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Vocabulary
Vocabulary
Dispossession: To take away someone's ownership of something, especially property.
Settler-colonialism: A distinct type of colonialism that functions through the replacement of indigenous populations with an invasive settler society that, over time, develops a distinctive identity and sovereignty, e.g., Canada, the United States, Australia, and South Africa.
Throughout most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the collective historical narrative of the Pennacook and other indigenous nations was written by white historians who maintained the “evil,” “wild,” and “noble savage” racial stereotypes of native people.
These writings used "racial hierarchies, dispossession, expulsion, subjugation, exclusionary concepts, legal theories, and other strategies to claim the lands and resources of indigenous peoples. Settler colonialism turned indigenous people into “others” who faced dispossession, displacement, enslavement, and subjugation and experienced a demographic disaster as result of colonization, disease, violence, and genocide."
During this time, many New England historians contrived their community's history to characterize native people as a "vanishing race," writing in their "disappearance" (forced by these historians' settler-colonist ancestors) to create room for more "deserving" Anglo-American people. These one-sided accounts tell an inaccurate story of native survivance, one that settler-colonists and their descendants used to justify stolen land and legitimize colonization.
The myth of the the "vanishing Indian" extended beyond local histories and into the literature of the 19th (The Last of the Mohicans) and 20th centuries (Island of the Blue Dolphin).
Definitions: https://globalsocialtheory.org/concepts/settler-colonialism/.Quotes: "Uncovering Indigenous Worlds and Histories on a Bend of a New England River before the 1650s: Problematizing Nomenclature and Settler Colonial History, Deep History, and Early Colonization Narratives," by Christoph Strobel. Image: Cover graphic from Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England, by Jean M. O'Brien.
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