Minimal Group Paradigm / All human beings are predisposed to form in-groups and out-groups and to respond to other beings based on these self-created and sometimes trivial distinctions. / Native people throughout the world have been categorized as “the other”.
Social Positionality / Human beings tend to draw distinctions not only in terms of in-group and out-group (minimal group paradigm), but also in terms of dominance and subordination. Social positionality has objective and subjective dimensions and has implications regarding knowledge construction in determining reality and truth. / European colonialists constructed social reality through education, religion and government policy in such a way as to justify and perpetuate their position of power.
Social Dominance Theory / Systems of dominance and subordination are placed in an evolutionary context and such group-based arrangements have been ever-present and inevitable. / Whites in the colonialized world established a set of legitimizing myths that characterized Indigenous people as infidels, heathens, savages and uncivilized.
Privilege and Penalty / Systems of social dominance are characterized by differential distribution of rewards and punishments to individuals not on the basis of individual worth but solely as a function of group membership. / White hegemony* embedded in systems of privilege and penalty further legitimized and exacerbated the subordinate position of Indigenous people.
* Hegemonic groups – those that tend to be disproportionately represented at the higher positions of authority within social institutions