Indigenous responses for survival and resistance during the age of colonialism
Indigenous response to colonialism refers to the actions, strategies, and efforts taken by Indigenous peoples to evade, oppose, challenge, and survive the impacts of colonial domination, dispossession, and assimilation. It has varied depending on the Indigenous group, historical period, territory, and colonial state(s) they have interacted with. Indigenous peoples have had agency in their response to colonialism. They have employed armed resistance, diplomacy, and legal procedures. Others have fled to inhospitable, undesirable or remote territories to avoid conflict. Nevertheless, some Indigenous peoples were forced to move to reservations or reductions, and work in mines, plantations, construction, and domestic tasks. They have detribalized and culturally assimilated into colonial societies. On occasion, Indigenous peoples have formed alliances with one or more Indigenous or non-Indigenous nations. Overall, the response of Indigenous peoples to colonialism during this period has been diverse and varied in its effectiveness.[5] Indigenous resistance has a centuries-long history that is complex and carries on into contemporary times.[6]
Background
Indigenous peoples are the earliest known inhabitants of a territory that was or remains colonized by a dominant group.[7] Before the age of colonialism, there were hundreds of nations and tribes throughout the territories that would be colonized, with diverse languages, religions and cultures.[8] The peoples that would come to be known as Indigenous had large cities, city-states, chiefdoms, states, kingdoms, republics, confederacies, and empires. These societies had varying degrees of knowledge of the arts, agriculture, engineering, architecture, mathematics, astronomy, writing, physics, medicine, irrigation, geology, mining, weather forecasting, navigation, metallurgy and more.[9] Their population would experience a significant collapse due to the effects of colonization. Most Indigenous groups in the world today have been displaced from some or all of their ancestral lands.[10][11][12] Indigenous peoples have existed in a context of colonialism, as they are not "Indigenous" without experiencing the practice of colonialism, that is, when their sovereignty and self-determination are realized.[13]
In recent decades, non-Indigenous historiography has paid increased attention to Indigenous agency. Before, Indigenous peoples were studied as passive objects of colonial policy and administration, but now the growing areas of borderland studies and Indigenous agency have emerged.[19]
As European colonialism has spread throughout the world, settlers have become dominant through conquest, occupation, or invasion. In this process, there has been and continues to be conflict between settlers and Indigenous peoples. For hundreds of years in recent history, Indigenous groups have been the target of a number of atrocity crimes including multiple genocides that have destroyed entire nations. In spite of this, Indigenous peoples survive and some are thriving. They account for a population of 476 million, residing in 90 countries around the world and speaking over 5000 languages from several language families, even though hundreds of Indigenous groups are extinct.[20][21] Some examples of important surviving Indigenous languages include Aymara, Guaraní, Quechua and Mapuche in South America; Lakota and Navajo in North America; Maya and Nahua in Central America; Inuit in the circumpolar region; Sámi in northwest Eurasia; and Torres Strait Islanders and Māori in Oceania.[22][23][24] For comparison, at the time of contact in 1492, there were 40 to 70 languages spoken in Europe, mostly from the Indo-European language family.[25]
Indigenous peoples continue to struggle as they suffer discrimination in most countries where they coexist with non-Indigenous peoples. The majority of the world's Indigenous peoples are among the poorest groups within the states where they live, and they amount to 19% of the world's poor.[26][2][27]
Contact and conquest
Before Europeans set out to discover what had been populated by others in their Age of Discovery and before the European colonization, Indigenous peoples resided in a large proportion of the world's territory. For example, in the Americas, there are estimates of a population of up to 100 million people.[28][29] The Indigenous response to colonization has been varied and also changed over time as each group chose to flee, fight, submit, support or seek diplomatic solutions. One example of an Indigenous group that fled is the Beothuk in Newfoundland, which is now practically extinct. The Charrúa were massacred in what is now Uruguay and were completely destroyed. In contrast, the Nenets have accommodated the Russian state.[30][16]
