An 1872 painting by John Gast called “American Progress”
shows a white woman floating across the plains of the United States.
The female figure is a depiction of Columbia. She wears the
Star of Empire on her forehead, carries a School Book under
her right arm, and is the herald of
techno-logic
perceptional reality, driving Indigenous people, bison, and
other animals out of the picture and into oblivion.
Historian
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz,
writing in
An
Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
(Beacon Press, 2014),
describes the significance of the Columbia persona:
The Columbus myth suggests that from US independence onward,
colonial settlers saw themselves as part of a world system of
colonization. “Columbia,” the poetic, Latinate name
used in reference to the United States from its founding
throughout the nineteenth century, was based on the name of
Christopher Columbus. The “Land of Columbus” was—and
still is—represented by the image of a woman in sculptures and
paintings, by institutions such as Columbia University, and by
countless place names, including that of the national capital,
the District of Columbia.
Within the theology of Western civilization’s industrial
progress—and belief in its intrinsic goodness that
indoctrinated generations of Europeans—rests the
justification for the wanton destruction of the great
civilizations existent in the Western Hemisphere long before
the arrival of Columbus. Throughout her book, Dunbar-Ortiz
explores the driving process of settler colonialism that was
and continues to be the global foundation of this destruction
and how “To learn about this history is both a
necessity and responsibility to the ancestors and descendants
of all parties.” From the Introduction:
Under the crust of that portion of Earth called the United
States of America—“from California ... to the Gulf
Stream waters”—are interred the bones, villages,
fields, and sacred objects of American Indians. They cry out
for their stories to be heard through their descendants who
carry the memories of how the country was founded and how it
came to be as it is today.
It should not have happened that the great civilizations of the
Western Hemisphere, the very evidence of the Western
Hemisphere, were wantonly destroyed, the gradual progress of
humanity interrupted and set upon a path of greed and destruction.
Choices were made that forged that path toward destruction of life
itself . . . To learn and know this history is both a necessity
and a responsibility to the ancestors and descendants of all parties.
What historian David Chang has written about the land that became
Oklahoma applies to the whole United States: “Nation, race,
and class converged in land.” Everything in US history is
about the land—who oversaw and cultivated it, fished its
waters, maintained its wildlife; who invaded and stole it; how it
became a commodity (“real estate”) broken into pieces
to be bought and sold on the market.
US policies and actions related to Indigenous peoples, though
often termed “racist” or
“discriminatory,” are rarely depicted as what they
are: classic cases of imperialism and a particular form of
colonialism—settler colonialism. As anthropologist Patrick
Wolfe writes, “The question of genocide is never far from
discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life—or, at
least, land is necessary for life.”
The history of the United States is a history of settler
colonialism—the founding of a state based on the ideology
of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery,
and a policy of genocide and land theft. . . .
Writing US history from an Indigenous peoples’ perspective
requires rethinking the consensual national narrative. That
narrative is wrong or deficient, not in its facts, dates, or
details but rather in its essence. Inherent in the myth
we’ve been taught is an embrace of settler colonialism and
genocide. The myth persists, not for a lack of free speech or
poverty of information but rather for an absence of motivation to
ask questions that challenge the core of the scripted narrative
of the origin story. How might acknowledging the reality of US
history work to transform society? That is the central question
this book pursues.
And from the Author’s Note:
A note on terminology: I use “Indigenous,”
“Indian,” and “Native” interchangeably in
the text. Indigenous individuals and peoples in North America on
the whole do not consider “Indian” a slur. Of course,
all citizens of Native nations much prefer that their
nations’ names in their own language be used, such as
Diné (Navajo), Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), Tsalagi
(Cherokee), and Anishinaabe (Ojibway, Chippewa). I have used some
of the correct names combined with more familiar usages such as
“Sioux” and “Navajo.” Except in material
that is quoted, I don’t use the term “tribe.”
“Community,” “people,” and
“nation” are used instead and interchangeably. I also
refrain from using “America” and
“American” when referring only to the United States
and its citizens. Those blatantly imperialistic terms annoy
people in the rest of the Western Hemisphere, who are, after all,
also Americans. I use “United States” as a noun and
“US” as an adjective to refer to the country and
“US Americans” for its citizens.
The above excerpts are reprinted with permission from
An
Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Beacon Press, 2014.
It is of critical necessity to understand how cultivated and
complex were the Nations of Indigenous Peoples across the
North American continent long before the arrival of Europeans.
Francis Jennings, in his 1976 historical account of
The
Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant
of Conquest (New York: W.W.Norton), underlines what he
explains as the myth that “America was virgin land,
or wilderness, inhabited by nonpeople called savages”:
European explorers and invaders discovered an inhabited land.
Had it been pristine wilderness then, it would possibly be so
still today, for neither the technology nor the social
organization of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries had the
capacity to maintain, of its own resources, outpost colonies
thousands of miles from home. Incapable of conquering true
wilderness, the Europeans were highly competent in the skill
of conquering other people, and that is what they did. They
did not settle a virgin land. They invaded and displaced a
resident population. This is so simple a fact that it seems
self evident. (p. 15)
In the above, Dunbar-Ortiz quotes Patrick
Wolfe when referencing
the specific form of colonialism that defines the history and
nature of the United States. The citation for the quote is,
Wolfe, Patrick.
“Settler
Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.”
Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 45 (December 2006): 387-409, p. 387.
In this article Wolfe describes the dynamics of settler
colonialism that cast civilizations of human beings living on
the North American continent for thousands of years before
the arrival of Europeans not as owners of the land but as
Indians.
... Indigenous
North Americans were not killed, driven away, romanticized,
assimilated, fenced in, bred White, and otherwise eliminated as
the original owners of the land but as Indians. Roger Smith has
missed this point in seeking to distinguish between victims murdered
for where they are and victims murdered for who they
are.[4]
So far as Indigenous people are concerned, where they are is
who they are, and not only by their own reckoning. As Deborah
Bird Rose has pointed out, to get in the way of settler
colonization, all the native has to do is stay at
home.[5]
Whatever settlers may say—and they generally have a lot to say—the
primary motive for elimination is not race (or religion,
ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory.
Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible
element.
The logic of elimination not only refers to the summary
liquidation of Indigenous people, though it includes that. In
common with genocide as Raphaël Lemkin characterized
it,[6]
settler colonialism has both negative and positive dimensions.
Negatively, it strives for the dissolution of native societies.
Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated
land base—as I put it, settler colonizers come to stay: invasion
is a structure not an
event.[7]
In its positive aspect, elimination
is an organizing principal of settler-colonial society
rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence. The positive
outcomes of the logic of elimination can include officially
encouraged miscegenation, the breaking-down of native title into
alienable individual freeholds, native citizenship, child
abduction, religious conversion, resocialization in total
institutions such as missions or boarding schools, and a whole
range of cognate biocultural assimilations. All these strategies,
including frontier homicide, are characteristic of settler
colonialism.
-
Roger W. Smith, “Human destructiveness and politics: the
twentieth century as an age of genocide,” in Isidor
Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski, eds,
Genocide
and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass
Death (New York: Greenwood Press. 1987), pp 21-39, at p 31.
-
Rose,
Hidden
Histories: Black Stories from Victoria River Downs, Humbert River and
Wave Hill Stations (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press 1991),
p 46.
-
“[O]ne, destruction of the national pattern of the
oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national
pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made
upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon
the territory alone, after removal of the population and
colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own
nationals.” Raphaël Lemkin,
Axis
Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government,
Proposals for Redress (New York: Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace 1944), p 79.
-
Wolfe,
Settler
Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (London: Cassell 1999), p 2;
“Nation and miscegeNation: discursive continuity in the post-Mabo
era,” Social Analysis, Vol 36, 1994, p 96.
Speaking about the book in December 2014, Dunbar-Ortiz describes
connections between the centuries-long genocidal program of the
settler-colonialist regimen and the US military today. It is critical
to understand the continuity between the unrelenting frontier wars
that began in the early seventeenth century and which moved overseas
after the Wounded Knee Massacre in December 1890, symbolizing
the end of Indigenous armed resistance in the continental US.
The next chapter is called “Bloody Footprints” and
it’s about how the U.S. Army was formed in the wars against
native people east of the Mississippi. This is a quote from a
military
historian, John Grenier, in a book called
The First Way of War:
For the first 200 years of our military heritage, then, Americans
depended on arts of war that contemporary professional soldiers
supposedly abhorred: razing and destroying enemy villages and
fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlements for
captives; intimidating and brutalizing enemy non-combatants; and
assassinating enemy leaders. . . . In the frontier wars between
1607 and 1814, Americans forged two elements—unlimited war
and irregular war—into their first way of war. [
The
First Way of War, American War Making on the Frontier,
1607-1814, John Grenier, Cambridge University Press,
2008, pp. 5, 10]
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. And interestingly enough, also, who were called in (one
division of them) to fight striking workers in Chicago. So I
think there [are] very interesting interconnections with the use
of the military in the United States that we don’t always put
together.
The Second Amendment and the irregular warfare, these were mostly
settler militias who could organize themselves. Andrew Jackson
started that way as the head of the Tennessee Militia. [For] his
militia’s war against the Muskogee Creeks, driving them out of
Georgia, he was made a Major General in the U.S. Army. So it was
a career builder as well to start a militia. But these were also
used, especially after U.S. independence, as slave patrols, these
militias, self-appointed militias. These militias would form to
police – free – they weren’t paid to do it –
and we still see the ghosts of this performing, actually today.
Recording of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz at Green Apple Books in San Francisco on
4 December 2014. Produced by
Time of Useful Consciousness Radio
in Parts One
and
Two.
Detailing the ways in which the conquest of lands that are today
called the United States came to be claimed and owned by European
men, reveal the processes and characteristics of settler
colonialism. This specific brand of colonial usurpation is founded
upon institutionalizing extravagant violence through unlimited war
and irregular war. Extreme violence was carried out by Anglo settlers
against civilians to cause the utter annihilation of the indigenous
population. The goal of this extermination was to enable the
settlers’ total freedom to acquire land and wealth.
To say that the United States is a colonialist settler-state
is not to make an accusation but rather to face historical
reality. (p. 7)
Settler colonialism, as an institution or system, requires
violence or the threat of violence to attain its goals. People
do not hand over their land, resources, children, and futures
without a fight, and that fight is met with violence. In
employing the force necessary to accomplish its expansionist
goals, a colonizing regime institutionalizes violence. The
notion that settler-indigenous conflict is an inevitable
product of cultural differences and misunderstandings, or
that violence was committed equally by the colonized and the
colonizer, blurs the nature of the historical processes.
Euro-American colonialism ... had from its beginnings a genocidal
tendency. (p. 8)
In the beginning, Anglo settlers organized irregular units to
brutally attack and destroy unarmed indigenous women, children,
and old people using unlimited violence in unrelenting attacks.
During nearly two centuries of British colonization, generations
of settlers, mostly farmers, gained experience as “Indian
fighters” outside any organized military institution.
Anglo-French conflict may appear to have been the dominant factor
of European colonization in North America during the eighteenth
century, but while large regular armies fought over geopolitical
goals in Europe, Anglo settlers in North America waged deadly
irregular warfare against the indigenous communities....
The chief characteristic of irregular warfare is that of the
extreme violence against civilians, in this case the tendency to
seek the utter annihilation of the indigenous population.
“In cases where a rough balance of power existed,”
observes historian John Grenier, “and the Indians even
appeared dominant—as was the situation in virtually every
frontier war until the first decade of the nineteenth
century—[settler] Americans were quick to turn to
extravagant violence.”
