'''Natal alienation''' is the estrangement or disconnection from historical memory which occurs by severing an individual from their kinship traditions, cultural heritage (including language and religion), and economic inheritance through experiences of social death. It creates the conditions in which an individual, now estranged from knowledge of their social heritage, can become a commodity defined by their relationship to systems and structures that often caused and benefit from their very alienation.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book|last=Hong|first=Grace Kyungwon|title=Death Beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference|publisher=University of Minnesota Press|year=2015|isbn=9781452945484|chapter=Blues Futurity and Queer Improvisation}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Feldman |first=Allen |url=https://www.bibliovault.org/BV.landing.epl?ISBN=9780226277332 |title=Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory |date=2015 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |isbn=978-0-226-27733-2 |pages=384 |language=en |doi=10.7208/chicago/9780226277479.001.0001}}</ref>
The term was coined by sociologist Orlando Patterson in reference to the conditions of African slaves through the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.<ref name=":0" /> The natally alienated individual is embodied in the colonized individual who has been forced to reject or forget their own histories, being born into a society which prevents them from participating in or knowing their traditions and conditions them to forget them.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Reparations: Interdisciplinary Inquiries|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=2007|isbn=9780199299911|pages=218–220}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book|last=Guenther|first=Lisa|title=Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives|publisher=University of Minnesota Press|year=2013|isbn=9780816686278|chapter=Fanon's Critical Phenomenology of Social Death}}</ref> It has been described as the inheritance of ''disinheritance<ref name=":0" />'' and an ''existential homelessness.''<ref>{{Cite book|last=Bohls|first=Elizabeth A.|title=Slavery and the Politics of Place: Representing the Colonial Caribbean, 1770–1833|publisher=Cambridge University Press|year=2014|isbn=9781316148150|pages=165}}</ref>
== Examples == American-born African enslaved people who were brought to the American colonies experienced high rates of natal alienation. Scholar Cornel West identifies that, while only 4.5% of all Africans imported to the "New World" arrived in North America, this percentage quadrupled "through an incredibly high rate of slave reproduction." As West identifies, this had the following result: "Second- and third-generation Africans in the USA made sense of and gave meaning to their predicament without an immediate relation to African worldviews and customs."<ref>{{Cite book|last=West|first=Cornel|title=Prophetic Fragments|publisher=William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company|year=1993|isbn=9780802807212|pages=161}}</ref>
Aboriginal Australians have been described as undergoing extreme forms of natal alienation. As Belinda Wheeler details, "successive removal policies have directly resulted in generations of mothers with 'no prototype' for transmitting the basics of mothering knowledge to their own children, let alone knowledge of traditional Aboriginal worldview, practices, and values."<ref>{{Cite book|last=Sepie|first=Amba J.|title=Sacred Inception: Reclaiming the Spirituality of Birth in the Modern World|publisher=Lexington Books|year=2018|isbn=9781498546706|pages=87}}</ref> Australia instituted policies in the twentieth century to "eliminate Aborigines through the eugenic expedient of 'breeding them white,'" which was standardized in all of its states by 1937.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Wolfe|first=Patrick|title=Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology|publisher=University of Michigan Press|year=2000|isbn=9780472087464|pages=199|chapter=White Man's Flour: The Politics and Poetics of Anthropological Discovery}}</ref>
The majority of the Indigenous peoples of California experienced natal alienation through the California Genocide by the end of the nineteenth century. Scholar Wendy Cheng writes that they "were reduced to naturally vanishing, picturesque figures in a sentimentalized history."<ref>{{Cite book|last=Cheng|first=Wendy|title=The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California|publisher=University of Minnesota Press|year=2013|isbn=9781452940274|chapter=Diversity on Main Street}}</ref>
Huanani-Kay Trask writes that natal alienation creates a psychological dependency for Indigenous peoples: "Generations become addicted to the worst cultural habits of colonial society which increases both, ignorance of, and alienation from the native culture...."<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Tsosie|first=Rebecca|date=2000|title=Sacred Obligations: Intercultural Justice and the Discourse of Treaty Rights|journal=UCLA Law Review|volume=47|pages=1615–72|via=Indigenous Rights}}</ref>
== References == <references /> Category:Colonialism Category:Slavery Category:Cultural genocide Category:Social rejection Category:Sociological terminology Category:Aftermath of genocides