Articles on Culture & Creativity.
A shared delusion of unity in the name of nations maintains the servitude of its population.
Gabriel N Elizondo
Beyond the consumer index, the economic magic show of conflated statistics, just outside of the speculative hopes that America is not actually collapsing, there are numerous populations that watch with a silent resolve forged from the resentment of oppression.
To hope for the downfall of a colonial nation that enslaved your people is not domestic terrorism. It is inevitable.
Those who came from European investors, various imperial crowns, racist opportunist mercenaries, bigoted religious zealots, and shameless capitalists would eventually take everything they could grab from stolen land until they only had themselves to consume.
The nation collapses.
Most indigenous descendant survivors and oppressed peoples watch with an indifference only centuries of hatred can distill from humanity. Yet, some patriotic indigenous citizens will rush forward to offer themselves to the colonizer, one more time, choosing slavery over sovereignty.
What creates such loyalty to colonizers? The abject acceptance of an alternate reality, where colonial narratives have replaced cultural identity.
Colonial powers require a power structure that regulates populations based on their defined systems of labor and control. Once a colonizing power’s military occupation transcends into full permanence, colonial forces begin the settlement process, in which indigenous populations are eliminated or assimilated by colonial force.
It is important to note that colonial settlerism is not a noble pursuit (the American education system glorifies settlers in its history books) but an outright genocide campaign of the indigenous populations. Colonial settlerism is the exploitation of indigenous resources, and an eventual erasure of indigenous existence from the land's history.
Colonial settlers create a hierarchical consolidation of power, positioning themselves in the highest governmental authority across all state-sponsored institutions. These systems are established to remove the last remaining rights of the indigenous people, allowing the starvation, torture, enslavement, and death of entire populations while removing accountability from colonial authorities. In this system, it is not the signature of a government authority who commits mass murder, it’s a paperwork issue.
Bureaucratic processes are created by colonial governments to restrict or remove human rights by creating complex protocols that act as a gate between officials and enslaved populations. Relying on the administrative systems put into place from previous imperial traditions, colonial governments force oppressed populations to abide by colonial law, colonial practice, and colonial jargon. The result of this purposefully complex system is a legal wall that easily turns oppressed populations away without considering their needs at all.
As settlers further infest newly stolen territory, they induct loyal members of oppressed populations to maintain the bureaucratic machine. Several empires like the British, French, and Spanish, selected assimilated indigenous leaders as representatives of the empire to carry out imperial law and orders. These indigenous “buffers” were able to convince their own people to fall in line, accepting lies and betrayals while preventing rebellion among the oppressed with the help of governmental authorities, i.e. the military.
These systems are still in play in American society. See my previous piece on Dehumanization.
Financial and economic systems are devised by colonial powers to force indigenous populations dependency on colonial currency. This financial enslavement forces indigenous populations away from subsistence living and into an economic system that prevents them from amassing any financial independence by requiring debt to operate in colonial society.
Land ownership is used by colonial powers to force indigenous populations to pay taxes, in colonial currency, on the land that was stolen by settlers.
Private companies often partner with colonial governments in theft, war, and genocide for access to the spoils of newly stolen land. Private corporations are allowed full claims on indigenous resources like land, minerals, oil, trees, and human labor, with colonial governments promising military intervention in the event of indigenous rebellion or resistance.
The Spanish Crown granted encomiendas to private leadership and government figures who helped fund New Spain’s expansion. This system exploited indigenous labor to extract silver from native lands in exchange for “living provisions”. It was slavery and murder.
King Charles I granted an official charter to The Virginia Company, a private company of investors looking to exploit land and resources in the New World. The result was the first British colony known as Jamestown that collapsed over the span of its existence. After the company failed to deliver on its investment, it was dissolved and absorbed by the British Crown.
The United States acted on behalf of the United Fruit Company, helping overthrow a democratically elected leader, Jacobo Arbenz and replacing him with a military dictator that protected the company’s interest.
