Reflecting on a “Human” Existence Lived Under and Subject to Domination

A View-from-the Shore Interpretation of the Word Human

I’d like to create an analogy. Suppose I want to become a member of a particular fraternal order. Suppose the leadership of the organization tells me, “To become a member of our order, you must do three things.” And after they informed me of the three steps which needed to be taken to become a full-fledged member of their order, I then start “becoming” a member. And after I have finished the process, I am now a member of their order.

Because my membership was the result of having performed required actions, those actions are folded into the membership. And if I say “I am a member of Fraternal Order __, those actions are integral to the Order and my membership.

Now let’s apply the analogy. Suppose I am a descendant of Native ancestors that the invading Christian Europeans of long ago considered to be either not human at all, or only partially human. And imagine the Christian Europeans decided that only when our ancestors followed certain steps of a brutal “civilizing” process would they then be undergoing a process of “becoming” human.

Logically, in the context of the above paragraph, it makes sense to say that the Christian Europeans of long ago required our ancestors to undergo a “humanizing” process. It also makes sense that the steps of the process of “humanizing” our ancestors ought to be included in the definition of the term “human.”

Let’s specify why the colonizers considered our ancestors to not be fully “human.” Christian European colonizers judged them to be lacking certain things: 1) They had never been baptized; 2) They did not have Christian names; 3) They were living free – i.e., not subject to Christian European control [domination].

It’s important to note that the Christian Europeans considered our Native ancestors to be undergoing a “humanizing” process through being forcibly compelled to live subject to Christian European domination!

So, in the context of the above explanation, the only Native people who would be thought of as living a “human” existence were the ones who had been baptized, who had been given a Christian name, and who had been forced to live under and subject to Christian European control. “Humans” in this context would be limited to those Native people who had been subjected to the brutal requirements of what, in the invading colonizers’ view, constitutes a full-fledged “human” existence.

From this we can discern that “human development” meant the steps of a forcible process needed to take homo sapiens labeled “barbarous” and “convert” them into full-fledged “human” beings: 1) baptize them, 2) assign each of them a Christian name, and 3) deprive them of their free existence by forcing them to live under a system of Christian ecclesiastical control by the Church, and civil control by the State [of domination].

Why is this important? Well, for one thing, it provides us with a more complete insight into what the word “human” means in this context. It shows the pattern of abuse that results in a “human” being in a “human” society that could be thoroughly controlled.

In the mid 1800s, Senator James Harlan of Iowa said of the Indians: “If they refuse to merge into and become part of the superior [dominating] race, they must necessarily be destroyed. It is a law of humanity.” His statement reveals how the claimed right of domination is part of an obscured meaning of “human” and “humanity.”

The term “superior” means “affecting or assuming superiority; arrogant, domineering.” The word “domineering” takes us to, “that [which] domineers; tyrannical.” “See dominate,” meaning “to predominate over; rule; control.”

Senator Harlan’s words are accurately restated as follows: “If they [the Native peoples] will not merge into and become part of the dominating race, they must necessarily be put out of existence by being annihilated, it is a law of the superior race called ‘humanity’.”

Within the society of a dominating race, even the individual members of that “race” are living in the context of an existence of domination. This is what can be accurately termed the “master-slave” paradigm, or the “domination-subordination” paradigm.

In the context of the English language, we as homo sapiens have been mentally conditioned to believe that the term “human” is a positive term. We have “human” potential. We have “human” rights. Our workplace very likely has a “human” resources department. We all have a “human” condition. We want to see people behave toward others in a “humane” manner, meaning with compassion and sensitivity.

Yet pretty much everywhere we turn within the system of reality called “human” we see overwhelming evidence of domination, a lack of compassion, and outright cruelty. And if we begin to ask questions about such things, we are likely to hear someone respond, “Well, that’s just human nature.”

