NCERT Class 11 History Chapter 6 Displacing Indigenous Peoples

The NCERT Class 11 History Chapter 6 Displacing Indigenous Peoples PDF carries the full story of what European settlers did to the native peoples of North America and Australia. It is Theme 6 of Themes in World History, and the official file also opens with the Towards Modernisation section note and Timeline iv. The complete chapter for the 2026-27 session is available below.

• Displacing Indigenous Peoples is Theme 6 and runs from page 135 to page 152 of the printed book, with the section opener and Timeline iv sitting ahead of it from page 123.
• The chapter covers roughly 1497 to 1999, from John Cabot reaching Newfoundland to Australia's National Sorry Day.
• It carries eight dated boxes, four activities and six exercise questions, split into Answer in Brief and Answer in a Short Essay.

Every name, date and quotation on this page is taken straight from the official NCERT Displacing Indigenous Peoples chapter for the 2026-27 session, checked line by line against the printed reprint.

What the Displacing Indigenous Peoples Class 11 PDF Contains, Section by Section

NCERT builds this theme as two halves that mirror each other: North America first, then Australia. Knowing which half holds which name is the fastest way to answer a question without rereading the whole file.

Towards Modernisation: the Section Opener That Comes Before the Chapter

The downloadable file does not begin with the chapter. It begins with the short section note titled Towards Modernisation, which introduces the last part of the book. Most students skip it, and it is the cheapest context you can pick up in ten minutes.

• Two developments created the setting for what is called modernisation: the Industrial Revolution, and a series of political revolutions that turned subjects into citizens, beginning with the American Revolution of 1776 to 1781 and the French Revolution of 1789 to 1794.
• Britain was the world's first industrial nation, and for a long time its path was treated as the model. Historians now argue that each country drew on the experience of others without reproducing any single model.
• In Britain coal and cotton textiles came first and railways began the second stage. In Russia, which industrialised much later, railways and heavy industry appeared in the very first phase.
• The opener already gives away the heart of Theme 6: the settlers bought and sold everything, including land and water, while the natives asked how anyone could buy the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water.
• It also separates civic nationalism, which defines nationhood by citizenship, from ethnic and religious nationalism, which defines a people by language, religion or tradition.

Timeline iv follows, covering about 1700 to 2000 in four paired columns. Its Americas and Australia column is the one to memorise for this theme: the Trail of Tears of 1838, the first British convicts shipped to Botany Bay in 1788, Matthew Flinders naming Australia between 1801 and 1803, the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840 followed by Maori uprisings from 1844 to 1888, and voting rights for women in New Zealand in 1893.

Displacing Indigenous Peoples Explained on Video

Source: Magnet Brains on YouTube

European Imperialism and the Names Europeans Gave the New World

The chapter opens by sorting out what kind of empire is being discussed. The American empires of Spain and Portugal did not expand after the seventeenth century. From then on France, Holland and England extended their trading activities and set up colonies in America, Africa and Asia, and Ireland was virtually a colony of England because its landowners were mostly English settlers.

• Profit drove people to establish colonies, but the nature of control varied sharply from place to place.
• In South Asia, trading companies such as the East India Company turned themselves into political powers, defeated local rulers, annexed territory, kept the older administrative system, collected taxes from landowners, then built railways, dug mines and set up plantations.
• In Africa, Europeans traded on the coast except in South Africa, and only in the late nineteenth century did they move into the interior, after which some European countries agreed among themselves to divide Africa up.
• The word settler is used for the Dutch in South Africa, the British in Ireland, New Zealand and Australia, and the Europeans in America. English was the official language in these colonies, with French also official in Canada.

The same box notes that the Geographical Dictionary lists over a hundred place names in the Americas and Australia that begin with the word New. That single detail makes a neat opening line for an answer on how colonisers renamed the land they took.

North America and Its Native Peoples Before the Europeans Arrived

North America extends from the Arctic Circle to the Tropic of Cancer and from the Pacific to the Atlantic. West of the Rocky Mountains lie the deserts of Arizona and Nevada and then the Sierra Nevada; to the east are the Great Plains, the Great Lakes, the valleys of the Mississippi and the Ohio, and the Appalachian Mountains. Forty per cent of Canada is covered with forests.

