Civilian-Driven Violence and the Genocide of Indigenous Peoples in Settler Societies

Mohamed Adhikari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032048130
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000411775
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

Existing studies of settler colonial genocides explicitly consider the roles of metropolitan and colonial states, and their military forces in the perpetration of exterminatory violence in settler colonial situations, yet rarely pay specific attention to the dynamics around civilian-driven mass violence against indigenous peoples. In many cases, however, civilians were major, if not the main, perpetrators of such violence. The focus of this book is thus on the role of civilians as perpetrators of exterminatory violence and on those elements within settler colonial situations that promoted mass violence on their part.

CHAPTER ONE
‘No Savage Shall Inherit the Land’: Civilian-driven Violence in the Making of Settler Genocides

Mohamed Adhikari

It is the fashion usually, to speak of these poor people as ‘aborigines’: the idea meant to be conveyed that they are a relic, so to speak, of the past, intruders in the path of the white man, and to be improved from the face of the earth accordingly. The argument seems to be, that God never intended them to live long in the land in which He placed them. Therefore, says the white man, in his superiority of strength and knowledge, away with them, disperse them, shoot and poison them, until there is none remaining; we will utterly destroy them, their wives and their little ones, and all that they have, and we will go in and possess the land.

This is no rhapsody or overstatement, but represents, in words, the actual policy which has been pursued towards the natives of the Australian colonies, and which is being acted upon vigorously in Queensland today.

George Carrington, 1871¹

1 Carrington G. 1871. Colonial Adventures and Experiences. London: Bell & Daldy, 143–144.

In the minutiae of quotidian life, in the presuppositions of service providers, in the structures of State actions and inactions, in the continuing struggles over land use, in a whole trajectory of policies and plans, The work of the conquest is being completed here and now.

Peter Kulchyski, 2005 ²

2 Kulchyski P. 2005. Like the Sound of a Drum: Aboriginal Cultural Politics in Denendeh and Nunavut. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 3.

Major General Edward Braddock, commander-in-chief of British forces in North America at the start of the French and Indian War (1754–1763), emphatically asserted that ‘no savage shall inherit the land’. With these words Braddock flatly rejected a proposed alliance against the French by Delaware chief Shingas, in return for being allowed to retain their land in the upper Ohio Valley. The general paid heavily for his arrogance because the Delawares and several other Native American peoples in the area instead sided with the French. This allied force, consisting overwhelmingly of Indians, routed Braddock’s army and killed him early on in the war.³

3 Barr D. 2006. ‘“The land is ours and not yours”: The Western Delawares and the Seven Years War in the Upper Ohio Valley, 1755–1758’, in The Boundaries Between Us: Natives and Newcomers along the Frontiers of the Old Northwest Territory, 1750–1850, ed. D. Barr. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 29; Hixson W. 2013. American Settler Colonialism: A History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 49, 52; Anderson G. 2014. Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime that Should Haunt America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 74–75.

Although uttered by a likely sojourner rather than a settler,⁴ Braddock’s rebuffgoes to the very heart of all settler colonial projects, particularly those that were part of Western global expansion since the fifteenth century. ‘No savage shall inherit the land!’ would have served as the perfect rallying cry for settlers around the world, especially those prepared to commit violence against Indigenous peoples to secure personal control of acreage, or more expansively, the territory they claimed as their new homeland. Braddock’s pronouncement emphasises not only the centrality of exclusive control of land and homeland in perpetuity to settler projects, but also the racialised contempt in which Indigenous peoples were held. Proclaimed in a time of war by the supreme military commander, the underlying threat of violence was clear, as was the colonial state’s backing of settler claims. More than a century later, and on the other side of the world, George Carrington, an Oxford graduate who travelled through, and worked in many parts of Queensland for four years during the mid-1860s, confirmed the centrality of these values to that settler society and elaborated on some of the justifications behind the murderous behaviour of sections of the civilian population toward indigenes. Similar sentiments, which echoed across virtually all settler frontiers through six centuries of Western expansion and conquest, were foundational to the violence visited upon Indigenous peoples.

4 Settlers come to stay in the colony and make it their new home while sojourners intend returning to the metropole. Sojourners were integral to the making of settler colonies, could be every bit as destructive of Indigenous societies as settlers, and many subsequently became settlers.

