6.8 The Birth of Two Nations — Canada and the United States

The countries known as Canada and the United States of America came into existence at the end of the eighteenth century. At that time they occupied only a fraction of the land they now cover. Over the next hundred years they extended their control to reach their present size. Large areas were acquired by the USA by purchase — they bought land in the south from France (the Louisiana Purchase, 1803) and from Russia (Alaska, 1867) — and by war — much of southern USA was won from Mexico in 1848. It did not occur to anyone that the consent of the natives living in these areas should have been asked. The western 'frontier' of the USA was a shifting one, and as it moved, the natives were forced to move back.

6.9 European Settlement — Land, Crops, Slaves

The landscapes of America changed drastically in the nineteenth century. Europeans treated the land very differently from the natives. Some of the migrants from Britain and France were younger sons who would not inherit their fathers' property and were therefore eager to own land in America. Later, waves of immigrants from Germany, Sweden and Italy who had lost their lands to big farmers wanted farms they could own. People from Poland were happy to work in the prairie grasslands, which reminded them of the steppes of their homes, and were excited at being able to buy huge properties at very low prices. They cleared land and developed agriculture, introducing crops (rice and cotton) which could not grow in Europe and could therefore be sold there for profit. To protect their huge farms from wild animals — wolves and mountain lions — these were hunted to extinction. The Europeans felt totally secure only with the invention of barbed wire in 1873.

The climate of the southern region was too hot for Europeans to work outdoors, and the experience of South American colonies had shown that the natives who had been enslaved had died in large numbers. Plantation owners therefore bought slaves from Africa. Protests by anti-slavery groups led to a ban on the slave trade, but the Africans who were already in the USA remained slaves, as did their children. The northern states, where the economy did not depend on plantations and slavery, condemned slavery as inhuman. In the Civil War of 1861–65, the side opposing slavery won. Slavery was abolished, though it was only in the twentieth century that African Americans were able to win the battle for civil liberties, and segregation between 'whites' and 'non-whites' in schools and public transport was ended.

The Canadian government had a problem more urgent than the natives' question. In 1763, Canada had been won by the British after a war with France. The French settlers repeatedly demanded autonomous political status. It was only in 1867 that the issue was solved by organising Canada as a Confederation of autonomous states.

6.10 The Native Peoples Lose their Land — Treaties, Reservations and the Trail of Tears

In the USA, as settlement expanded, the natives were induced or forced to move, after signing treaties selling their land. The prices paid were very low, and there were instances when the 'Americans' (a term used to mean the European people of the USA) cheated them by taking more land or paying less than promised. Even high officials saw nothing wrong in depriving the natives of their land.

This is shown by an episode in Georgia. State officials had argued that the Cherokee tribe was governed by state laws but could not enjoy the rights of citizens — even though, of all the native peoples, the Cherokees had made the most effort to learn English and to understand the American way of life.

Those who took the land justified it by saying the natives "did not deserve to occupy land which they did not use to the maximum". They criticised them for being lazy, since they did not use their crafts skills to produce goods for the market, for not learning English, and for not dressing 'correctly' (which meant like the Europeans). They deserved to "die out", they argued. A visiting Frenchman wrote, "Primitive man will disappear with the primitive animal." The prairies were cleared for farmland, and wild bison were killed off.

6.11 The Reservation System — Bands, Wars, Wounded Knee

Meanwhile, the natives were pushed westward, given land elsewhere ('theirs in perpetuity') but often moved again if any mineral — lead, gold or oil — was found on their lands. Many tribes were forced to share land originally occupied by one tribe, leading to quarrels between them. They were locked off in small areas called reservations^?, often on land with which they had no earlier connection.

They did not give in without a fight. The US army crushed a series of rebellions from 1865 to 1890, and in Canada there were armed revolts by the Metis (people of mixed native and European descent) between 1869 and 1885. The most famous of the Plains tribes — the Sioux (Lakota), the Cheyenne and the Apache — fought legendary battles, including the defeat of General Custer at the Little Big Horn in 1876. But after 1890 they gave up. The massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in December 1890, in which around 250 Sioux men, women and children of Chief Big Foot's band were shot dead by the US Seventh Cavalry, is usually treated as the symbolic end of armed indigenous resistance in the USA.

