The Colonization and Decolonization of Indigenous Diversity

By Isabel Altamirano-Jimenez

Originally published in Lighting the Eighth Fire. Editor Leanne Simpson, Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2008, pp. p.175-186.

Contemporary North America is a contested geographical construction, deeply embedded in the politics of Othering and of disrupting ancient Indigenous territories. Although an ancient notion of North America encompassing Canada, the United States, and Mexico existed, colonial and national state discourses redefined the boundaries of the region by emphasizing difference and focusing on the two English-speaking countries. Since then, social scientists and particularly political scientists have continued to emphasize the predominance of these two countries by applying dichotomies such as First/Third World, North America/Latin America, and global North/ global South to the political science field. From this perspective, the notion of North America as a region limited to Canada and the United States has taken root in academic and political discourses. However, the increasing trend towards globalization has been accompanied by some attempts to conceptualize North America as a region characterized by the kind of general dynamics that impact and shape economic integration. While economic integration is taking place, this region was not created by the North American Free Trade Agreement. Before Europeans came to the continent, many Indigenous Peoples shared a spatial notion of Turtle Island, a vast territory roughly encompassing contemporary U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Later, colonial enterprises in North America were entangled processes that influenced each other’s development.

In this chapter, I discuss the extent to which colonial and post-colonial political strategies have undermined North American entangled histories in favour of national geographies, which tend to emphasize fixed borders. I argue that through the redefinition of borders, the construction of colonial societies, the homogenization/division of what is “Indigenous,” and who is and is not part of the “national” geographical spaces, the efforts to disentangle North American histories have undermined Indigenous diversity and interconnections and promoted a racially-divided conception of North America. This process has in turn created asymmetrical relationships among Indigenous Peoples, who, ironically, have reproduced Indigenous North/South relationships in North America.

I begin by exploring an Indigenous view of North America. Second, I discuss how colonization disrupted/domesticated Indigenous North America and its consequences for Indigenous transnationalism. Finally, I briefly elaborate on how this process can be decolonized.

A Continent of Diverse Islands

"Turtle Island” was the old name for the continent that included Canada, the United States, and Mexico and had its origins in the many creation myths of the people who have lived here for millennia. Turtle Island, then, is North America—not present-day North America, but the continent of the past and its great diversity. Although limited to Canada and the United States, Winona LaDuke’s idea of Indigenous North America can be extended to include Mexico and to portray the whole region as a set of islands in a continent, with each island representing an Indigenous people and territory. Thus, the Blackfoot, Crow, Cheyenne, Navaho, Yaqui, Mohawk, Cree, Aztecs, Zapotecs and Mixtecs’ islands, among others, existed and continue to exist as differentiated cultural entities[i]. Some of them have been larger than others, and all of them have had their distinctive political organizations. This continent of islands was extremely diverse and had its own social, cultural, political, and economic dynamics. Rather than east-west, this geographic space had a south-north logic of economic and cultural exchanges among the different Indigenous civilizations.

Such exchanges developed in “interaction spheres” which facilitated the exchange of gifts, ideas, trade, and the creation of alliances, both political and military[ii]. Interaction spheres can be understood as the spaces or centres where cultural innovation occurred and which influenced distant peripheries.[iii] In fact, one of the issues that has received a great deal of attention from archaeologists and anthropologists has been the influence of Mesoamerican cultures such as those of the Mayans and Aztecs on the northern Indigenous cultures. Platform mounds with temples atop and standard community layouts with plazas, and certain artifacts and decorative motifs have, for several decades, induced scholars to speculate about the cultural connections and trade between the northern cultures and Mesoamerica or Middle America.[iv]

Influence and exchange are not exclusive to archaeological remains, for oral history is also an important source for tracing back Indigenous interrelations between Mesoamerica and northern North America.

The Colonization of Diversity

Territories and borders are the result of human agency rather than changeless geographical spaces. The continent of islands or Indigenous North America and the interconnectedness of its peoples were gradually displaced by colonial processes and moral and racial discourses and, later, by a new east-west logic that was imposed internally in each newly created national state in the region.

