Displacing Indigenous Peoples | Class 11 History Notes

This chapter tells the story of what happened to the original inhabitants of North America and Australia once European settlers began to arrive from the eighteenth century onwards. It covers how colonies were built, how native peoples were pushed off their land, the spread of the slave economy, the different sects of Christianity that reached these lands, and the many tribes who had lived there for thousands of years. These notes cover the whole chapter in order, and sit alongside our other Class 11 History notes.

Introduction

In the eighteenth century, large numbers of European migrants settled in parts of South, Central and North America, as well as in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Their settlements grew into colonies. South and Central America were colonised largely by the Spanish and the Portuguese. Asians also joined these movements of people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As the settlements grew, the native peoples were pushed out. Immigrants forced them into other areas, and over time the natives became a minority on their own land. Once the settlers won independence, these colonies became separate countries.

Even today, many rivers and towns in these regions carry indigenous names. For example, Ohio, Mississippi and Seattle in the United States, Saskatchewan in Canada, and Wollongong and Parramatta in Australia.

European Imperialism

What do we mean by European imperialism?

Europeans built their power and influence by expanding trade and setting up colonies in Asia, Africa and America. After the seventeenth century, however, the Spanish and Portuguese empires in America did not grow much further.

England was also racing to expand its colonies, but the kind of control it set up varied a great deal, because colonisation was a risky and expensive business. Ireland was effectively a colony of England, since most of its landowners were English settlers.

Trading companies such as the East India Company rose to power in South Asia, defeating local rulers and taking over their territories. They kept collecting taxes from landowners using the older administrative systems already in place. Later they built railways, opened mines and set up large plantations to boost trade.

Except in South Africa, Europeans mostly traded along the coast and did not move into the interior until the late nineteenth century. Eventually several European countries agreed to divide Africa into colonies among themselves.

The word "settlers" refers to the Dutch in South Africa, the British in Ireland, New Zealand and Australia, and Europeans in America. English became the official language of these colonies, except in Canada, where French is also official.

North America

North America stretches from the Arctic Circle to the Tropic of Cancer, and from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. To the west lie the Rocky Mountains, and around them the Great Plains, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi river valley and the Appalachian mountains. Mexico lies to the south.

Canada

Canada is a country in the north of the continent, with about 40 per cent of its land under forest. It has rich oil, gas and mineral resources in many places, which is one reason both the United States and Canada developed such large industries.

Wheat, corn and fruit are now widely grown, and fishing is an important industry. Large-scale mining, industry and farming, along with immigration from Europe, Africa and China, have mostly developed over just the last 200 years. Before Europeans arrived, people had already lived in North America for thousands of years.

The Native Peoples

The oldest human-made object found in America is an arrow-point. The earliest inhabitants of North America are believed to have crossed the Bering Straits over a land bridge more than 30,000 years ago and then moved south during the last Ice Age. A stable climate is often given as the main reason their population grew, at a rate of roughly 5,000 people a year.

These communities usually lived in bands along the rivers. Their diet included fish and meat, along with vegetables and maize that they grew. They travelled long distances hunting animals, mainly the bison, the wild buffalo that roamed the grasslands, and practised only limited farming.

Controlling land was not a major concern. There were some disputes between tribes over territory, but ownership of land was generally not an issue.

Forming alliances, making friendships and exchanging gifts were an important part of native custom. Many languages were spoken across North America, though they were not written down. The people were also skilful craftworkers and beautiful weavers of textiles. Although they did not write, they could "read" the land, understanding the climate and different landscapes closely. Each tribe held a wide range of beliefs and passed down stories about its own origins and early history from one generation to the next.

Encounters with Europeans

The first meetings between native peoples and Europeans were overwhelming for the natives. Along the north coast of North America the Europeans were warmly welcomed. Because there was little gold in the north, the Spanish and others traded in fish and furs, helped by natives who were skilled hunters.

According to French accounts, natives living along the Mississippi held regular gatherings to trade handicrafts special to each tribe, or foods that were not available elsewhere.

In exchange for local products, Europeans gave the natives blankets, iron vessels (which sometimes replaced their clay pots), guns (a useful addition to bows and arrows for hunting) and alcohol. The natives became dependent on such goods, which helped the Europeans take control of the trade and dictate its terms.

Mutual Perceptions

Europeans treated literacy, organised religion and city life as the marks of a "civilised" society, so the natives of America seemed "uncivilised" to them. Yet French thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau admired such people, seeing them as untouched by the corruption of "civilisation". A popular phrase for this idea was "the noble savage".

