The Routledge Companion to Global Indigenous History

Ann McGrath, Lynette Russell, Ann McGrath, Lynette Russell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351723633
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

The Routledge Companion to Global Indigenous History presents exciting new innovations in the dynamic field of Indigenous global history while also outlining ethical, political, and practical research.

Indigenous histories are not merely concerned with the past but have resonances for the politics of the present and future, ranging across vast geographical distances and deep time periods. The volume starts with an introduction that explores definitions of Indigenous peoples, followed by six thematic sections which each have a global spread: European uses of history and the positioning of Indigenous people as history's outsiders; their migrations and mobilities; colonial encounters; removals and diasporas; memory, identities, and narratives; deep histories and pathways towards future Indigenous histories that challenge the nature of the history discipline itself. This book illustrates the important role of Indigenous history and Indigenous knowledges for contemporary concerns, including climate change, spirituality and religious movements, gender negotiations, modernity and mobility, and the meaning of 'nation' and the 'global'. Reflecting the state of the art in Indigenous global history, the contributors suggest exciting new directions in the field, examine its many research challenges and show its resonances for a global politics of the present and future.

This book is invaluable reading for students in both undergraduate and postgraduate Indigenous history courses.

1

History’s Outsiders?

Global Indigenous Histories

Ann McGrath and Lynette Russell

DOI: 10.4324/9781315181929-1

Introduction

If we wish to draw lessons from the human past, the global scale and scope of Indigenous history is an illuminating place to start. The study of global history will be greatly enhanced, too, if it can meet the challenge of Indigenous history.¹ Over aeons, Indigenous peoples² have developed a vision of a world shared by humans and non-humans as not only mutually interdependent but intimately interconnected. On a planet where waterways, seas, and lands are being exploited ever more destructively, Indigenous people’s respect for the environment as a living entity offers inspiring insights for future generations. Indigenous people’s long custodianship and management of forests, rivers, and seas offer pathways to a more sustainable future. In the crises that the world faces today, in particular the mounting climate emergency, Indigenous people’s knowledge is more important than ever.

The aim of this introduction is to canvas some of the wider questions important to Indigenous history. We discuss why Indigenous peoples have rarely featured in mainstream accounts of global history. We reflect upon the complexities around definitions of Indigenous people, noting common historical experiences and diversity. We then consider the multiple meanings of the term ‘Indigenous history’ and consider future approaches and directions for the history discipline. We contend that a collaborative, community-centred approach to scholarship will allow fresh interdisciplinary and Indigenous-focussed methodologies and approaches. The practice and purpose of history itself, and its associated disciplines, might be reconceptualised. So much can be learnt from Indigenous peoples.

First, however, we need to recognise that Indigenous peoples have a history – and a global history at that. It is a dynamic story that covers the full expanse of the human past. Indigenous histories encompass epic migrations, dramatic and slow changes over time, patterns of continuity, sustainability, adaptability, resilience, and survival. The history of Indigenous people took place on various scales – at familial, community, and national levels – and in specific sites within wider regional land and waterscapes. Indigenous people have formed self-governing Indigenous Nations in the past and present, although today they often live under the umbrella of acquisitive, more powerful nations. Despite protracted historical negotiations, including treaty processes, Indigenous peoples have rarely elected to voluntarily relinquish their lands, their sovereignty, or their autonomy.³

For Indigenous Nations, the past several centuries have brought dramatic ruptures, primarily through imperialism, colonialism, and various forms of global expansionism and local land takeovers. What unites so many Indigenous peoples today are their common historical experiences under external impositions. This includes their long struggles to regain sovereignty over ancestral lands – estates that, in many cases, have been stolen by rapacious intruders. Indigenous identity is rightly connected with histories of struggle, often involving forced removal and exile to distant reserves and reservations. However, their histories also demonstrate displays of strength and creative reinvention – resistance, resilience, survival, and creativity, including the development of new economies and thriving diasporas of cultural transformation and renewal.⁴ The long political struggles of Indigenous people for basic rights have created powerful global connections between groups. They have mobilised in trans-national and global movements to gain redress and to advance towards a better future for their communities.⁵

Indigenous peoples are by no means homogenous in their recent, modern, or deep-time experiences of history, or in their aspirations for the future.⁶ This diversity – of residence, region, culture, and political arrangements – is clearly evident throughout this Companion. Some groups live on autonomously held lands, on tribal reservations, upon state-run reserves, in remote and rural areas. Many Indigenous peoples live in cities and towns, of varying sizes and composition. Even on the same continents, Indigenous peoples have contrasting historical experiences. Their lives are shaped by specific and ever-changing economies, climates, and ecosystems. Generally speaking, Indigenous people are proud of their collective ethos, but their individual stories also offer important histories that need to be told. Contributors to this Companion tell stories of outstanding leaders, the quiet achievers and the famed. As with all histories, each person has a unique experience, varying according to age, gender, sexuality, class, belief, politics, education, work, health, family, life stories, landed associations, rights, behaviours, talents, tendencies, and the myriad historical factors that nuance human lives.

Whether an individual is Indigenous is commonly a matter of self-identification, contingent upon recognition and acceptance by the relevant Indigenous organisation or community, who may require specific evidence criteria. The people around the world who identify as Indigenous belong to tribal nations and other entities, by which they are known. These include many different groups that share certain things in common but also have many differences. They have divergent cultures and economies, contrasting physical appearances or phenotypes, with distinctive hair and skin colouring that varies from light to dark and everything in between. Historical factors that ruptured their ties with land, combined with ethnic and cross-colonial intermixing, have led to serious obstacles to recognition and inclusion. When individuals could not enjoy cultural and community belonging, they often suffered anxiety and intergenerational trauma. Losing connections to land, and even community links, however, did not mean that Indigenous people permanently lost their identity or rights. Many fought hard to assert their Indigenous sovereignty, to forge new kinds of landed and community-oriented associations and systems of governance.