The colonization of the Americas by different European empires such as the British, Spanish, and French crowns initiated gigantic transformations in the dynamic of Indigenous interrelations by redefining North America’s cultural, political, and economic interactions around the dichotomy “Old World” and “New World.” As suggested by Gould (2007:765), far from being different, these competing empires were part of the same hemispherical system, which was extremely asymmetric, with Spain being the most prominent member. This asymmetric relationship influenced the way in which the British project was conceived, the arguments used to legitimize possessions and the Indigenous peoples/colonizers relationships.

Scholars generally accept that the construction of the idea of the “New World” was based upon cultural representations as ideological legitimization for territorial expansion. Therefore, the “New World” became a place populated by pagan savages, who became the oppositional Other of the civilized West or the “Old World.” Regardless of their background, European colonizers constructed these differences to legitimize their racial superiority. Colonizers’ representations of the Other centered on similar strategies such as archives or travelers’ information and tales, knowledge, religion, taboos, fear, and ethnography in order to describe and construct a world of Others.

Through these oppositions, colonial discourses perpetuated an ideology that justified European expansion and the aggression inflicted on Indigenous Peoples through genocide, slavery, and deterritorialization. The European colonial moral discourse was that of a civilizing mission oriented to save “savages.” As Brown argues, to justify their domination, colonizers created categories and moral hierarchies that distinguished between the pure and the impure, and the savages and the civilized, and turned cultural difference into natural, binary oppositions.[v]

The process of negotiating and imposing borders and constructing difference created a complex colonial hierarchy of peoples that continues to exist today in subtle forms. This hierarchy grouped/homogenized peoples into new racial categories that defined them in relation to the colonial history. First Nations, Métis, Inuit, Mixed Blood, Mestizos, Indians, and other terms are a reflection of the complex racial distinctions that today characterize North America and Indigenous peoples’ relations to the national states. In fact, one of the most divisive issues afflicting Indigenous Peoples in this region involves who has a legitimate right to define his or her identity and by what criteria and by whose definition this assertion may or may not be true. As the symbolic power of race continues to be strongly embedded in the construction of ambiguous Indigenous identities, further paradoxes are created. The Métis people of Canada, for example, are often irreducibly constructed as “mixed” regardless of how they perceive themselves and of how little metissaje[vi] may add to the understanding of their identity. Metissage, on the other hand, has also been used to undermine Indigenous place-base identities.

The racial re-construction of difference in North America was not limited to only Europeans versus Amerindians. Rather, the discourses varied according to the contexts in which they were deployed and the competition among European empires that characterized the colonization of North America. For this reason, European rivalry and moral disqualification became the basis for constructing differences among Spanish, English, and, to some extent, French colonial adventures in North America. It was particularly clear between the British and the Spaniards.

According to Gedges Gonzalez, the British highlighted the violence that Spaniards had inflicted on Indigenous populations and by insinuating that miscegenation had caused the decadence among the Indigenous Peoples.[vii] English Protestants, in contrast, represented themselves and Indigenous Peoples as two separate worlds that never mixed. They represented British colonial enterprises as an orderly business carried out through treaty and trade relationships with Indigenous Peoples, punctuated by few “accidental” regrettable episodes. The British adopted a doctrine of effective occupation, which was conceived to subvert Spanish claims to territory not directly under Spain’s control. This doctrine also served to differentiate Britain’s “libertarian” imperial project from the Spaniards.