What does "noble savage" mean?

The "noble savage" is a stock character in literature. It stands for the outsider or wild human who has not been "corrupted" by civilisation, and who therefore is imagined to show the natural goodness of humanity.

Europeans could make large profits selling fish and furs back in Europe, where prices rose and fell each year with supply. The natives found this puzzling, because they had no idea of a distant European market. They were confused that Europeans sometimes gave a great deal and sometimes very little for the same goods. In their rush for furs, the Europeans killed huge numbers of beavers, and the natives feared the animals might take revenge. The first Europeans who came to "settle" in America were these traders.

Different Sects of Christianity

During the seventeenth century, several groups of Europeans were persecuted for belonging to a different Christian sect: Catholics in countries where Protestantism was official, or Protestants in countries where Catholicism was official.

What is Protestantism?

Protestantism is a branch of Christianity that grew out of the sixteenth-century Reformation, a reaction against what its followers saw as errors in the Catholic Church.

Many such people left Europe to start a new life in America. This caused no problem while there was empty land, but as Europeans moved further inland they came closer to native villages. They cleared forests with their iron tools to make farms, following tracks that Europeans could not even see.

Europeans dreamed of forests cut down and cornfields planted in their place. Thomas Jefferson's dream was of a country where Europeans lived on small farms. The natives, who grew crops to feed themselves rather than for profit, and who believed it was wrong to "own" land, could not understand this. In Jefferson's eyes, that made them "uncivilised".

At the end of the eighteenth century, the countries of Canada and the United States of America were formed. At first they held only a small part of the land they cover today. The United States bought territory in the south from France (the Louisiana Purchase) and in the north-west from Russia (Alaska), and won much of the south-west from Mexico through war.

It never occurred to anyone that the natives living in these areas should be consulted. The western "frontier" of the United States kept moving forward, and the natives were pushed back with it. During the nineteenth century, America's landscapes changed dramatically, because Europeans had a very different attitude to land than the natives did.

Some migrants from Britain and France were younger sons who would not inherit their fathers' property, and were keen to own land in America. Later, waves of immigrants arrived from countries such as Germany, Sweden and Italy, people who had lost their land to big farmers and wanted farms of their own.

Poles were delighted to work in the prairie grasslands, which reminded them of the steppes of their homeland, and were thrilled to buy large properties cheaply. Settlers cleared land and developed farming, introducing crops such as rice and cotton that could not grow in Europe but sold well there. Wolves and mountain lions were hunted almost to extinction to protect the vast farms. Only after the invention of barbed wire in 1873 did the farmers feel completely safe.

Climate and slavery

The climate caused real problems for Europeans, since it was often too hot for them to work outdoors. Experience in the South American colonies had shown that natives forced into slavery died in very large numbers.

So plantation owners bought enslaved people in Africa, and a slave economy took hold. Protests by anti-slavery groups eventually led to a ban on the slave trade, but Africans already in the USA remained enslaved for generations. Between 1861 and 1865 a war was fought between the states that wanted to keep slavery and those that supported abolition. Slavery was abolished, but it was only in the twentieth century that African Americans won the battle for civil rights, and that segregation between "whites" and "non-whites" in schools and public transport was ended.

Canada faced a different problem that seemed more urgent for a long time. In 1763 Canada had been won by the British after a war with France, and the French settlers repeatedly demanded self-government. This was finally settled in 1867 by organising Canada as a Confederation of self-governing states.

Why did the natives lose their land?

Several examples show how the natives were stripped of their land by the migrants:

• In the USA, natives were forced to move and made to sell their land after signing treaties. The European settlers repeatedly cheated them, taking more land and paying less than the deal promised. Even senior officials saw nothing wrong in depriving native peoples of their land.
• The Cherokee tribe in Georgia was placed under state law but denied the rights of citizens. The Cherokees worked hard to learn English and understand the American way of life, yet even so they were barred from claiming citizens' rights.
• The US Chief Justice John Marshall described the Cherokees as a distinct community, holding their own territory in which the state of Georgia had no authority, and with sovereignty in certain matters.
• President Andrew Jackson refused to accept Marshall's judgement and ordered the US army to drive the Cherokees off their land towards the Great American Desert. Of the roughly 15,000 people forced to go, over a quarter died along the way, on a journey remembered as the Trail of Tears.
• Tribes were often criticised for being lazy and for not using their land or their crafts fully. Displacement did not stop once: if precious metals were found on a tribe's new settlement, they were moved again. Many tribes were forced to share land that had belonged to a single tribe, which led to quarrels between them.

