Profiting From Genocides and Land Grabs: US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand

The four former British colonies—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the US (CANZUS)—stand tall on the world stage. They champion the Western values of freedom, human rights, and justice in their global crusades against autocracy. Sharing a common culture and language, they have come to incarnate the supreme form of human government.

Despite the effusive praise for CANZUS, the dominant narrative ignores some ugly truths, those of intercontinental invasions, continental genocides, and continuous exploitation of stolen land.

In all four countries, colonists and governments proceeded with systematically wiping out the Indigenous peoples.

Once roaming the vast expanse of wilderness in the US, Indian tribes such as the Cherokee, Navajo, and Cheyenne were exterminated through warfare and diseases, while others went extinct. It is estimated that 12 million natives died between 1492 and 1900. The US federal government removed the Indigenous survivors from their lands and moved them to reservations, which are the most poverty-stricken lands to this day. It forced some 100,000 Indian children to attend 400 day and boarding schools, whose goal was to eradicate their languages, cultures, and even names. Based on the principle of "kill the Indian in him and save the man," the cultural genocide went on for years.

Of equal significance but relatively less publicized is the destruction of natives in the other three former British colonies.

After invading Australia, white settlers from British Isles waged frontier wars against the Aboriginal people. Civilian and government-sponsored attacks lasted until the 1920s, succeeding in extirpating the natives from huge swaths of land and killing 15,000 of them in 500 massacres. Aborigines died en masse of smallpox, influenza, measles, tuberculosis and venereal diseases. In 1789, after the British navy landed to establish a penal colony, smallpox killed 70% of First Nations people. Between 1788 and 1911, the Aboriginal population fell 95%. The Australian federal and state authorities and churches forced Indigenous children into boarding schools, and resorted to "breeding out" Aboriginal blood through forced marriages with whites.

The Indians in Canada fared no better, although they maintained relatively peaceful relations with colonists. The latter used various means to destroy the "savages." Thousands of Indians were starved to death to make room for the Canadian Pacific Railroad and clear the prairies for white settlers. As in the other former British colonies, diseases brought by Europeans decimated the Indian population. In British Columbia, deliberate smallpox exposure was used as a method of ethnic cleansing. Over a hundred years, the Canadian government waged cultural genocide by placing 150,000 Indigenous children in residential schools, where they were forced to assimilate to white culture.

After annexing New Zealand in 1840, the British Crown and New Zealand government fought a relentless war against the Maori for 27 years (1845-1872), resulting in 3,000 deaths, 90%.of them Maori. Large numbers of Maori died of European diseases after the influx of white settlers. In the 1890s, the Maori population had fallen 60%. The New Zealand government imposed an English-only education system aimed at obliterating the Maori language and culture. Although the natives currently make up 17% of the population, the cultural genocide has been so effective that the Maori language is dying.

The paradox between liberal rhetoric and oppressive reality is striking. On the one hand, the American, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand leaders seize every chance to lecture the Global South about the sanctity of human rights and the people's right to self-determination. On the other hand, their capitalist democracies rest on brutal invasions, physical and cultural annihilation of Indigenous peoples, and illegal land expropriation.

Some may argue that the more than two-century-old horrific genocides in the four former British colonies belongs in the history books and that the past should not overshadow the present-day CANZUS's notable achievements in spreading freedom.

From the viewpoint of Indigenous peoples, that rationalization is beside the point. The crux of the matter is that white colonists—mostly from the British Isles, sailing at least two months to North America and four months to Australasia, covering a distance of 4,200 miles and 13,500 miles respectively, having no kinship whatsoever with the inhabitants of their destinations—landed on the shores and upended the natives' lives by massacring them and stealing the vast plains, coasts, and mountains that had been their means of livelihood.

The scale of land grabs in North America and Australasia is nothing short of staggering. In terms of total area and world landmass percentage, Canada ranks second; the US fourth; Australia sixth; and New Zealand seventy-sixth (a small country but the sixth largest island in the world). When combined, the total area and world landmass percentage of these four countries amount to 10,548,218 square meters and 17.6%, exceeding those of Russia (6,601,665 square meters and 11%), the largest country in the world.

What makes the Indigenous Holocaust even more aggravating is the unbroken exploitation of the ill-gotten lands. In all four countries, British colonists and their successive governmentsbutchered and displaced the natives with the aim of taking the land and turning it into farmland and pastureland, freeing it for railroad tracks and construction, and mining metals and minerals.

The lands stolen from the Indigenous peoples turn out to be a huge bonanza to the four democracies. Among others, extracting and exporting metals and minerals is either a major industry or has played an integral role in their economic growth. The US is the top producer of natural gas and petroleum, Canada of potash, and Australia of bauxite and lithium. All four countries possess abundant reserves of gold, iron ore, nickel, coal, to name a few. 

Their lands plundered and mired in poverty, the Native Americans in the US and Canada, the Indigenous Australians in Australia, and the Maori in New Zealand have seldom seen the economic benefits trickled down to them. Reduced to a minority in their own land,  they have lost sovereignty over the abundant natural resources and the land they have inhabited for 14,000 to 20,000 years (North American Indians), 65,000 years (Aboriginal Australians), and 700 years (Maori).

The plight of the natives in CANZUS falls squarely within the scope of global justice, which seeks fairness for the have-nots and redress in distributive and recognitional matters. Issues such as genocides, illegal land appropriations, economic development based on oppression, and economic and social inequalities between occupiers and natives need to be addressed and remedied. 

The world cannot count on the other Western governments for seeking justice. Once colonialist and imperialist, they will not condemn CANZUS for the atrocities that they had committed themselves. None of them would dare to challenge the US, the reigning global superpower. In fact, mindful of their own interests, nation-states are unable to achieve global justice by themselves.

Nor can the world rely on international organizations. Notoriously ineffective and biased, the International Criminal Court mainly prosecutes cases from Africa and Latin America. It has never investigated any of the advanced industrialized countries.

As a result, in spite of international laws, greater emphasis on fairness, and Indigenous reclamation movements, the governments, agencies, and churches in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have been given de facto immunity from genocides and land seizures. Though official apologies had been extended and some restitution attempts implemented, they have amounted to little more than window dressing, given the sheer magnitude of Indigenous peoples' losses. 

Realistically, there are no viable resolutions to the stealing of Indigenous land. Like many intractable issues, the law of the jungle, which killed and dispossessed the natives, has prevailed and will continue to do so.

The blatant and massive land theft raises, however, an important question: Can we legitimize someone who killed a family's parents, expropriated their children, built a castle on top of their dwellings, and become the envy of his neighbors? If not, what about the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and their subjugation of the natives?

We must puncture the veneer of these four democracies' moral superiority over the Global South. Having committed genocides and stolen continents and islands, they are as rotten as their purported adversaries.