The Colonizer Playbook
Tried and true ways European Colonizers have spread their violence for centuries.
Welcome "Explorer"!
After years of searching, you have finally discovered habitable land ready for settlement… the only problem is that there happen to be people already living there. Oh dear, whatever shall you do?
Not to worry! This pesky problem can be easily fixed by setting up your very own ✨colony ✨
Don’t know the first thing about colonizing? Don’t worry! Just follow our instructions, and you’ll have your own colony up and running in no time!*
*We, the authors of this playbook, hereby wave any responsibility for the outcomes from following these tips, including but not limited to social, economical, or cultural degradation or genocide that may affect the world for centuries to come.
1. Establish Moral Justification
You might be wondering why this is necessary, but there are some people who might take issue with what you are doing. Some will say, "you have no real claim to the land" or "what you are doing is unjust and barbaric". But whatever, to shut them up, all you have to do is create moral and legal justification for your colonialism.
The easiest and quickest way is to get someone with 'authority' (who will stand to benefit from your project) to give it the green light! Find yourself a local Pope, King, or any other wealthy, influential white man! 🙏🏻 👑
All they have to do is claim that the "people" living in the lands you want have no true civilization or moral code that you can recognize, so they aren't really "human" (you know, like you and I). Once you have established that there are no real people living there, you can officially declare the land as 'terra nullius' (aka uninhabited) and move on in! After all, no one can fault you for occupying "land belonging to no one", right?
2. Play to your strengths! (Guns, Germs, and Stealing!!)
When invading the land, don't be afraid to unlevel the playing field by using weapons and battle tactics that will ultimately decimate the original land's inhabitants- it doesn't matter, because they aren't human!
Biological warfare (something your descendants will condemn during their time, is completely good to go as long as you aren't the recipients) is an easy way to annihilate communities. Go ahead and hand out those blankets covered in foreign diseases that these Indigenous peoples have never experienced and have no immunity against. Anyone who survives can be killed using a variety of weaponry, thus making the land easier to colonize.
Remember, you've got the moral high ground since what you are doing is for God (via the King), Gold, and Glory, so the ends toootally justify the means.
NB: all acts of inhumanity and savagery are preapproved by your friendly neighbourhood local church, government and monarchs divinely appointed by God
3. Set up an Occupation Regime
After a successful invasion, it's time to get down to business and properly occupy the land. The most successful colonies have well-planned occupation regimes, so you must choose carefully!
You could go for the tried and true Apartheid regime: set up separate lands and rules for the remaining native population. Make them restrictive enough so that they lack any autonomy (physical or otherwise), which will make it easier for you to control them!
If you are practising extractive colonialism, it is paramount for you to move the natives away from resource-rich lands that they've lived on since time immemorial. Move them onto the Badlands, where they'll lack the resources to fight against you because they'll be barely surviving - talk about a double win! Don't forget to ensure that the punishments for breaking your laws are cruel and brutal- you can't appear benevolent if you want to be a baddie.
4. Infighting is your friend!
You'll inevitably find yourself in a situation where the native inhabitants outnumber you - this is not ideal. To solve this dilemma, you must sow distrust and discord amongst the native populations. Dig up old feuds (or be a proactive colonizer and start new ones!), plant lies and falsehoods and/or instil envy by favouring one tribe/community over the other. You can take this even further by drawing new borders within territories and splitting up tribes! The more internal conflict, the better! We're aiming for maximum chaos of these pesky plebs, so they aren't organizing against your rule.
An additional and useful tip is to use collaborators. 🤝🏻 Entice these locals with the promise of wealth, power, prestige, and influence over their own people, and they'll totally help spread your propaganda and normalize your regime. They'll probably also give you useful information to use against their own people! If done well, you will sow enough distrust to last several lifetimes, preventing any ideas of collaboration among native populations from rising up against you!
5. Assimilate, Assimilate, Assimilate!
The final and most important step in your colonization journey is the assimilation of the native population into your culture.
In order to cement your dominance over this land, it is essential that you destroy as much of the native people's way of life as possible. This will require lots of plotting and planning to ensure that elements of your culture are present in every area of their lives - from the food they eat to how they think of themselves.
Here are our top 4 ways to achieve this goal
i. Introduce a strict language policy 🤫
Prohibit the speaking or teaching of native tongues. You can achieve this by shaming, ridiculing, or even punishing those who continue to speak their native tongue and rewarding those who learn and speak your language with social and economic rewards, e.g. more land, better food and clothes, proximity to you (AKA social cachet) etc.
ii. Destroy communities by breaking up families 👪
You want new generations to only know how to live the *right* way. There are several ways to do this, for example, setting up Boarding/Residential schools. By removing little children from their families and mercilessly teaching them how to transform themselves into "good" natives, you will ensure that languages and culture cannot be passed on! With time, the native people's language and culture will surely die out or, at the very least, be diluted with your own.
iii. Destroy and ban native's places of worship 🙇
Forbid the open worship of 'heathen' deities. Use the aid of your local missionaries to accomplish this! Demonize their original ways of worship and paint yourselves as the only moral and ethical, religious option. They'll work hard to preserve their culture underground but don't fret about that; your descendants will one day find a way to monetize this savage worship via things like "goat yoga."
iv. Destroy traditional knowledge systems 📚
Reinforce the belief that the only way of truly knowing and understanding the world is through your knowledge systems. Only your culture practices logic and reasoning, only your people have discovered new ideas and concepts (even though that's factually inaccurate), and only your scientists have and can invent new and wonderful technologies! Before you came along, there was nothing but savagery and primitivism amongst these non-humans; only you managed to create real civilization and order on this land. Remember, only you know best! Don't let anyone forget it!
The Long Game that Works For You & Yours
Congratulations, now you can sit back, relax, and enjoy your legacy.
In reality, your way will destroy the planet in a couple of hundred years. However, you'll be long gone by then, and your descendants will still be benefiting from the unearned privilege they inherited and/or generational wealth, so it's on them to deny and distance themselves from this tried and true family tradition.
And what of the descendants of the non-Humans around the world that you stole land and resources from; enslaved (free labour is the best labour, amirite?); genocided; erased cultures, religions, languages, histories from; communities you created division and hate between?— your actions will be felt by them for centuries to come, though they'll be so busy trying to survive that they'll struggle to band together, rise up and demand reparations.
But what do you care, they aren't human remember?
And you, you're the one that won.
From our Team at On Canada Project:
For a long time now we have wanted to write about how European colonizers spread their violence, bc it is actually a couple of honed tricks of the trade that they used on so many of us in the global majority.
We always strive to bring evidence informed, compassionate information to you -- and that is still true in this post, except for once, we centered compassion for ourselves by using a different, jokey tone in this post.
Why? because the vast majority of our team has been ancestrally harmed by colonial violence and continues to be harmed by colonial violence. writing about this *hurts* so the only way to do it, was this.
To that point, it is worth noting the critical role of solidarity. To Non-Indigenous and Non-Black People of Colour living in Canada:
We have been complicit in colonial violence in Canada, despite having lived and ancestral experiences with colonial violence ourselves. Indigenous peoples experiences here in Canada are uncomfortably similar to our ancestors' stories, so don't shut them out.
We cannot continue to aspire to whiteness and/or conform to it.
We have unearned privilege that isn't afforded to Black and Indigenous peoples – so let's use it to do good.
