCERT says would cause a public outcry today. Natives, for their part, mocked European greed and deceit in folk tales, references Europeans understood only much later.

Settlers follow traders. From the 17th century Europeans persecuted for their sect — Protestants in Catholic countries, Catholics in Protestant ones — went to America for a new life. While land was vacant there was no problem, but settlers moved inland near native villages, cut forests with iron tools and laid out farms. Natives saw tracks in the forests invisible to Europeans; Europeans imagined the forests as cornfields. Jefferson’s ‘dream’ was a country of European small farmers; natives, who grew crops for their needs and thought owning land wrong, could not understand it — which, in Jefferson’s view, made them ‘uncivilised’.

Canada and the USA came into existence at the end of the 18th century, occupying only a fraction of their present area. The USA bought land from France (the Louisiana Purchase, 1803) and Russia (Alaska), and won much of the south from Mexico by war — ‘it did not occur to anyone’, NCERT says, to ask the natives’ consent. As the western frontier moved, natives were forced back. Landless younger sons from Britain and France, then immigrants from Germany, Sweden, Italy and Poland, sought farms; they introduced crops such as rice and cotton for sale in Europe, hunted wolves and mountain lions to extinction to protect their farms, and felt secure only with barbed wire (1873).

Slavery and the Civil War. The southern climate was too hot for Europeans to work outdoors, and enslaved natives in South America had died in large numbers, so planters bought African slaves. The slave trade was banned after anti-slavery protests, but enslaved Africans and their children remained slaves. The northern states, not dependent on plantations, condemned slavery as inhuman; in the war of 1861–65 the abolitionist side won and slavery ended — though African Americans won civil liberties and an end to segregation only in the 20th century. Canada’s pressing problem was different: the French settlers’ demand for autonomy after Britain won Canada in 1763, resolved by the Confederation of 1867.

The native peoples lose their land. Natives were induced or forced to move after signing treaties selling land at very low prices; sometimes Americans took more land or paid less than promised. In Georgia, officials held that the Cherokee were subject to state laws but could not enjoy citizens’ rights — even though the Cherokee had done most to learn English and the American way of life. In 1832 US Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the Cherokee were ‘a distinct community, occupying its own territory in which the laws of Georgia had no force’, with sovereignty in certain matters. President Andrew Jackson, known for fighting privilege, refused to honour the ruling and ordered the army to evict the Cherokee to the ‘Great American Desert’: of 15,000 forced to go, over a quarter died on the ‘Trail of Tears’.

Justifications and reservations. Those who took native land claimed natives did not deserve land they did not use ‘to the maximum’, called them lazy for not producing for the market, and faulted them for not learning English or dressing like Europeans — they ‘deserved to die out’, these men argued. Prairies were cleared and bison killed; a visiting Frenchman wrote that ‘primitive man will disappear with the primitive animal’. Natives were pushed west onto land promised ‘in perpetuity’, then moved again when lead, gold or oil was found; tribes were forced to share land, causing quarrels; they were confined to reservations, often with no earlier connection to them. They resisted: the US army crushed rebellions from 1865 to 1890, and in Canada the Métis rose between 1869 and 1885.

Gold, railways and industry. Gold found in California in the 1840s set off the Gold Rush; railways were built across the continent with thousands of Chinese workers — the US line completed by 1870 (NCERT), Canada’s by 1885. Andrew Carnegie, a poor Scottish immigrant turned millionaire, boasted that ‘the Republic thunders on at the speed of an express’. Industry in North America grew to make railway equipment and farm machinery (unlike England, where, NCERT says, one reason was small peasants losing land and moving to factories). In 1860 the USA was undeveloped; by 1890 it was the world’s leading industrial power. By 1890 the bison were almost exterminated, ending the natives’ hunting life; in 1892 continental expansion was complete — no frontier remained — and soon the USA had colonies of its own in Hawaii and the Philippines.