For a long time, scholars have explained that the large fatality rates of Indigenous peoples upon contact with settlers have been caused by new infectious diseases brought to Indigenous territories from overseas. Recent scholarship has shifted to explore the nature of the difficult conditions of life imposed on Indigenous peoples due to colonization itself, which made Indigenous peoples more vulnerable to any disease, including new diseases. In other words, causes of death such as forced labor combined with hunger that converged during the colonization process made Indigenous peoples weaker and less resistant to disease.[36] For example, scholars maintain that smallpox probably killed a third of the population in colonial Mexico but admit that there is no evidence to quantify the impact with certainty.[37] Jeffrey Ostler gives the example of the colonization of California as causing disease in the context of a structural genocide.[38]
During the colonization of New Spain from the 16th to the 18th centuries, the focus of the colonizers was to practice agriculture, farming, mining, and infrastructure construction while exploiting Indigenous labor.[39]Slavery was one of the main factors that decimated the Indigenous population of North America. Indigenous slavery predated and outlasted the African slave trade until the 20th century. The Spanish crown allowed slavery of Indigenous peoples captured in "just wars", which included Indigenous resistance to colonialism, such as religious conversion or forced labor. Indigenous forced labor took place in repartimientos, encomiendas, Spanish missions and haciendas. Indigenous women and children were forced to do domestic work. Even after slavery was outlawed by the Spanish Empire, and then ex-colonies such as the Mexican and United States governments, those that benefitted from slavery used legal frameworks to avoid enforcement such as vagrancy laws, convict leasing, and debt peonage.[40]
Indigenous nations sought diplomacy or military alliances to survive, seeking allies in other nations, including neighbouring Indigenous nations and other colonizing powers, as in the French and Indian War and the War of 1812. In Central America, Miskito people allied with the English to resist Spanish colonialism.[41] Indigenous peoples have sought alliances if the alliance has improved their chances of survival or worked to their advantage. Some Indigenous nations attempted to show their allegiance to the colonizing power by becoming a military ally in the attacks of other Indigenous nations, as in the case of the Tlaxcalans in the central valley of Mexico.[42] Other times, they would ally themselves with escaped African slaves, as in the case of the Seminoles.[43]
The Mapuche in the Arauco War,[44] the Māori in the New Zealand Wars, the Incas in the Neo-Inca State, the Yaqui in the Yaqui Wars, and the Seminoles in the Seminole Wars are examples of Indigenous nations that resisted for decades or even centuries.[45] However, in many parts of the world, Indigenous peoples moved away from fertile, resource-rich territories to inaccessible and inhospitable territories such as swamps, deserts and jungles.[46] They were displaced from fertile places in Argentina, Brazil, the Philippines and temperate Africa. Some examples include small Indigenous groups moving to parts of the Amazon basin, Australia, Central America, the Arctic and Siberia. Others came into conflict with other Indigenous groups as they were forcefully displaced and occupied territory that was inhabited by other Indigenous groups.[47]
On occasions, the reaction of Indigenous peoples to attacks resulted in their transformation into warrior horse cultures that used European fire guns to resist further invasion of their territories. Even today, the stereotypical Native American depicted in Indian Wars is riding on a horse. For example, the people of the Great Plains[48] and Mapuche[49] adopted the horse into their everyday cultures.
Indigenous peoples also adopted newly introduced domestic animals in their diet as Europeans introduced chicken, cattle, pigs, goats, and sheep in the Columbian exchange. Indigenous peoples have hunted their territory for centuries or millennia, and many times killed the animals belonging to settlers, and this has been the cause of much conflict between settlers and Indigenous peoples.[50][51]
Indigenous peoples were not always conquered militarily, as in the case of treaties made between Great Britain and France with Indigenous peoples.[52][53] The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi of the Maori, and the 1868 Treaty of Bosque Redondo of the Navajo are two examples of treaties that remain important today.[54]
Colonization
Modern colonialism that started in the 15th century, along with European transatlantic navigation, resulted in the expansion of European empires and the associated settler colonialism that occurred in the Americas, Oceania, South Africa and beyond.
According to historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, the fact that Indigenous peoples survive today against genocidal attacks is proof of resistance:[55]
Native nations and communities, while struggling to maintain fundamental values and collectivity, have from the beginning resisted modern colonialism
using both defensive and offensive techniques, including the modern forms of armed resistance of national liberation movements and what now is called terrorism. In every instance they have fought for survival as peoples.
