Colonialism and the Erasure of Cultures

“You didn’t learn our language.”

It has been a long time since I saw the film ‘1492: Conquest of Paradise’, but the closing scene (as I remember it) was Christopher Columbus asking the leader of the indigenous peoples who were fighting the invaders, ‘what went wrong?’ or words to that effect.

Columbus had taught the leader the Spanish language but had not bothered to learn the native language of the Taino people of Guanahani, and so he did not learn of their planned rebellion against the Spanish colonisers who were violently exploiting them in their quest to find gold.

Although not in the film, Columbus had remarked in his journals that his relationship with the indigenous leader was such that he could ‘Christianise him and bring him back to Spain to be a slave to Queen Isabella’.

European cultural superiority drove the conquest of colonisation and imperial expansion firstly in Asia and then through the Americas, in a quest for spices and as industrialisation grew, raw materials to feed the new factories producing materials and goods unimagined in previous generations. The start of a consumer led economy which encircled the world for both good and ill.

Part of the ‘good and ill’ was the bringing of the Christian faith wherever the Europeans landed. The ‘good’ bit was the feelings the missionaries may have felt as they introduced the love and saving grace of Jesus to distant tribes of the conquered territories. The ‘ill’ bit, the erasure of indigenous cultures and languages, and the trauma caused by the loss of identity and the exploitation of those peoples.

Today, we in the western hemisphere, the ‘better, more civilised, educated, distinctly superior’ part of the this sphere we call mother earth, benefit from this cultural superiority, benefit from the exploitation of people in far flung places working for subsistence wages as we seek every new thing to enhance out already over stimulated lives, not bothering to consider the unseen cost of producing the beautiful new garments that will stand out in a crowd, in a good way, the new electrical item we don’t know how we ever managed to live without, the gargoyle and gadgets, all the things our hearts could possibly desire delivered postage free by Temu and unbelievably cheap prices.

Or even a stroll through the nearest Aldi store, the central aisle. How have I lived for goodness sakes, so many things that are totally essential for a better (what ever that means) life.

And if those things we just had to have don’t really perform, don’t really make us feel so good, chuck them, and get back on the Internet for more bargains we cannot do without, until something new and hopefully better comes along.

Never ending consumerism, a never ending stream of ‘must haves’, with no thought given to the real cost of production.

Ah yes, I confess, I bought something yesterday.

A book at a book launch. A local writer’s new poetry anthology, and she dares to make the reader think. The continuum of life, carried through the human genome, carried through human experience and learnings, the traumas as well as those elements of life that are celebratory.

One poem struck me as most poignant, ‘To The Bone’, about ‘Phossies’. The writer’s note at the end of the poem explains: ‘…refers to match factory workers in the nineteenth century who developed phossey jaw, as a result of white phosphorus poisoning.’

The description in the poem describes the harm caused; ‘…a hot potato. After a while it’s the only thing soft enough to eat, what with the tooth ache and the swelling gums.’ (The Hum Hearers; Shey Marque, 2025 UWA Press). Children were the match factory workers, cheap to feed, and easily replaceable.

Again we consider this employment exploitation as part of the growing industrialisation in Europe, and the way people both in the colonised lands as well as the most vulnerable in European nations were exploited. The discarded ones, the uneducated became factory fodder, but were denied a fair share of the profits they produced with their labour.

The education system at that time was purely for the privileged classes, the leaders of tomorrow, those who already had the power and the capital to further enrich themselves.

The same mentality which drove the push to take people from Africa to labour in fields where ‘no white man should work’, saw the exploitation of the most vulnerable people in the industrialised cities of Britain, and as industry grew, throughout industrialised Europe.

Those who needed to steal to survive were shipped off to far-flung colonial outposts; French Guiana, The Caribbean, the Virginias and to New South Wales. Disposed of, out of sight, out of mind. The original inhabitants were somehow to ‘die out’. Small pox was a wonderful tool, a few infected blankets given as gifts to keep people warm and whole populations died within a few years. Europeans had developed an immunity to small pox through vaccination and from there, the passing on of the immunity to following generations. As Jared Diamond clearly outlines in ‘Guns, Germs & Steel – The Fates of Human Societies’, poisoned foods, new weaponry such as guns and cannon, protective armour and tools made of steel were also great to eliminate unwanted peoples.

But I started out writing about the erasure of culture.

That occurred on several fronts. Firstly, the move to either kill off indigenous peoples or to Christianise them.

The North American example is a good one to use. Bruce L Shelley wrote a tome on Church History, trolling through history of the Christian Church from the time of Jesus to the present day, but when it comes to discussing the settlement of North America and the subsequent ‘manifest destiny’, the idea that god had given the land to the white Christian newcomers form coast to coast, there is no mention of missionary work to ‘Christianise’ the indigenous tribes. The treatment of them was through treaty after broken treaty, culminating in the massacre of Wounded Knee.