Settler colonial projects do not primarily seek the domination, exploitation or conversion of Indigenous peoples, but rather the reproduction of their home societies or the creation of new ones through migration — more accurately, through invasion of other peoples’ land in the sense that migrants can only settle vacant land, but of necessity invade occupied land. Settler regimes typically pursue total control of the newly claimed homeland, purged of any Indigenous claims to sovereignty, real or symbolic. In some instances, such as Australia, California, British Columbia and the Cape Colony, prior ownership of the land by Indigenous peoples was not even recognised in law.⁵ In these and other cases, the legal fiction that Indigenous people did not own their land — retrospectively referred to as terra nullius (no one’s land)⁶ — was used to justify colonisation and to stake claims against competing powers.

5 For discussion of terra nullius throughout the Pacific, especially Australia, California and British Columbia, see Banner S. 2007. Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. For the Cape Colony, see Ülgen Ö. 2002. ‘Developing the doctrine of aboriginal title in South Africa: Source and content’. Journal of African Law, 46, no. 2, 131–154; and for the formation of property rights during the first century of Dutch rule, see Dye A. & La Croix, S. 2018. ‘Institutions for the taking: Property rights and the settlement of the Cape Colony, 1652–1750’. Economic History Review, 8 November 2018.

6 For a discussion of the lineage of the term terra nullius and its currency from the late nineteenth century onwards, see Fitzmaurice A. 2007. ‘The genealogy of terra nullius’. Australian Historical Studies, 38, no. 129, 1–15; and Borch M. 2001. ‘Rethinking the origins of terra nullius’. Australian Historical Studies, 32, no. 117, 222–239. Although the term itself did not come into use until the late nineteenth century, the juridical tactic of the blanket denial of Indigenous sovereignty over entire territories, subcontinents and even continents was deployed by invading settler regimes.

Because settler colonialism is predicated on the invasion and expropriation of foreign land by largely civilian populations, civilian-driven violence against Indigenous peoples has always been congenital to frontier relations, and intrinsic to settler society after the closing of the frontier.⁷ Given the prominent role of settler colonialism in European maritime expansion, civilian-driven violence was clearly integral to the making of Western global dominance. Civilian-driven violence on any significant scale was also specific to settler colonialism, for in other forms of colonialism the violence was of necessity largely perpetrated by metropolitan and colonial states and their military structures. Settler colonialism was particularly damaging to Indigenous communities as it sought not only to dispossess indigenes, but also usually to displace them completely from their habitations, except perhaps as rightless, cheap labour corralled into reserves to be exploited for the benefit of the colonial economy.⁸ In many settler colonies, the destruction of Indigenous societies was clearly genocidal and the violence perpetrated by civilians, especially settlers, a primary contributor to Indigenous social erasure. In most settler colonies, especially where frontier conflict radicalised into genocide — in places as far apart as Queensland, the Cape Colony, California and Tierra del Fuego — the historical record is littered with calls from civilian sectors of the population for the extermination of indigenes. Although not proof of genocide, such demands are an indication of a genocidal mindset and a gauge of colonists’ willingness to condone or perpetrate exterminatory violence against Indigenous peoples. Subsequently such violence has been routinely denied, minimised or misrepresented in ways that favour settler claims and self-perceptions.⁹

7 There is a sense in which only uninhabited land can be settled, and what are today generally referred to as ‘settlers’ are actually invaders; see Johnson A. & Lawson A. 2005. ‘Settler colonies’, in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, eds. S. Ray and H. Schwarz. Malden: Blackwell, 364. That such invaders have managed to appropriate the term ‘settler’, and given it wide enough currency for almost universal use, is a measure of the degree to which these ‘victors’ have been able to determine the terms on which their histories have been written and the degree to which voices of the vanquished have been silenced. It also means that the full extent of the violence that has gone into the making of settler societies is seldom recognised — ‘colonial amnesia’ being a term that comes to mind.

8 I am mindful of Veracini & Cavanagh’s observation that settler colonialism ‘is as much a thing of the past as a thing of the present’, but use the past tense here as I am referring specifically to frontier violence and its role in the making of settler societies. See their definition of settler colonialism at https://settlercolonialstudies.blog/about-this-blog/ accessed 25 February 2019.

9 For a discussion of settler colonial narratives in this regard, see Veracini L. 2015. The Settler Colonial Present. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; see also Veracini L. 2010. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Basingstoke: London Macmillan, ch. 4.