Thus, the “Black Legend,” or the story about Spanish atrocities in the New World, became a way for English imperialists to distinguish their benign project from the Spaniards’ destructive one.[viii] According to Butcher, this difference and the idea of two separate worlds would later be used for the normalization of interracial marriage taboos, racial segregation, and the creation of reservations, all characteristics of English colonial enterprises in North America.[ix]

The opposing representations extended to people of mixed ancestry as well. Unlike the English, the Spanish colonial system needed Native people for its population base and as a major labour force. Thus, Spanish authorities encouraged or tolerated miscegenation.[x] Unlike the interracial unions that occurred in British-controlled territories and that were undermined by whiteness, the ones developed in Spanish-controlled territories eventually resulted in a growing mixed population characterized by class distinctions and racial undertones.[xi] This growing population eventually became the Mestizo mainstream society and not a different segment of the Indigenous population. Mestizos appropriated and transformed European notions of race and culture into similar mediations based on hybridity and metissaje that later became a mode of rationality and a new way of reifying culture and policing borders and identities, particularly after Mexico gained independence in 1810. Of course, while metissaje celebrates an indigenous past, living Indigenous Peoples and identities were perceived as the internal Other.

From this perspective, both whiteness and metissaje worked in these different contexts as regulatory mechanisms defining and circumscribing Indigeneity and predicating racial and cultural difference internally. At the transnational level, whiteness emphasized an Anglo-North America and constructed metissaje as a contaminated misfit that still haunts North American “post-colonial relations.”

In the same way that colonial discourses characterized Indigenous Peoples’ laws and politics as inferior, the Othering of other colonial enterprises by British colonizers also created social and geographical segregation that distinguish Indigenous Peoples in relation to who colonized their territories. The settler society encouraged Indigenous Peoples to perpetuate such differences and discourses.[xii] As Bahbha observes, colonial discourse turns on the recognition and disavowal of races/cultural/historical differences and functions to create space for “subject peoples”.[xiii] This function suggests that the geographical frontier also existed as a moral frontier.[xiv] While colonial racial/cultural/historical discourse separated Indigenous Peoples from Europeans, such rhetoric also created a difference between English/north/Indigenous Peoples and Spanish/south/Indigenous Peoples.

However these historical differences, representations, and relationships between the colonizers and Indigenous Peoples and also between competing empires must be understood not as separate but as entangled histories influencing each other. Migration, dispossession, resettlement, the creation of markets, the construction of ethnic labour systems, and metropolitan growth have been common practices in the larger story of the colonization of Native North America by peoples from elsewhere. The European colonial competition for the control of the continent of islands altered not only the interconnectedness of the original peoples in the Americas but also re-shaped their identification along racial inclusions/exclusions. The historical reconfiguration of borders and difference created not only distinctive national histories but also a complex racial hierarchy that places groups of people within borderlands where they are still subjected to racial discrimination and Othering at the present.

Ironically, this historical politics in the region has continued to transform the material and discursive legacies of contemporary Indigenous peoples and replaced them with an asymmetrical North-South/Anglo-Spanish relationship that subsumes Indigenous diversity and past interactions. The fact is that Indigenous Peoples, who prior to colonization regarded themselves as distinct peoples and interacted based on their difference, now identify themselves along linguistic lines and pan-Indigenous legal categories amidst the many destructive effects of colonialism. This identification conceals the internal tension between frontiers and regions, the existing inequalities that characterize Indigenous peoples both in Spanish and English North America. This also reflects the spatial genealogy of ideas and the contingency of the north and south relations in the construction of this region.[xv] More importantly, such identification privileges separate colonial histories and undermines Indigenous past histories and normalized diversity.

From this point of view, race and the colonial in the Foucaultian sense continue to inform politics in present North America and continues to be a disciplinary tool that controls, regulates, and protects the settler/colonial population from itself and from its internal enemies or those who do not conform to the ideal. Whiteness and metissaje as regimes of truth continue to circumscribe the political possibilities of Indigenous Peoples both within and across national borders.[xvi]

The Possibilities of Indigenous Transnationalism

Contemporary global, national, and local developments signal markedly different contexts in normalizing (post?) colonial relations among Indigenous Peoples. Academic and political discourses have emphasized the increasingly complex forms of social interaction associated with global capital flow, technology, information, labour, and new forms of economic integration.