At times, Indigenous peoples used violent resistance, at times successfully or at times involving two or more Indigenous allies. Examples include the Mixton rebellion, the Zapatista uprising, the Caste War of Yucatán, Rebellion of Tupac Amaru II, the Tzeltal Rebellion of 1712, Pontiac's War and the North-West Rebellion.[1][56] Academic Benjamin Madley said that throughout the world, groups targeted for annihilation resist, often violently. He details the case of the Modoc War comparing the casualties of the conflict. Furthermore, he says that "The Modoc genocide is hardly the only genocide against Indigenous people that has been sanitized as war."[57] According to Frank Chalk, in the 19th century United States, the federal government policy toward Native Americans was ethnocide, but when they resisted, the result sometimes was genocidal.[58] Historically, victims of genocide have resisted, and this resistance has been criminalized to justify massacres.[59]
According to Ken Coates, sexual relations between Indigenous women and non-Indigenous men took place to some extent in New Zealand, New Spain, the Metis in Canada, whereas they generally did not take place in other places such as Australia and British North America. People of mixed settler-Indigenous ancestry have been discriminated against. The mixing blurred the lines between Indigenous and newcomer populations, and most learned the language of the colony, which was a European language.[60][61] Some scholars have argued that the concept of mestizaje, the process of transcultural mixing, has been used to promote assimitionalism and monoculturalism in Latin America.[62][63]
In North America, where the British made treaties with Indigenous peoples, they learned that these treaties could be broken and would not protect their communities.[64][65] Faced with the risk that their people would be destroyed, leaders of Indian resistance agreed to treaties requiring land cessions, and the redefinition of borders in the hope that the settlers would not encroach further on Indigenous territory.[6] One of such examples is the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, a federally recognized Indian Nation, which was led by Potawatomi leader Leopold Pokagon. Other times, treaties were signed under coercion or right after Indigenous groups suffered massacres, such as in the case of the Treaty of Hartford of 1638.[66] Colonial powers also sought control of new territories by appropriating the Indigenous elite through bribery and assimilation.[67]
In North America, the United States and Canada established residential schools, removing Indigenous children from their families for years while prohibiting the use of their Indigenous language and cultural practices. Australia focused on children with mixed ethnicity and removed children to be placed in residential schools or to be adopted by non-Indigenous families.[68] Canada and the United States have assimilated Indigenous peoples via Indian termination policies, in which incentives are offered for Indigenous peoples to renounce Indigenous rights in exchange for benefits such as citizenship rights. Furthermore, Canada removed Indigenous rights if an Indigenous woman married a non-Indigenous person, an Indigenous person graduated from university, or joined the military.[69]
The Cherokee Nation is one of the federally recognized tribes within the United States. It is now located in Oklahoma after being forcefully removed in the Trail of Tears along with other Indigenous groups. Indigenous groups in North America were assigned to small reservations, typically on remote and economically marginal territories that would not support crops, fishing or hunting. Some of the reservations were then dismantled through an allotment process such as the Dawes act in North America, but some Indigenous peoples refused to sign.[70]
A 2009 United Nations report stated that Indigenous peoples have "...documented histories of resistance, interface or cooperation with states...Indigenous peoples were often recognized as sovereign peoples by states, as witnessed by the hundreds of treaties concluded between Indigenous peoples and the governments of the United States, Canada, New Zealand and others".[71]
Contemporary response
Strategies
Indigenous strategies continue to pursue Indigenous rights and freedom and seek to rebuild their nations and cultures to maintain national groups with distinct cultural identities. Indigenous nations continue to pursue self-determination and sovereignty.[72][73]
Erich Steinman has compiled a record of Native American resistance processes and responses that he says are not well studied by American sociology.[90]
In New Zealand and Ecuador, Indigenous peoples have formed political parties, Te Pāti Māori and Pachakutik respectively. Bolivia has had an Indigenous president, Evo Morales.[8]
Indigenous nations and peoples have managed to survive despite sustained long-term attacks to their survival as Indigenous nations, cultures or as members of an Indigenous group.[91][92] Hall argues that Indigenous peoples challenge the idea that the state is the basic form of political organization. He argues that the Indigenous fight for self-determination today is part of a cycle of centuries of resistance to colonialism.[93]