• The earliest inhabitants came from Asia over 30,000 years ago on a land bridge across the Bering Straits, and moved further south during the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago.
• The oldest artefact found in America, an arrow point, is 11,000 years old. The population began to grow about 5,000 years ago when the climate became more stable.
• They lived in bands in villages along river valleys, ate fish and meat, and grew vegetables and maize. Long journeys in search of bison became easier from the seventeenth century, when natives began riding horses bought from Spanish settlers.
• They killed only as many animals as they needed, produced no surplus, and therefore did not develop the kingdoms and empires seen in Central and South America.
• Control of land was largely not an issue. Goods were obtained not by buying them but as gifts, and formal alliances and friendships were a central tradition. Wampum belts of coloured shells sewn together were exchanged after a treaty was agreed.
• Many languages were spoken but none were written down. Time was believed to move in cycles, each tribe passed on its own account of its origins, and the people could read the land the way literate people read written texts.

William Macleish, quoted in the chapter from The Day before America, writes that on the day before the Europeans arrived people spoke in more than a hundred tongues and lived by every possible combination of hunting, fishing, gathering, gardening and farming. Learn that line: it is the perfect opening for exercise question 1.

Encounters with Europeans: Fish, Furs and the Terms of Trade

In the seventeenth century, European traders reached the north coast of North America after a difficult two month voyage and were relieved to find the native peoples friendly and welcoming. Unlike the Spanish in South America, who were overwhelmed by gold, these adventurers came to trade in fish and furs, and the natives, who were expert hunters, helped them willingly.

• Further south along the Mississippi, the French found that natives held regular gatherings to exchange handicrafts unique to a tribe and food items not available elsewhere.
• In exchange for local products, Europeans gave blankets, iron vessels used in place of clay pots, guns that supplemented bows and arrows, and alcohol.
• Alcohol was new to the natives and they became addicted to it, which suited the Europeans because it let them dictate the terms of trade. The Europeans, in turn, picked up an addiction to tobacco.
• The chapter also prints a passage from a 1986 talk by Lee Brown, in which the Hopis, waiting for brothers who would come as turtles across the land, saw the Spanish Conquistadores in armour, extended a hand and were given a trinket instead of a handshake.

Mutual Perceptions: the Noble Savage, Wordsworth, Jefferson and Washington Irving

In the eighteenth century, western Europeans defined a civilised people in terms of literacy, an organised religion and urbanism. By that test the natives of America appeared uncivilised. The chapter then lines up four European voices that disagree with one another, and comparing them is exactly what Activity 1 asks for.

• The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau admired such people as untouched by the corruptions of civilisation. The popular term was the noble savage.
• The English poet William Wordsworth described them as living amid wilds where fancy has small liberty, meaning that people living close to nature had only limited powers of imagination and emotion.
• Thomas Jefferson, third President of the USA and a contemporary of Wordsworth, spoke of an unfortunate race that had justified extermination, words that would cause a public outcry today.
• Washington Irving, younger than Wordsworth and the only one of the four who had actually met native people, wrote that among themselves they were great mimics, and that white men were prone to treat them as little better than animals.

The economic misunderstanding sat underneath all of this. To the natives, goods exchanged with Europeans were gifts given in friendship. To the Europeans they were commodities to be sold for profit in Europe at prices that changed year by year with supply. The natives had no sense of a market in faraway Europe, were puzzled when the same goods fetched very different returns, and were saddened by the greed that led traders to slaughter hundreds of beavers. Many native folk tales mocked Europeans as greedy and deceitful, but because they were told as imaginary stories, it was only much later that the Europeans understood the references.

The Native Peoples Lose their Land: the Cherokee Case and the Trail of Tears

Once the traders came the settlers, from the seventeenth century onwards, including Protestants persecuted in Catholic countries and Catholics persecuted where Protestantism was official. While land was vacant this caused no conflict. Then the Europeans moved inland near native villages and used iron tools to cut down forests for farms.

• Canada and the United States came into existence at the end of the eighteenth century, occupying only a fraction of their present area. The USA bought land in the south from France in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and Alaska from Russia, and won much of the south from Mexico by war. It did not occur to anyone that the consent of the natives living there should have been asked.
• Migrants came from Britain and France as younger sons who would inherit no property, then in waves from Germany, Sweden and Italy. People from Poland liked the prairie grasslands because they recalled the steppes of home. Rice and cotton were introduced because they could not grow in Europe and so sold well there.
• Wolves and mountain lions were hunted to extinction to protect the huge farms, and settlers felt entirely secure only after the invention of barbed wire in 1873.
• The southern climate was judged too hot for Europeans to work outdoors, so plantation owners bought slaves in Africa. The Civil War of 1861 to 1865 ended slavery, though segregation in schools and public transport was ended only in the twentieth century.
• In Canada the more urgent problem was the French settlers' demand for autonomous political status, solved only by the Confederation of 1867.

