We live in a day and age where that which is seen as native and indigenous is celebrated and that which is seen as a settler or colonizer is disparaged. This ingrained bias is so intense and widespread that it even influences the world of rap beefs (perhaps a surprising interest of mine), where in a recent diss track Kendrick Lamar took Canadian pop-rapper Drake to task for being “not a colleague, but a colonizer,” as if that was a bad thing. Being a colonizer is, at least in the corrupt world of Academia and those worlds influenced by its social prestige, as being a sort of original sin that cannot be washed clean except through paying ransom and blackmail to supposedly oppressed subaltern colonized peoples, but is this just? Today I propose to address and at least outline the answer to the question of whether or not it is a bad thing to be a colonizer. I propose that it is not only not a bad thing, but it is inevitable, and that moreover everything that is viewed as native was originally a colonizer of some kind.

Let me say that again, because it bears repeating. Everything that we view as a native eventually, if we look at it long enough, came from something and somewhere else. Nothing is sui generis, nothing is autochronous. Everything that is happens to be a colonist, a colonizer, and a settler. This is true no matter what contemporary worldview we adopt. For though the founding myths of many peoples view themselves as springing directly from the soil, whether we look into the picture of faith, which tells us that everything was formed by the ultimate outsider (namely God) and spread–sometimes not by choice–to where it now resides, sometimes subject to exile as a judgment, or whether we look at DNA evidence which shows the evidence of migration of peoples through their genes, or whether people hold to an evolutionary perspective by which everything that exists comes from some previous life form that existed, whatever base we start with involves the admission that we all came from something else and somewhere else. We all have a history. If we have survived, we have moved beyond what we once were in some fashion and become something else. To remain stagnant in a world subject to change is to become extinct. Some level of adaptability is required to survive, and that adaptability involves colonizing something, spreading beyond what is comfortable and familiar to develop new ranges, new capabilities, and new perspectives. Growth and death are the only options we have, and to grow is to colonize.

That this is true on a cultural level is so obvious that it scarcely needs to be defended. A colony is but a mobile part of an existing culture that travels in search of a less crowded and hospitable home, whether it comes from a human civilization or a coral reef or any other group of living things. That this is true on a biological level is so trivially true that anyone who knows anything about natural history is aware of such phenomena as the spread of plants across the surface of the earth and the eventual colonization of earth’s land surface by successive animal kingdoms. The spread of human beings over the earth is similarly viewed as an article of faith whether one comes from a biblical perspective or an out-of-Africa perspective that views the Rift Valley of East Africa as the cradle of successive waves of colonizing and settling hominid species/groups. It seems cruel to point out that Africans were, in the view of evolutionists, the original colonizers, in spreading beyond Africa into first the Middle East, and then around the rest of the world, and that the colonization of Australia, New Zealand, and the Americas had disastrous effects for the megafauna in those places due to extinction or habitat destruction that left the people in those areas somewhat isolated and backwards when they met those who colonized them, namely my own ancestors from Western Europe.

There can be little serious debate, to anyone who looks at the spread of people or of anything else over time, that colonization is what brought all of us to where we are. Ultimately, no one is a native if you go back far enough. Moreover, there are similar patterns to colonization that are seen nowadays as a bad thing, to such an extent that many people who wish to privilege the place of those viewed as “natives” or “first people” or “indigenous peoples” often have to deny the unpleasant reality that their own arrival in their supposed “homelands” was marked by the destruction of the life that was there before (especially the largest animals) and often by an immense transformation of the local flora to support the preferred lifestyle of its settlers. Those who transformed an area have little cause to complain when other people come in from outside later on and transform it to their own tastes using their technology and expressing their own cultural values. What’s good for the first people is good for the more recent ones. If we are looking strictly at the justice of the deed, we all seek to recreate the world around us in our own image to make it less hostile and less alien and more familiar to us.

There is, of course, some difference between those who are viewed as natives and those who are most obviously not. The native has, over a long period of time and the development of a great deal of specific local knowledge and awareness, come to grips with the reality of the place where they have long resided. After having changed the original flora to suit their own background to create a blend between old and new and the destruction or at least near-eradication of those resources which were the easiest to obtain, a more intensive and sustainable use of the environment is required for such people to endure. It is this coming to terms with the constraints of one’s environment, with its particular qualities and patterns, is what it means to become a native of an area. The original exploitation of an area by outsiders who have discovered a land teeming with easily gathered resources changes with time into a careful stewardship of a land of limited resources whose ways and conditions are well-known and understood for the best interests of survival. We all come as colonizers, but just as we transform the land into our own image based on our own history and what we carry with us from where we come from, we are also transformed by the realities of where we go, so that we become something else with time, a blend between where we came from and what we found that represents a native synthesis, a mutual coming to terms with the realities of being planted from outside and the realities of where we have been planted.

This suggests that the antipathy towards those viewed as colonizers is merely a temporal bias that ignores the historical perspective. For a colonizer to survive, it must bring something from outside that allows it to prosper, be it new resources, social cohesion, an adaptability to fill unfilled niches, technology, proper attitudes and mindsets and superior cultural ways, and so forth. At first, colonizers tend to exaggerate the ease of life in the areas where they go, unaware of its patterns and limitations, but over time the difficulties of life in a given area lead the colonizer to better understand and appreciate the ways of their transformed land, and they learn how to adapt to its ways and preserve it so that not only may they enjoy it but that they may also pass down that enjoyment to generation after generation to follow. We have no choice but to begin as colonizers, and if we are to survive, we will have no choice but to become natives, or at least to survive and adapt enough so that our children or children’s children become natives after us, a task that occurs so easily that it takes hardly any time at all for people to feel that they have always belonged in a given place, and to deny that they were ever colonizers or settlers in the first place, but were always people who lived in harmony with the world around them. Perhaps if we can keep in mind that all people and indeed all things were once outsiders and strangers, we may be less hostile to those whom we think to be strangers and outsiders to us. To keep alive our own history of growth and change and colonizing gives us empathy to those who come after us, and will, God willing, become more like ourselves if given the time and space to do so.