Many historians who acknowledge the exceptional one-sided
colonial violence attribute it to racism. Grenier argues that
rather than racism leading to violence, the reverse occurred:
the out-of-control momentum of extreme violence of unlimited
warfare fueled race hatred. “Successive generations of
Americans, both soldiers and civilians, made the killing of
indian men, women, and children a defining element of their
first military tradition and thereby part of a shared
American identity. Indeed, only after seventeenth- and
early eighteenth-century Americans made the first way of war a
key to being a white American could later generations of
‘Indian haters,’ men like Andrew Jackson, turn the
Indian wars into race wars.” By then, the indigenous
peoples’ villages, farmlands, towns, and entire nations
formed the only barrier to the settlers’ total freedom to
acquire land and wealth. Settler colonialists again chose their
own means of conquest. Such fighters are often viewed as
courageous heroes, but killing the unarmed women, children, and
old people and burning homes and fields involved neither courage
nor sacrifice. (p. 58-9)
US history, as well as inherited indigenous trauma, cannot
be understood without dealing with the genocide that the
United States committed against indigenous peoples. From the
colonial period through the founding of the United States
and continuing in the twenty-first century, this has entailed
torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military
occupations, removals of indigenous peoples from their ancestral
territories, and removals of
indigenous children to military-like boarding schools.
The absence of even the slightest note of regret or tragedy
in the annual celebration of the US independence betrays a
deep disconnect in the consciousness of US Americans. (p. 9)
From the
Introduction and Chapter 4, Bloody Footprints, pp. 7, 8, 58-9 (and
also for pages 9 and 59), of
An
Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.
Reprinted for Fair Use Only.
Grenier’s First Way of War is one of more than 250
works cited in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United
States. At the end of Chapter Ten, “Ghost Dance
Prophecy,” Dunbar-Ortiz cites a passage of Grenier’s book in
the context of the five major US wars conducted since WWII, those of
Korea, Vietnam, Iraq in 1991 and 2003, and Afghanistan, within the
historical continuity of the massacres in Jamestown, the Ohio Valley,
and Wounded Knee, and how “a red thread of blood connects the
first white settlement in North America with today and the future”:
U.S. people are taught that their military culture does not
approve of or encourage targeting and killing civilians and know
little or nothing about the nearly three centuries of
warfare—before and after the founding of the
U.S.—that reduced the Indigenous peoples of the continent
to a few reservations by burning their towns and fields and
killing civilians, driving the refugees out—step by
step—across the continent.... [V]iolence directed
systematically against non-combatants through irregular means,
from the start, has been a central part of Americans’
way of war. (The First Way of War, pp. 223-24)
Dunbar-Ortiz references Grenier’s First Way of War to
a significant extent. Many US Americans today believe the purpose of
the Second Amendment was to ensure people have the right to bear
arms. However the point is made that starting in the early 1600s
the founding of the United States and its way of life was dependent
on the dispossession, killing, and counterinsurgency warfare practiced
by colonial settlers and militias (and in time commissioned rangers
and the Army) against the hundreds of nations and thousands of
communities of people living on this land long, long, long before
the arrival of Europeans. As she relates
in
a radio interview on The Real News, October 28, 1024:
DUNBAR-ORTIZ:
[John Grenier is] a military historian. He’s
actually a professor of military history at the Air Force
College. I couldn’t believe they allow their people to write
these things. But that book came out just in time for me. I knew
all this stuff, but it’s very small and dense and
well-researched. And it has that perspective. And it was the
first time I had those arguments where it’s also connected up
with the present. His whole point is that what we see in
Afghanistan and Iraq, what we saw in Vietnam, what we saw in all
of these U.S. interventions is a playing out again of this
American way of war that was forged before the United States was
even a state, with the colonial settlers. Being a settler state,
it was the colonial militias. That’s why they were so adamant
about putting the Second Amendment in. Those colonial militias
were to kill Indians.
STEINER:
Let me stop you for a minute, because this is a really
important piece. And we’ve talked about it on my program a number
of times, the Second Amendment, because we look at the Second
Amendment often as coming from the slaveholder South. They could
have state militias to ensure [crosstalk] But what you’re adding
here to this is an element that affected native people and why
they had militias, which I think is critical to the Second
Amendment.
DUNBAR-ORTIZ:
You know, of course, they were used in the whole
colonial era and the early republic and invented for Native
Americans. But it wasn’t until the really closed plantation, the
cotton kingdom, that they started patrolling. They had—all
white men were basically police over all African-Americans. So
they didn’t necessarily have to have, until the cotton kingdom,
when freedom was in the air, the abolitionist movement and people
were leaving and marooning in the peripheries of the plantations,
that they really started developing formal militias to guard the
peripheries of the plantations. But that practice was already
practiced for two centuries with native communities. And by that
time they had removed all the native people from the southeast,
to Oklahoma, to Indian territory, brutal forced removal, to
develop the plantation, expand the plantation system into
Mississippi and Alabama.
This formative process of terrorizing civilians—non-combatants,
women and children and elders—is deeply rooted in what
became the United States. At the end of Chapter 4,
“Bloody Footprints,” General George Washington
is quoted instructing Major General John Sullivan to take
preemptory action against the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) in
the Anglo separatists war with Britain. Sullivan was advised
“to lay waste all the settlements around...that the
country may not be merely overrun but destroyed.... [Y]ou
will not by any means, listen to any overture of peace before
the total ruin of their settlements is effected.... Our future
security will be in their inability to injure us...and in the
terror with which the severity of the chastisement they
receive will inspire them.” Sullivan wrote back,
“The Indians shall see that there is malice enough
in our hearts to destroy everything that contributes to their
support.”
[Washington and Sullivan quoted in Drinnon, Richard.
Facing
West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building.
Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 1980, p. 331.]
This sentiment of the future first President of the United
States, that “our future security will be in their
inability to injure us” expresses a mindset wherein only
the total ruin of Native nations will produce the requisite
security for the settler colonists. What does it say about
the psychological makeup and consciousness of George Washington
that he framed the intention to lay waste to the nations of
people called the Haudenosaunee by directing a severity of
terror against them? Washington’s clear acknowledgment
that terror is the most effective weapon to extirpate people
who simply were in the way by virtue of living on land the
settlers wanted to steal indicates how such a way of war and
a way of life caused settler colonialism to spread across
the continent and then across the planet.
There is a vast psychological dimension to the shadow side of
settler colonialism. A staggering degree of psychological
projection was employed by generations of Anglo settlers in order
to commit the unspeakable level of violent, blood-drenched murder
of Indigenous peoples that spanned centuries. Under the heading
of “Projection, Psychology” Encyclopedia
Britannica defines “Defense mechanism” as
“3. Projection is a form of defense in which unwanted
feelings are displaced onto another person, where they then
appear as a threat from the external world. A common form of
projection occurs when an individual, threatened by his own angry
feelings, accuses another of harbouring hostile
thoughts.”