The ‘democratic spirit’ of the independence struggle of the 1770s defined the USA against Old World monarchies; its constitution protected the individual’s right to property, which the state could not override. But democratic rights (voting for Congress and the President) and property rights were only for white men. In 2000 the Canadian native writer Daniel Paul pointed out that Thomas Paine had used Indians as models of how society might be organised, arguing that Native Americans ‘sowed the seeds’ of the movement towards democracy in Europe (We Were Not the Savages).

The winds of change. Things began to improve only in the 1920s. The Problem of Indian Administration, a survey directed by Lewis Meriam and published in 1928, exposed terrible health and education on reservations; white sympathy led to the Indian Reorganisation Act of 1934, giving natives on reservations the right to buy land and take loans. In the 1950s–60s the US and Canadian governments planned to end special provisions so natives would ‘join the mainstream’ — adopt European culture — but natives refused: in the 1954 Declaration of Indian Rights many accepted US citizenship on condition that their reservations and traditions be left alone. In Canada the government announced in 1969 that it would ‘not recognise aboriginal rights’; organised native demonstrations and debates followed, and in 1982 the Constitution Act accepted existing aboriginal and treaty rights, though ‘many details remain to be worked out’. NCERT concludes that native peoples, though far fewer than in the 18th century, have asserted their right to their cultures and, especially in Canada, their sacred lands.

The peoples NCERT calls ‘aborigines’ — a general name for many societies — began arriving over 40,000 years ago (possibly earlier) from New Guinea, then joined by a land-bridge. In their own traditions they did not come to Australia but had always been there; the past is the ‘Dreamtime’, in which past and present blur. In the late 18th century there were 350–750 communities, each with its own language (NCERT: 200 still spoken). The Torres Strait Islanders of the north are a distinct group (NCERT says they are believed to have migrated from elsewhere). Together they made up 2.4% of the population in 2005 (NCERT). Most towns are on the coast, where the British first arrived in 1770, because the centre is arid desert.

Contact and violence. The Australian story resembles the American one but began nearly 300 years later. Cook’s crew first reported natives’ friendliness, but British feeling reversed when Cook was killed by a native — in Hawaii, not Australia; NCERT notes that a single incident was often used by colonisers to justify later violence against other peoples. Natives could not foresee that in the 19th and 20th centuries nearly 90% of them would die from germs, loss of land and resources, and battles with settlers (NCERT). Britain, having lost its American colonies, sent convicts to Australia (Portugal had abandoned convict settlement in Brazil after violent clashes); freed convicts, forbidden to return to Britain, felt no hesitation in ejecting natives from land they took for farming.

Development. Australia’s economy was less varied than America’s: sheep farms and mining, then vineyards and wheat. A name proposed for the new capital was ‘Woolwheatgold’; it became Canberra (NCERT: from kamberra, a native word meaning ‘meeting place’ — the meaning is disputed, Beyond NCERT). Some natives worked on farms in conditions ‘little different from slavery’; Chinese immigrants later supplied cheap labour, but unease about depending on non-whites led governments to ban them; and until 1974 (NCERT) a policy kept ‘non-white’ people out for fear of migration from South and Southeast Asia — the ‘White Australia’ policy.

In 1968 the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner gave a lecture called ‘The Great Australian Silence’ — historians’ silence about Aboriginal people. From the 1970s, as in North America, there was a new eagerness to understand native communities not as anthropological curiosities but as peoples with distinct cultures, knowledge of nature and climate, vast bodies of stories and skills in textiles, painting and carving. Historian Henry Reynolds later asked, in a powerful book, Why Weren’t We Told?, condemning history that began with Cook’s ‘discovery’. University departments, gallery and museum displays and native life histories followed — a ‘wonderful effort’ at a critical time, NCERT says. From 1974, multiculturalism became official policy, giving equal respect to native cultures and to immigrant cultures from Europe and Asia.

Terra nullius and the children. From the 1970s, as ‘human rights’ entered UN debates, Australians realised that, unlike the USA, Canada and New Zealand, Australia had no treaties with its native peoples formalising the takeover of land: the government had always termed the land terra nullius, belonging to nobody. There was also a long, agonising history of children of mixed descent being forcibly removed from their native families. Agitation led to inquiries and two decisions: to recognise the natives’ strong historic bonds with land sacred to them, and — since past acts could not be undone — to make a public apology for the injustice done to the children in an attempt to keep ‘white’ and ‘coloured’ apart.

