NCERT Solutions for Class 11 History Chapter 6: Displacing Indigenous Peoples (NCERT 2026–27)
These Class 11 History Chapter 6 solutions cover Displacing Indigenous Peoples from Themes in World History, the NCERT textbook continued for the 2026–27 session. The chapter belongs to the section Towards Modernisation and tells the story of the native peoples of America and Australia — how, from the eighteenth century, European (and later Asian) settlers pushed the original inhabitants out of their lands, how the Gold Rush and industrialisation transformed these continents, and how, from the twentieth century onwards, indigenous communities won back rights to their cultures and sacred lands. Below you get step-by-step answers to every NCERT exercise question, clear notes on key terms, extra practice, 10 MCQs with a key, Assertion–Reason questions and FAQs.
Class: 11Subject: HistoryBook: Themes in World HistoryChapter: 6Theme: Towards ModernisationSession: 2026–27
Chapter 6, Displacing Indigenous Peoples, recounts the histories of the native peoples of North America and Australia after European settlement. The earliest inhabitants of North America had arrived from Asia over 30,000 years ago across the Bering Straits; the aborigines of Australia had lived there for more than 40,000 years. These peoples lived in small bands, hunting, fishing and farming only for their needs, and did not believe land could be ‘owned’ or commodified. From the seventeenth century European traders came for fish and furs, followed by settlers who cleared forests for farms. The chapter explains the clash of two notions of civilisation, the loss of native land through unfair treaties, force and broken promises (the Cherokee Trail of Tears, the doctrine of terra nullius in Australia), the impact of the Gold Rush and rapid industrialisation that made the USA the world’s leading industrial power by 1890, and the long struggle — from the 1920s onwards — through which native peoples finally won legal recognition of their cultures, treaty rights and sacred lands.
Key Terms & Concepts
Indigenous / native peoples: people belonging naturally to a place — here the original inhabitants of North America (native Americans / First Nations) and Australia (aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders) before European colonisation.
Settler colony: a colony in which large numbers of Europeans came to settle permanently and pushed out the native peoples, e.g. the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — unlike direct imperial control as in British India.
Trail of Tears: the forced march in 1838 of about 15,000 Cherokees, evicted from their land in the southern USA on the orders of President Andrew Jackson; over a quarter died on the way.
Reservations: small, fixed areas to which native peoples in the USA were confined (1825–58 onwards), often land with which they had no earlier connection.
The ‘frontier’: the shifting western boundary of European settlement in the USA; as it moved west the natives were forced to retreat. The frontier was declared ‘closed’ in 1892 when the land between the Pacific and Atlantic was fully divided into states.
Gold Rush: the rush of thousands of Europeans to California from the 1840s after gold was found; it spurred railway building (using Chinese labour) and industrial growth.
Terra nullius: Latin for ‘land belonging to nobody’ — the legal fiction by which the British claimed Australia without treaties. It was declared invalid by the Australian High Court in the Mabo case of 1992.
Dreamtime: the Australian aborigines’ understanding of the ancestral past, in which the distinction between past and present is blurred and the people had ‘always been there’.
Oral history: history recorded from people’s own spoken accounts; from the 1960s native peoples were encouraged to write or dictate their own histories.
Multiculturalism: official Australian policy from 1974 giving equal respect to native cultures and to the various immigrant cultures from Europe and Asia.
National Sorry Day: 26 May 1999, observed in Australia as a public apology for the ‘Stolen Generations’ — mixed-blood children forcibly separated from their families from the 1820s to the 1970s.
NCERT Exercise — Full Solutions
All questions below are reproduced verbatim from the NCERT textbook’s end-of-chapter Exercises. Answers are original, written in CBSE exam-ready style.
