Colonialism by Ego
By Tanya McKenzie

The American aborigines are possessed of inferior mental endowments… the Aryan family represents the central stream of human progress, because it has produced the highest type of mankind, and because it has proved its intrinsic superiority by gradually assuming the control of the earth.”
- Henry Morgan, father of American anthropology

Arrogance blinded the European settlers in North America from being able to appreciate the value and diversity of the Aboriginal cultures upon their arrival to the “new world”. Even the term new world is evidence of the egocentrism of the colonizers and their focus on self when defining the world. As Dr. Morgan implied in the quote above, “assuming the control of the earth” marked the Aryan races superiority over all other races. This assumption was perpetrated, and continues to be perpetrated today; carried by the self-centred attitude of the colonizers of North America through ego of culture, science, and politics and policy.
Ego is the part of the mind that reacts to reality. Egocentrism is when that reaction to reality focuses on self-interest as the basis of person, or race’s, moral behaviour. European colonization of North America was completely perpetrated by self-interest and moral righteousness and this egocentrism sought to destroy every aspect of Aboriginal life on Turtle Island.
Newly arriving Europeans during the colonization of North America felt it was their mission to extend to the savages the opportunity of “civilization”. Europeans assumed that Indians would embrace civilization wholeheartedly as ego held them to believe their culture superior. As Parker Duchemin stated a 1988 article entitled Stealing History, “The Indians’ resistance to being made over into replicas of Europeans eventually became a source of much puzzlement and anger to the newcomers.” This anger led to settlers asserting their cultural superiority. “Civilization or death to all American savages” toasted the U.S army in the Eighteenth century and war was declared.
In the mid 1700’s, the killing of Indians was not only tolerated but also encouraged. Bounties were offered for Indian scalps, even those of women and children. The goal of this tactic was simple - extermination. The Native people did not want to live like the new settlers and were dehumanized to obstacles in the expansion of the new world. Entire tribes were erased and many others reduced to only small percentages of their previous standings. These sudden decreases of Indian tribes saw the emergence of a new science, anthropology.
Prior to anthropology, many established disciplines such as history, philosophy, and sociology had already contributed to the degradation of the Native peoples of North America. As Duchemin explains, historians “formulated a theory of progress which held that the human race advanced historically through various stages of growth, from hunter to shepherd to farmer, until at last it attained the pinnacle of development represented by modern “civilized” Europe.” As Aboriginal people were categorized as hunters, they were considered still in the first development stages of the human race. It was in this context that anthropologists began their research.
The first Anthropologists sought to systematically study the Native peoples of North America before they vanished altogether. The inability of the Indian to progress past the hunter stage had anthropologists studying them as “cultural dead-ends who had somehow, because of their own weaknesses, failed to adapt to the modern world.” Evolutionists even assumed that Indians were closer to animals than Europeans. As Duchemin compares, “Physical anthropology looked for scientific evidence for these assumptions, which, on another continent and in another context, fed the racist ideology of the Nazis.” And much like the Jews did in Germany, the Aboriginal peoples of North America experience genocide by the arrogance of the Aryan race. Only, eleven times more Aboriginal peoples have died than in the holocaust and it still continues today.
Ironically, one of the major discoveries of the new Anthropological studies was the realization that each Aboriginal tribe was indeed unique. As Duchemin details about the settlers, “Although they found an enormously rich variety of languages and cultures, European observers assumed that native peoples were basically identical.” The anthropologists’ discovery did little to derail the view of the generic Indian person, a myth that guided government policy and still breathes strong in contemporary society.
The stereotype of the single national Indian is embodied by the Indian Act; a legal policy of assimilation that was applied equally to all Indians irrelevant of tribe affiliation. It provided Indians with their rights in colonized North America and continues to do so today. It is the only Apartheid agreement left in the world and is in direct contravention to the United Nations 1948 Convention of Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide.
As outlined by Ward Churchill in Crimes Against Humanity, some of the direct contrary actions of the Indian Act under the UN Convention include the forced transfer of children of a targeted racial group, involuntary sterilization as a means of preventing births among the targeted population, and the creation of conditions leading to the destruction of an identifiable human group. Churchill emphasizes, “Genocide, as defined in international law, is a continuing fact of day-to-day life (and death) for North American’s native peoples. Yet there has been – and is – only the barest flicker of public concern about, or even consciousness of, this reality.” So far have the European settlers of Turtle Island degraded the humanity of the Aboriginal people, that their fellow compatriots have no reaction to the continuing death of the Indian.
The question then remains, how do the Aboriginal peoples free themselves from the legacy of five centuries of colonial egocentrism? How do they eliminate the stereotypes and myths of their culture and existence, especially in a society that sees the Indian as a mascot or logo? The answer, argues Duchemin, is “only if native and non-natives alike come to understand the significance and the pervasiveness of these ideas can the vicious cycle of colonialism be broken.” The difficulty of this task surpassed only by its gravity.