Tim Thielmann has served as chief of staff for Tara Armstrong and Dallas Brodie. He’s been doing the podcast rounds defending colonization, saying it was good for Indigenous Peoples.
He said that before Europeans arrived, Indigenous people had short lives, constant war, stone tools and cannibalism. Apparently, he learned this from early missionary diaries, although he did not say which ones.
Missionary diaries can be useful historical sources, but they were not neutral. Many missionaries came to convert Indigenous Peoples. They described Indigenous societies through Christian assumptions about sin, savagery and salvation. Portraying Indigenous people as lost, violent or uncivilized made mission work look necessary.
So which diaries, written by whom, for what audience and for what purpose?
Were some Indigenous nations at war? Yes. So was England. Were some societies violent? Yes. So was Europe, where people were burned, tortured, conquered, enslaved and executed in the name of kings, empires and God.
Did some Indigenous peoples hunt and gather using stone tools? Yes. That does not make them inferior. A tool should be judged by whether it works in its environment. Fish traps, canoes, medicines, controlled burns and agricultural systems were all technologies.
Low average life expectancy often reflects high infant and child mortality. It does not mean everyone died young. That was true in Europe too.
Colonization brought land theft, forced labour, disease, starvation policies, outlawed ceremonies, residential schools and children taken from their families.
When I say Europeans relied on Indigenous Peoples for survival, I am not guessing. Jacques Cartier’s account describes Indigenous knowledge saving his men from scurvy in 1536. The National Park Service states that the Powhatan provided food to starving English colonists at Jamestown. These were not helpless societies waiting to be saved.
Thielmann also said reserves were created to protect Indigenous people from gold miners. That ignores how the reserve system restricted Indigenous Peoples to small portions of their territories, made land available for settlers and imposed colonial control.
You do not prove colonialism was good by listing things Indigenous societies did not have. You judge colonialism by what it took: their land, their governments, their children, their languages and their freedom to decide their own future.
That was not help. That was conquest.
Thanks for being here. I hope you join our growing Substack community. We are still welcoming new members to our tribe.