Answer in Brief
1. Comment on any points of difference between the native peoples of South and North America.
ANSWERThere were important differences between the native peoples of South and North America in the way they organised their societies and economies.Agriculture and surplus: In South and Central America the natives practised intensive agriculture, produced a surplus and built powerful, wealthy empires such as those of the Aztecs and Incas, with large cities, temples and gold. The natives of North America, by contrast, did not attempt extensive agriculture; they cultivated only for their own needs, hunted bison and fished, and produced no surplus.States and kingdoms: Because they had no surplus, the North American natives did not develop kingdoms and empires; they lived in small bands and villages along river valleys. The South American natives, with their surplus, developed kingdoms, empires and a tiered society.Attitude to land: The North Americans felt no need to ‘own’ land — control of land was generally not an issue and goods were exchanged as gifts rather than bought and sold. South American societies were more hierarchical and centralised.Numbers after colonisation: By 1820 the native population of the USA had fallen to about 0.6 million while whites numbered 9 million, whereas in Spanish America around 1800 the natives still numbered 7.5 million — far more than the whites (3.3 million). Thus the natives survived in much larger proportion in the south.
2. Other than the use of English, what other features of English economic and social life do you notice in nineteenth-century USA?
ANSWERBesides the English language, several features of English economic and social life were visible in nineteenth-century USA, since many settlers came from Britain and France and carried their ways with them.1. Private ownership of land: Like the English, the settlers strongly believed in owning land as private property; many were younger sons who could not inherit in Europe and were eager to own farms in America.2. Commercial, profit-driven farming: They cleared land and grew crops such as rice and cotton not for their own needs but for sale and profit in Europe — a market-oriented, capitalist attitude to agriculture.3. Industrialisation: As in England, industries grew rapidly — manufacturing railway equipment and farm machinery — and by 1890 the USA had become the leading industrial power in the world.4. The democratic spirit and the right to property: The settlers’ fight for independence in the 1770s was built on the ‘democratic spirit’, and their constitution guaranteed the individual’s ‘right to property’, which the state could not override — ideas rooted in the English tradition (though at first these rights were only for white men).5. Profit and enterprise: The bourgeois mentality of buying and selling everything, the drive for quick fortunes in the Gold Rush, and the use of imported labour all reflected an English commercial outlook.
3. What did the ‘frontier’ mean to the Americans?
ANSWERTo the Americans the ‘frontier’ was the shifting western boundary of European settlement — the line beyond which lay land not yet occupied by settlers.It was not a fixed border; as settlers moved further west in search of land, the frontier kept moving with them, and the native peoples were forced to retreat before it. To the settlers the frontier meant opportunity — vacant land to clear, farm and own, and the hope of gold and a quick fortune.Karl Marx described the American frontier as ‘the last positive capitalist utopia’ because of the seemingly limitless land and space it offered to the ‘limitless thirst for profit’. The frontier ‘pulled’ European settlers westward for decades.By 1892 the land between the Atlantic and Pacific had been fully divided into states, so there was no longer any open land — the frontier was declared ‘closed’, and continental expansion was complete. For the natives, however, the moving frontier meant the steady loss of their lands.
4. Why was the history of the Australian native peoples left out of history books?
ANSWERThe history of the Australian native peoples was left out of history books for several reasons connected with the attitudes of the European settlers.1. The myth of ‘discovery’: Australian history was written as though it had begun only with Captain Cook’s ‘discovery’ in 1770; the long history of the aborigines before that was simply ignored. The anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner called this neglect ‘The Great Australian Silence’ in a famous 1968 lecture.2. The natives were not seen as ‘civilised’: Europeans regarded the aborigines as ‘primitive’ because they did not have writing, settled agriculture, cities or organised religion, so their past was thought unworthy of being recorded as history.3. Guilt and the desire to forget: The settlers had taken the natives’ lands, declared Australia terra nullius, and forcibly separated mixed-blood children from their families. Writing them into history would have exposed these injustices, so it was easier to leave them out.The change: Only from the 1970s, as human rights came to be discussed worldwide, did historians (such as Henry Reynolds in Why Weren’t We Told?) condemn this silence, and native cultures began to be studied, recorded and respected.
Answer in a Short Essay
5. How satisfactory is a museum gallery display in explaining the culture of a people? Give examples from your own experience of a museum.
