“In the frontier wars between 1607 and 1814, Americans forged two
elements – unlimited war and irregular war – into their first
way of war which is still their way of war. I make throughout the book,
connections between the U.S. military today and its foundation in these
unrelenting wars that actually went up through 1890 and then moved overseas
to the Philippines and the Caribbean with the same generals in the
Philippines who had been fighting the Sioux and the Cheyenne in the Northern
Plains.”
From the Author’s Note (page xiii):
“I’ve come to realize that a new periodization of US history is
needed that traces the Indigenous experience as opposed to the following
standard division: Colonial, Revolutionary, Jacksonian, Civil War and
Reconstruction, Industrial Revolution and Gilded Age, Overseas Imperialism,
Progressivism, World War I, Depression, New Deal, World War II, Cold War,
and Vietnam War, followed by contemporary decades. I altered this
periodization to better reflect Indigenous experience but not as radically
as needs to be done. This is an issue much discussed in current Native
American scholarship.
“I also wanted to set aside the rhetoric of race, not because race and
racism are unimportant but to emphasize that Native peoples were colonized
and deposed of their territories as distinct peoples - hundreds of nations
- not as a racial or ethnic group. "Colonization," "dispossession,"
"settler colonialism," "genocide" - these are the terms that drill to the
core of US history, to the very source of the country’s existence.
“The charge of genocide, once unacceptable by establishment academic and
political classes when applied to the United States, has gained currency as
evidence of it has mounted, but it is too often accompanied by an
assumption of disappearance. So I realized it was crucial to make the
reality and significance of Indigenous peoples’ survival clear throughout
the book. Indigenous survival as peoples is due to centuries of resistance
and storytelling passed through the generations, and I sought to
demonstrate that this survival is dynamic, not passive. Surviving genocide,
by whatever means, is resistance: non-Indians must know this in order to
more accurately understand the history of the United States.
“My hope is that this book will be a springboard to dialogue about
history, the present reality of Indigenous peoples’ experience, and
the meaning and future of the United States itself.”
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