As Sidaway has pointed out, the actors, including the state, in such dramas are neither innocent nor romantic resistance heroes struggling against Western culture and domination.[xvii] Rather, they are the result of systematic forms of exploitation and Othering, of ethnically or spatially distinct populations in colonial and postcolonial states reproducing racial and political hierarchies through negotiating meaning. Places—or the local—are not different because of who colonized those places. Rather, they are different because of their historical and contemporary linkages to broader political and economic processes. Thus, understanding the connection between colonialism and economic development involves realizing how the everyday enactments of development in the diverse landscapes of what is called global north and global south rest upon colonial relations and the social, political, and economic ties among regions.

Indigenous Peoples continue to be the most marginalized segments of the population in both the global north and global south. Nevertheless, these peoples’ marginalization is often represented differently. What is neglected in these representations is how economic globalization affects Indigenous Peoples in particular ways because they are exposed to a complex system of oppression involving race, colonization, rules, and institutions in both north and south. Although this system of oppression is usually represented as inherent to the margins and as being hardest in the south, it is a creature of the neo-liberal state formation and the colonialist discursive subject. In both north and south, Indigenous Peoples have struggled and continue to struggle to maintain control of their lives and lands and confront complex networks that traverse the boundaries between the state, the market, and civil society. The growing importance of international corporations and global flows of capital puts pressure on Indigenous Peoples’ lands and resources regardless of where they are.

In North America, regional economic integration has involved transformations that are not only economic but dramatically political.[xviii] While neither Canada nor Mexico’s close relationship with the U.S. economy is new, the intensification of these relationships, and especially the neoliberal reforms that have accompanied continental integration, have redefined how people relate to each other, to resources, and to the state. In this context, relationships between the state and Indigenous Peoples also have been transformed and new forms of governance negotiated. These understandings of governance are usually shaped in controversial ways because it both undermines collectivities and emphasizes market-oriented development.[xix]

There are certainly important differences in terms of political strategies and actions that are place specific. However, the question is: can North American Indigenous Peoples decolonize colonial representations and constructions in order to identify common issues, interests, allies, and enemies across borders and difference?

Decolonizing colonial constructions of Indigeneity requires us to recognize the diversity of Indigenous cultures and histories. It requires us to examine nation-specific precolonial conceptualizations of citizenship, how our nations determined who were their citizens and how we related to other Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island. It is not colonial history that makes us different or similar; as Indigenous Peoples we have always been different. What unites Hawai’ians with Zapotecs, what connects the Mohawks with Mayan activists or Inuit with Nahuatls and Mixtecs is neither colonial language nor their primordial attachments, but their long survival and resistance and their will to continue to be who they are. As James Clifford argues, commonalities among diverse peoples are historically contingent, though no less real for all that. Indigenous Peoples and movements are positioned but not necessarily connected by similar experiences in relation to who colonized their territories.[xx] Corporations and private investors pushing Indigenous Peoples to open their lands and resources to economic development neither work exclusively within national borders nor along cultural identification. They are rather transnational. This is not to suggest that Indigenous Peoples in the North American region do not have their own temporality or struggle strategies; rather it is to argue that there are possibilities of networking, coalition building, and transformative actions in diversity across different Indigenous nations.

Conclusions

Turtle Island was a continent of islands with their own interactions, trade, and cultural exchanges. The colonial enterprises in North America radically changed those interactions. The representation and construction of Indigenous difference in North America has been informed by colonial discourses, which are still being deployed. Variations among representations depend upon the contexts in which discourses are deployed. Moreover, I have shown that the colonizers’ representation and construction of difference was not limited to Indigenous Peoples but extended to European rivals in the struggle to control North America. Colonial competition in this region produced entangled histories, which shaped transitions from colonies to national states and blurred cross-cultural relations.

The historical re-configuration of difference along colonial racial and linguistic lines subsumed the uneven and contradictory impacts of development among actors, institutions, and areas. This politics of representation and geographic construction continues to influence how Indigenous Peoples perceive themselves and how they relate to others. In addition, such representation continues to hide common origins and processes and conceals some of the similar challenges face by contemporary North America’s Indigenous Peoples.