ANSWERA museum gallery display is useful, but only partly satisfactory, in explaining the culture of a people. This is an experience-based question, so you should add examples from a museum you have actually visited; a model answer is given below.What a museum does well: A gallery can preserve and show real objects — tools, textiles, paintings, carvings, the wampum belts and native art of America, or aboriginal art and dioramas in Australia. It makes a vanishing culture visible, helps us see craftsmanship and beauty, and (especially when curated by the community itself, like the National Museum of the American Indian in the USA) it can present a people with dignity rather than as ‘curiosities’.Its limitations: A museum shows culture frozen in time and out of its living context. It cannot easily convey beliefs, oral traditions, the relationship of a people with their land, their languages, music, rituals and daily emotions — the things that gave the objects meaning. Visitors may misread objects, and selection by the curator decides what is shown and what is left out.Example (model): On visiting the National Museum in New Delhi (or a tribal/state museum), I saw beautiful pottery, weapons and textiles displayed with labels; I admired the artistry, but I could not hear the songs, stories or beliefs behind them, and felt I understood the objects better than the living culture. (Write about your own museum visit here.)Conclusion: A museum display is a good starting point and an excellent way to preserve and respect a culture, but it must be combined with oral histories, writings by the people themselves and an understanding of their way of life to be truly satisfactory.
6. Imagine an encounter in California in about 1880 between four people: a former African slave, a Chinese labourer, a German who had come out in the Gold Rush, and a native of the Hopi tribe, and narrate their conversation.
ANSWERThis is an imaginative writing question; you must compose a conversation based on the chapter. A model answer is given below.(Scene: a dusty California town, about 1880, near a railway line.)German (Hans): “I came across the ocean in the Gold Rush, dreaming of a fortune. I found little gold, but here at least a poor man may buy land and own a farm — something impossible back home, where the big farmers took everything.”Chinese labourer (Li): “You speak of dreams. I was brought here as cheap labour to lay these railway tracks across the mountains — back-breaking, dangerous work. Now that the line is done, your government wants to keep us out and calls us a threat. We built your roads, yet we are not wanted.”Former African slave (Sam): “At least you came of your own will. My people were carried in chains to work the plantations in the south. The war ended slavery in 1865, but freedom on paper is not the same as freedom in life — we are still treated as less than equal, kept apart in schools and on the trains.”Hopi native (Honani): “You all came to this land. It was the land of my people for thousands of years. We did not buy or sell the earth, the air or the water — they are sacred to us. Now the bison are slaughtered, the forests cut, and we are pushed into reservations on land we never knew. You call us ‘uncivilised’ because we do not wish to own the land. But who, truly, has been unkind to this earth?”Hans: “Perhaps each of us has paid a price for this ‘new world’ — some in gold, some in toil, some in chains, and you, friend, in your very home.” (The four fall silent, each lost in his own loss.)
Extra Practice Questions
Short Answer Type Questions
Q1. Who were the earliest inhabitants of North America and how did they reach it?
ANSWERThe earliest inhabitants of North America came from Asia over 30,000 years ago across a land-bridge over the Bering Straits. During the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago, they moved further south, and the population began to increase around 5,000 years ago when the climate became more stable.
Q2. What was the Trail of Tears?
ANSWERThe Trail of Tears was the forced march of the Cherokee tribe in 1838. Despite Chief Justice John Marshall’s 1832 judgement upholding their rights, President Andrew Jackson ordered the army to evict about 15,000 Cherokees from Georgia and drive them west to the Great American Desert; over a quarter of them died on the way.
Q3. What did the doctrine of terra nullius mean for Australia’s natives?
ANSWERTerra nullius means ‘land belonging to nobody’. By calling Australia terra nullius, the British claimed the continent without making any treaties with the natives, ignoring their long-standing bonds with the land. In 1992 the Australian High Court, in the Mabo case, declared terra nullius legally invalid and recognised native land claims from before 1770.
Q4. Why did the natives and the Europeans hold different notions of land?
ANSWERThe natives saw land, air and water as sacred and shared, not to be owned, bought or sold; they took only what they needed and exchanged goods as gifts. The Europeans, with a commercial, bourgeois mentality, treated land and resources as commodities to be owned and sold for profit. These were two competing notions of civilisation.
Q5. How did the Gold Rush change North America?
ANSWERWhen gold was found in California in the 1840s, thousands of Europeans rushed to America hoping for quick fortunes. This led to the building of transcontinental railways (using thousands of Chinese workers), the rapid growth of industries and towns, and large-scale farming. By 1890 the USA had become the leading industrial power in the world, but the bison were almost exterminated, ending the natives’ way of life.
Long Answer Type Questions
Q1. Describe how the native peoples of North America lived before the coming of the Europeans.