But given that “nature” is defined as “essential character, constitution,” and “innate or inherent character,” isn’t it a strange contradiction to claim that the word “human” is a positive term while also admitting that the domination and cruelty that we see continuously inflicted on millions of people around the globe is a result of the very nature of what it means to be “human”?

Here's a point I’m attempting to communicate: There is a dark and hidden dimension of the term “human” that has escaped detection because the English language has kept it out of focus. Let’s think about this: evidence of domination, ruthlessness, and horrific cruelty is described in English as “inhumane,” meaning “not human, lacking humanity,” also, “unlike what is normally human.” These meanings are contradicted, however, by the idea that such behavior is “human nature,” and that it is a “law of humanity” to destroy Indians for not being willing to merge themselves into a dominating human race.

Commentator Ann Coulter was evidently expressing this spirit of the “law of humanity” when she recently posted on the platform X: “We didn’t k*ll enough [American] Indians.”

It strikes me as a contradiction to claim that human cruelty and domination were required to make “barbarous” peoples “human” and that heartless behavior was required to “civilize” them and their children into a supposedly positive form of existence, or system of reality, called “human.”

Our Native peoples did not use corporeal punishment on our children. They considered the beating of children a form of mental illness. They believed that when you beat children, you beat badness into them.

The domination system of the Christian Europeans forcibly took an estimated 85 percent of all Native children away from their loved ones and families and put them into “lock-down” institutions that subjected them to intense and sadistic cruelty. That was part of the process of “merging” them into the domination system of a “superior” dominating race. In the contexts we’re talking about, civilization is defined in terms of violence: “the forcing of a cultural pattern on a population to which it [that pattern] is foreign”. Why is the result, which is called “civilizing the Indian,” considered a “positive” outcome?

In the book Massacre (1931) Robert Gessner provides testimony delivered to a 1929 U.S. congressional subcommittee of the Committee on Indian Affairs pursuant to Senate Resolution 341 p. 30. The testimony recounts some of the brutality inflicted on Native children in the so-called boarding “schools.” In a chapter titled “Flogging Children” we find a statement made by Mr. H. J. Russell:

“I have seen Indian boys chained to their beds at night for punishment. I have seen them thrown in cellars under the building, which the superintendent called a jail. I have seen their shoes taken away from them and they then forced to walk through the snow to the barn to help milk. I have seen them whipped with a hemp rope, also a water hose. Forced to do servants work for employees and superintendent without compensation under the guise of industrial employment and education.”

W. Carson Ryan, Jr., who was one of the investigators of the conditions in those institutions, stated.

“The superintendent showed me a dungeon in the basement previously used for girls, up to his coming two years ago. ‘I never locked up any Indian child yet, and I don’t intend to begin,’ he said. The dungeon is 18 by 8, absolutely dark. Girls told the superintendent of two or three of them sleeping there on mattresses and rats crawling over them at night. Their food was bread and water. Brick walls showed where the girls had worked holes through and escaped.” The “civilizing” process to make children fully “human” under domination can be harsh.

This kind of behavior toward children is evidently endemic to Western society. In the opening paragraph of his Introduction to A History of the Rod (1890), Reverend William Cooper refers to the fifty-year career of a schoolmaster who estimated that he had beaten five hundred thousand children with a “cane” (“canings”) during those five decades and issued another one hundred and twenty-four thousand floggings. And that was in just one school. This was part of the “civilizing” process of “coercing” children into “human” “obedience” to a system of domination.

The canings and floggings are evidence of the schoolmaster’s assumed right of domination—examples of cruel behavior inflicted on the children to make them fully “human” so that they could learn how to live obediently in a religious and civil society [of domination]. We need to learn how to focus on this dark side of the “human” experience so we can work on an antidote.

Steven Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape) is the founder and director of the Indigenous Law Institute and Original Nations Advocates. He is the author of Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Fulcrum, 2008) (Chicago Review Press), and co-producer of “The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code” (2015).