The remaining ‘Indians’ were pushed onto reservations of the least productive land to languish in poverty, discarded, far away from the civilised settlers, and criminalised if they ventured too close.

In Australia we were better, weren’t we?

We had the Catholics, the Lutherans, Methodists and various other denominations establish missions where the indigenous people were educated to know the word of god, to understand their need of the saving grace etc, as children were taken from parents. Taught how to be useful to the new settlers, children used as domestic workers, farm hands, basically slave workers, to be fed and cared for by the white settlers who had stolen their lands, poisoned water holes, supplied arsenic laced flour and more often than not just shot them.

And those who survived were to be indoctrinated in the faith of the invader, a faith which included a god given law with something about not killing or stealing… Mmmm.

The removal from their lands and the repression of the use of indigenous languages stripped them of the dignity of knowing who they were (and still are), stripped them of the spiritual links to the land of their heritage, stripped them of their very livelihood to become what they are today, a largely troubled people, marginalised, criminalised, despised as we so well demonstrated by denying them a voice to Parliament.

The other form of cultural erasure is the way working people are treated here and in other ‘rich’ nations.

How is it that with all the wealth we boast of, we have an underclass of homeless people, we have a despairing young population who sense there is no room for them on the upward steps of the social class ladder? Even denied access to home ownership. That, as with all the other social issues, are not just issues in Australia, they are endemic throughout the industrialised world.

In all the western industrialised countries the education system is geared for the production of workers, useful to industry, whether it is as factory workers or retail and service industry people on minimum wages and a social upper crust which go to the most expensive schools, paying high fees for the privilege but constantly badgering governments for more funds to improve the already sumptuous environments… A new Olympic sized swimming pool, a new assembly hall which is also an arts and entertainment facility, sporting grounds which resemble the putting greens of the world’s best golf courses.

These schools are the gateway to higher education with tutoring and support which will all but guarantee a place in the best colleges and universities. That discrimination, sorry, access to higher education is further bolstered by offering university places to overseas students who have the means to pay the tuition fees and living costs of being away from home.

In that way, the culture of the rich supplants that of ‘lesser beings’, but offer a glimpse of what is possible for those aspirational people from the lower rungs. An attempt was made to close that gap with the Whitlam Government of 1972-5 offering free university education so that the class barriers were, for a brief period, lifted. Unfortunately, those who benefited from that education and entered subsequent parliaments, started imposing fees, albeit with a debt repayment scheme called HECS. A new graduate doctor may have incurred a debt equivalent to a small house. Welcome to a satisfying career!

We mostly speak the same language now. English is an almost universal language, but there are other ways of depriving people of their cultural heritage.

For indigenous people, it is the continued marginalisation, as witnessed by the seemingly un-closable gaps in the ‘Closing the Gap’ initiative of 2007 with high rates of incarceration, poor health outcomes, poor educational outcomes and the resultant poor employment opportunities which has led to a ‘shit life syndrome’ for many, a life of despair, of a sense of helplessness and hopelessness with high rates of drug and alcohol dependence and resultant family violence.

We have come a long way, yet seem to not have moved a lot.

The only time in the history on colonisation and industrialisation where the spoils of labour were the most equitably distributed was in the post WWII period, up to the mid 1980s when the Chicago School of Economics changed the orthodoxy of economics to a trickle down theory which has seen the wealthiest people in the world increase their wealth exponentially while the rates of poverty in ‘the richest countries in the world’ see poverty and homelessness emerge as a major problem. The push to deal with homelessness is to effectively push the homeless aside. Local governments are issuing fines for people who are forced to sleep in cars parked near public facilities. Those facilities are locked so that use is limited. Not much is ‘trickling down’.

Cultural erasure for the less privileged is to deny access to the ‘culture’ of the monied elite. To adopt a ‘Trumpian’ stance, reinforcing privilege to those who already have and working hard to deprive those who have not the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of the haves. We saw it during the time of the previous LNP government where real wages reduced by about 12% for the low income earners, the retail and service industry workers, the labouring class.

Those who will spend every cent earned, generate new wealth. I did learn once along time ago about the ‘multiplier effect’ of consumer spending, that every dollar spent generates more wealth, every dollar saved only earns a bit of interest for the saver. But let’s not tell too many employers about that.

Colonialism, and what we may today call neo-colonialism, or Right Wing Nuttery, which is a class based system, works when people are denied the true value of who they are, are measured in terms of their ability to contribute to the growing wealth of the colonisers and neo-colonisers but deprived the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of the wealth they generate. Deprived even of the social benefits such as housing, health and social security.

 

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