ANSWERBefore the Europeans arrived, the native peoples of North America lived in small bands in villages along river valleys. They ate fish and meat, and cultivated vegetables and maize, but did not attempt extensive agriculture and produced no surplus, so they did not develop kingdoms and empires as in Central and South America. They hunted bison on long journeys — made easier from the seventeenth century when they began to ride horses bought from the Spanish — but killed only as many animals as they needed. Control of land was not an issue; they felt no need to ‘own’ it and exchanged goods as gifts rather than buying and selling, marking treaties with wampum belts of coloured shells. They spoke numerous unwritten languages, believed that time moved in cycles, and preserved their origins and history through oral tradition. They were skilled craftspeople who wove beautiful textiles and could ‘read’ the land — its climates and landscapes — the way literate people read written texts.
Q2. Explain how the native peoples of the USA and Australia lost their lands, and how their condition improved in the twentieth century.
ANSWERLoss of land: In the USA, as settlement expanded the natives were induced or forced to sign treaties selling their land at very low prices, and were often cheated of even that. The Cherokees, though they had tried hardest to adopt the American way of life, were driven out on the Trail of Tears (1838). The natives were pushed westward, confined to small ‘reservations’ (often unfamiliar land), and moved again whenever minerals, gold or oil were found. They resisted in the American Indian Wars (1865–90) and, in Canada, the Metis rebellions (1869–85), but were crushed. In Australia the British declared the land terra nullius, made no treaties, ejected natives from land for cultivation, and forcibly separated mixed-blood children from their families.Improvement in the twentieth century: Change began in the 1920s. The Meriam survey (1928) exposed the terrible conditions in reservations, leading to the US Indian Reorganisation Act of 1934, which let natives buy land and take loans. When the USA and Canada tried to make natives ‘join the mainstream’, they resisted: the 1954 Declaration of Indian Rights accepted citizenship only on condition that reservations and traditions were protected, and Canada’s Constitution Act of 1982 recognised aboriginal and treaty rights. In Australia, the ‘White Australia’ policy ended in 1974, multiculturalism became official, the Mabo case (1992) struck down terra nullius, and a National Sorry Day (1999) apologised for the stolen children. Though greatly reduced in number, native peoples have thus reasserted their right to their cultures and sacred lands.
Q3. ‘The natives and the Europeans represented competing notions of civilisation.’ Discuss with reference to the chapter.
ANSWERThe chapter shows a deep clash between two ways of seeing the world. To eighteenth-century western Europeans, ‘civilised’ people were marked by literacy, an organised religion and urban life; by this measure the natives of America and Australia appeared ‘uncivilised’. Some, like Rousseau, romanticised them as ‘noble savages’ living close to nature, while others, like Wordsworth, thought people close to nature had only limited imagination — yet Washington Irving, who actually met natives, found them intelligent, witty and mistreated by the whites. The Europeans had a commercial, bourgeois mentality: they wished to own land, cut forests for cornfields, and turn fish, furs and crops into commodities sold for profit. The natives, by contrast, believed that the earth, air and water were sacred and could not be bought or sold — Chief Seattle asked, ‘How can you buy or sell the sky?’ They took only what they needed and exchanged goods as gifts. Europeans condemned the natives as ‘lazy’ for not exploiting land ‘to the maximum’ and even justified driving them out and ‘exterminating’ them. Thus the two peoples represented genuinely competing notions of civilisation — one based on ownership, profit and progress, the other on harmony with, and respect for, nature.