Whereas most studies of settler colonial genocide explicitly consider the roles of metropolitan and colonial states and their military forces in the destruction of Indigenous societies, specific attention to the nature of civilian-driven exterminatory violence has not featured in any significant way in the field of genocide studies, nor in investigations of settler colonial conquest. Occasionally, analyses have mentioned the phenomenon incidentally, or examined its significance in localised contexts. For example, Alison Palmer’s Colonial Genocide cursorily describes the near extermination of Queensland’s Aboriginal peoples as a ‘societally-led’ genocide.¹⁰ Richard Price refers in passing to the ‘“unofficial” violence … of settlers against indigenous peoples … [as] baked into the everyday experience of empire’.¹¹ And Brendan Lindsay’s Murder State restricts his analysis of how democratic structures were used to propel civilian-driven genocidal violence to parts of northern California.¹² In a seminal piece written in the 1980s, Tony Barta, however, recognised the significance of civilian-driven violence by arguing that in large parts of Australia it was a ‘relationship of genocide … structured into the very nature of the encounter’ rather than government ‘policy’ or ‘intention’ that drove the destruction of Indigenous societies.¹³ This important insight and its implications have, however, largely been overlooked within the discipline.

10 Palmer A. 2002. Colonial Genocide. Adelaide: Crawford House Publishing, 3, 199.

11 Price R. 2018. ‘The psychology of colonial violence’, in Vi olence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World, eds. P. Dwyer and A. Nettelbeck. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 25. Price also describes such violence as ‘casual’, ‘quotidian’ and ‘everyday’. See Price, ‘Psychology of colonial violence’, 25, 27, 39, while the editors of the volume write of the ‘private violence committed by colonial settlers’. See Dwyer P. and Nettelbeck A. 2018. ‘“Savage wars of peace”: Violence, colonialism and empire in the modern world’, in Violence, Colonialism and Empire, 9.

12 Lindsay B. 2012. Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846–1873. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ch. 5.

13 Barta T. 2000. ‘Relations of genocide: Land and lives in the colonisation of Australia’, in Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, eds. I. Walliman & M. Dobkowski. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 237–239.

This collection thus seeks to shed light on a neglected area by exploring the dynamic behind civilian-driven violence in settler colonial situations globally, and to focus on those elements within civilian society that promoted genocidal attitudes, behaviour and outcomes in the making of Western global dominance.¹⁴ This project is also fundamentally interested in how civilian, military and non-military state structures overlapped, collaborated and supported each other in the perpetration of genocidal violence against Indigenous peoples. The underlying question of why ‘ordinary’ people are so easily capable of perpetrating unspeakable atrocities, often with equanimity, is of course an extremely broad, highly complex and multidimensional subject that one cannot hope to address in any comprehensive way in a volume of this kind. The intention rather is to put the issue on the radar for scholars working on settler colonial genocide.

14 Martin Shaw places great emphasis on the importance of civilians to the concept of genocide — but as victims, not as perpetrators. See Shaw M. 2015. What is Genocide? Cambridge: Polity Press, 162–166.

Civilians as perpetrators of genocidal violence

The term ‘civilian’ as used here needs some explanation as it has not in any systematic or categorical way been applied to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Contributors
• 1. ‘No Savage Shall Inherit the Land’: Civilian-driven Violence in the Making of Settler Genocides
• 2. Raiders, Slavers, Conquistadors, Settlers: Civilian-driven Violencein the Extermination of Aboriginal Canary Islanders
• 3. ‘Shooting a Black Duck’: Genocidal Settler Violence against Indigenous Peoples and the Creation of Canada
• 4. ‘An Unbroken Line of Crimes and Blood’: Settler Militia and the Extermination and Enslavement of San in the Graaff-Reinet District of the Cape Colony, c. 1776–1825
• 5. Establishing a Code of Silence: Civilian and State Complicity in Genocidal Massacres on the New South Wales Frontier, 1788–1859
• 6. ‘Pale Death … Around our Footprints Springs’: Assessing Violent Mortality on the Queensland Frontier from State and Private Exterminatory Practices
• 7. ‘There Cannot be Civilisation and Barbarism on the Island’: Civilian-driven Violence and the Genocide of the Selk’nam People of Tierra del Fuego
• 8. Missionaries, Agents, Principals and Teachers: Civilian Complicity in the Perpetration of Genocide in Indigenous Boarding Schools in New Mexico and Manitoba, 1879–1975
• 9. ‘Little Kings’: Farmers’ ‘Erasive’ Practices in German South West Africa
• 10. Settler Genocide in Rwanda? Colonial Legacies of Everyday Violence
• 11. Colonialism, Frontiers, Genocide: Civilian-Driven Violence in Settler Colonial Situations
• Bibliography
• Index