“Civilized”

by Carolina Splawn

The word civilized is a part of our everyday vernacular, we live in a “civilization”, we have “civil” rights, we try to be “civil” by being fair with people. The word “civilized” is synonymous with words like educated, agreeable, polite, and can generally describe a well-behaved person in a structured society. If "civilized" was thought of as a way to establish and maintain peace, in theory, the idea of creating a civilization with all civilized people, where everyone treats one another with respect, sounds like a reasonable idea. But it is important to think beyond theory and think about the details of this idea. Who would define what peace meant, what respect meant, what being “civilized” meant? What would happen to the people that didn’t meet this criterion?

According to Brett Bowden’s piece about Civilization and its Consequences, the word civilized has Latin roots stemming from civitas, meaning cities, and was later was used in the 1700s as the French word civilizer, which was used in the legal system as a way of defining the conversion of a criminal into a civil member of society. From there, the term grew to be related to a “state of society” that involves people doing more than what it takes to survive, as in being involved in leisure activities. Bowden notes that R.G. Collingwood, in 1992, described civilization as, “the civilized pursuit of wealth,” “the idea of joint action,” and “a society governed by law” (Collingwood 1992, cited by Bowden 2015). Western Europe defined its idea of civilization, including ideals like literacy, Christianity, capitalism, and European-style governance. These structured definitions of civilization were helpful in defining a Western way of life and a way to identify their own societal successes, however they advantageously failed to account for all other ways of life and societal structures.

For centuries, from the “discovery” of the Americas in the 1400s to the Indian Removal Act in 1830, European powers have used the Eurocentric idea of “civilization" to deem themselves as the rightful owners of foreign lands and allowed them to use this word as a weapon to differentiate themselves from the original inhabitants of the land they sought to control. Obviously unfamiliar with European ways of life, ideals, and language, these indigenous people were labeled as "uncivilized," "savages," and "barbarians," among other insidious labels. In 1879, Chief Thunder Traveling Over the Mountains (Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe) advocated for his tribe and all Native American tribes to Congressmen and other United States government officials. His tribe had been forcibly removed from their homelands in present day eastern Oregon and relocated in Indian Territory, present day Oklahoma. In this speech, Chief Thunder Traveling Over the Mountains respectfully pointed out the hypocrisy with which the United States government had treated his people, and noted how white settlers and government representatives had invaded his land, cheated, lied, and coerced his people, among other crimes. Chief Thunder Traveling Over the Mountains spoke of his tribe’s laws and civilization before the white settlers disrupted their way of peaceful life:

“They [tribal leaders] told us to treat all men as they treated us; that we should never be the first to break a bargain; that it was a disgrace to tell a lie; that we should speak only the truth; that it was a shame for one man to take from another his wife, or his property without paying for it” (Joseph).

Interestingly, these tribal laws are very similar to some of the rights listed in the Declaration of Independence– the United States" founding document– and the Ten Commandments, a religious text that serves as a moral guide for many faiths, including Christianity, the dominant colonial religion. Both texts would certainly be considered “civilized,” in fact they are the very same texts that would be used to try to convert Native Americans from their “savage” ways. In a similar narrative to the Nez Perce tribe were the five tribes that the United States government labeled as the “Five "Civilized" Tribes,” which included the Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek), and the Seminole tribes, all originally from the present day southeast United States. In the interest of self-preservation and in an attempt at peaceful negotiations, these tribes checked all the boxes for the “civilization” criteria, including modeling their governments after the United States, integrating parts of Anglo-American culture, developing and maintaining economies, converting to Christianity, intermarrying with white settlers, and even owning slaves (Frank). However, despite this assimilation to the settlers' ways, and even after being labeled as “civilized,” they were still brutally removed from their homelands in the Trail of Tears which lasted for nearly 20 years. The sins of hypocrisy know no bounds, and these heartbreaking examples show that the desire for civilization was perhaps not as concrete as just meeting a certain criterion, and in fact, seems to represent an unobtainable fixture designed to exclude and justify their conquests.