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Notes

[i] W. LaDuke, “An Indigenous View of North America,” Oral Presentation, (Raleigh: North Carolina State University), November 13, 1995.

[ii] Joseph R. Caldwell, "Interaction Spheres in Prehistory," Hopewellian Studies Volume 12 (1964), no. 6:133-156.

[iii] Caldwell, “Interaction Spheres in Prehistory.”

[iv] Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Tennessee: Tennessee Press, 1982); Alfonso Ortiz, (Volume Ed.), Handbook of North American Indians Vol. 10, (Washington: Smithsonian Institute, 1983); Michael S. Foster, "The Mesoamerican Connection: A View from the South" in Frances Mathien, and Randall McGuire, eds., Ripples in the Chichimec Sea: New Considerations of Southwestern-Mesoamerican Interactions (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986).

[v] Richard Harvey Brown, “Cultural Representations and Ideological Domination,” Social Forces Volume 71 (1993) no. 3, 660.

[vi][vi] Metissage roughly refers to “the mixing of races” or “cultural hybridization.” In Mexico, metissage was used as an ideology to strategically construct a distinct and racialised national identity that synthesized both the Indigenous and colonial pasts. As such it became the invisible norm through which Indigenous Peoples are judged and Indigenous political possibilities circumscribed.

[vii] Henry Gedges González, “Icon, Conquest, Trasnationalism: the Visual Politics of Constructing Difference in the Americas,” Passages: A Journal of Trasnational and Transcultural Studies Volume 1 (1999) no. 1:33-52.

[viii] Richard Harvey Brown, “Cultural Representations,” 665.

[ix] B. Butcher, “Al Oeste del Eden: La Semiótica de la Conquista, Reconstrucción del Icono y Política Estructural” in López-Baral, Mercedes, Iconografía Política del Nuevo Mundo: (San Juan: Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1990), 18-20.

[x] James Axtell, The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 206.

[xi] Claudio Esteva-Fabregat, Mestizaje in Ibero-America, trans. John Wheat (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995), 57.

[xii] Jean Barman, “What a Difference a Border Makes: Aboriginal Racial Intermixture in the Pacific Northwest,” Journal of the West 38 (1999):14-20; Jay Nelson, “‘A Strange Revolution in the Manners of the Country’: Aboriginal-Settler Intermarriage in Nineteenth-Century British Columbia” in John McLaren, Robert Menzies and Dorothy E. Chunn, eds., Regulating Lives: Historical Essays on the State, Society, the Individual, and the Law, (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003); Sylvia Van Kirk, "From "Marrying-In" to "Marrying-Out": Changing Patterns of Aboriginal/Non-Aboriginal Marriage in Colonial Canada," Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies Volume 23 (2002) no. 3:2-11.

[xiii] Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (London: Routledge, 2004).

[xiv] Jay Nelson, “‘A Strange Revolution in the Manners of the Country,’” 24.

[xv] M. Bell, “Inquiring Minds and Postcolonial Devices: Examining Poverty at a Distance,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Volume 92(2002):77, 507–23.

[xvi] Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “A New Research Agenda? Foucault, Whiteness and Indigenous Sovereignty,” Journal of Sociology Volume 42 (2006) no. 4:383-395.

[xvii] J.D. Sidaway, “Postcolonial Geographies: Survey – Explore – Review,” in A. Blunt and C. McEwan, eds., Postcolonial Geographies, (New York: Continuum, 2002), 18-19.

[xviii] Laura Macdonald, “Governance and State Society Relations: The Challenges,” in George Hoberg ed., Capacity for Choice: Canada in a North America, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 187–223.

[xix] Makere Stewart-Harawira, The Indigenous New Response to Imperial Globalization Order (London: Zed Books, 2005), 179.

[xx] James Clifford, “Indigenous Articulations” in David Welchmean Gegeo, ed., Cultural Rupture and Indigeneity: The Challenge of (Re) Visioning “Place” in the Pacific, (Honolulu, Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 472.