The US army crushed a series of native rebellions between 1865 and 1890, and in Canada there were armed revolts by the Metis, people of mixed native and European descent, between 1869 and 1885.

What is anthropology?

Anthropology is the scientific study of human beings, their biology, customs, behaviour and societies. It was from the 1840s that anthropology, which had first developed in France, was introduced in North America, out of a curiosity to study the differences between native "primitive" communities and the "civilised" communities of Europe. Some anthropologists argued that, just as there were no "primitive" peoples left in Europe, the American natives too would "die out".

The Gold Rush and the growth of industries

The Gold Rush in California began in the 1840s and drew huge crowds rushing to the USA to seek their fortune. Women took part in this movement too. Thousands of Chinese workers were recruited to lay the railway lines across the continent. The railway across the USA was completed by 1870, and the one across Canada by 1885.

One reason the Industrial Revolution began in England when it did was that small peasants were losing their land to big farmers and moving into factory jobs. In North America, industry developed for very different reasons: to manufacture railway equipment so that rapid transport could link distant places, and to build machinery that made large-scale farming easier. Industrial towns grew and factories multiplied in both the USA and Canada.

The scale of change is striking. The USA was still underdeveloped in 1860, yet had taken the lead in industrial power by the 1890s. Farming also expanded hugely, and by 1890 vast areas had been cleared and divided into farms.

By 1892 the continental expansion of the USA was complete. The land between the Pacific and the Atlantic had been divided into states, and there was no longer a "frontier". Within a few years the USA was setting up its own colonies, in Hawaii and the Philippines, and had become an imperial power.

Constitutional rights

The "democratic spirit", which had been the settlers' rallying cry during their fight for independence in the 1770s, came to define the identity of the United States compared with the monarchies and aristocracies of Europe.

Settlers also valued the "right to property" written into their constitution, which the state could not override. However, both democratic rights, such as the right to vote for Congress and the President, and property rights, were reserved for white men only.

Daniel Paul, a Canadian native, pointed out in the year 2000 that Thomas Paine, a champion of democracy during the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, had used the "Indians" as models of how society might be organised.

The Indian Reorganisation Act, 1934

During the 1920s, little changed for the natives of the United States and Canada. A survey called The Problem of Indian Administration, led by the social scientist Lewis Meriam and published in 1928, painted a bleak picture of the very poor health and education facilities for natives living on reservations. This came just a few years before a major economic depression swept the United States and affected all its citizens.

Many white Americans sympathised with natives who were discouraged from expressing their cultures fully while also being denied the benefits of citizenship. The Indian Reorganisation Act of 1934, which gave natives on reservations the right to buy land and take out loans, was a landmark law.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the US and Canadian governments considered ending all special provisions for natives, hoping they would "join the mainstream" and adopt European culture. In the 1954 Declaration of Indian Rights, a group of indigenous peoples agreed to become citizens of the United States, but only on the condition that their reservations would not be taken away and their traditions would not be disturbed.

In 1969 the Canadian government declared that it would not recognise aboriginal rights. The natives responded with a well-organised movement of demonstrations and debates. The issue was not settled until 1982, when the Constitution Act recognised the natives' existing aboriginal and treaty rights, though many details still remain to be worked out.

Although their numbers had fallen sharply since the eighteenth century, the native peoples of both countries have been able to assert their right to their own cultures and sacred lands in a way their ancestors could not have done in the 1880s.

Australia

The word "aborigines" was a general name given to many different societies whose ancestors began arriving on the continent over 40,000 years ago, or even earlier. Some accounts trace their origin to a small island near Australia called New Guinea, but by the natives' own traditions they had always been there. Europeans found it hard to understand this sense of a past that was also the present, which the aborigines call "Dreamtime".

By the late eighteenth century there were around 750 native communities in Australia, each with its own language. There is another large group of indigenous people in the north, called the Torres Strait Islanders. Together the aborigines made up about 2.4 per cent of Australia's population in 2005, most of them living along the coast. The British first arrived here in 1770.

The natives were well known for being friendly and kind. A ship's captain was killed in Hawaii, and colonisers seized on this single incident to justify brutal violence against native peoples. In fact, reports suggest that around 90 per cent of native deaths were not caused by the natives at all, but by unhygienic conditions, loss of resources, or battles against the settlers.

