The Color of Violence

Abstract

AT ONE TIME, THE LAND UPON WHICH THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA Cruz, sits, as all lands in California, was home to an untold number of Native tribes that occupied this area for over 20,000 years. Who were these indigenous peoples? Of Native nations we do know in an area from Northern California border down to Golden Gate Bridge in west and Yosemite National Park in east, an area of 250 miles by 200 miles, there were Tolowa, Yurok, Chilula, Karok, Shasta, Wiyot, Whilkut, Yana, Waintu, Maidu, Washo, Konkow, Patwin, Wappo, Pomo, Paiute, Ohlone, and many, many others (Stannard, 1992:21). Few of these tribes remain today. From 18th century onward, California Indians were rounded up in Jesuit and Franciscan missions that were, in historian David Stannard's (Ibid.: 137) words, furnaces of death. Mission Indians died as a result of European-introduced diseases, malnutrition and brutal enslavement, fatal forms of punishment, and sexual abuses. California Governor Peter Burnett enunciated an official policy of genocide in his 1851 message to California legislature, in which he argued that ongoing wars against Native peoples must continue to be waged between races until Indian becomes extinct (Ibid.: 144). The situation in South America was no different. During course of four centuries--from 1490s to 1890s--Europeans and white Americans engaged in what Stannard calls the worst human holocaust world has ever witnessed. From an estimated population on two American continents of some 75 million Native people at contact, only some five million remained at end of 19th century (Ibid: 146). Colonization was historical process, and genocide official policy. Genocide: any act committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, national, ethnic, racial, or religious groups, including killing members of group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of group; inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction of group in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within group; and forcibly transferring children of one group to another group. This is accepted United Nations definition (United Nations, 1948). Genocide: European conquest of Americas. Colonialism: The historical process of conquest and exploitation. The United States of America: a country created out of genocide and colonialism. Today, United States is most powerful country in world, a violent country created out of bloody extermination of Native peoples, enslavement of forcibly transported peoples, and continuing oppression of dark-skinned peoples. The color of violence, then, is color of white over black, white over brown, white over red, white over yellow. It is violence of north over south, of continents over archipelagoes, of settlers over natives and slaves. Shaping this color scheme are labyrinths of class and gender, of geography and industry, of metropoles and peripheries, of sexual definitions and confinements. There is not just one binary opposition, but many oppositions. Within colonialism, such as that now practiced in my own country of Hawai'i, violence against women of color, especially our Native women, is economic and cultural violence of tourism and of militarism. It is violence of our imprisonments: reservations, incarcerations, diasporas. It is violence of military bases, of largest porting of nuclear submarines in world, of inundation of our exquisite islands by eager settlers and tourists from American and Asian continents. These settlers have no interest in, or concern about, our Native people. Settlers of all colors come to Hawai'i for refuge, for relaxation. They do not know, nor do they care, that white sugar planters overthrew our Native government in 1893 with willing aid of American troops; that our islands were annexed in 1898 against expressed wishes of our Native people; that our political status as Hawaiian citizens was made impossible by forced annexation to United States. …

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