Indigenous Peoples and the Capitalist World System: Researching, Knowing, and Promoting Social Justice

Asafa Jalata

University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA.

DOI: 10.4236/sm.2013.32023                

Abstract

This paper explores the major consequences of the expansion of the European-dominated capitalist world system, colonial terrorism, and continued subjugation for indigenous Americans, Australians, and Africans between the late fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Western powers as well as most of the descendants of European colonialists in Europe, the Americas, Australia, and in Africa and their regional and local collaborators deny or forget or minimize the crimes committed against indigenous peoples and claim that their ancestors spread modernity and civilization around the world. Not recognizing these crimes and ignoring or forgetting or minimizing them have far reaching consequences for humanity and raise moral and ethical issues for the validity of modern civilization that claims to promote the principles of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, democracy, and social justice. The commitment to these principles and truly promoting them require reevaluating the past and present mistakes in the modern world system to openly and honestly debate them and seek correct and urgent solutions for the surviving indigenous peoples who are still suffering from state terrorism, massive human rights violations, dispossession of resources and rights, absolute poverty, disease, and illiteracy.

Keywords

Indigenous Peoples; Global Capitalism; Colonialism; State Terrorism; Genocide; Dispossession; Social Justices; Human Rights Violations, Indigenous Movements; Human Rights

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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