Displacing Indigenous Peoples — Class 11 History

This theme studies how European settlers from the eighteenth century onwards took over the lands of indigenous peoples in North America (the United States and Canada), Australia and New Zealand, displacing native populations whose ways of life and ideas of property differed sharply from those of the newcomers. The natives of America lived by hunting, fishing and small-scale farming, did not feel the need to own land for profit, and held gatherings to exchange tribe-specific handicrafts; many died from European diseases and from being pushed onto "reservations" — often land they had no earlier connection to. The chapter traces the westward-moving "frontier" of the USA, the near-extermination of the bison by 1890, the 1849 Gold Rush, the use of African slaves on plantations, and how the USA became the leading industrial power by 1890 while denying equality to natives and slaves. In Australia, claimed by Captain Cook and declared terra nullius ("belonging to nobody"), convicts were shipped to Botany Bay and Aborigines were dispossessed and later subjected to forced assimilation, a history reassessed by Henry Reynolds. In New Zealand the Maori signed the Treaty of Waitangi (1840) but still lost land through wars; later, native rights and identities were gradually recognised.