Indigenous Peoples and Imperialism
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Indigenous Peoples and Imperialism Ward Churchill Atlanta, GA, USA
Synonyms Colonialism; Eurocentrism; First Nations; Fourth World; Genocide; Imperialism; Settler colonialism
Definition This entry describes the historical expansion of imperialism as inseparable from the colonial subjugation of indigenous peoples on a planetary basis. It argues that without the subjugation of indigenous (or “aboriginal”) peoples, imperialism in any of its modern forms would have been not only impossible but inconceivable. The entry describes the colonialist appropriation of knowledge, natural resources, labor, and wealth from indigenous societies, and the genocidal logic that propelled it. Mainstream conceptions of the origins of scientific, cultural, and historical “progress” are demonstrated to be thoroughly imbued with Eurocentric colonial prejudice. “Imperialism” has been defined in a number of ways. Irrespective of the definition employed, however, the phenomenon described is inseparable from
the colonial subjugation of indigenous peoples on what has long since become a planetary basis. Indeed, without the subjugation of indigenous (or “aboriginal”) peoples, imperialism in any of its modern forms would have been not only impossible but inconceivable (Nietschmann 1994). As Shuswap resistance leader George Manuel observed more than 40 years ago, the Earth’s several thousand First Nations comprise a Fourth World, and its near-total subjugation has been the veritable bedrock upon which all three of the other “worlds” delineated at the 1955 Bandung Conference were constructed (Manuel and Poslins 1974). In the Bandung formulation, the First World consisted of the industrially advanced capitalist/ imperialist powers situated primarily in Western Europe, North America, and Japan; the Second World comprised the Eurasian socialist bloc countries, which were construed as being anti-capitalist and therefore inherently anti-imperialist; and the Third World was composed of the First’s AfroAsian colonies and former colonies; Latin America was grafted onto the basic schema at the 1966 Tricontinental Conference, held in Havana (Prashad 2007, pp. 31–50, 105–115). The formulation is noticeably different from that embodied in the “three worlds theory” later propounded by Mao Zedong, wherein the USA and the Soviet Union comprised the capitalist/imperialist First World; Western Europe and Commonwealth countries, as well as Japan, all of them imbued with a “dual character,” comprise the Second; and the Third World is made up of the remaining countries
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 I. Ness, Z. Cope (eds.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91206-6_229-1
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Indigenous Peoples and Imperialism
(states), each of which is construed as being fundamentally anti-imperialist (on the Maoist formulation, see Melkote and Merriam 1998, p. 10). It follows that perfecting the contemporary imperial edifice of globalization is contingent upon continuatio
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