The experiment of settling Brazil with Portuguese convicts had been given up when their violence provoked angry reprisals from the natives. The British had followed the same practice in the American colonies until independence, and then continued it in Australia. Most early settlers were convicts deported from England who, once their jail term ended, were allowed to live as free people in Australia on condition that they did not return to Britain. With no choice but to make a life in this unfamiliar land, they felt no hesitation about pushing natives off land they took over for farming.

Economic development

Australia and its European settlements did see economic development, but it was not as varied as America's. Vast sheep farms and mining stations were built up slowly and with much labour, followed by vineyards and wheat farms. These became the basis of the country's prosperity.

When the states were united and it was decided in 1911 to build a new capital for Australia, one name suggested was "Wool wheat gold". In the end it was called Canberra, from "kamberra", a native word meaning "meeting place". Some natives were employed on farms under conditions so harsh that they were little different from slavery.

Later, Chinese immigrants provided cheap labour, as in California, but unease about depending on non-white workers led the governments of both Australia and the USA to ban Chinese immigrants. Until 1974, fear that "dark" people from South Asia or South-East Asia might migrate in large numbers kept a government policy in place to keep non-white people out.

The winds of change

The great anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner gave a lecture called "The Great Australian Silence" in 1968. Like the indigenous peoples of North America, the aborigines came to be seen as communities with distinct cultures and their own ways of understanding nature and climate, with rich bodies of stories and skills in textiles, painting and carving that deserved to be understood and respected.

Henry Reynolds later wrote a powerful book titled Why Weren't We Told?, which condemned the writing of Australian history as though it had begun with Captain Cook's "discovery". Since then, universities have created departments of native culture, art galleries have added native art, and museums have expanded to include displays on native life, while natives have begun writing their own life histories. This happened at a crucial time, because if native cultures had gone on being ignored they might have been forgotten.

Australia's official policy since 1974 has been multiculturalism, which respects both native and immigrant cultures. In the 1970s, the Australian public became aware that, unlike the USA, Canada and New Zealand, Australia had never signed treaties with natives to formalise the European takeover of land. The Australian government had always called it terra nullius, meaning "no one's land". Children of mixed native and European descent had also been forcibly taken and separated from their native families. While the past could not be undone, many argued that there should at least be a public apology for the injustice done to these children in the effort to keep "white" and "coloured" people apart.

Key dates at a glance

• 1770: The British first arrive in Australia.
• 1861 to 1865: The American Civil War between pro-slavery and abolitionist states.
• 1873: Barbed wire is invented, making settler farms feel secure.
• 1892: The continental expansion of the USA is complete; the "frontier" ends.
• 1934: The Indian Reorganisation Act lets natives on reservations buy land and take loans.
• 1974: Australia adopts multiculturalism as official policy.
• 1982: Canada's Constitution Act recognises existing aboriginal and treaty rights.

Why it still matters

This chapter can feel like distant history, but the questions it raises about removal, apology and recognition are still being argued over right now. The chapter ends by asking whether there should be a public apology for indigenous children who were forcibly taken from their families. In Australia and Canada, that debate has recently turned into real law and real money.

In Australia, the "Stolen Generations" the chapter describes are at the centre of a live policy. On 10 November 2025, the Western Australian government opened a Stolen Generations Redress Scheme. Aboriginal survivors who were forcibly removed from their families before 1 July 1972 can apply for a payment of 85,000 Australian dollars and a personal acknowledgement, and families can apply on behalf of survivors who have already died. The state estimates that between 3,000 and 3,500 survivors are still living there. Western Australia had one of the highest rates of child removal, and it is one of the last states to offer this kind of compensation.

In Canada, the removal of native children that the chapter mentions is remembered every year on 30 September, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. The day grew out of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which ran from 2008 to 2015 and issued 94 Calls to Action. The 2025 commemoration marked ten years since that final report, and government leaders admitted that a great deal of work still remains. In other words, the words in your textbook, terra nullius, treaties, reservations and apology, are not just history: they are still shaping decisions and payments today.

If you want to see how school topics like this connect to current world affairs, explore more free study material in our Resources library and the world-linked notes on the Learnacy Hub.

Sources

1. ABC News, "Redress scheme opens for 3,000 Stolen Generations survivors in WA", 10 November 2025: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-10/wa-stolen-generations-redress-scheme-begins/105992142
2. Human Rights Watch, "Western Australia Announces Reparations for the Stolen Generations", 27 May 2025: https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/05/27/western-australia-announces-reparations-stolen-generations
3. Government of Canada, "National Day for Truth and Reconciliation": https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/national-day-truth-reconciliation.html