Impacts of Colonization

The lives of Anishinabe people and the many nations that lived and prospered on Turtle Island. Its many inhabitants were forever changed by the so called "discovery" of our lands.  European arrival and eventual settlement by millions of Europeans coming to the "new world" not only changed the people who had always been here, the arrival changed the land and its relationships with the people and creatures who thrived and co-existed in harmony.

Over the course of 500 years, Turtle Island nations have experienced extinction or near extinction levels of population loss. The culture, heritage, language and traditional territories have been destroyed to a point that our future as strong, healthy and sustainable societies was put at great risk.

By 1914, 80% of the world had been colonized by European powers. Imperial Japan joined the group with its imperialist expansion in Asia. Every part of the world that was colonized, experienced significant losses of population due to disease, hunger, displacement, and socio-economic policies enacted by colonizers.

On Turtle Island, 55 million people, amounting to 95% of the pre-colonization population was eliminated after colonization.  Today, the population of RRAN is a mere 2,800 tribal members. If we had not experienced the brutality of colonization, our Nation would have over 40,000 tribal members! 

The population decline on Turtle Island was so severe that it caused a mini-ice age. Researchers at University College London found that the "Great Dying" — the massive loss of life that followed Christopher Columbus’ 1492 conquest of the Americas through genocide and the spread of disease — left roughly 56-million hectares of previously farmed land abandoned. As plants and forests took over previously farmed lands, the average temperature on Turtle Island dropped by 2 degrees Celsius.

The populations of the many nations on Turtle Island are small fractions of what they once had been. Colonization was a genocide event for our peoples. Tens of millions of ancestors were lost and today, we not only miss their contributions to our society, but we are also missing tens of millions of relations whose footstep will never fall on our sacred lands.

"My ancestors carried an ancient and an old language embedded into our way of life. Anishinaabemowin is a spiritual language. It is a sacred language. For many generations, Anishinaabemowin has flowed through the veins of my ancestors, and our language now flows in my veins. It will flow through the veins of many future generations. Anishinaabemowin is in our blood. It is in our DNA. Our culture is embedded in our languages in our ways of knowing and doing. Apijii kijii inaandagood chii Anishinaabemow wang is a great gift, an honour, and imperatively important that we speak our language." - Mary Maytwayashing

The wisdom of people from another land far away says that the "spirits of their ancestors are carried on the wings of language"

Colonization and the policies of colonizers intended to destroy the spirit and wisdom of our ancestors and our people by destroying our language. We were connected over time with each other and with how we maintained our way of life through our language and how it defined our relationships and our way of being and connecting with the world around us.

For the Anishinabe people and our Nation, the loss of identity and language re the primary cause of our people's suffering. Without Anishinabemowin remaining a part of our daily lives as the language of our families, our community and our Nation, mino-bimaadiziwin, the good life our ancestors sought has been taken away from us. Restoring the good life will need us to strengthen and restore Anishinabemowin as the sacred language that carries the spirit of our community and teaches us the wisdom and knowledge of our ancestors.

We have always been a people with a strong tradition of sharing history, knowledge and collective memory orally. Our stories passed on our knowledge across generations and each generation added its learning to our collective wealth. 

The loss of language interrupted our stories. At the same time, colonizers changed our history and substituted what they thought of us for what we know of ourselves. After colonization, we could no longer collect our stories and the loss of language made it impossible for us to pass on our knowledge to the next generation.

This is how we lost so much of our rich history and found ourselves defined by people who neither knew us nor knew our way of life.  Defining our future on our terms will require that we restore our past, our history, our heritage and our stories. This is how we will restore our place in our world and become able to pass on our way of knowing to future generations.