Q1–4 are brief answers (about 100 words); Q5–6 are short essays (250–300 words). Try each first.

Numbers

One-liners

• Settler colonies replaced native populations; direct rule governed them; semi-colonies were exploited without annexation.
• Native North Americans made alliances with gifts; land, air and water could not be owned.
• The same trade meant friendship to one side and profit to the other.
• ‘Noble savage’ or ‘uncivilised’ — mostly the views of those who had never met native people.
• Marshall ruled for the Cherokee; Jackson ignored him; the Trail of Tears followed.
• Reservations were promised ‘in perpetuity’ until minerals were found.
• Rights in the young USA were for white men.
• Native peoples rejected assimilation but claimed citizenship on their own terms (1954).
• Australia had no treaties; terra nullius said the land belonged to nobody.
• Stanner broke ‘the Great Australian Silence’; Reynolds asked ‘Why weren’t we told?’
• Mabo (1992) ended terra nullius in law.
• Who tells history — anthropologists, settlers or the peoples themselves — shapes what it says.

Traps to avoid

• Terra nullius = ‘land belonging to nobody’; struck down in Mabo (1992), not by a 1970s law.
• Australia had no treaties with indigenous peoples; New Zealand had the Treaty of Waitangi (1840).
• Marshall ruled for the Cherokee (1832); President Jackson enforced removal anyway.
• Torres Strait Islanders are distinct from the peoples NCERT calls ‘aborigines’.
• The Métis are of mixed native and European descent; their revolts were 1869–85 in Canada.
• The ‘noble savage’ idea is Rousseau’s; Washington Irving actually met native Americans.
• The famous Chief Seattle text is largely a 1971 rewriting; the original speech survives only in an 1887 version.
• The Hopi live in Arizona, not ‘near California’.
• National Sorry Day was first held on 26 May 1998 (NCERT prints 1999).
• Canada’s 1982 Constitution Act recognised existing aboriginal and treaty rights; its 1969 policy had refused them.
• ‘Red Indian’ comes from Columbus’s mistaken belief that he had reached India.
• The Indian Reorganisation Act (1934) let natives on reservations buy land and take loans.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• No Prelims question in the archive has asked about the native peoples of the Americas or Australia. Prepare likely pairs anyway: terra nullius–Mabo (1992), Trail of Tears–Cherokee, Treaty of Waitangi (1840)–Maori, Meriam survey (1928), Indian Reorganisation Act (1934), Constitution Act (1982); Australian apology (2008) and the 2023 referendum as current-affairs-linked facts.
• Timeline IV’s South Asia column overlaps Indian history Prelims (Plassey 1757, sati 1829, Congress 1885); those questions belong to the Indian history chapters.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• GS1 2019: ‘Explain how the foundations of the modern world were laid by the American and French revolutions.’ The Section IV introduction frames exactly this: revolutions that turned subjects into citizens, popular sovereignty, nationalism (civic versus ethnic). Add this chapter’s caution — the new rights were for white men; for native peoples, as Spodek argues, liberty became confinement — a strong balancing point.
• GS1 2015: ‘Why did the industrial revolution first occur in England? Discuss the quality of life … and compare with India today.’ From the Section IV introduction and the chapter: Britain as first industrial nation (coal, cotton, then railways), small peasants losing land and moving to factories, and the human costs — child labour, poverty, environmental damage, cholera and tuberculosis. Note NCERT’s point that historians no longer treat Britain as the only model (Russia, the USA, Germany). This is the weaker fit: the full story needs more than this chapter.
• Essays and GS1/GS2: settler colonialism versus direct rule; indigenous land rights (compare India’s tribal rights, Beyond NCERT); assimilation versus multiculturalism; whose history gets told (oral history, museums); apology and reconciliation. Attribute positions — governments, settler descendants, indigenous communities — and avoid present-day political verdicts.

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