Views on ongoing colonialism
Elaine Coburn and historian Lorenzo Veracini say that colonialism is present in contemporary settler colonial states, including Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States.[94][95] Michael Grewcock has argued that in Australia, there are Indigenous peoples "who still resist the colonization of country that was never ceded".[96]
Native American anthropologist Audra Simpson argues that the colonial project is ongoing, as the case of the Mohawks of Kahnawake, a self-governing territory of the Mohawk Nation within the borders of Canada.[97]
Pablo G. Casanova has said that in Mexico there has been a practice of internal colonialism.[98][99] According to sociologist Anibal Quijano, Bolivia and Mexico have undergone limited decolonialization through a revolutionary process.[100] In Mexico, the case of the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) denotes resistance in many areas, including education, territorial, epistemological, political and economic terms. EZLN is viewed as a continuation of the struggle against more than 500 years of oppression of Indigenous peoples.[101]
According to Ken Coates, liberal democracies do not like being called up on internal human rights abuses "when these same governments are often prominent in criticizing other nations for abuses of human and civil rights". Furthermore, post-independence era countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia have been dismissive of Indigenous rights as much as colonial empires.[102]
Many smaller European colonial museums have closed after the end of European colonization.[129] According to Pascal Blanchard, the political climate in France has not allowed the emergence of a museum about French colonialism.[130] In Bristol, England, the only museum dedicated to colonialism, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, has been closed after operating for just 6 years.[131][132]
Some movements, such as the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, have sought to promote the use of Indigenous languages in educational programs.[137] In recent years, there has been a revival in the use of Māori language in New Zealand, where it is an official language and taught in 350 schools.[138][11] New technologies are making access to educational language programs accessible to the general public.[139] Furthermore, there are examples of Indigenous schools that move away from Eurocentric curriculums while considering the graduates' future prospects within a non-Indigenous majority state.[140] In Paraguay, Guaraní is the official language and is spoken by 6.5 million people in the region. Quechua and Aymara are official languages in Peru and Bolivia and are spoken by 8 and 2.5 million people, respectively.[141] Nationalism has promoted the use of local languages in most of Eurasia, but in the rest of the world, European languages remain dominant in mass media, education and the internet.[142]
Culture
Today, Indigenous peoples can react to cultural processes in various ways, including acculturation, transculturation, assimilation, and cultural loss, while some remain separated from the dominant culture or marginalized from any group, including their own. In Hispanic America, Indigenous peoples have adopted Spanish religion, institutions, language, and literature, as well as non-endemic domestic animals and crops.[143][144]
Some scholars and Indigenous peoples argue that renaming geographical entities should be part of a reclaiming process of Indigenous cultures.[145][146]
International law
In the area of international law, the Working Group on Indigenous Populations participated directly in the development of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and worked on the development of the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention of 1989.[147] Indigenous scholar Jeff Corntassel said that article 46 of UNDRIP may be detrimental to some Indigenous rights: "...the restoration of their land-based and water-based cultural relationships and practices is often portrayed as a threat to the territorial integrity of the country(ies) in which they reside, and thus, a threat to state sovereignty".[148]
For decades, Indigenous peoples had demanded that the Catholic Church rescind the Doctrine of Discovery theories that justified the seizure of Indigenous land and supported a legal basis.[149]
^ abHidalgo, Dennis (2007). "Anticolonialism". In Benjamin, Thomas (ed.). Encyclopedia of Western Colonialism since 1450 (Gale Virtual Reference Library ed.). Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA. pp. 57–65. Retrieved May 22, 2015. For a comprehensive list of Non-european rebellions, revolts and resistance movements, see pages 62–63.
^"Indigenous definition". Merriam-Webster. 2021. Archived from the original on 10 December 2021. Retrieved 10 December 2021. of or relating to the earliest known inhabitants of a place and especially of a place that was colonized by a now-dominant group.