MCQs & Assertion–Reason
1. The earliest inhabitants of North America came from which continent across the Bering Straits?
(a) Europe (b) Africa (c) Asia (d) South America
2. The forced march of the Cherokees in 1838 is remembered as the:
(a) Long Walk (b) Trail of Tears (c) Great Trek (d) Gold Rush
3. Which US President refused to honour Chief Justice Marshall’s 1832 judgement on the Cherokees?
(a) Thomas Jefferson (b) Andrew Jackson (c) Abraham Lincoln (d) Thomas Paine
4. The Latin term terra nullius, used by the British for Australia, means:
(a) land of the south (b) sacred land (c) land belonging to nobody (d) new land
5. The Gold Rush of the 1840s took place in which region of the USA?
(a) Florida (b) California (c) Virginia (d) Alaska
6. By which year had the USA become the leading industrial power in the world?
(a) 1860 (b) 1870 (c) 1890 (d) 1920
7. The native leader who wrote ‘How can you buy or sell the sky?’ in an 1854 letter to the US President was:
(a) Chief Pontiac (b) Chief Seattle (c) Juan Santos (d) Daniel Paul
8. The 1968 lecture ‘The Great Australian Silence’ was delivered by the anthropologist:
(a) Henry Reynolds (b) W.E.H. Stanner (c) Judith Wright (d) Lewis Meriam
9. In which year did the Australian High Court, in the Mabo case, declare terra nullius legally invalid?
(a) 1974 (b) 1982 (c) 1992 (d) 1999
10. The US law of 1934 that gave natives in reservations the right to buy land and take loans was the:
For each Assertion–Reason question, choose: (A) Both true and the Reason correctly explains the Assertion; (B) Both true but the Reason is not the correct explanation; (C) Assertion true, Reason false; (D) Assertion false, Reason true.
A-R 1. Assertion: The native peoples of North America did not develop large kingdoms and empires.
Reason: They did not practise extensive agriculture and produced no surplus.
A-R 2. Assertion: The Europeans and the natives represented competing notions of civilisation.
Reason: The natives treated land and water as sacred while the Europeans treated them as commodities to be bought and sold.
A-R 3. Assertion: The British made detailed treaties with the Australian aborigines before taking over their land.
Reason: The British government always termed the land of Australia terra nullius, that is, belonging to nobody.
A-R 4. Assertion: The American ‘frontier’ kept shifting westward through the nineteenth century.
Reason: As settlers moved west in search of land, the native peoples were forced to move back.
A-R 5. Assertion: The condition of native peoples began to improve only after the 1920s.
Reason: The Meriam survey of 1928 exposed the poor health and education facilities in the reservations.
Answer key: 1-(A), 2-(A), 3-(D), 4-(A), 5-(A).
Exam Tips & Common Mistakes
How to score full marks in this chapter
Fix the key dates in your memory — Trail of Tears (1838), Marshall’s judgement (1832), American Civil War (1861–65), American Indian Wars (1865–90), frontier ‘closed’ (1892), USA the top industrial power by 1890, Indian Reorganisation Act (1934), end of ‘White Australia’ (1974), Mabo case (1992) and National Sorry Day (1999). For ‘difference’ questions (South vs North America) write in clear points with the population data. Always bring in the natives’ idea of land as sacred and not for sale, quoting Chief Seattle, and contrast it with the Europeans’ commercial outlook. In short essays, give a balanced two-sided answer and end with a clear conclusion.
Common mistakes to avoid
Confusing the natives of North America (no surplus, no empires) with those of South/Central America (Aztecs, Incas, empires and gold).
Writing that the British made treaties in Australia — they did not; they declared the land terra nullius.
Mixing up the dates of the Trail of Tears (1838) and Marshall’s judgement (1832).
Saying the frontier was a fixed border — it was a shifting line that moved west with the settlers.
Forgetting that early democratic and property rights in the USA were only for white men.
Leaving experience/imagination questions (Q5 and Q6) without your own examples or a written conversation.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Chapter 6 of Class 11 History about?
Chapter 6, Displacing Indigenous Peoples, is part of the section Towards Modernisation in Themes in World History. It recounts the histories of the native peoples of North America and Australia — how European settlers pushed them out of their lands, the impact of the Gold Rush and industrialisation, and how indigenous peoples later won back recognition of their cultures and sacred lands.
How many exercise questions are there in Class 11 History Chapter 6?
The NCERT Exercises for this chapter have six questions in two parts — four under ‘Answer in Brief’ (questions 1–4) and two under ‘Answer in a Short Essay’ (questions 5–6) — all answered step by step on this page, along with extra questions, MCQs and Assertion–Reason practice.
What was the Trail of Tears in Class 11 History Chapter 6?
The Trail of Tears was the forced march in 1838 of about 15,000 Cherokees, evicted from their land in Georgia on the orders of US President Andrew Jackson and driven westward; over a quarter of them died on the way. It is a key example of how the native peoples of the USA lost their land.
