Lecture 3 - Colonialism, land grabs and exploitation Flashcards
(13 cards)
White supremacy
A global system that confers unearned power and privilege on those who become identified as white while conferring disprivileged and disempowerment on those who become identified as people of color
the rigths, desires and needs of whites, europeans, coloinailsts settlers come first
much more than an issue between black vs white - include class also
White supremacy and trade war
Banda islands - refused to enter trade with VOC - leading to stolen land and near genocide
Links to curley and ghosh and tallbear
Trade war
there can be no trade without war and no war without trade - Jan Coen
- destroying of the banda islands, trade monopoly
- displacement of the indigenous tribes - Standing rock Sioux Tribe
The Nutmeg’s curse / commodity fetishism
- nutmegs became so valuable in europe that a handful could buy a house or a ship, really fetishes - primordial forms of the commodity
Commodity fetishism (of things and people)
- the idea of value placed on something
differ between use-value (the physical properties of the commodity - how it may serve human needs
and exchange value - the value the object attains through its exchange within a socioeconomic system.
a commodity is fetishised in its societal and economic relations.
EG oil, nutmeg, pig, cattle, the tree in rainforest in Indonesia
same happens to people- some valued more than others, eg massacre used on British deaths but not Banda deaths - a value system which differentiates lives.
Genocide and epistimicide
- epistimicide is the systematic erasure of knowledge in relation to a certain group of people - done as a justification of the exploitation to happen
- connected to the enlightenment - the white man’s knowledge became the standard and default human and his view of nature - to serve humans - was intended to become universalised
- eg the nutmeg - as western scientific/commercial knowledge, only useful for profiting through trade. in Banda knowledge, the nutmeg has mystical properties, woven into the living landscape - interspecies combining the living spirit f plants, animals, water, human, histories and events.
Darwin x Genocde
link nature and genocide of people- if nature can be dominated, people can be dominated
science supported the belief and “truthfulness” of a “subhuman” - Darwin in Ghosh and therefore its evolutionary justified killing of certain humans
Epistimicide and university
enclosing of uni as knowledge keepers, who gets to talk - what degree do you have - which other ways of knowing exists - who are included and excluded
Other than human beings and entities I
what are the agencies of nature and animals? centers the nutmeg - makes it alive
enlightenment disregarded this knowledge - human-centered as they are above - excluded non-human beings
Other than human beings and entities II (war-related)
- settler conflicts experienced as a permanent state of war for indigenous
- these wars involved other than human beings (OTHB)eg pathogens, rivers, forests, plants and animals
- diseases = invisible bullets
- processes of colonialism produced MULTI-SPECIESgenocide, altering landscapes and wiping out ways of life - linked to Tallbear (is this not genocide? to the DAPL)
Land Dispossesion and Resitance - Oceti Sakowin
- Known as the Sioux Indians- Lakota and Dakota divisions
- connection to Ghosh - systems of way of thinking connect everything
- before natives were depending on buffalo herds
- kin extend beyond human world to include the spiritual and natural world (inter-relatedness) - here, trade only makes sense if it benefits kin relations of beings, living or non-living - not about profit or gain
Dakota Access Pipeline
- transport crude oil passing through streams, rivers, dams, cultural, ancestral burial sites
- affects environments, water, etc
- disregarded for “lack of evidence” relating to discourses on power - who decides what is legitimate evidence?
- going around white urban communities
not a new thing! eg construction of dams along Missouri river
disregarding the treaties made a long time ago - just because it is a treaty does not mean it stays like that - but what makes a part change the treaty without consequences
- treating indigenous people as environmentalist is also wrong - many reliant on coal mining - it is about colonial dispossesion of land
Tallbear and Curley
- the resistance is not all about ecology, but land being stolen
- environmentalist narrative can be racist
- they are interlinked
- another way to kill indigenous is sever relations to land