^ abcHitchcock, Robert K.; Koperski, Thomas E. (2008). "Genocides of Indigenous Peoples". In Stone, Dan (ed.). The Historiography of Genocide. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 578, 579, 585, 589. ISBN978-1-4039-9219-2. The rights to land and resources are key goals of the world's indigenous peoples, and they are enshrined in the only international human rights instrument that is binding on states, the International Labor Organization's Convention No. 169 Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries.
^Hixson, Walter L. (2013). American Settler Colonialism: A History. Springer. pp. 13–15. ISBN978-1-137-37426-4. Indigenous people thus not only confronted the European expansion, but also participated in a complex and contested colonial encounter... Rather than simply bloody rivals from the outset, Indians and Euro-Americans frequently were trade and alliance partners, neighbors, wives, employers, and co-religionists.
^Limb P. Etherington N. & Midgley P. (2010). Grappling with the beast: indigenous southern african responses to colonialism 1840-1930. Page vii. Leiden The Netherlands: Brill.
^Mann, Charles C. (2011). 1493: Uncovering the new world Columbus created. Vintage. Page 439. "American history is often described in terms of Europeans entering a nearly empty wilderness. For centuries, though, most of the newcomers were African, and the land was not empty, but filled with millions of indigenous people. Much of the great encounter between the two separate halves of the world thus was less a meeting of Europe and America than a meeting of Africans and Indians—a relationship forged both in the cage of slavery and in the uprisings against it. Largely conducted out of sight of Europeans, the complex interplay between red and black is a hidden history that researchers are only now beginning to unravel."
^Curthoys, Ann; Docker, John (2001). "Introduction: Genocide: definitions, questions, settler-colonies". Aboriginal History. 25: 1–15. ISSN0314-8769. JSTOR45135468. Some of the worst examples of escalating death by sickness and disease occurred on the Spanish Christian missions in Florida, Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico in the period 1690–1845. After the military delivered captive Indians to the missions, they were expected to perform arduous agricultural labour while being provided with no more than 1400 calories per day in low-nutrient foods, with some missions supplying as little as 715 calories per day. Amongst the survivors, stress, anxiety, trauma, depression, demoralisation and despair led not only to vulnerability to physical and psychological illnesses but also to a plummeting of birth rates.
^ abDunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne (2014). An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. Beacon Press. p. 40. ISBN978-0-8070-0041-0. If disease could have done the job, it is not clear why the European colonizers in America found it necessary to carry out unrelenting wars against Indigenous communities in order to gain every inch of land they took from them-nearly three hundred years of colonial warfare, followed by continued wars waged by the independent republics of the hemisphere.
^Ostler, Jeffrey (2021-06-01). "Denial of Genocide in the California Gold Rush Era: The Case of Gary Clayton Anderson". American Indian Culture and Research Journal. 45 (2): 81–102. doi:10.17953/aicrj.45.2.ostler. ISSN0161-6463. Recent scholars, however, have shown that virgin soil epidemics were far less universal and had less deadly consequences than has generally been assumed. Depopulation from disease more often resulted from conditions created by colonialism—in California, loss of land, destruction of resources and food stores, lack of clean water, captive taking, sexual violence, and massacre—that encouraged the spread of pathogens and increased communities' vulnerability through malnutrition, exposure, social stress, and destruction of sources of medicine and capacities for palliative care.
^Jones, "Warfare Reorganization and Readaptation at the Margins of Spanish Rule" in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, pp. 138–187.
^Mann, Charles C. (2011). 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. p. 110. ISBN978-0-307-59672-7. Colonists quickly lost control of them. Indians woke up to find free-range cows and horses romping through their fields, trampling the harvest. If they killed the beasts, gun-waving colonists demanded payment. Animal numbers boomed for decades. The worst may have been the pigs...
^Madley, Benjamin (2014). "California and Oregon's Modoc Indians: How Indigenous Resistance Camouflages Genocide in Colonial Histories". In Woolford, Andrew; Benvenuto, Jeff; Laban Hinton, Alexander (eds.). Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America. Duke University Press. pp. 118–120. doi:10.2307/j.ctv11sn770. ISBN978-0-8223-5763-6. JSTORj.ctv11sn770. Variations of the Modoc ordeal occurred elsewhere during the conquest and colonization of Africa, Asia, Australia, and North and South America. Indigenous civilizations repeatedly resisted invaders seeking to physically annihilate them in whole or in part. Many of these catastrophes are known as wars. Yet by carefully examining the intentions and actions of colonizers and their advocates it is possible to reinterpret some of these cataclysms as both genocides and wars of resistance. The Modoc case is one of them (p120).
