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Intertribal Conflict Myth

Indigenous violence in Africa, America and Australia - ancient tribal conflicts or colonial divide and conquer strategies?

Mar 6, 2007

Colonial governments create and ignore intertribal conflicts, perpetuating the myth of chaotic, violent savagery in the indigenous world.

Colonial myths about traditional intertribal warfare allow the west to justify their theft of land and native genocide as “natural” and even benevolent. Fostering these conflicts is a good way to clear native people away without getting your hands dirty.

Traditional indigenous warfare involves testing warrior skills, intelligence and courage, rather than developing increasingly murderous technologies. These modern tools of destruction have turned warriors into mass-murderers around the world. And when the genocide occurs, the world turns its back, dismissing the killing as “ancient intertribal conflict”.

It was thus with Rwanda. The Tutsis had been elevated to a false position of power by Belgian colonists, based on the perception that they had more Caucasian-looking features than the Hutus. This made enemies of two groups who had traditionally coexisted without conflict.

When the massacre came, over a million Tutsis were hacked up with machetes in 24 hours. The world could have stopped it, but they stood by, because America wanted to see French interests in the region extinguished. They justified their inaction with that phrase “ancient intertribal conflict”. It seems this is the one aspect of aboriginal business that the outside world does not interfere with (well, aside from creating the conflict in the first place).

These unnatural conflicts have always been created by non-indigenous people. Even in America, war between Native American tribes began when people were removed from their land, and suddenly had to compete with other tribes for space to exist. For example, the Indian Removal Act in Kansas saw forty different tribes moved into one small area, where they of course began to act out the colonial myth of “ancient tribal conflicts” to compete for survival.

We see the ongoing legacy of this myth in our own remote Indigenous communities in Australia. In many places the missionaries and police elevated certain families, clans and language groups to the top of an alien hierarchy, usually based on ideas of “racial superiority” due to certain groups having mixed with European or Islander peoples. These families still dominate communities today, based on such racist colonial criteria. Naturally, this breeds resentment and conflict that builds to violent clashes in the Aboriginal community.

This is dismissed once again as “ancient tribal conflict” perpetuating victim-blaming discourses about Aboriginal genetic and cultural deficit (eg. “They have always been a violent people – it’s in their blood”) and thus excusing the horrors of European invasion, which suddenly seems benevolent by comparison.

The copyright of the article Intertribal Conflict Myth in Aboriginal Rights is owned by Tyson Yunkaporta. Permission to republish Intertribal Conflict Myth in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.