Robert Williams is an author, legal scholar, and member of
the Lumbee Indian Nation. In his 2012 book,
Savage
Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization
he discusses the anxiety-producing imagery of the
“savage” from the time of Greek colonizers to its
influences today. Anglo settlers projected their own inner savagery
outside themselves onto Indigenous people whose way of life
was perceived to be so different that they could be branded
as “other” and then destroyed. One instance of
the savagery practiced by Anglo settlers was in the way
scalp hunting came to be practiced. The roots of scalp hunting
pre-date the Settler Colonialism project in North America.
During the early 1600s the English conquered Northern Ireland,
and declared a half-million acres of land open to settlement; the
settlers who contracted with the devil of early colonialism came
mostly from western Scotland. England had previously conquered
Wales and southern and eastern Ireland, but had never previously
attempted on such a scale to remove the indigenous population and
“plant” settlers. The English policy of exterminating
Indians in North America was foreshadowed by this English
colonization of Northern Ireland. The ancient Irish social system
was systematically attacked, traditional songs and music
forbidden, whole clans exterminated and the remainder brutalized.
A “wild Irish” reservation was even attempted. The
planted settlers were Calvinist Protestants, assured by their
divines that they had been chosen by God for salvation (and title
to the lands of Ulster). The native (and Papist) Irish were
definitely not destined for salvation, but rather the reverse,
both in the present and hereafter.
The “plantation” of Ulster followed centuries of
intermittent warfare in Ireland, and was as much the culmination
of a process as a departure. In the sixteenth century, the
official in charge of the Irish province of Munster, Sir Humphrey
Gilbert, ordered that:
The heddes of all those (of what sort soever thei were) which
were killed in the daie, should be cutte off from their bodies
and brought to the place where he incamped at night, and should
there bee laied on the ground by eche side of the waie ledying
into his owne tente so that none could come into his tente for
any cause but commonly he muste passe through a lane of heddes
which he used ad terrorem...[It brought] greate terrour to the
people when thei sawe the heddes of their dedde fathers,
brothers, children, kindsfolke, and freinds.
[Francis Jennings,
The
Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialsim, and the Cant of
Conquest (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 168.]
Bounties were paid for the Irish heads brought in and later only
the scalp or ears were required. A century later, in North
America, Indian heads and scalps were brought in for bounty in
the same manner. Native Americans picked up the practice from the
colonizers. The first English colonial settlement in North
America had been planted in Newfoundland in the summer of 1583,
by Sir Humphrey Gilbert.
From
“The
Grid of History: Cowboys and Indians, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz,
Monthly Review, 2003, Volume 55, Issue 03 (July-August).
Reprinted for Fair Use Only.
In Chapter 4 Dunbar-Ortiz explains more about how scalp hunting
became routine amongst Anglo settlers starting in the mid 1670s
and cites John Grenier making the point that with settler
authorities offering bounties for scalps, “they established
the large-scale privatization of war within American frontier
communities.” Understanding the savagery visited upon the
nations and communities of Indigenous peoples at the hands of
Europeans bent on taking their lands by extirpating them provides
a more holistic understanding of how the commonplace violence
expressed today throughout the United States has its historical
roots in the founding centuries of this settler colonialist state.
Indigenous people continued to resist by burning settlements and
killing and capturing settlers. As an incentive to recruit
fighters, colonial authorities introduced a program of scalp
hunting that became a permanent and long-lasting element of
settler warfare against Indigenous nations.
[Grenier,
First
Way of War, pp. 29-34, 36-37, 39.]
During the Pequot
War, Connecticut and Massachusetts colonial officials had offered
bounties initially for the heads of murdered Indigenous people
and later for only their scalps, which were more portable in
large numbers. But scalp hunting became routine only in the
mid-1670’s, following an incident on the northern frontier
of the Massachusetts colony. The practice began in earnest in
1697 when settler Hannah Dustin, having murdered ten of her
Abenaki captors in a nighttime escape, presented their ten scalps
to the Massachusetts General Assembly and was rewarded with
bounties for two men, two women, and six children.
[Taylor, Alan.
American
Colonies: The Settling of North America.
New York: Viking, 2001, p. 290.]
Dustin soon became a folk hero among New England settlers. Scalp
hunting became a lucrative commercial practice. The settler
authorities had hit upon a way to encourage settlers to take off
on their own or with a few others to gather scalps, at random,
for the reward money. “In the process,” John Grenier
points out, “they established the large-scale privatization
of war within American frontier communities.”
[Grenier,
First
Way of War, pp. 39-41.]
Although the
colonial government in time raised the bounty for adult male
scalps, lowered that for adult females, and eliminated that for
Indigenous children under ten, the age and gender of victims were
not easily distinguished by their scalps nor checked carefully.
What is more, the scalp hunter could take the children captive
and sell them into slavery. These practices erased any remaining
distinction between Indigenous combatants and noncombatants and
introduced a market for Indigenous slaves. Bounties for
Indigenous scalps were honored even in absence of war. Scalps and
Indigenous children became means of exchange, currency, and this
development may even have created a black market. Scalp hunting
was not only a profitable privatized enterprise but also a means
to eradicate or subjugate the Indigenous population of the
Anglo-American Atlantic seaboard.
[Ibid. pp 41-43.]
The settlers gave a name to the
mutilated and bloody corpses they left in the wake of
scalp-hunts: redskins.
This way of war, forged in the first century of
colonization—destroying Indigenous villages and fields,
killing civilians, ranging and scalp hunting—became the
basis for the wars against the Indigenous across the continent
into the late nineteenth century.
[Ibid. p 52.]
From
Chapter
4, Bloody Footprints, pp. 64-5, of
An
Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.
Reprinted for Fair Use Only.
It follows that the commonplace violent nature of today’s
culture in the United States would have as its roots,
generations of US Americans who were raised within a tradition
of killing indian men, women, and children as part of the genesis
of a shared American identity as well as the shared experience
of engendering profitable privatized enterprises resulting from
such extravagant violence.
