America Still Colonizing at Thacker Pass
by Justin McAffee for The Desert Guardian
June 2, 2021
Nearly 2 billion acres of land have been stolen from Native Americans within the territorial boundaries of the United States alone. The genocide, massacres, Trail of Tears, confinement to reservations, boarding schools, children separated from their families, and missing and murdered indigenous women and girls is the legacy of American colonization. So what’s a few thousand acres more desecrated at Thacker Pass? That appears to be the bipartisan attitude of the United States government.
Today, America outsources its colonizing to corporations. It is couched in the more palatable terms of economic development and even renewable energy, but it is the same old same old. It is European cultural values being enforced at the end of a gun to the detriment of indigenous society and culture, and to the natural world.
Read the rest at The Desert Guardian.
It is not European cultural values, it is Capitalism. The people who live in Europe these days are far removed from those who invaded America and many are descendants of those who suffered at the hands of those type of people (their own countrymen). There are many in Europe who empathize with you and have experienced similar. So please, don’t point the finger at the innocent. What is happening needs to stop and to do that the real perpetrators need to be identified and held accountable. Those perpetrators are Capitalists and they exist in every nation.
Colonization: “the action of appropriating a place or domain for one’s own use.”
Colonization isn’t just about people colonizing other people; it’s also about people colonizing nature. And the reason for that colonization isn’t capitalism; it’s overshoot of carrying capacity. As William Catton wrote in his book Overshoot:
“For those of radical inclination, it seemed plausible (in the absence of an ecological paradigm) to attribute the dire situation to a failure of “the capitalist system.” But socialists believed as ardently as capitalists in the myth of limitlessness. In spite of socialists’ commitment to production for use rather than for profit, they were not then (and have not been since) any more cautious than capitalists about adopting the drawdown method. They assumed that socialist sponsored versions of drawdown could somehow eliminate such “capitalist contradictions” as simultaneous overproduction and abject poverty. They remained just as unconcerned as the capitalists about overshoot.”
The reason we colonize is because of overshoot. Humanity long ago overshot the carrying capacity of Earth and we are living on “ghost acreage” as Catton calls it, the acreage of non-renewable metals and minerals below our feet that allows us to continue in overshoot just a little bit longer. We would need those resources to support us in overshoot even if the global economy was not capitalism: “an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit”. Even if the global economy was socialism: “a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole,” or any other “ism” we’d need those resources to maintain human population in overshoot because without them, human population would (and will, when they run out) collapse.
As you note, all people alive today have ancestors who were colonized at some point in history. And likewise with nature; as soon as humans switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture, we human animals broke our symbiotic relationship with nature and began colonizing her, and we haven’t let up since.
What is mining then? It is taking land from other beings who need it (whether that’s human people or sage-grouse or pronghorn or golden eagle people) and destroying it by digging up non-renewable resources–metals and minerals–that allow humans to continue to overshoot carrying capacity of the ecosystems we live within. Sounds exactly like colonization to me.
“European cultural values” are the values of growth, consumption, expansion and destruction of both the natural world and indigenous communities. One could say it is essentially the industrial civilization that is the culprit, but that would also clearly be a European cultural value, especially where the indigenous people on this continent are concerned. That’s just the cold hard truth. The United States comes from that tradition and we still see these values being played out all over the world at the hands of Western corporations. Socialism might offer a more mitigated version, but unless dramatically altered, wouldn’t be far off from what the corporations are doing. The Soviets and the Chinese for example have not hesitated to crush indigenous lands and the natural world. So yes, let’s be clear on who the real perpetrators are. It’s the industrialists expanding resource extraction, consumption, infrastructure, regardless of their views on economic ideologies.