The Impacts of Capitalist Incorporation and Terrorism on Indigenous Americans (original) (raw)

This article critically explores the essence of colonial terrorism and its consequences on the indigenous American peoples during their colonization and incorporation into the European-dominated racialized capitalist world system between the late 15 th and 19 th century. It employs multidimensional, comparative methods, and critical approaches to explain the dynamic interplay among social structures, human agency, and terrorism to explain the connection between terrorism and the emergence of the capitalist world system or globalization. Raising some complex moral, intellectual, philosophical, ethical, and political questions, this paper explores the essence, roles, and impacts of colonial terrorism on the indigenous Americans. First, the paper conceptualizes and theorizes colonial terrorism as an integral part of the capitalist world system. Specifically, it links capitalist incorporation and colonialism and various forms of violence to terrorism. Second, the paper examines the structural aspects of colonial terrorism through connecting it to some specific colonial policies and practices. Third, it identifies and explains different kinds of ideological justifications that the Euro-American colonial settlers and their descendants used in committing crimes against humanity. In the capitalist world system, the contestation over economic resources, such as land, minerals, and other commodities, and over power and the resistance to domination and repression have facilitated the intensification of terrorism from above (i.e. state actors) and from below (i.e. non-state actors). My focus here is state-sponsored or colonial terrorism that was committed on the indigenous American peoples. Among their many weapons, the Euro-American powers systematically imposed colonial terrorism on these and devastated them in order to exploit their economic and labor resources mercilessly and to takeover their homelands. Although many authors have explained the role of colonial violence in the Americas, they did not explore the connections among capitalist incorporation, various forms of violence, and colonial terrorism. Competing European colonial forces engaged in state-sponsored terrorism that was practiced in forms of unjustified wars, organized and systematic mass killings, mutilation, ecological and cultural destruction, the spreading of lethal diseases, and continued subjugation. By engaging in such crimes against humanity, the European colonial forces had laid the foundations for the economic and political supremacy of North America and Western Europe in the global capitalist world system. Although the competing European colonial forces initially used contacts, cooperation, exploration, trade, diplomatic mechanisms, such as negotiations, treaties, and land cessions, as well as different forms violence, their main political tool for destroying and/or suppressing indigenous communities and establishing settler colonialism and its institutions in the America was colonial terrorism. Conceptualizing and Theorizing Terrorism Considering the historical and global context in which terrorism developed and intensified, we need a more comprehensive, historical, and broader definition of terrorism. So, I define terrorism as a systematic governmental or organizational