Colonial governments systematically remove indigenous populations from their native lands either through a facade of political theater, governmental bureaucracy, religious declarations, or military intervention. The result is a displaced population that must live under the control of settler governments who proactively attempt to genocide the remaining survivors.
The Spanish Empire used the Doctrine of Discovery in which Pope Alexander VI would categorize Indigenous Peoples as “subhuman because they were not Christian” and thus allowed their land to be stolen by Christians. The seized land would then fall into the encomienda system that enslaved the native populations.
The British Empire saw King Charles II simply claim ownership of the land in North America, divvying up territories and granting them to cronies or governmental partners as rewards for favors. This tradition of nepotism found its way into the American political system.
The American Empire stole more than half of the land in North America, forcing indigenous tribes onto reservations by fake treaties or gunpoint. The result was a genocide of several tribes, and the complete theft of native land, goods, resources, crops, housing, possessions, horses, and people.
The difference between empires and nations is the lack of transparency and blatant denial of responsibility. Kingdoms did not worry about the sentiment of their subjects, they merely invaded, stole, murdered, and enslaved with complete pride. Centuries of social change, communication technologies, and a growing base of literate populations, forced empires to rebrand themselves as nations who “genuinely cared” for those they exploited. The mechanisms of colonization were given a new paint job, renamed, packaged up with propaganda, and forced into the culture as nationalism.
As nation-states emerged from their colonial stages, European-descendants were unnerved by the looming threat found in the eyes of indigenous children. The oppressed populations greatly outnumbered colonial settlers, and the illusion of colonial power could collapse at any moment, providing an opportunity for outright rebellion. European and American settlers instituted a race system along their stolen lands, placing themselves as the superior authority and creating a narrative of “reforming” their enslaved populations with European culture and belief systems.
Surviving generations of colonial genocide are indoctrinated with colonizer narratives that label indigenous peoples as savages. These narratives create the “white savior” myth in which European and European-descendant colonizers position themselves as the moral and genetic superior in comparison to the populations they’ve enslaved. These colonial narratives are actively integrated into every aspect of colonial society, racist myths become history while human atrocities are quietly removed from government websites.
European-centric educational systems created boarding schools built specifically for indigenous child indoctrination, teaching racist propaganda, anti-indigenous social behaviors, and religious ideologies. Children were stripped of their native appearances and forbidden from speaking their native languages. Countless children endured torture, sexual assault, and eventually succumb to starvation, abuse, and death.
The Spanish Empire justified its genocide by the authority of the Catholic Church. Every conquest was in the name of God, a performative quest to spread the word of Christ to indigenous populations that survived the Spanish’s mass murder. After stealing indigenous land, Spanish missions were built to “help” the native populations by offering food in exchange for the obedience and acceptance of religious indoctrination.
The American Empire justified its own genocide and land theft by citing their authority as a divine act of their god. The American ideology of “Manifest Destiny” allowed Americans to hide behind religion as they slaughtered and stole a future from native tribes across North America. The intertwining of Christian ideology and American colonialism provided the foundation for the newest iteration of fascism in the Republican party.
The American government banned native cultural practices in 1883 with the Code of Indian Offenses Act. This law forbade native populations from maintaining, practicing, and teaching their native culture. White cultural standards and behaviors were seen as “proper” in comparison to native populations. In reality, Henry M. Teller pushed for the act in order to prevent rebellion and uprising in future indigenous populations.
Colonial narratives are dispersed across all aspects of daily culture including language, entertainment, commercialism, and religion. Each part of these cultural institutions play a role in upholding, regulating, and expanding on national mythos that actively remove accountability from governments and forcing populations to see an alternate version of a violent history.
