Modernizing Conquest Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Kinnison, Jedediah Citation Kinnison, Jedediah. (2021). Modernizing Conquest (Doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA). Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction, presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 07/10/2021 07:55:19 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/656818 MODERNIZING CONQUEST by Jedediah Kinnison ______________________________ Copyright © Jedediah Kinnison 2020 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the SCHOOL OF GEOGRAPHY AND DEVELOPMENT In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2020 2 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by: Jed Kinnison titled: and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. _________________________________________________________________ Date: ____________Jan 11, 2021 Jeffrey Banister Marvin Waterstone _________________________________________________________________ Date: ____________Jan 11, 2021 Marvin Waterstone Elizabeth Oglesby _________________________________________________________________ Date: ____________Jan 11, 2021 Elizabeth Oglesby _________________________________________________________________ Date: ____________Jan 12, 2021 Emma M Perez Robert A. Williams, Jr. _________________________________________________________________ Date: ____________Jan 24, 2021 Robert A. Williams, Jr. Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. We hereby certify that we have read this dissertation prepared under our direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. _________________________________________________________________ Date: ____________Jan 11, 2021 Jeffrey Banister School of Geography, Development and Environment Marvin Waterstone _________________________________________________________________ Date: ____________Jan 11, 2021 Marvin Waterstone School of Geography, Development and Environment 3 for Mariama, Aya Ruth, and the future generations 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………….5 CHAPTER 1. Beginnings…………………………………………………………………………6 CHAPTER 2. 1920s. Civilizing Mission: “justified any sacrifice”…………..…………….……39 CHAPTER 3. 1930s. Trans-Atlantic Transpositions: applying the African model to the American continents…………………………………………56 CHAPTER 4. 1940s, Part I. Internal Colonialism: toward a “final solution”………….………..79 CHAPTER 5. 1940s, Part II. External Colonialism: a salt water fallacy………………………102 CHAPTER 6. 1950s, Part I. External Colonialism: UN’s solution to the “colonial problem”………………………………………………………………………………………..132 CHAPTER 7. 1950s, Part II. Internal Colonialism: ILO’s solution to the “indigenous problem”…………..….…………………………………………………………………..……209 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………………..….255 APPENDIX……………………………………………………………………………………..258 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………..259 5 ABSTRACT My research leads me to the conclusion the international human rights system's separation of the “indigenous problem” from the “colonial problem” is important. It is important to the way in we understand indigenous rights today, and it is important in terms of the ways in which we understand this fundamentally statist system. First, we must first ask in what sense and to whom these "problems" are problems requiring resolution. In theory, the UN system is established to safeguard the basic rights of all peoples to a dignified existence. And yet, to believe that this represents the UN founders’ intentions for the new system would be tantamount to believing that America’s founders intended to protect the equal rights of Black peoples when they drafted Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3—the three fifths clause—of the US Constitution. The issues are further clarified if we ask why the UN posed and then bifurcated the questions of what to do with: (1) colonized peoples, and (2) Indigenous peoples. The world system continues to deem it necessary to push the discussion of the multitude of problems presented by European colonization along two discrete tracks, with neither track on course to reach any destination. As the leaders of the euro-derivative world order strive to convince everyone that they have put an end to the colonial destruction of every Indigenous culture on the planet, a primary strategy is to bifurcate the problem of European overseas colonialism and to treat both of the resulting halves of discussion as if the other half never existed. This division permits the United Nations (UN) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to engage in discourse regarding Indigenous peoples that are so misrepresentative that they would qualify as farce if the actual problems were not so tragic. It also facilitates revolutions in social consciousness, producing gaps in social memory that are filled by new narratives celebrating the new tragedies in the making, those posed by hyper-individualism-based market logics and deculturation through statist democracy building and large-scale structural integration programs. Indigenous societies remain under attack, and post-colonialism perpetuates the status quo of colonial territoriality and neocolonial economic dependency. The international system and its discourse plays an important role in this perpetuation. The "new" mode of thought and material production that emerged in the prelude to the “decolonization era” puts all life on an omnicidal track. ! 6 CHAPTER 1 Beginnings Kids in the Congo are being sent down into mines to die so that kids in Europe and America can kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms.1 -Oona King Like the miner's canary, the Indian marks the shifts from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere….2 -Felix Cohen A tale of two colonizations This is a story on the accretion of layers of colonizing discourse, dispossession, deceit, and destruction, over time and territories. At the center of the story are Indigenous nations and the process of formal decolonization within the United Nations (UN) system. But many more institutions, peoples, and places inform its shape. Before arriving at this story’s center, we must first locate a station of departure, a provisioning context, a place of origin. This question, a doozy; all its markers confound: a storm, traces of the site of inception, objective moments of birth, glints of archival beginnings, now vanished by dark shrouds, wisps of churning vapor in dance. Nonetheless, as this story is for our ancestors, ourselves, and our children, it is vital we start somewhere. We therefore pick up the trail at the fin-de-siècle, toward the end of the late- Victorian period of holocausts, with two true tales of terror, tragedy, and obliterative transformation set, respectively, along the shores of the Putumayo and the Congo rivers, or however those lands are known by their proper names. And while both stories are known—one more so than the other, owing, in large part, to the instant splash and enduring celebrity of Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness—I believe it is important to retell them here, not merely because of their convenience as an opening and the aptness of the anecdotes to my broader theses, but also for the reasons of remembrance, reminders of the victims of acts of unfathomable cruelty, despicable misdeeds of criminality and avarice, all building blocks of the social orders we inhabit today.3 1 Kabamba, Patience. "Heart of Darkness.” Anthropological Theory, vol. 10, no. 3 (2010) p. 296. 2 Cohen, Felix S., “The Erosion of Indian Rights, 1950-53: A Case Study in Bureaucracy.” Yale Law Journal, vol. 62 (1953) p. 349. 3 The first paragraphs are, in part, inspired by Edward Said’s second book, an extended meditation on the themes of beginnings, originality, and authenticity. Said, Edward W., Beginnings: intention and method. (New York: Basic Books, 1975). 7 I chose these two stories to show the arbitrary nature of the United Nations’ decision to separate the “indigenous problem” from the “colonial problem” in the mid-20th century program for decolonization. They suggest little more than a hint of the violence perpetrated in pursuit of rubber profits. The notorious Putumayo and Congo rubber regimes amount themselves, moreover, to mere tributaries. A river of blood, drained from Indigenous peoples’ bodies and soils, charts the history of European colonial expansion over the past five centuries. Yet, within the UN’s world system, these regimes are treated as distinctly different maladies. One is prescribed formal decolonization, itself a bad cure. The other is prescribed formal integration, dissolution into the anonymous masses of settler colonial society. Before long, we will return with a far fuller explanation of this barely introduced matter of the false division drawn by the UN. But first, we must provide the already promised accounts of two equatorial hells. Colonial violence: Congo According to the Belgian government, over the course of the last quarter of the 19th century, King Leopold II’s