The Georgia episode is the case study to memorise. Officials argued that the Cherokee tribe was governed by state laws but could not enjoy the rights of citizens, even though the Cherokees had made more effort than any other native people to learn English and understand the American way of life.

1. In 1832 the US Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the Cherokees were a distinct community occupying its own territory in which the laws of Georgia had no force, and that they had sovereignty in certain matters.
2. President Andrew Jackson, who had a reputation for fighting economic and political privilege, refused to honour the judgment and ordered the army to evict the Cherokees and drive them to the Great American Desert.
3. Of the 15,000 people forced to go, over a quarter died along the Trail of Tears.

Those who took native land justified it by saying the natives did not use it to the maximum, were lazy because they did not make goods for the market, and had no interest in learning English or dressing correctly. They deserved to die out, it was argued. A visiting Frenchman wrote that primitive man will disappear with the primitive animal. Natives were pushed westward onto land said to be theirs in perpetuity, then moved again whenever lead, gold or oil was found, and finally locked into small reservations that were often land they had no earlier connection with. The US army crushed a series of rebellions from 1865 to 1890, and the Metis, people of native European descent, revolted in Canada between 1869 and 1885.

Tip: the reply of Chief Seattle to the President in 1854 is the most quotable passage in the theme. He asked how anyone could buy or sell the sky or the warmth of the land, said every part of the earth was sacred to his people, and called the water in the streams not just water but the blood of his ancestors. One line from it lifts any source based answer.

Activity 2 asks you to comment on this pair of columns. The point the table makes is that the native share collapsed in the USA while it remained the largest single group in Spanish America, which is also the fastest way to answer exercise question 1.

The Gold Rush, the Railways and the Growth of Industries

Traces of gold were found in California in the 1840s, and the resulting Gold Rush brought thousands of eager Europeans hurrying to America to make a quick fortune. That rush pulled the railways across the continent.

• Thousands of Chinese workers were recruited to build the lines. The railway of the USA was completed by 1870 and that of Canada by 1885.
• Andrew Carnegie, a poor immigrant from Scotland who became one of the first millionaire industrialists in the USA, said the old nations creep on at a snail's pace while the Republic thunders on at the speed of an express.
• Industry in North America grew for reasons unlike those in England. There it was small peasants losing land to big farmers and moving to factories; here it was the need to manufacture railway equipment and machinery that made large-scale farming easier.
• In 1860 the USA was an undeveloped economy. In 1890 it was the leading industrial power in the world.
• By 1890 the bison had almost been exterminated, ending the hunting life the natives had followed for centuries. In 1892 continental expansion was complete, the frontier was gone, and within a few years the USA was setting up its own colonies in Hawaii and the Philippines.

Set that against the constitutional half of the story. The democratic spirit had been the rallying cry of the settlers in the 1770s and the constitution protected the individual's right to property, yet both the vote and the right to property were only for white men. Daniel Paul, a Canadian native, pointed out in 2000 that Thomas Paine used the Indians as models of how society might be organised, and argued from this that native Americans by their example sowed the seeds of the long movement towards democracy in Europe. Karl Marx, quoted in the margin, called the American frontier the last positive capitalist utopia.

The Winds of Change in the USA and Canada, 1928 to 1982

Things began to improve only from the 1920s, and the chapter tracks the change through four documents. Weak answers stop at the Trail of Tears; a full answer carries the story to 1982.

In the 1950s and 1960s both governments had hoped that ending all special provisions would make the natives join the mainstream, meaning adopt European culture. The natives did not want this. Today, though far fewer in number than in the eighteenth century, they have asserted the right to their own cultures and, particularly in Canada, to their sacred lands, in a way their ancestors in the 1880s could not have done.

Australia: Dreamtime, Terra Nullius and the Children Who Were Taken Away

The Australian half of the chapter mirrors the American half but begins nearly 300 years later. The aborigines, a general name for a number of different societies, began to arrive over 40,000 years ago from New Guinea, which was then joined to Australia by a land bridge. In their own traditions they did not come to Australia at all but had always been there, and the past centuries are called the Dreamtime, in which the distinction between past and present is blurred.