Providing an integrated understanding of the origin of the
term “redskins” is one instance of the quality
of illumination and expanding consciousness Dunbar-Ortiz
provides throughout An Indigenous Peoples’
History of the United States. Such understanding is
profoundly liberating to all who are concerned about the
current state of humanity and are seeking constructive
paths to more fully acknowledge the reality of US history
as a means towards transforming society.
A primary rationalization conjured up to steal the land of
human beings outside Europe was the “Doctrine of
Discovery,” based on a series of late-fifteenth century
papal bulls. The driving justification of what came to be
enshrined in the credo of Manifest Destiny had its antecedent
in the Doctrine of Discovery. As Dunbar-Ortiz writes:
In 1801, President Jefferson aptly described the new
settler-state’s intentions for horizontal and vertical
continental expansion, stating: “However our present
interests may restrain us within our own limits, it is impossible
not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid
multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover
the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people
speaking the same language, governed in similar form by similar
laws.” This vision of manifest destiny found form a few
years later in the Monroe Doctrine, signaling the intention of
annexing or dominating former Spanish colonial territories in the
Americas and the Pacific, which would be put into practice during
the rest of the century.
Origin narratives form the vital core of a people’s
unifying identity and of the values that guide them. In the
United States, the founding and development of the Anglo-American
settler-state involves a narrative about Puritan settlers who had
a covenant with God to take the land. That part of the origin
story is supported and reinforced by the Columbus myth and the
“Doctrine of Discovery.” According to a series of
late-fifteenth-century papal bulls, European nations acquired
title to the lands they “discovered” and the
Indigenous inhabitants lost their natural right to that land
after Europeans arrived and claimed it.
[See Watson, Blake.
Buying
America from the Indians: “Johnson
v. McIntosh” and the History of Native Land Rights.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012;
and Robertson, Lindsey G.
Conquest
by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous
Peoples of Their Lands. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2005.
For a list and description of
each
papul bull, see The
Doctrine of Discovery.]
As law professor Robert
A. Williams observes about the Doctrine of Discovery:
Responding to the requirements of a paradoxical age of
Renaissance and Inquisition, the West’s first modern
discourses of conquest articulated a vision of all humankind
united under a rule of law discoverable solely by human reason.
Unfortunately for the American Indian, the West’s first
tentative steps towards this noble vision of a Law of Nations
contained a mandate for Europe’s subjugation of all peoples
whose radical divergence from European-derived norms of right
conduct signified their need for conquest and remediation.
[Williams, Robert.
The
American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses
of Conquest. New York Oxford University Press,
1992, p. 59.]
From the
Introduction, pp. 3-4,
An
Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.
Reprinted for Fair Use Only.
The Doctrine of Discovery continues to be cited in US Supreme
Court rulings as an established principle of US law. In response
to demands from Indigenous peoples, a number of religious
institutions—including the Unitarian Universalist and
Episcopal Churches as well as the World Council of
Churches—have declared opposition to the Doctrine of
Discovery.
In its yearly meeting in 2012, the New York Society of Friends
(aka Quakers)
produced
a document repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery asserting
that, “We cannot accept that the Doctrine of Discovery was
ever a true authority for the forced takings of lands and the
enslavement or extermination of peoples.” An accompanying fact
sheet, “What
is the Doctrine of Discovery? Why Should It Be Repudiated?,”
states unambiguously: “Elements of the Doctrine have
rationalized heinous behaviors against Indigenous peoples through
the centuries.” Among its many useful citations and references,
the document underscores examples of United States rationalizations
regarding claims of sovereignty over Native nations including these
US Supreme Court cases:
1823:
JOHNSON
& GRAHAM’S LESSEE v. M’INTOSH (21 U.S. 543)
made “discovery doctrine” explicit in US law. The court
denied individuals permission to buy land from American Indian
tribes [nations]. Under the doctrine, the court assumed only a
sovereign United States could acquire the land, should the Indians
choose to sell. In this decision, Indians were given a limited right
of “occupancy” without full title to their own land, and
could thus lose their land if they could not prove continuous
occupancy. The doctrine was reframed in secular terms, in which
the criterion for sovereignty became “cultivators of
land” instead of “Christians.”
1995:
TEE-HIT-TON
INDIANS v. UNITED STATES (348 U.S. 272) relied on the
doctrine of discovery. The court ruled that because
“Tee-Hit-Tons were in a hunting and fishing stage of
civilization” they had only a limited right of occupancy,
and therefore the US was not required to reimburse the
Tee-Hit-Ton for timber harvested from their land.
2005:
CITY
OF SHERRILL V. ONEIDA INDIAN NATION OF N.Y. (544 U.S. 197)
relied on doctrine of discovery to limit the Oneida
Nation’s sovereignty. The Oneidas had documented their
sovereignty through US treaties. The court ruled that due to an
interval of nonoccupancy, land in question was not sovereign
Oneida territory.
Dunbar-Ortiz also cites the
2012
Responsive Resolution on the Doctrine of Discovery
by the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) as being a
“particularly powerful and an excellent model.”
THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that we, the delegates of the 2012
General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association,
repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery as a relic of colonialism,
feudalism, and religious, cultural, and racial biases having
no place in the modern day treatment of indigenous peoples; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that we call upon the Unitarian Universalist
Association and its member congregations to review the historical
theologies, policies, and programs of Unitarianism, Universalism,
and Unitarian Universalism to expose the historical reality and
impact of the Doctrine of Discovery and eliminate its presence in
the contemporary policies, programs, theologies, and structures of
Unitarian Universalism; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that we call upon the Unitarian Universalist
Association to invite indigenous partners to a process of Honor and
Healing (often called Truth and Reconciliation), and if one or more
partners agree, to undergo such a process about Unitarian,
Universalist, and Unitarian Universalist complicity in the
structures and policies that oppress indigenous peoples and the
earth; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that we call upon the leadership of the
Unitarian Universalist Association to make a clear and concise
statement repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery and its current
use in U.S. laws and regulations; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that we encourage other religious bodies
to reject the use of the Doctrine of Discovery to dominate
indigenous peoples, and that the UUA collaborate with these
groups to propose a specific Congressional Resolution to
repudiate this doctrine; and
BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED that we call upon the United States to
fully implement the standards of the
U.N. Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples in the U.S. law and policy
without qualifications.
