 | |
| Author | Ronald Wright |
|---|---|
| Subjects | Colonisation |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin |
Publication date | 1992 |
| Pages | 320 |
| Award | Gordon Montador Award |
| ISBN | 0-395-56500-6 |
Stolen Continents is a 1992 non-fiction book by Ronald Wright that covers the colonial theft of land between 1492 and 1990. It specific focuses on activities directed towards the Maya, Inca, Aztec, Cherokee, and Iroquois peoples.
The book won the Gordon Montador Award in 1993.
Stolen Continents covers the period 1492 to 1990 and documents five examples of the colonial theft of land from Maya, Inca, Aztec, Cherokee, and Iroquois people. [1] [2] Wright breaks each example into three stages: initial contact, violent struggles, and modern resistance. [1] The book uses contemporary accounts from native peoples. [1]
The writer T. F. Rigelhof described the book as "remarkable" and "essential reading." [3] The archaeologist Brian M. Fagan was critical of what he saw as Wright's prioritisation of indigenous perspectives, which he claimed made the book unbalanced. [4]
Stolen Continents won the Gordon Montador Award in 1993. [5]
The prehistory of the Americas begins with people migrating to these areas from Asia during the height of an ice age. These groups are generally believed to have been isolated from the people of the "Old World" until the coming of Europeans in the 10th century from Iceland led by Leif Erikson and in 1492 with the voyages of Christopher Columbus.
During the Age of Discovery, a large scale European colonization of the Americas took place between about 1492 and 1800. Although the Norse had explored and colonized areas of the North Atlantic, colonizing Greenland and creating a short term settlement near the northern tip of Newfoundland circa 1000 CE, the later and more well-known wave by the European powers is what formally constitutes as beginning of colonization, involving the continents of North America and South America. During this time, several empires from Europe—primarily Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Russia, the Netherlands and Sweden—began to explore and claim the land, natural resources and human capital of the Americas, resulting in the displacement, disestablishment, enslavement, and in many cases, genocide of the indigenous peoples, and the establishment of several settler colonial states. Some formerly European settler colonies—including New Mexico, Alaska, the Prairies or northern Great Plains, and the "Northwest Territories" in North America; the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the Yucatán Peninsula, and the Darién Gap in Central America; and the northwest Amazon, the central Andes, and the Guianas in South America—remain relatively rural, sparsely populated and Indigenous into the 21st century. Russia began colonizing the Pacific Northwest in the mid-18th century, seeking pelts for the fur trade. Many of the social structures—including religions, political boundaries, and linguae francae—which predominate the Western Hemisphere in the 21st century are the descendants of the structures which were established during this period.
Spain began colonizing the Americas under the Crown of Castile and was spearheaded by the Spanish conquistadors. The Americas were invaded and incorporated into the Spanish Empire, with the exception of Brazil, British America, and some small regions of South America and the Caribbean. The crown created civil and religious structures to administer the vast territory. The main motivations for colonial expansion were profit through resource extraction and the spread of Catholicism through indigenous conversions.
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The Gordon Montador Award was a Canadian literary award, presented by the Writers' Trust of Canada to honour non-fiction writing on social issues. Created in 1991 in memory of book editor and publisher Gordon Montador, the award was presented until 1999, when it was superseded by a reorganization of the Writers' Trust Awards. The Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, presented for the first time in 2000, encompassed much of the same subject area; although the Cohen award was never formally stated by the organization to be an official replacement for the Montador award, no new winner was ever announced for the Montador award after the Cohen award was introduced.