• In the late eighteenth century there were between 350 and 750 native communities, each with its own language. Even today 200 of those languages are spoken.
• The Torres Strait Islanders of the north are a separate group of indigenous people, believed to have migrated from elsewhere. Together the two groups made up 2.4 per cent of Australia's population in 2005.
• Initial reports from Captain Cook and his crew were enthusiastic about the friendliness of the natives. Feeling reversed sharply when Cook was killed by a native, not in Australia but in Hawaii, and that single incident was used to justify later violence.
• Nearly 90 per cent of the native peoples died in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by exposure to germs, by the loss of their lands and resources, and in battles against the settlers.
• Most early settlers were convicts deported from England who, once their jail term ended, could live free in Australia on condition that they never returned to Britain. Having no other way to make a life, they felt no hesitation about ejecting natives from land they took for cultivation.
• Development was narrower than in America: vast sheep farms and mining stations, then vineyards and wheat farming. One name suggested for the new capital in 1911 was Woolwheatgold. It was finally called Canberra, from kamberra, a native word meaning meeting place.
• Some natives worked on farms in conditions little different from slavery. Chinese immigrants then supplied cheap labour, as in California, until unease about depending on non-white labour led to bans. Until 1974 there was a government policy to keep non-white people out.

The turn came in 1968, when a lecture by the anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner called The Great Australian Silence named the silence of historians about the aborigines. From the 1970s came a real effort to understand natives not as anthropological curiosities but as communities with distinct cultures. Henry Reynolds put the question in the title of his book Why Weren't We Told?, condemning the habit of writing Australian history as though it began with Cook's discovery. University departments, galleries of native art and enlarged museums followed, and from 1974 multiculturalism became official policy.

The chapter also prints Two Dreamtimes by Judith Wright, who lived from 1915 to 2000 and was a champion of the rights of the Australian aborigines. The poem was written for Oodgeroo Noonuccal and speaks of the dark children she was not allowed to play with.

The word terra nullius, meaning land belonging to nobody, is the single most important term in the Australian half. Australia, unlike the USA, Canada and New Zealand, had no treaties with the natives formalising the takeover of land, so the government simply termed the whole continent terra nullius. The forcible removal of children of mixed descent from their native relatives, known outside the textbook as the Stolen Generations, is the injustice the National Enquiry and Sorry Day answer.

Exercises at the End of Displacing Indigenous Peoples and What Each One Tests

Six questions are printed at the end, four under Answer in Brief and two under Answer in a Short Essay. Four activities sit inside the chapter margins. The table below shows where each answer is hiding.

Common Mistakes Students Make in the Displacing Indigenous Peoples Chapter

Student Feedback on the Displacing Indigenous Peoples Chapter

How to Use the Displacing Indigenous Peoples PDF in a Three Block Revision Plan

This theme is two parallel stories with a large number of dates, so the order you read it in matters more than the hours you give it. Three sittings are enough.

1. Block 1, about 45 minutes. Read the six exercise questions first, then read from the chapter opening to the end of Mutual Perceptions. Mark every name and date as you go.
2. Block 2, about 45 minutes. Read The Native Peoples Lose their Land through to the end of the Winds of Change section on North America, and copy out the Chief Seattle passage in your own words.
3. Block 3, about 40 minutes. Read the Australia section end to end, write out the four closing decisions from 1974 to 1999 by hand, then attempt Answer in Brief 4 without looking back at the PDF.

Tip: keep one quotation ready from each of the four source boxes, Lee Brown on the Hopis, Washington Irving, Chief Seattle and the Sydney description from Creating a Nation. A single quoted line noticeably lifts a source based answer.

How the Chapter 6 PDF Connects to the Themes Around It

Displacing Indigenous Peoples is not a standalone theme. It opens the final section of the book, and the chapter on either side of it is scheduled as an NCERT Book PDF in exactly the same format as this page.

Themes in World History Chapters Available in NCERT Book PDF Format

Every link below opens the official NCERT chapter file for the 2026-27 session, in the same format as the Displacing Indigenous Peoples download on this page.

Displacing Indigenous Peoples Class 11 History Chapter 6 NCERT Book PDF FAQs