States may contract by treaty’ (in Billington 1974: 580). Natives should
be treated instead as individuals and trained to assume the responsibilities of
citizenship. Measures taken to ensure this were the opening of schools in
reservations and the introduction of the principle of private ownership of
land in reservations. In Canada, no similar decision to stop treating natives as
nations was taken, although many treaties negotiated throughout the nine-
teenth century were systematically breached by the whites, and the extermin-
ation of the bison on which the First Nations depended led them to poverty,
alienation and, in some cases, extinction. If in 1815 they constituted aWfth of
the total population, by 1911 their total number had halved to just over
100,000 (Porter 1999: 533).
Internal colonialism also occurred in colonies such as South Africa and
Australia. Despite the peculiarities of each historical process, both indicate a
trend towards frontier expansion and appropriation by the whites of native
lands. Processes of expulsion, segregation, and extermination took place and
entire native populations were compelled to change their lifestyles and be-
come part of the underclass of the capitalist state. It was believed to be a moral
and even biological imperative for the superior races to emancipate other
races by encouraging change and civilizing them, and it was considered that
the assistance they needed for this could only be received through imperial
rule. South Africa, a seventeenth-century Dutch colony occupied by Britain in
1805, slowly saw the Zulu kingdoms fall, powerless in the face of the Voor-
trekkers’—the white explorers’—and the white settlers’Wrearms. The aboli-
tion of slavery in 1828 led many Boers—South Africans of Dutch descent, also
known as Afrikaners—to move northwards, displacing the native inhabitants
of the country in their way. In contrast to the relatively amicable terms that
Zulu agriculturalists and Bushmen had enjoyed until then, the Boers’ inXex-
ible attitude caused trouble between both native groups (Vinnicombe 1976:
ch. 2). From the 1860s the discoveryWrst of diamonds and then of gold
encouraged the British to impose direct rule on coastal areas from Namibia
round to Mozambique. After the Anglo-Boer War, the Union of South Africa
was formed in 1910. The need for unskilled labour led the government to
impose taxes and to compel Africans to work in order to have cash to pay
them. The defeat of the Bambatha Rebellion in 1906 resulted in an increase of
African men working in the mines. Blacks—especially Zulus—joined the
ranks of the lower-status class in South African society. The unwillingness
of Bushmen to integrate in the capitalist system meant either their retreat
towards areas to the north, their imprisonment or extermination by the white
settlers.
Similar processes occurred in other settler colonies or ex-colonies such as
Australia (Evanset al. 1975). The independence of the United States in 1776
284 Colonial Archaeology