Native American Colonialism

In discussing the contact between Europeans and the indigenous populations of the Americas, we often consider the historical and political aftermath of their imbalance, the complex relationship between the two established over the course of hundreds of years. However, what we too often forget to discuss is how this colonialism too easily continues to exist to this day, albeit with the ratio of interests involving economical gain versus imperial expansion perhaps reversed a little bit. In this piece, we will analyze the article of “Construction of the Imaginary Indian” by Maria Crosby and the first chapter of “Debt: The First 5000 Years” by David Graeber to help us construct what can be understood as modern colonialism by investigating the
Colonialism, in the long run, involves the “transfer of population to a new territory, where the arrivals [live] as permanent settlers while maintaining political allegiance to their country of origin” (Kohn 2006), and imperialism exists as the “way that one country exercises power over another, whether through settlement, sovereignty, or indirect mechanisms of control” (Kohn 2006). When we lay these power relations of colonialism and imperialism next to debt, it’s easy to understand debt as a tool that can be used under the nationalistic interests of imperialism, as well as a standalone display and method of maintaining power, and many parallels arise between our understanding of this and what we can see in a modern context. We are thus able to recognize modern versions of colonial structures that have been built today in the form of companies like McDonalds, with its golden-arches logo ranked as the most recognizable symbol in the world, and establishing its permanent presence, and in turn the U.S.’s, in 119 countries (Badkar
As stated by Marcia Crosby, difference is being encouraged and praised (277). However, this does not change the fact that much of this is still done in North America from a Western perspective, with Western interests. All throughout history, the way the “white man” has interacted with cultures foreign to its own has been very rooted in the way their society did things; women in cultures who wore less clothes were considered crude and sexually available, grass huts and canoes were considered primitive and uncivilized (Kelly 2015). Despite this, the West has always been very much interested in the cultural production of these populations, which stays consistent to the nature of colonialism and imperialism and its colonial history. Crosby discusses how the Western interest in First Nations people extends across history from “dominating or colonizing First Nations people, [their] cultural images and [their] land” to “salvaging, preserving, and reinterpreting material fragments of a supposedly dying native culture for Western “art and culture” collections” (277). From such examples as Captain Cook’s Club gifted by the Nuu-chal-nulth, indigenous works and artifacts are being labelled with unbelievably high prices—the simple club