I hope that title makes sense. I started to list a few countries and then realised I didn't have space

But this is just an attempt at looking at the similarities and differences in at least three colonial situations where European colonists settled (you can say "invaded" if you like, I don't mind) in land masses outside of Europe that were already being used by indigenous people.

The situations that come to mind are Australia (which is where I live), the United States and Canada. I am very aware that nearly every country on Earth can be included in this, if we go back far enough, but those three countries seem to be the ones that have excited discussion in this forum in the last few days.

Australia was settled in 1788 by the British as a penal colony, a fact well known (the Brits had to use somewhere else after those grumpy Americans went postal on them). In so doing the Brits in Australia had to deal with the indigenous people of the land mass. Even today there is still unease between the descendants of the European settlers and indigenous people. The shared history has been difficult, appalling at times - on both sides, and a lot of misconceptions still exist about it. It's a subject I find interesting and if anyone's interested it would be good to discuss the historical and contemporary relations between the European and indigenous peoples of these shared landmasses.

I am interested in a comparison between America, Canada and Australia on the treatment of native cultures (Native Americans, Native Canadians, Aboriginal tribes of Australia). What's the history and our current situations.

As for America, our history with native culture can be summarized as ethnic cleansing (at best) or even genocide (at worst). We have reservations for these cultures. There are some tribes/nations that have become almost autonomous, like the Navaho in the SW states. And then we have the Lakota in the NW threatening to secede from the United States recently.

The Native Americans in my state, California, are generally running or building Casinos. Perhaps this will sound wierd in other countries, but gambling has been outlawed in most states, but the loophole is Native Americans can legally own and operate casinos on tribal lands. It has turned some tribes from poverty to great wealth.

California's history with the native culture has started with the Spanish basically enslaving them or making them dependent Christians and in the Gold Rush years ending up being genocide, with bounties paid for "Indian" heads or ears. The greed for gold brought out the most evil form of racism, genocide.

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National Debt =

I suppose I can start, almost in parallel, on the Australian experience. The landmass was known to Europeans for quite some time before Captain James Cook RN surveyed the eastern coast in 1768. But Dutch and Portuguese navigators had been to the landmass well before Cook, so it wasn't quite the unknown great southern land we sometimes take it to be. It's recently been suggested that for perhaps a thousand years or more fishermen from what we now know as Indonesia had been visiting northern Australia and trading and inter-marrying and even settling. But I suppose we all want to discuss the Brits and their colonisation of the landmass.

1788 the First Fleet arrived at Botany Bay and deposited its cargo of miserable convicts and grumpy Royal Marines (and families) ashore. The first governor, Governor Philip, was given the role of "protector of aborigines" (which is wry since the British government of the time sidestepped English law on treaties with occupied landmasses and pretended that no-one lived in Australia yet still found itself able to appoint a "protector of aborigines"). But as in so many instances in human history, there was another imperative. Britain had to grab the landmass before France took it.

Anyway, the title of the first governor is a clue to the attitude of the British government towards Australia's native people at that time. Protector. Protectionism. It was a policy that was to last for many years.

Would you prefer we had just stayed confined on the East Coast? Or that the British had not come at all?

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"Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states...Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds."



~Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The experience of Europeans is the same no matter where they happened to go. Look at the US, Canada or Australia, then look at Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Borneo, Angola, south Africa, India, and so many others....

it's about competition for scarce resources. If you want to call it genocide, that's your right, but consider what might have happened in Europe had the Aztecs landed in Spain or England. The outcomes would have been very different in cultural terms, but there would have been mass death and suffering all the same.

The word is: inevitable.

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"Yes. That's correct. Making a statement that's 100% true can't be bigoted."

Even though British and other European settlers helped start America off they are also responsible for destroying some of it too, just ask all the Native Americans who got wiped out. So really they helped create a new country at the expense of an older one.

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"I find no black men appealing, they look like giant monkeys." -LilithIshtar (some member of another forum I used to be part of)

Who, me?

No, the experiences were very different. The Spanish in South America were probably the most brutal of the European invaders, they made the Brits look like football hooligans by comparison. But then I believe the Dutch were fairly benign where they colonised. The French in Canada were even more civil in their dealings with First Nations people.

As for the hypotheticals, well, we're really talking about what happened rather than what might have happened.

What about England? You had the Romans and the Normans.

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Handlebars

"If you are looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror"- V

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
H. L. Mencken

come on you know you wanna play football..

Beagán agus a rá go maith.

Economic Left/Right: 3.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.87

Don't forget the Angles, Saxons, Danes and Jutes (everyone forgets the Jutes).

The Danelaw was a fine example of colonialism.

And let's not forget the poor old Britons who had to shoot through to Cornwall and Wales when the Germanic types moved in when the Romans headed off to defend home against the Goth hordes.

But what goes around comes around. The Saxons eventually had to put up with the Normans and people like Hereward the Wake did their guerilla bit but to no avail.