The hope that colonizers only wanted control over Indigenous peoples’ land and resources is unfortunately a native belief. Labeling people as civilized and uncivilized was just the first step in a plan with insidious motivations. Labeling people in this way established a racial hierarchy that served as a tier of humanity, with non-white people finding themselves at the bottom of this formation, effectively dehumanizing them. Dehumanizing these people gave colonizers the justification to deny them human rights, and thus granting themselves the ability to enslave them, displace them, and murder them. If this plan and rationale sound familiar, it’s because it is the beginning stages of genocide, the killing of the people of a certain culture, nationality, religion, ethnicity, or race. In 2016, Gregory Staton, President of the Genocide Watch, published a clear criterion for the ten stages of genocide, with stage one being the classification of people into categories and creating the division of “us” vs. “them,” ergo, “civilized” vs. “uncivilized.” Stages three and four are discrimination: denying rights of the “other,” or uncivilized, and dehumanization: denying the humanity of the selected group (Stanton). While a simple label might not seem enough to kill an entire group of people, the power, implications, and intentions behind the word certainly can, will. It’s important to note that just by labeling a group of people as "uncivilized," the first few stages of genocide have been carried out and can easily snowball into the next stage and the next stage until the eventual extermination of an entire group of people. Which, unfortunately, was the fate of Native Americans in the United States. Russell Thornton, a Cherokee anthropologist, estimates that during the "American Indian Holocaust," in what is now the United States, the number of indigenous lives dropped from 5-12 million in 1492 to about 250,000 in 1900. This staggering and heartbreaking number of indigenous lives were lost to the havoc colonialism wreaked on Natives, including diseases, genocidal violence, enslavement, land wars, relocation atrocities, and other violent attempts at extinction of the Native American peoples. With these gruesome acts in mind, it becomes clear that the spread of civilization can be synonymous with genocide.

The millions of Native American lives lost to the effects of colonialism and genocide are tragic, to say the absolute least, but, unfortunately, those numbers do not account for all the harm Natives faced at the hand of their oppressors. In addition to the loss of their homelands, Natives found themselves forced into assimilation and a part of another form of genocide, ethnocide, the destruction of a culture. After being forced from their homelands, Native American children were stolen from their families and were put into boarding schools, where they would be forced to learn the Christian religion, the “American” culture, and how to be “civil.” In these boarding schools, Native children were forbidden to speak in their native language and practice any aspect of their culture, or they would face horrendous abuse from their oppressors at the school. Children at these schools faced physical, mental, sexual, psychological, and spiritual abuse, and a federal investigation into the boarding schools in North America in 2024 found that at least 900 children died in these boarding schools at the hands of their abusers (United States Department of the Interior and Newland). Even the children of the “Five "Civilized" Tribes,” who were already proclaimed to be civilized, were stolen and subjected to this torture. Again, under the excuse of the betterment of civilization, the white settlers were able to continue their genocidal and ethnocidal practices on Native children to prime them to become more exploitable and vulnerable. This period of heinous torture to the children that represented the future of these tribes, nearly pushed the ethnocide agenda to completion, and Native American tribes are still fighting today to regain the cultural knowledge lost during the boarding school era. As reported by the First Nations Development Institute in 2024, most Native languages in the United States today are spoken by a small number of elders, many languages could become extinct in the next 50 to 100 years. These attempts to “civilize” Native children were just another attempt at erasing Indigenous existence.