Colonial narratives have become tightly integrated into modern culture, brainwashing new generations of indigenous descendants with nationalism. Every institution within a settler-society exists to serve and maintain their positions of colonial power. The result of this carefully constructed system are younger generations that lack the education, awareness, or desire to go beyond colonial institutions and seek historically accurate truths about their origins. This lack of initiative to challenge the colonial-settler paradigm is praised by colonial society as the “choice” of a “model citizen”.
As the Age of Colonial Empires came to an end in the late 19th and early 20th century, mercantile capitalism powered the expansion of a new era: The Age of Nation-States. This shift in global ideology came after the collapse of traditional empire power systems with the introduction of modern capitalism.
In the past, empires were able to maintain an exclusive system of wealth based on lineage and “divine rule.” As territorial resources began their exchange across imperial territories, private companies came into immense wealth after sponsoring numerous imperial campaigns. Over time, private shareholders and corporations became more wealthy than the aristocratic nobility who attempted to cling to power. The merchants began to buy out the land and influence from previous royal lineages.
Nationalism emerged from the necessity of funding global wars over the last remaining pieces of unconquered land. The old empires (America, Britain, and France) quickly shifted their attention from conquest to formalizing boundaries and the populations they controlled with official national languages, national anthems, national currency, national labor forces, and national cultural narratives.
“Good citizens”, or “model citizens” in the American nomenclature, are individuals who obey and participate in nation-state agendas. “Good citizens” believe national agendas without questioning repercussions or the impact on their own personal lives. The nation-state expects “good citizens” to sacrifice their own rights, belief systems, ancestral culture, language, and identity for the sake of the nation.
Growing up in modern nations, many indigenous descendants are entirely unaware of their own ancestral oppression, blindly supporting the colonial nation-state due to hundreds of years of indoctrination by government institutions, propaganda, and reinforced stereotypes about their own people.
In the modern era, oppressed descendants have begun seeking the accurate historical truth about their cultural roots, including ancestral and modern-day persecution by their own governments. Modern technology has allowed deeper transparency into the historical records, as well as empowering indigenous and oppressed populations with growing communities seeking justice for their ancestors. These movements across nation-state populations have revealed an underlying dilemma that has existed for generations.
Oppressed descendants gain generational clarity of their history, seeing their ancestors pain and suffering reflected back in their own positions within colonial society. National pride and patriotism is suddenly revealed to be systemic forms of control, an empire’s colonial narrative that attempted to erase mass murder, theft, torture, abuse, slavery, and genocide with racist belief systems and religious ideology.
For the descendant individual, this revelation leads to an existential identity crisis: an impossible task of reconciling their believed nationalist identity with the truth of their oppressed ancestry.
For a descendant, or current member of an oppressed population, the process of reconciliation between their national identity and their cultural identity leads to a choice between their nation and their lineage. Colonial institutions attempt to remove this decision by cultural gaslighting oppressed populations with racist narratives about “forgetting the past” and “getting over” the systemic enslavement of previous and current generations.
This inability to reconcile both narratives leads to a cultural identity dilemma. An individual who descends, or who is part of, historically oppressed populations must align their perspective with the colonizer or with their own people.
The results are entire generations of confused populations that are forced to choose between their “nation” and their history.
For those that chose to break away from their colonizer and embrace their ancestry, every part of reclaiming their cultural identity becomes a form of resistance. The choice itself to challenge the nationalist agenda, to see beyond the colonizer systems, and find meaning defined by the individual’s roots leads to the greatest threat against modern colonizer control: cultural reclamation.
Adams, David Wallace. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928. University Press of Kansas, 1995.
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. Beacon Press, 2014.
Gleijeses, Piero. Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954. Princeton University Press, 1991.
Pope Alexander VI. Inter Caetera. 4 May 1493. Papal Encyclicals Online, www.papalencyclicals.net.
Reséndez, Andrés. The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.
Schlesinger, Stephen, and Stephen Kinzer. Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Harvard University Press, 2005.
Teller, Henry M. "Rules Governing the Court of Indian Offenses." Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1883.
U.S. Department of the Interior. Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report. Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs, May 2022.
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