6.12 The Gold Rush, the Railway and the Industrial Take-Off

There was always the hope that there was gold in North America. In the 1840s, traces of gold were found in the USA, in California. This led to the Gold Rush of 1849, when thousands of eager Europeans hurried to America in the hope of making a quick fortune. This led to the building of railway lines across the continent, for which thousands of Chinese workers were recruited. The USA's railway was completed by 1870; that of Canada by 1885.

One reason the Industrial Revolution had happened in England was that small peasants were losing their land to big farmers and moving into factory jobs. In North America, industries developed for very different reasons — to manufacture railway equipment so that distant places could be linked, and to produce machinery that would make large-scale farming easier. Industrial towns grew and factories multiplied, both in the USA and Canada. In 1860, the USA had been an undeveloped economy. In 1890, it was the leading industrial power in the world.

Large-scale agriculture also expanded. Vast areas were cleared and divided into farms. By 1890 the bison had almost been exterminated, ending the centuries-old hunting life of the natives. By 1892, the USA's continental expansion was complete. The area between the Pacific and Atlantic was divided into states. There no longer remained the 'frontier' that had pulled European settlers west for many decades. Within a few years the USA was setting up its own colonies — in Hawaii and the Philippines. It had become an imperial power.

6.13 Constitutional Rights — and Their Limits

The 'democratic spirit' that had been the rallying cry of the settlers in their fight for independence in the 1770s came to define the identity of the USA against the monarchies and aristocracies of the Old World. Equally important to them was that the constitution included the individual's right to property, which the state could not override.

But both democratic rights (the right to vote for representatives to Congress and for the President) and the right to property were only for white men. The Canadian native writer Daniel Paul pointed out in 2000 that Thomas Paine, the great democrat of the American and French Revolutions, "used the Indians as models of how society might be organised". From this Paul argued that "the Native Americans, by their example, sowed the seeds for the long-drawn-out movement towards democracy by the people of Europe" (We Were Not the Savages, p. 333). It is a striking thought: those whose lands were being taken were also being copied as political teachers.

6.14 The Winds of Change — From the 1920s

Not till the 1920s did things begin to improve for the native peoples of the USA and Canada. The Problem of Indian Administration, a survey directed by social scientist Lewis Meriam and published in 1928, only a few years before the Great Depression, painted a grim picture of "terribly poor health and education facilities for natives in reservations".

White Americans felt sympathy for the natives, who were being discouraged from the full exercise of their cultures and simultaneously denied the benefits of citizenship. This led to a landmark law — the Indian Reorganisation Act of 1934 — which gave natives in reservations the right to buy land and take loans.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the US and Canadian governments thought of ending all special provisions for natives in the hope that they would 'join the mainstream' (i.e. adopt European culture). But the natives did not want this. In 1954, in the Declaration of Indian Rights they had drafted, a number of native peoples accepted citizenship of the USA but on condition that their reservations would not be taken away and their traditions would not be interfered with. A similar development occurred in Canada. In 1969, the Canadian government announced that they would 'not recognise aboriginal rights'. The natives held a series of demonstrations and debates. The question was finally resolved in 1982, when the Constitution Act accepted the existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the natives. Many details remain to be worked out. Today it is clear that the native peoples of both countries, although reduced enormously in numbers, have been able to assert their right to their own cultures and, particularly in Canada, to their sacred lands, in a way their ancestors could not have done in the 1880s.

6.15 Australia — The Aborigines and the Dreamtime

As in the Americas, human habitation in Australia has a long history. The 'aborigines' (a general name given to a number of different societies) began to arrive on the continent over 40,000 years ago (possibly earlier). They came from New Guinea, which was connected to Australia by a land-bridge. In the natives' own traditions they did not 'come' to Australia — they had always been there. The past centuries were called the 'Dreamtime'^? — something difficult for Europeans to understand, since the distinction between past and present is blurred.

In the late eighteenth century, there were between 350 and 750 native communities in Australia, each with its own language. (Even today around 200 of these languages are spoken.) Another large group of indigenous people lived in the north — the Torres Strait Islanders — believed to have migrated from elsewhere and to belong to a different race. Together, these two groups make up 2.4 per cent of Australia's population in 2005. Australia is sparsely populated, and even now most towns are along the coast (where the British first arrived in 1770), because the central region is arid desert.