It seems as if Native Americans have been fighting a losing battle since the day they first encountered white settlers in 1492. In a futile, never-ending battle, they have fought tirelessly for their humanity. In these sabotaged battles, they’ve lost loved ones, parts of their cultures and languages, and their innocence and trust. All that sacrifice and loss, just to end up in today’s world, plagued with the generational traumas of their past and uncertain of their future. The colonizers, now so integrated onto their lands and into their lives, can now be referred to as Americans, the majority, the dominant race of the United States. The issues Natives faced thousands of years ago; their children face now. Currently, echoes from the past threaten the children of Oklahoma, which has the largest Native American population in the United States (Sánchez et al.), with a mandate from the state’s superintendent that forces schools to teach the Bible, in the classroom, which sounds eerily similar to the forced assimilation Native children in the boarding schools (Kemp). While it’s now considered disrespectful to label someone as a “savage,” “barbarian,” or “uncivilized,” it is socially acceptable to use microaggressions such as “delinquent,” “lazy,” or “unkempt.” Using racist labels to refer to groups of people is still a practice in our society today, demonstrating that the meanings and implications behind these ever-evolving words continue to enforce racist hierarchies. Our country’s practice of deeming people civilized and uncivilized has continued to evolve into internalized racism and microaggressions. But, don’t let the words "internalized" and "micro" lead you to believe that these issues are small, because they have a way of festering into much bigger issues for minority groups, such as increased incarceration rates, resource and education inequalities, increased murder and abuse rates, especially Native women, and mainly at the hands of non-indigenous men (Native Hope), and increased mental illness and substance abuse issues, to name just a few problems. All the while, the privileged, majority of the country eagerly awaits on minority groups to make one wrong step so they can reaffirm their stereotypes about them and use that confirmation as a justification to continue the cycle of racist labeling.

Unfortunately, history does repeat itself. So, we must learn lessons from our past to make our future better. It is important to remember that the intention and power we put behind words and labels are the defining factor that has cost millions of people their lives, cultures, and histories. In a world that is ever evolving, we must stay vigilant and stay informed. We must remember that systems that may serve us today, have the power to destroy us tomorrow. Our country is founded on deep rooted racism, eurocentric ideals, and genocidal tendencies. No matter what is happening in popular media, or what the consensus believes, it is important for each and every one of us to keep our eyes and minds open. We must question dominant narratives. We must challenge Eurocentric, imperialist, racist narratives and write our own stories. We must be ready to stand up and call out injustices, even and especially micro-injustices. We must recognize that to recognize these injustices and the atrocities of the past are not weaknesses, but strengths that have the power to prevent these atrocities from happening again.

Works Cited

Bowden, Brett, “Civilization and Its Consequences.” Oxford Handbook Topics in Politics (online edn, Oxford Academic, 6 Aug. 2015), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935307.013.30.

Collingwood, R.G. The New Leviathan: or Man, Society, Civilization, and Barbarism. Edited by David Boucher, Oxford University Press, 1992.

First Nations Development Institute. “Native Language Immersion Initiative.” 2024, https://www.firstnations.org/projects/native-language-immersion-initiative/.

Frank, Andrew K. “Five Civilized Tribes in Oklahoma.” Oklahoma Historical Society, 2010, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=FI011.

Hinton, Alexander Laban. “The Dark Side of Modernity: Toward an Anthropology of Genocide.” Annihilating Difference, vol. 3, University of California Press, 2019, pp. 1–40, doi:10.1525/9780520927575-004.

Joseph, Chief. "An Indian's Views of Indian Affairs, Young Joseph’s Translated Narrative." Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc. Alexander Street, 1879.                https://search-alexanderstreet-com.dartmouth.idm.oclc.org/view/work/bibliographic_entity|bibliographic_details|4404556.

Kemp, Adam. “How schools in Oklahoma are responding to a new Bible mandate.” PBS, 15 August 2024, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/how-schools-in-oklahoma-are-responding-to-a-new-bible-mandate.

Native Hope. “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW).” Native Hope, 2024, https://www.nativehope.org/missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women-mmiw/.

Sánchez, Ana I., et al. “Detailed Data for Hundreds of American Indian and Alaska Native Tribes.” U.S. Census Bureau, 3 October 2023, https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/10/2020-census-dhc-a-aian-population.html.

Stanton, Gregory H. "The ten stages of genocide." 2013.

Thornton, Russell. American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492. University of Oklahoma Press, 1987.

United States Department of the Interior, and Bryan Newland. Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report. 2024, https://www.bia.gov/sites/default/files/media_document/doi_federal_indian_boarding_school_initiative_investigative_report_vii_final_508_compliant.pdf.