Just slightly over 500 years ago, in 1492, three European ships under the command of Christopher Columbus arrived on the shores of what has come to be known as the Americas. With this began a genocidal war aimed at destroying Indigenous nations, occupying our ancestral territories, and plundering the natural wealth of the earth. How many tens of millions of Indigenous people were killed in this war will never be known, although the methods of massacres, biological warfare, executions, torture, and the enslavement of entire nations, has been well documented by historians.

Similar invasions were being carried out in Africa and parts of Asia during this same period. This systematic campaign of genocide and colonization was a total war waged against Indigenous nations by European colonialist nations. No one can deny this historical fact.

Colonization can be defined as the practise of invading other lands for the purpose(s) of settlement and/or resource exploitation. When the land is already occupied by another people, the result is usually war. In fact, colonialism occurs in a similar manner to many military conflicts between nations: there is a reconnaissance, an invasion, occupation, and then assimilation (the same methods can be seen in Iraq and Afghanistan).

War can be defined as,

“a state of hostilities that exists between or among nations, characterized by the use of military force… a violent clash between two hostile, independent, and irreconcilable wills, each trying to impose itself on the other.

“The means to that end is the organized application or threat of violence by military force.”

Warfighting, p. 3

Here in North America, military violence can be said to have characterized the imposition of colonialism & the establishment of settler-nations up to 1890. That year, 300 Indigenous men, women and children were massacred by US military forces at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. By the late 1880s, the use of gun-boats to destroy villages had ended along the Northwest Coast. In the southwest, Apache guerrillas had also been defeated. At this time, the military domination of Indigenous peoples was virtually complete. This was only slightly over 100 years ago.

FULL ARTICLE: Colonization: A War for Territory | Warrior Publications.