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
provides examples of how US exceptionalism and rationalizations for
how it was necessary to steal the land from its original inhabitants
as well as destroy them and their societies and cultures, has not
only been extolled by government officials, military authorities,
entrepreneurs, and historians, but is also evident in US poets and
writers.
“[I]t is the manifest destiny of the English race to occupy
this whole continent and to display there that practical
understanding in matters of government and colonization which no
other race has given such proof of possessing since the Romans.”
“The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated: it is the
law of the races, history.... A superior grade of rats come and
then all the minor rats are cleared out.”
“The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon
the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them
for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization,
follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable
creatures from the face of the earth.”
—Frank L. Baum, author of
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,
3 Jan 1891,
writing in the
Saturday
Pioneer,
a weekly newspaper in Aberdeen, S.D.
“Ever since Daniel Boone took his first excursion over Cumberland
Gap, Americans have been wanderers.... With a continent to take
over and Manifest Destiny to goad us, we could not have avoided
being footloose. The initial act of emigration from Europe, an
act of extreme, deliberate disaffiliation, was the beginning of
a national habit.
“It should not be denied, either, that being footloose has always
exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from
history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with
absolute freedom, and the road has always led west. Our folk
heroes and our archetypal literary figures accurately reflect
that side of us. Leatherstocking, Huckleberry Finn, the narrator
of Moby Dick, call are orphans and wanderers; any of them could
say, ’Call me Ishmael.’ The Lone Ranger has no
dwelling place except in the saddle.”
At the beginning of Chapter Six, “The Last of the Mohicans
and Andrew Jackson’s White Republic,” Dunbar-Ortiz
quotes Prussian Otto von Bismarck, founder and first chancellor
(1871-90) of the German empire in observing, “The
colonization of North America has been the decisive fact of the
modern world.” From its outset, possession of the land has
been the driving force and overriding imperative of settler
colonialism.
The essential history of the United States is never truly
confronted by the mainstream culture. How could it be? Any
explication of the Unspeakable in this context must integrate and
acknowledge “the fact that the very existence of the
country is a result of the looting of an entire continent and its
resources” (p. 5) as well as “that the great
civilizations of the Western Hemisphere, the very evidence
of the Western Hemisphere, were wantonly destroyed, the gradual
progress of humanity interrupted and set upon a path of greed and
destruction.” (p. 1) Understanding the factual history of
the theft of land from sea to shinning sea encapsulates the
creation and existence of the United States.
The particular mode of U.S. colonization, or expansion of its
capitalist system, required the taking of Indian lands, which
were flooded with European and Anglo-American settlers. From that
base, states and institutions were formed. The
Land
Ordinance of 1785 propagated a national land system and
was the basis for its implementation. The
Northwest
Ordinance of 1787, albeit guaranteeing Indian occupancy and
title, set forth a plan for colonization establishing an
evolutionary procedure for the creation of states in the order of
military occupation, territorial status, and finally statehood.
Statehood would be achieved when the count of settlers
outnumbered the Indigenous population, which in most cases
required forced removal of the Indigenous inhabitants.
The United States created a unique land system among colonial
powers. In this system, land became the most important exchange
commodity for the primitive accumulation of capital and building
of the national treasury. In order to understand the apparently
irrational policy of the U.S. government toward the Indians, the
centrality of land sales in building the economic base of the
U.S. capitalist system must be the frame of reference.
From the
Introduction,
Roots
of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico,
by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2007)
Reprinted for Fair Use Only.
In the book’s Conclusion, “The Future of the United
States,” are two sections demonstrating the historical arc,
as John Grenier describes (above), of how
“violence directed systematically against non-combatants
through irregular means, from the start, has been a central part
of Americans’ way of war.” The first, headlined
“The Return of Legalized Torture,” describes how
assistant US attorney general John Yoo employed the historical
precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1873 opinion in
Modoc Indian Prisoners as part of the justification in
2003 for creating the never before known in the annals of Western
warfare designation of “unlawful combatants”.
The Return of Legalized Torture
Bodies—tortured bodies, sexually violated bodies,
imprisoned bodies, dead bodies—arose as a primary topic in
the first years of the George W. Bush administration following
the September 2001 attacks with a war of revenge against
Afghanistan and the overthrow of the government of Iraq. Afghans
resisting U.S. forces and others who happened to be in the wrong
place at the wrong time were taken into custody, and most of them
were sent to a hastily constructed prison facility on the U.S.
military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on land the United
States appropriated in its 1898 war against Cuba. Rather than
bestowing the status of prisoner of war on the detainees, which
would have given them certain rights under the Geneva
Conventions, they were designated as “unlawful
combatants,” a status previously unknown in the annals of
Western warfare. As such, the detainees were subjected to torture
by U.S. interrogators and shamelessly monitored by civilian
psychologists and medical personnel.
In response to questions and condemnations from around the globe,
a University of California international law professor, John C.
Yoo, on leave to serve as assistant U.S. attorney general in the
Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, penned in
March 2003 what became the infamous
“Torture Memo.”
Not much was made at the time of one of the precedents Yoo used
to defend the designation “unlawful combatant,” the
US Supreme Court’s 1873 opinion in Modoc Indian
Prisoners.
In 1872, a group of Modoc men led by Kintpuash, also known as
Captain Jack, attempted to return to their own country in
Northern California after the U.S. Army had rounded them up and
forced them to share a reservation in Oregon. The insurgent group
of fifty-three was surrounded by U.S. troops and Oregon
militiamen and forced to take refuge in the barren and rugged
lava beds around Mount Lassen, a dormant volcano, a part of their
ancestral homeland that they knew every inch of. More than a
thousand troops commanded by General Edward R. S. Canby, a former
Civil War general, attempted to capture the resisters, but had no
success as the Modocs engaged in effective guerrilla warfare.