^Chalk F., R. Jonassohn K. & Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies. (1990). The history and sociology of genocide : analyses and case studies. pp203. Yale University Press. "In our view, ethnocide was the principal United States policy toward American Indians in the nineteenth century, but the federal government stood ready to engage in genocide as a means of coercing tribes when they resisted ethnocide or resorted to armed resistance. Ethnocide was at the core of the Indian removals, the reservation system, the Dawes Act, and the schemes for educating native children at boarding schools far from their parents after the Civil War."
^Semerdjian, Elyse (2024-01-24). "A World Without Civilians". Journal of Genocide Research: 1–6. doi:10.1080/14623528.2024.2306714. ISSN1462-3528. Many scholars, including myself, believe that war, especially its colonial variety with its eliminationist logic against the native that seeks to remove all physical and cultural traces of indigenous peoples from the land, carries with it genocidal capacity that our existing legal frameworks enable. Terms like "civil war," "conflict," and even "counterinsurgency" frequently serve as legal cover for genocide, and in its wake, form the repertoire of genocide denial. This includes the world's ongoing demand for a "perfect victim," one that does not resist oppression whether through violence or non-violence though other instances of resistance are valorized. Historians know that in every case of genocide, victims resisted and that resistance was always framed as a criminal provocation for mass killing.
^Martinez-Echazabal, Lourdes (1998). "Mestizaje and the Discourse of National/Cultural Identity in Latin America, 1845-1959". Latin American Perspectives. 25 (3): 21–42. doi:10.1177/0094582X9802500302. ISSN0094-582X. JSTOR2634165. S2CID144745370. Mulataje or mestizaje, particularly in its culturalist rendition, was central to the politicized assimilationist, monoculturalist rhetoric that surfaced in Latin America during the 1920s and thereafter as a means to neutralize the cultural (and racial) pluralism typical of virtually all Latin American countries -a pluralism considered by many politically counterproductive in the face of Latin America's move toward refurbishing the nation-state.
^Tucker, Dr. Spencer C., ed. (2008). The Encyclopedia of North American Colonial Conflicts to 1775. Oxford: HarperCollins Christian Publishing. p. 375. ISBN978-1-4185-6064-5. Of the estimated 2,500 Pequots who survived the war, at least 30 male captives were executed, and 180 other prisoners were given as slaves to the colonists' native allies. Colonial officials sold many other Pequots into slavery in the West Indies, and some women and children became household slaves in Massachusetts....The terms prohibited the Pequots from returning to their lands, speaking their tribal language, or even referring to themselves as Pequots.
^Morrock, Richard (1973). "Heritage of Strife: The Effects of Colonialist "Divide and Rule" Strategy upon the Colonized Peoples". Science & Society. 37 (2): 129–151. ISSN0036-8237. JSTOR40401707. Three major strategies have been used by modern colonial powers to maintain control of their far-flung empires. The first involves colonization- the settlement of large numbers of Europeans among the subject peoples, as in southern Africa and Algeria. The second consists of co-opting the native elite through assimilation or bribery; there are many examples of this in Africa and the West Indies. The third strategy is "divide and rule" a policy that has played a crucial part in ensuring the stability -indeed, the viability- of nearly every major colonial system.
^Jiménez, Juan Esteban Lewin, Sonia Corona, Federico Rivas Molina, Miguel (2022-09-25). "Las estatuas más incómodas de América". El País (in Spanish). Retrieved 2024-02-06.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^Steinman, Erich W. (2016). "Decolonization Not Inclusion: Indigenous Resistance to American Settler Colonialism". Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. 2 (2): 219–236. doi:10.1177/2332649215615889. ISSN2332-6492. S2CID147233532. For more than five years, I have continuously gathered supplemental data regarding non-state-oriented indigenous actions, including primary documents (community publications and documents) and written notes from informal participant observation of scores of American Indian and Canadian First Nation gatherings, conversations, presentations, institutions, and formal meetings. (See page 5 for a table of entries on Native American resistance to colonial domination: Table 2. North American Settler colonialism and contemporary Indigenous Resistance: Nonpolity Domination and Decolonization)
^Wiessner, Siegfried (2011). "The Cultural Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Achievements and Continuing Challenges". SSRN2253420.
