Indigenous Communities: Genocide Against Indigenous People

Genocide against indigenous communities is woven into the history of colonial imperialism. During European colonialism, indigenous people were condemned to death and genocidal actions by nature of their race. Indigenous peoples are distinct people who have a historical connection that developed with their territories pre-colonial invasions (Jones 105). Colonialism and imperialism went hand in hand during the 17th to 19th centuries. Colonialism is the practice of obtaining political control over another nation or community, settling the area with colonist settlers, and exploiting it for economic gain (Webster Dictionary). On the other hand, imperialism is the practice of extending a nation’s power and authority over another group through military …show more content…
Most famously, the works of Robert Noxx’s Races of Men, Thomas Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero Worship, and Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species. Robert Noxx was one of the forefathers for scientific racism as he argued in his book that superior races would naturally dominant inferior races. Thomas Carlyle argued that inequality was the proper way to rule a society and those who “know” should rule those who “do not know”. Furthermore, a scientist and physician named Samuel George Morton studied anatomy and craniometry. He wrote about the differences in skull sizes in humans and how that corresponded to the intelligence of certain races. The ideas of these three men influenced the way in which white Europeans perceived themselves as “scientifically” superior beings to colored indigenous …show more content…
The Herero genocide largely started in 1904 with the Herero uprising against Germans who had flooded into their territory the previous year. After decisively defeating the Hereros in battle, the Germans launched a death campaign after Lt.-Gen. Lothar von Trotha’s “annihilation order” (Jones 122). Following these orders, the remaining Herero population was “moved to concentration camps” after being starved in the deserts (Jones 122). In these concentration camps, approximate fifty percent of their population was killed. The Germans through racial supremacy and the science of eugenics fundamentally justified the fate of the Herero peoples.
Following the genocide of the Herero people, the Germans continued to use the Namibian people as research experiments for scientific racism. The ideology that facilitated this genocide paralleled Nazi “ideas like Lebsraum [living space], annihilation war [Vernichtungskrieg], and German racial supremacy” (Jones 123). Eugen Fischer, a German eugenics scientist who had be active in Namibia, later joined the Nazi party and aided in racial medical research at Auschwitz (Tickell, “Racism: A