Before the Civil War, Canby had built his military career
fighting in the Second Seminole War and later in the invasion of
Mexico. Posted to Utah on the eve of the Civil War, he had led
attacks against the Navajos, and then began his Civil War service
in New Mexico. Therefore, Canby was a seasoned Indian killer. In
a negotiating meeting between the general and Kintpuash, the
Modoc leader killed the general and the other commissioners when
they would allow only for surrender. In response, the United
States sent another former Civil War general in with more than a
thousand additional soldiers as reinforcements, and in April 1873
these troops attacked the Modoc stronghold, this time forcing the
Indigenous fighters to flee. After four months of fighting that
cost the United States almost $500,000—equal to nearly $10
million currently—and the lives of more than four hundred
of its soldiers and a general, the nationwide backlash against
the Modocs was vengeful. Kintpuash and several other captured
Modocs were imprisoned and then hanged at Alcatraz, and the Modoc
families were scattered and incarcerated on reservations.
Kintpuash’s corpse was embalmed and exhibited at circuses
around the country. The commander of the army’s Pacific
Military Division at the time, Lieutenant General John M.
Schofield, wrote of the
Modoc
War in his memoir, Forty-Six
Years in the Army: “If the innocent could be separated
from the guilty, plague, pestilence, and famine would not be an
unjust punishment for the crimes committed in this country
against the original occupants of the soil.”
[Quoted in Byrd, Jodi A.
The
Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, pp. 226-28.]
Drawing a legal analogy between the Modoc prisoners and the
Guantánamo detainees, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Yoo
employed the legal category of homo sacer—in
Roman law, a person banned from society, excluded from its legal
protections but still subject to the sovereign’s power.
[Reference: Agamben, Giorgio.
Homo
Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1998.]
Anyone may kill a homo sacer without it being considered
murder. As Jodi Byrd notes, “One begins to understand why
John C. Yoo’s infamous
March 14, 2003, torture memos
cited the 1865 Military Commissions and the 1873 The Modoc
Indian Prisoners legal opinions in order to articulate
executive power in declaring the state of exception, particularly
when The Modoc Indian Prisoners opinion explicitly marks
the Indian combatant as homo sacer to the United
States.” To buttress his claim, Yoo quoted from the 1873
Modoc Indian Prisoners opinion:
It cannot be pretended that a United States soldier is guilty of
murder if he kills a public enemy in battle, which would be the
case if the municipal law were in force and applicable to an act
committed under such circumstances. All the laws and customs of
civilized warfare may not be applicable to an armed conflict with
the Indian tribes upon our western frontier; but the
circumstances attending the assassination of Canby [Army general]
and Thomas [U.S. peace commissioner] are such as to make their
murder as much a violation of the laws of savage as of civilized
warfare, and the Indians concerned in it fully understood the
baseness and treachery of their act.
Byrd points out that, according to this line of thinking, anyone
who could be defined as “Indian” could thus be killed
legally, and they also could be held responsible for crimes they
committed against any US soldier. “As a result, citizens of
American Indian nations become in this moment the origin of the
stateless terrorist combatant within U.S. enunciations of
sovereignty.”
From the
Conclusion, pp. 222-24,
An
Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.
Reprinted for Fair Use Only.
The second section of the Conclusion describing a central part
of US Americans’ way of war lists some of the Indigenous
peoples throughout the world who have suffered theft of their
ancestral lands and displacement at the hands of a voracious US
appetite for military bases from which to pursue further
exploitation of labor and resources in service to a now
globalized corporate empire.
Ramped-Up Militarization
The Chagos Archipelago comprises more than sixty small coral
islands isolated in the Indian Ocean halfway between Africa and
Indonesia, a thousand miles south of the nearest continent,
India. Between 1968 and 1973, the United States and Britain, the
latter the colonial administrator, forcibly removed the
indigenous inhabitants of the islands, the Chagossians. Most of
the two thousand deportees ended up more than a thousand miles
away in Mauritius and the Seychelles, where they were thrown into
lives of poverty and forgotten. The purpose of this expulsion was
to create a major U.S. military base on one of the Chagossian
islands, Diego Garcia. As if being rounded up and removed from
their homelands in the name of global security were not cruel
enough, before being deported the Chagossians had to watch as
British agents and U.S. troops herded their pet dogs into sealed
sheds where they were gassed and burned. As David Vine writes in
his chronicle of this tragedy:
The base on Diego Garcia has become one of the most secretive and
powerful U.S. military facilities in the world, helping to launch
the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (twice), threatening Iran,
China, Russia, and nations from southern Africa to southeast
Asia, host to a secret CIA detention center for high-profile
terrorist suspects, and home to thousands of U.S. military
personnel and billions of dollars in deadly weaponry.
[Reference: Vine, David.
Island
of Shame: The Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009, p. 2.]
The Chagossians are not the only indigenous people around the
world that the US military has displaced. The military
established a pattern during and after the Vietnam War of
forcibly removing indigenous peoples from sites deemed strategic
for the placement of military bases. The peoples of the Bikini
Atoll in the South Pacific and Puerto Rico’s Vieques Island
are perhaps the best-known examples, but there were also the
Inughuit of Thule, Greenland, and the thousands of Okinawans and
Indigenous peoples of Micronesia. During the harsh deportation of
the Micronesians in the 1970s, the press took some notice. In
response to one reporter’s question, Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger said of the Micronesians: “There are only
ninety thousand people out there. Who gives a damn?”
[Kissinger quoted in ibid., p. 15.]
This is a statement of permissive genocide.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the United States
operated more than 900 military bases around the world, including
287 in Germany, 130 in Japan, 106 in South Korea, 89 in Italy, 57
in the British Isles, 21 in Portugal, and 19 in Turkey. The
number also comprised additional bases or installations located
in Aruba, Australia, Djibouti, Egypt, Israel, Singapore,
Thailand, Kyrgyzstan, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab
Emirates, Crete, Sicily, Iceland, Romania, Bulgaria, Honduras,
Colombia, and Cuba (Guantánamo Bay), among many other locations
in some 150 countries, along with those recently added in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
From the
Conclusion, pp. 225-26,
An
Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.
