Quantifying colonialism
Another week, another news article. An unsustainable pace if I also want to write a book, so this is it for me and news for a while (I hope). I wrote about a new paper in Science that quantifies Indigenous land dispossession and forced migration in the United States, and finds that Native people have lost nearly 99% of their documented historical land. And that’s very likely an underestimate. Present-day Indigenous land is also at increased risk from climate change hazards like extreme heat and drought. As Kyle Whyte, an environmental justice scholar at the University of Michigan and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, told me:
“It’s not just that Indigenous people happen to live in areas that are disproportionately impacted in negative ways by climate change.” They were often forcibly relocated to land that settlers considered less valuable, and those lands are more at risk from climate change hazards today.
It’s an unprecedented data set representing years of difficult work, and I hope it pushes all of us forward in the way we think about our history and what justice could look like today. Read more!
Starting in the 17th century, European settlers pushed Indigenous people off their land, with the backing of the colonial government and, later, the fledging United States. Indian removal policies intensified in the 19th century, including the forced migration of tens of thousands of people in the U.S. southeast to Oklahoma, known as the Trail of Tears. Indigenous people have always understood the devastating effects of these policies, says Deondre Smiles, a geographer at the University of Victoria and a citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, who was not involved in the study. But most of their stories existed only in qualitative historical records, including hundreds of treaties, or oral histories. “The pushback you get in academia is that qualitative narratives are not robust. [Scientists often ask,] ‘Where’s the data? Where’s the hard science?’” Smiles says. “It’s right here, in this article.”