The Europeans Reach Australia — A Short Timeline

The story of European settlers, native peoples and the land in Australia has many similarities to the story of the Americas, although it began nearly 300 years later. Initial reports from Captain Cook and his crew described the natives as friendly. There was a sharp reversal of feeling on the part of the British when Cook was killed by a native — not in Australia but in Hawaii. As often happened, a single such incident was used by colonisers to justify subsequent acts of violence against other peoples.

6.16 The Convict Colony — Settlers vs Aborigines

The Aborigines did not foresee that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries nearly 90 per cent of them would die — by exposure to germs, by the loss of their lands and resources, and in battles against the settlers. The experiment of settling Brazil with Portuguese convicts had been abandoned when their violent behaviour provoked angry reprisals from the natives. The British had used the same practice in the American colonies until they became independent. They then continued it in Australia. Most of the early settlers were convicts who had been deported from England and, when their jail term ended, were allowed to live as free people in Australia on condition that they did not return to Britain. With no recourse but to make a life for themselves in this unfamiliar land, they "felt no hesitation about ejecting natives from land they took over for cultivation".

The Development of Australia, 1850–1948

Economic development in Australia was less varied than in America. Vast sheep farms and mining stations were established, followed by vineyards and wheat farming. These came to form the basis of the country's prosperity. When the states were united in 1901 and a new capital was planned, one suggested name was Woolwheatgold! Ultimately, it was called Canberra — from kamberra, a native word meaning 'meeting place'.

Some natives were employed in farms, under conditions so harsh they were "little different from slavery". Later, Chinese immigrants provided cheap labour, as in California, but unease about being dependent on non-whites led both governments to ban Chinese immigrants. Until 1974, popular fear that 'dark' people from South Asia or Southeast Asia might migrate to Australia in large numbers led to a government policy to keep 'non-white' people out — the 'White Australia' policy.

6.17 The Winds of Change in Australia

In 1968, people were electrified by a lecture by the anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner entitled The Great Australian Silence — the silence of historians about the Aborigines. From the 1970s, as in North America, there was an eagerness to understand natives not as 'anthropological curiosities' but as communities with distinct cultures, unique ways of understanding nature and climate, and vast bodies of stories, textile, painting and carving skills. The historian Henry Reynolds later asked, in his powerful book, Why Weren't We Told?, condemning the practice of writing Australian history as though it had begun with Cook's 'discovery' in 1770.

Since then, university departments to study native cultures have been created, galleries of native art have been added, museums enlarged, and natives have begun writing their own life histories. From 1974, multiculturalism has been official policy in Australia, giving equal respect to native cultures and to the different cultures of immigrants from Europe and Asia.

Terra Nullius and the Mabo Case (1992)

From the 1970s, as the term 'human rights' began to be heard at meetings of the UNO and other international agencies, the Australian public realised with dismay that, in contrast to the USA, Canada and New Zealand, Australia had no treaties with the natives formalising the takeover of land. The British government had always termed Australia terra nullius^? — 'land belonging to nobody'. There was also a long and agonising history of children of mixed blood being forcibly captured and separated from their native relatives — the so-called Stolen Generations.

Agitation around these questions led to enquiries and to two important decisions: (i) recognition that the natives had strong historic bonds with the land, which was sacred to them and should be respected; (ii) while past acts could not be undone, a public apology should be made for the injustice done to children in an attempt to keep 'white' and 'coloured' people apart.

6.18 New Zealand — The Maori and the Treaty of Waitangi

Across the Tasman Sea, the islands of New Zealand had been settled by the Maori^? — a Polynesian people — from about the thirteenth century. Their society was organised into iwi (tribes) and hapū (subtribes), with elaborate carving, weaving and oral traditions of chiefly genealogies (whakapapa). When Captain Cook arrived in 1769–70, the islands were already densely peopled.

In 1840, the British and the Maori chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi^?. In NCERT's brief mention of this event, the treaty is presented as the legal foundation of New Zealand and as a contrast to Australia, where there was no such treaty. The Maori version of the treaty, however, used the word kawanatanga ('governorship') where the English text used 'sovereignty', and a series of Maori uprisings (1844–88) followed when the British failed to respect Maori land rights. Despite these wars, the treaty is today celebrated each year on Waitangi Day (6 February) as the founding document of the country.