Detribalization

Detribalization was usually explained as an effort to raise people up from what colonizers perceived as inferior and "uncivilized" ways of living and enacted by detaching Indigenous persons from their traditional territories, cultural practices, and communal identities.

[10] While, according to James F. Eder, initial colonial detribalization most often occurred as a result of "land expropriation, habitat destruction, epidemic disease, or even genocide," contemporary cases may not involve such apparent or "readily identified external factors."

In a postcolonial framework, "less visible forces associated with political economies of modern nation-states – market incentives, cultural pressures, new religious ideologies – permeate the fabric and ethos of tribal societies and motivate their members to think and behave in new ways.

Mahmood Mamdani has contended that rather than a "civilizing mission," as was often claimed by European powers to be the rationale for colonization, colonial policy instead sought to "'stabilize racial domination by 'ground[ing] it in a politically enforced system of ethnic pluralism.

Historian Eric T. Jennings has commented how this policy was "certainly not new" and had been informed by "a host of reductionist thinkers from Gustave Le Bon to Edouard Drumont or Alexis Carrel", while also eerily foreshadowing arguments to be used by the modern French far right.

However, shortly after Dutch settlers introduced slave labor to the region and arrived in increasingly greater numbers, conflicts from 1659 to 1660 and 1673 to 1677, followed by a smallpox outbreak, caused the majority of the Nama to flee from their traditional territory.

A study on the location and role of these mission stations by Franco Frescura noted how throughout the nineteenth century, there was a "spreading geographical presence of missionaries over southern Africa", which paralleled the restructuring of the social, economic, and political landscape of the region by colonial forces.

"[36] This was a common perception among missionaries in southern Africa, who "sought to impose an alien morality and work ethos upon the local people without realizing that these undermined their most basic social and cultural tenets and were therefore largely resisted.

"[35] The status of detribalization was perceived by Dutch colonizers as a potential method of redemption, as noted by scholar Kitty Millet, so that "the 'detribalized' African" could learn "his proper place" as a member of an exploited class of laborers fueling colonial industry.

According to Hickel, administrators even regarded "the idea of a civilizing mission with suspicion, fearing that 'detribalization' would lead to social anomie, mass unrest, and the rise of a politically conscious class that would eventually undermine minority rule altogether."

In South Africa and Namibia, the colonial government soon "forced [their] relocations into modernist townships laid out along rectilinear grids" with the stated intention of conditioning "detribalized" Africans to become "happy, docile subjects" who would "internalize the values of European domesticity.

In 1914, Grosskopf documented an instance in which several urbanized Black South Africans who had "never visited their tribe in Thaba Nehu" left their "permanent and well-paid jobs in Bloomfontein" after a Baralong chief "bought land for his followers in the southern part of Rhodesia."

In a review of his work by Doreen Anderson Wood, she acknowledges how "sociologists and anthropologists have observed how detribalization and forcing mine workers into compound living [has] weakened family life in Africa, but few portray it with Mtshali's punch."

This "detribalized" man, in Mtshali's perspective, did not care for politics or concern himself with the imprisonment of anti-apartheid figures like Robert Sobukwe or Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, and was perhaps reflective, in Wood's words, of men who had been removed from the "stabilizing influences of tribal life" as a result of colonialism.

In 1681, as part of the Laws of the Indies, issued by the Spanish Crown for the American and the Philippine possessions of its empire, "continued the reduction of the Indians (their instruction in the Holy Faith) 'so that they could forget the errors of their ancient rites and ceremonies'."

[59][60] Slave expeditions by the bandeirantes continued throughout the eighteenth century with the intention of stealing precious metals, especially gold, from the interior, which further led to "the acquisition of land grants, official appointments, and other rewards and honors" for white male settlers.

Political tensions erupted into full-scale rebellions, the largest of which was the Cabanagem revolt in Pará, in which "rebels turned with a vengeance on their landlords and patrons," resulting in an estimated death rate of at least thirty thousand, or one quarter of the province's population.

Occupying an "ambiguous" social category between intact tribal groups and the white population, the "claims and interests" of the tapuios could not be effectively addressed by the Brazilian state, meaning they were faced with immediate "extermination or integration.

In Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon by US Navy lieutenants William Lewis Herndon and Lardner Gibbon, tapuios are referred to as "peons" and were described in 1849, along with "negroes" and "mestizos" by the President of the province of Pará, Jeronimo Francisco Coelho, as "people void of civilization and education, and who exceeded in number the worthy, laborious, and industrious part of the population by more than three-quarters."

As a result, "Indians who heeded President Juárez's orders and privatized their holdings but failed to disband their tribal councils could argue in court that although they were not given deeds, the Spanish land grant titles [from the colonial period] were still valid since they were not detribalized communities."

Scholar Florencia Mallon has proposed that, in response, Indigenous communities developed "their own popular Liberalism, one that recognized communal institutions and property, and that defined citizenship in terms that did not exclude culturally different groups."

"[87] Members of the privileged elite classes in contemporary Mexico, who are largely descendants of European colonizers have been noted to still regard "anything that is Indian, any trait that recalls the original ancestry of Mexican culture and society" as backward, grotesque, and inferior, by using derogatory and racist language such as "naco".

[95] By the second half of the seventeenth century, the colonists in the Virginia Colony attempted to "convert the Powhatans culturally" through permitting them to engage in a form of paid labor under the watchful eyes of white employers with the intention of "civilizing them and making them Christians."

[95] Detribalization was also used by the state governments in the northeastern region of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island in the nineteenth century to refer to the deliberate process of terminating relationships between Indigenous peoples and their Indian nations in the debate over federal recognition.

As noted by historian Lisbeth Haas, the Spanish had "granted genízaros and lower-status settlers land throughout the eighteenth century in order to create buffer zones between nomadic raiding and the colonial towns, including those of Pueblo Indians, such as Santo Domingo and Ysleta."

Newly emancipated Russian and Ukrainian Slavic serfs sought territory in Siberia and Central Asia in hopes "of acquiring a free plot of land" to escape their previous condition of "extreme poverty and starvation."

Indigenous groups which had survived were "either institutionalized on government or mission settlements or allowed to form camps on the fringes of upcountry towns, pastoral properties, farms, and mines, which were usually tucked away well out of sight of the busier centers of colonial life."

He notes how European-Australian pastoralists forced "Aboriginals living on their stations to perform some sort of token labor before they hand them their government social welfare check," viewed Indigenous children as undisciplined, and perceived their ownership over the land as justifiable based on their alleged superior morality.

[124] Roberto Cintli Rodríguez questions how and why "peoples who are clearly red or brown and undeniably Indigenous to this continent have allowed ourselves, historically, to be framed by bureaucrats and the courts, by politicians, scholars, and the media as alien, illegal, and less than human.

There is "anecdotal evidence" that some "applicants to Ivy League and other top-ranked schools who want an affirmative-action leg up in competitive admissions processes have used DNA tests to back up their personal decisions to self-identify as racial or ethnic minorities.