^Grewcock, Michael (2018). "Settler-Colonial Violence, Primitive Accumulation and Australia's Genocide". State Crime Journal. 7 (2): 222–250. doi:10.13169/statecrime.7.2.0222. ISSN2046-6056. JSTOR10.13169/statecrime.7.2.0222. However, there is a long, if often hidden and denied, history of resistance by Indigenous peoples to colonization and its enduring impacts. pp 228. More important is that we understand as state crime the ongoing, normative endeavours of the Australian state to dispossess, control and disempower the original inhabitants of the land, who still resist the colonization of country that was never ceded. pp 246.
^Quijano, Anibal (2000). "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America"(PDF). Nepantla: Views from the South. 1 (3): 533–580. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2012-06-16. A limited but real process of colonial (racial) homogenization, as in the Southern Cone (Chile, Uruguay, Argentina), by means of a massive genocide of the aboriginal population. An always frustrated attempt at cultural homogenization through the cultural genocide of American Indians, blacks, and mestizos, as in Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, Central America, and Bolivia.
^Hanson, A. J. (2020). Literatures, communities, and learning: Conversations with Indigenous writers. pp 13,77. Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. "Our stories generally—traditional stories of Indigenous communities, but also everyday stories that are told—are almost invisible in a lot of con-temporary culture, mass culture. I find it interesting that it’s when those stories are turned into a commodity and placed into this system of literary value that they can be celebrated. Whereas the oral stories are not. I am disturbed by that, in a way. I think there is still a very strong colonial bias toward text. One of the reasons I’m so interested in stories as performed stories is because they are very resistant to commodification."
^LaVaque-Manty, Danielle (2000). "There Are Indians in the Museum of Natural History". Wíčazo Ša Review. 15 (1): 71–89. ISSN0749-6427. JSTOR1409589. Native Americans (and other indigenous peoples) have criticized the role that anthropologists, archaeologists, and museums have played in portraying Indians to the societies that surround them.
^Sauvage, Alexandra (2010). "To be or not to be colonial: Museums facing their exhibitions". Culturales. 6 (12): 97–116. ISSN1870-1191. The first challenges, however, did not come from the museums, but from the previous colonies where Indigenous peoples could claim a right to be included in the national narrative. Indigenous leaders challenged museum authorities, calling into question the veracity of the stories within their walls...In fact, the objects were not the subject of much direct commentary by the elders, who had their own agenda for the meeting. They referred to the regalia with appreciation and respect, but they seemed only to use them as aide-mémoires, occasions for the telling of stories and the singing of songs.
^van Huis, Iris (2019), Lähdesmäki, Tuuli; Passerini, Luisa; Kaasik-Krogerus, Sigrid; van Huis, Iris (eds.), "Contesting Cultural Heritage: Decolonizing the Tropenmuseum as an Intervention in the Dutch/European Memory Complex", Dissonant Heritages and Memories in Contemporary Europe, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 215–248, doi:10.1007/978-3-030-11464-0_8, ISBN978-3-030-11464-0
^Aldrich, R., 2013. Colonial museums in a postcolonial Europe. In Museums in postcolonial Europe (pp. 25). Routledge.
^Bancel, N., Blanchard, P., & Pernsteiner, A. (2017). Is a colonial history museum politically impossible? In N. Bancel, P. Blanchard, & D. Thomas (Eds.), The Colonial Legacy in France: Fracture, Rupture, and Apartheid (pp. 395–411). Indiana University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctt20060bg.38 "The question that remains is whether a museum devoted to colonial history is feasible given the current political climate— a museum that would be irreproachable from a scholarly perspective, include all forms of historiographic sensibilities in France in a genuinely comparative framework, emphasize debate as the primary mode of engagement, shed light on the complexities of the colonial phenomenon without shying away from any awkward questions, the intrinsic violence, ambivalences, or long term consequences."
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