It is important that we do not view history exclusively through the lens of imperial chronologies and histories, which is the prevailing perspective of many written histories. In this volume, we were keen to foreground Indigenous perspectives and responses, but we did not overlook the significant colonising policies and actions that led to the impoverished and disadvantaged situation of many Indigenous people today. Over the last several hundred years, imperial strategies for eroding Indigenous autonomy and economies followed peremptory declarations of sovereignty by more powerful entities. These were generally argued according to the Law of Nations, an established mechanism of the European powers, on the basis of discovery or conquest.

Here, we summarise some of the violent patterns that emerged. Well-armed invaders arrived on Indigenous lands; they implemented takeovers by means of large-scale military operations and warfare. Various colonial states routinely condoned murders and acts of violence by frontiersmen and women, the ordinary civilians. From the sixteenth century, on their expeditions to South America, both Spanish conquistadors and French colonisers used gruesome means to kill and degrade gender-non-conforming men.⁷ In some colonising nations, tens of thousands of Indigenous peoples – women and children included – were targeted and killed in cold blood. Women were raped, tortured, and subjected to ongoing sexual exploitation. Massacres were carried out and frequently covered up. Large-scale warfare, guerrilla warfare, poisonings, murders, state-endorsed executions, starvation, and disease led to shocking death tolls. Coloniser states also sought to exploit rivalries and to turn Indigenous Nations against each other; indigenous police forces were deployed against other Indigenous groups.⁸ Indigenous people fought back, waging both short and sustained campaigns, and although there were many wins, the larger European populations and forces eventually gained control. Overall, these imperial and colonial takeovers constituted a reign of terror.

Even in regions where there was less violence, the uninvited arrival of outsider populations jeopardised or totally destroyed Indigenous hunting, herding, agricultural, and trading economies. Malnutrition, combined with exposure to introduced diseases such as smallpox, measles, rubella, chickenpox, and influenza, depleted Indigenous populations, facilitating the land resumptions that would permanently remove their sustenance and lifeways. In various settler-coloniser states, state authorities forcibly removed whole Indigenous communities from their traditional lands, and implemented numerous other forms of cultural genocide, including forced assimilation.⁹

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, state authorities in several nations attacked the cohesion and autonomy of Indigenous families, splitting them on the basis of colour. They imposed contemporary Western-style gender roles on Indigenous families and regulated sexual and marital relations in ways alien to them. Government-sanctioned policies removed Indigenous children from their families, often violently, then raised them as if they were orphans in distant state-run institutions. In Canada, the United States, and Australia, Indigenous people suffered their lands being stolen and consequent poverty; in Greenland, too, the Inuit lost babies and the children that they dearly loved. Child-removal created lasting cross-generational trauma.¹⁰

After Europeans took over Indigenous lands, the prior occupants were routinely moved off to poorer lands. Colonial state authorities prevented them from residing and running viable economies on their lands and from ruling themselves. They prohibited Indigenous peoples from implementing their own systems of law, speaking their own languages, conducting key ceremonies, practising their own spirituality, and nurturing and raising their children according to their values and customs. Sacred sites, including places of deep storied significance, were destroyed by the intruders, their spiritual significance ignored. In Australia, in a particularly devastating move, in June 2020, the mining giant Rio Tinto destroyed two Juukan Gorge caves, sacred caves described as being of ‘the highest archaeological significance’, which contained artefacts dating back 46,000 years.¹¹

Even the memory of their ancestors, and other fundamental ways that Indigenous peoples honoured their own pasts were subject to assault. Burials and human remains were routinely stolen, then resold to collectors. Thousands of Indigenous remains were shipped to distant European museums, and despite repatriation efforts many are still held there to this day.¹² This continues to be justified in the name of Western science. Yet, while Indigenous knowledge of navigation, hydrology, trackways, food resources, and ecologies were eagerly exploited for the purpose of European expansionism, such expertise was not recognised, let alone admitted into the pantheon of mainstream science. From an Indigenous perspective, the hypocrisy and immorality of the colonisers must have been unfathomable.

The forces of imperialism and colonialism disempowered Indigenous people around the globe, but it is important to avoid oversimplifying this as a binary of coloniser/colonised. The colonised were by no means unified, with sharply competing interests.¹³ And Indigenous history, too, is extremely complicated, with factions, fusions, cross-overs, and conflicting survival strategies. Across the globe, Indigenous peoples mixed outside their communities with other peoples, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, exchanging ideas, teaching them, learning from them, and getting to know them as fellow humans. More often than not, their lives and their histories became entangled in the most intimate ways with people of other ethnicities, many of whom were at odds with each other – whether over religion, politics, or economic goals. Family, residency, everyday labour, working relationships, and marriages played roles in bringing peoples together.¹⁴

On Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English colonising frontiers, in a range of diverse collisions, collusions, and other relationships, Indigenous lives became enmeshed with the invaders, traders, and settler-colonisers. Rape and sexual assault were common forms of colonising violence, and led to children of mixed descent being born and accepted by Indigenous families. On plantations in the Caribbean, the local Indigenous people became enmeshed with people who arrived as slaves from the African continent, with the case of Polly Indian of Tobago, as explored in Brooke Newman’s chapter, demonstrating the fluidity of the so-called ‘race’ categories.¹⁵ Individuals across colonising boundaries intermingled sexually, and many consensual short- and longer-term love unions took place. On some frontiers, including Australian and North American, this forged a ‘marital middle ground’ where intermixed families creat...