Hi, it was recommended to me to crosspost here, my apologies if my questions seem a little... Disjointed
I'm here because I'm seeking answers in regards to philosophical positions on the colonial genocides of the new worlds. My experience is specifically to Australia, and how the British took the land using methods well established from the colonisation of the Americas. The establishment of the day used scientific knowledge to dehumanise the traditional peoples, claiming land deemed unclaimed because it didn't have agriculture or roads upon it. Bands of "police" went on slaughtering sprees, massacring peoples in huge swaths of land, like the Forrest River Massacres.
This trauma, this injustice, is still in living memory, the there are still people alive today who were affected by the West Australian 1905 act or the 1945 Native Citizenship Act, if that's not enough The Stolen Generation is an even more recent black mark on my nation (Read the "Bringing them home Report, 1997"). It just keeps happening with the 2007 Northern Territory intervention and Don Dale Detention Centre, it's endless.
I suppose my question, if any, is how can we trust the values and positions of philosophers in the past 200 years (or longer for the Americas) if they knew thats what was happening? Who objected? Why were they ignored? Is this even a philosophical debate even though at it's core it's an issue of ethics? (At lease from where I'm standing). And why do we just keep doing it?
I suppose it all relates to Raphael Lemkin and the Armenian Genocide, "nobody is speaking about Armenia" is an oft quoted term for the reasoning behind the Holocaust. Silence is easy sometimes.
I'm going to query the assumption in your question that philosophers ignored these questions, and discuss British criticisms of colonialism and how some strands tried to do better, as illustrated in the context of British settlement of New Zealand (my home country, and I have some Maori ancestry).
For a start, colonial projects were criticised. For example Adam Smith, in 1776, in The Wealth of Nations, wrote a sweeping criticism of European imperialism, in his Book 5, Chapter VII: "On Colonies", including such phrases as:
At the particular time when these discoveries were made, the superiority of force happened to be so great on the side of the Europeans, that they were enabled to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remote countries.
And again:
Folly and injustice seem to have been the principles which presided over and directed the first project of establishing those colonies; the folly of hunting after gold and silver mines, and the injustice of coveting the possession of a country whose harmless natives, far from having ever injured the people of Europe, had received the first adventurers with every mark of kindness and hospitality.
(Note that this chapter also argues, convincingly I think, that the imperialism made the home country worse off, though obviously not as badly off as the colonised. It also includes a discussion of how Smith thinks Britain should treat its colonies in what would become the USA.)
Such criticisms of European imperialism were not entirely ignored. When British-Maori connections were growing in the early 19th century, one of the prompts for the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi (the founding treaty of New Zealand as a British settlement, signed between the British Crown and various Maori chieftains) was a desire to avoid a repeat of past atrocities. Claudia Orange, a NZ historian in her classic An illustrated history of the Treaty of Waitangi (1987), mentions UK Parliament official reports that were anti-colonial, a House of Lords select committee report in 1838, and a House of Commons select committee report that "emphasised that European contact for indigenous people had generally been calamitous." [Emphasis mine]. (Chapter 2).
A number of European missionaries to New Zealand and the British officers sent out to NZ, such as James Busby, or Governor Grey, were also aware of past atrocities and desired to avoid repeats. The NZ Historian Keith Sinclair says of Grey in The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography
Grey's greatest success as a colonial governor was probably his management of Maori affairs in the years 1845 to 1853. He gave every appearance of scrupulously observing the terms of the Treaty of Waitangi, and assured Maori that their rights to their land were fully recognised.
So why did the Treaty of Waitangi get signed at all? European and British settler-traders were getting increasingly involved in Maori affairs, and it was virtually impossible for the British to regulate this from the Australian colony in Sydney. On top of this, there were private plans for British settlement in NZ, most famously the New Zealand Company, led by William Wakefield sent off to purchase large quantities of land. The Treaty of Waitangi itself had its timing set by the New Zealand Company.
And why wasn't British settlement of New Zealand post the Treaty a symphony of beautiful harmony? Why do people repeatedly fail to live up to their ethical ideals? British governments in New Zealand were under pressure from European settlers wanting land from farming, while the British government in London was very far away and always distracted by other matters closer to home.
But, from the point of view of philosophy, European atrocities were criticised, and with strength enough to have filtered down to even the British House of Lords and House of Commons, along with British government officials.