Settler Colonial

Oregon State Song, as I learned it in third grade in 1959:

"Land of the Empire Builders,

Land of the Golden West;

Conquered and held by free men,

Fairest and the best."

Pioneer Woodsman, atop the Oregon Capitol 

Americans of European heritage did not colonize what became the United States. We conquered it. We displaced the people who were here and felt proud of it. We chose the state song. "Hail to thee, land of heroes, my Oregon."

People interpreting the history of Oregon, both the Gold Rush history of miners rushing into boom town Jacksonville near Medford, and the pioneer farmers known from the Oregon Trail history, have been hearing a phrase, expressed as an epithet and accusation. It is settler colonialism. 

My family farm traces back to the Donation Land Claim act of 1850, the predecessor of the Homestead Act. My great grandfather bought the farm from a man who acquired it from the federal government. Indians had lived on it prior to the arrival of Whites. I find arrow heads. A series of Indian wars in the 1850s resulted in the removal of Indians to a reservation over 200 miles away. 

I have complicated feelings about all this.

Tam Moore is a career journalist, having worked in television and print for over six decades. He is still active. He volunteers at the Southern Oregon Historical Society, and he, too, has heard the words "settler colonialism."

Guest Post by Tam Moore

Thoughts on one way to look at Westward expansion of the United States

How things look, the photo opportunity part of staging an event, may be important in creating favorable first impressions, but words – spoken or written – are a keystone of communication. When a word or phrase crops up in reading that runs counter to that which we “know” from past use, red flags go up. We either ignore the strange words or try to understand what the author is attempting to say.

It keeps bugging me. When I pick up my Oregon Historical Society Quarterly, a journal of Oregon history, or read one of my favorite magazines, High Country News, the label “colonial” or “settler colonial” crops up. Mostly it is used describing some event or trend in the westward expansion of the United States. Sometimes the term is attached to the here-and-now or recent 
practices such as logging timber.

 

 

 

So where did the term “settler colonialism” originate? Scholars trace it to two Australians, Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini. They coined the phrase, then applied it as one way to analyze history. Veracini, in a 2013 journal article, characterized the concept as “an ongoing and uncompromising form of hyper-colonialism characterized by enhanced aggressiveness and
exploitation.” By the 1970s, Veracini says scholars began interpreting the concept as bringing with it “high standards of living and economic development.”

 The "invasion" of Indigenous land was a structure, not an event;" settler-colonialism destroys to replace (Woolfe 2006). In contrast to the domination and exploitation practiced by external colonialism, settler-colonialism overwhelmed and inevitably tried to extinguish the Indigenous population by pushing them to the margin (Veracini, 2013).”

Wolfe, in an earlier paper, argues the “goal (of settler colonialism) was elimination of indigenous people.” Veracini observes that in North America “...Indians did not give up their land quickly, easily or entirely.”

From that launch in Australia, the settler colonial interest of academia grew. There’s a four-times a year on-line academic journal titled Settler Colonial Studies. Its purpose is 

“…to respond to what we believe is a growing demand for reflection and critical scholarship on settler colonialism as a distinct social and historical formation. We aim to establish settler colonial studies as a distinct field of scholarly research.”

Many of us grew up learning that the “colonial period” of American history coincided with planting of British colonies, beginning with the Virginia Company’s Lost Colony in 1587 and ending with conclusion of the Revolutionary War (1783). Colonies by definition were dependent on the mother country and under political control of that country. Using the “old” colonial definition, except for the Hudson’s Bay Company settlements in what is now Washington state, perhaps some Spanish mission settlements in California and the fur-trade era Russian North American outposts, there’s nothing colonial about history of the U.S. West.

 

Clearly, HBC came west under a charter granted in 1670 by Charles the second, the King of England. That was an age of colonization. European nations were issuing charters to businesses and companies of settlers setting up shop around the globe. Those same nations were claiming sovereignty over lands with little or no regard for resident native peoples. For the Americas it began in earnest with Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage of discovery. Colonies sprang up, peopled by Europeans beholden to investors in their companies and to protection from the chartering government. Global trade drove it all. Tea from East India. Gold from Central and South America. Spice from the Far East. Furs from North America. HBC built fur-trading posts across the Pacific Northwest from 1820 to 1850 and hired natives from Hawaii to run its many farms growing food for residents of those posts.

Westward expansion of the United States had its origins in the 13 British colonies, even before the Revolutionary War ended England’s rule. George Washington as a young man was surveying – and buying – land to the west. After all, the London Company’s 1621 Virginia charter claimed the Ohio River country and implied a claim west to the Pacific Ocean, constrained by 31 degrees latitude on the south and 40 degrees on the north. That’s roughly from present-day Florida on the south to Pennsylvania on the north, westward to the Pacific coast.

 

Virginia colonists often had little regard for the Indians. After a conflict in 1622, colonists the next year invited Indians for a peace treaty celebration. One report says perhaps 50 Indians were shot and 200 poisoned. Bands of colonists prowled the countryside destroying the Indian’s cornfields. That war continued off-and-on for 10 years. Virginia would again launch a war on Indians in 1666, and again with the Maryland colony in 1675.

When the colonial era ended with the 1783 Treaty of Paris, the western boundary shrank to the Mississippi River. By the time the U.S. purchased France’s Louisiana Territory in 1803, historians say Americans actually outnumbered the French as residents within the sparsely settled lands stretching north to Canada. The non-native population was estimated at 60,000, perhaps half of them enslaved laborers on plantations along the lower Mississippi River.

The Library of Congress, which authors teaching materials on U.S. History breaks eras down this way: Colonial settlement 1600s to 1763; American Revolution 1763-83, New Nation 1783-1815, National Expansion and Reform 1815-1880; Civil War and Reconstruction 1861-77; Rise of Industrial America 1876-1900; Progressive Era to new Era 1900-1929; Great Depression and WWII 1929-1945; Post War United States 1945-68. We can add the Cold War 1947-91, the Vietnam War and Civil Rights 1954-75, an Energy Crisis 1973-80, the Internet 1995 -present, War on Terror 2001-present.

Despite having an academic journal to its name, there’s no place to establish a “settler colonial” period after the American Revolution. But that’s no reason to ignore the sometime troubling history of our nation and setting the Western United States.

How we write and teach our history makes a difference. So do the words we use to chronicle that history. Ray Raphael, author of several books on U.S. history, concludes his 2004 “Founding Myths” by observing:

Americans from the beginning, were both bullies and democrats. Despite the hesitancy of elites, most patriots at the time of our nation’s birth believed that ordinary people were entitled to rule themselves and fully capable of doing so. They also believed they had the right, and even the obligation to impose their will on people whom they deemed inferior.

These two core beliefs are key to understanding American history and American character, and we do an injustice to ourselves and our nation when we pretend otherwise.

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