Reprinted for Fair Use Only.
Speaking in 2001 about
“What
It Means To Be A Human Being,” John Trudell articulates
a profound understanding of what respecting and serving Life’s
needs encompasses.
I mean this is the purpose of techno-logic civilization. They
call it techno-logic for a very specific reason. This isn’t
an accident, okay? You know, it truly isn’t. But the
purpose of the civiliz[ation] – and so one of the
civilizing processes is to erase memories. Alright?, to erase
memories. Because we have ancestral memory. It’s encoded in
the DNA – it’s a genetic memory.
You look at how techno-logic civilization – and everywhere
that it goes, the longer it’s there, the more isolated the
human beings – but they’re not called human beings,
they’re workers and citizens, etc., alright? Alright? But
the more isolated they feel, they no longer – you know,
maybe they remember their grandparents or their great grandparents.
But see, you’ve got all that ancestral knowledge
that’s encoded in the DNA, but it’s been cut
off. So it can’t activate because if we’re not
conscious that it’s there then we can’t – it
just makes [things] difficult. See this is the memory that
it’s very important for them to erase. Alright, and
it’s about who we are – it’s memory of identity
and self-reality.
So anyway, we, because we
are, we come from where we come from, every one of us is the
descendant of a tribe. Every person in this room is a descendant
of a tribe at some point in our ancestral evolution. Common,
collective, genetic memory that’s in there, you know,
that’s encoded, like I say, in the DNA.
And for every individual, encoded in our individual DNA, alright?,
is the experience of our lineage from the very beginning. Whose
whole perceptional reality was what I was just saying: all things
have being, we’re made up of the Earth – all my
relations, pray to spirits. See, and they didn’t pray to
man or human form. The closest they came to it was
they prayed to spirits that were called ancestors.
Alright? And because they were praying to those ancestors for
help and guidance, they understood that we were borrowing today
from the past and the future. We’re borrowing it
from both places.
So they had this understanding of reality. So they knew that to
keep the balance was the purpose. That was the purpose. The
reason for being was to keep the balance.
So this was like, you know, what I will call a spiritual
perception of reality. And so because of the spiritual perception
of reality they understood that life was about responsibility.
It wasn’t about the abstraction of freedom – it was
about responsibility. That life was about responsibility.
In the Introduction quoted at the beginning of this, Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz articulates the imperative that “To learn and
know this history is both a necessity and a responsibility to the
ancestors and descendants of all parties.” John Trudell
submits that responsibility is the liberator’s word,
“because then we are taking direct action with our
intelligence.... [and t]hat means to activate and respect our
intelligence and activate the thinking process so that
it’s going the way we want it to be because
that’s why it was given to us.”
Studying An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the
United States has been, for this writer, a process of
waking from a long-term incoherent dream of sugar-coated
stories about the land of the free and the home of the brave,
otherwise known as the founding and progress of the United
States. While the victors write the history handed down
from prior generations, there is here a sourcebook compilation
of many of the elements forming a more complete, holistic
exposition of how “‘[c]olonization,’
‘dispossession,’ ‘settler colonialism,’
‘genocide’ ... drill to the core of US history, to
the very source of the country’s existence.”
(p. xiii)
Each of us possesses an intrinsic intelligence that is ours to
engage and express as we so choose. In every moment we have
the ultimate power to choose to interpret what we perceive in
precisely the way we choose to do so. Learning more
about and acknowledging the actual history of the United States
offers the possibility of altering the future timeline away
from further domination and oppression and toward living as
one human family sharing this irreplaceable home some still
relate to as Grandmother Earth. The choice is for each of us
to make.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz interviews about / speaking on
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
on the internet include:
-
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Twitter Postings
-
Book Discussion Indigenous Peoples’ History | Video | C-SPAN.org,
recorded at BookPeople Bookstore, Austin, Texas, (1:19:48) Sep 15, 2014
-
From
Indigenous Socialism to Colonial Capitalism, Examining Native
History of a Settler State, with Laura Flanders, Truthout,
(25:00) 14 Oct 2014
-
The Real News, October 24 & 28 2014
-
Part
1 of 3 (32:50): discusses growing up and getting
involved in the radical movements of the 1960s
-
Part
2 of 3 (12:23): explores the colonial roots and the
foundational myths of the United States
-
Part
3 of 3 (18:44): discusses the racism of some of
America’s storied poets and scholars
-
American
Cultures Book Series, UC Berkeley, (1:27:45) October 30, 2014
The first history of the United States told from the perspective
of indigenous peoples: Today, in the United States, there are
more than five hundred federally recognized indigenous
communities and nations comprising nearly three million people.
These individuals are the descendants of the once fifteen million
people who inhabited this land and are the subject of the latest
book by noted historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. In An
Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United
States, Dunbar-Ortiz challenges the founding myth of the United
States and shows how policy against the indigenous peoples was
genocidal and imperialist—designed to crush the original
inhabitants. Spanning more than three hundred years, this classic
bottom-up history significantly reframes how we view our past.
Told from the viewpoint of the indigenous, it reveals how Native
Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US
empire.
-
Time of Useful Consciousness Radio
Parts
One (29:00), and
Two (29:00),
Green Apple Books, San Francisco, December 4, 2014
In part re-writing the official history of the US, Dunbar-Ortiz
is looking for reasons why the founding ideology of the US
proved so deadly for the indigenous peoples living here. She
explains how the early settlers considered themselves to be
the chosen people and claimed a covenant with god that is
later expressed in the US constitution.
Part One includes a
description of North America before invasion, the emergence of
the US concept of a chosen people, the development of the role
of the US military as a force for genocide that seamlessly
transitioned into the US foreign wars, the role of militias,
a brief history of the American Indian Movement (AIM), and
the consequences of the Gold Rush in California.
Part Two
includes a description of an earlier book by the author,
The
Great Sioux Nation - Sitting in Judgement on America.
Published in 1977, it came out of the 1974 Wounded Knee trials
where Dunbar-Ortiz was an expert witness. She evoked the history
of the armed takeover of Wounded Knee by the American Indian
Movement and the 71-day siege by federal forces that encircled
them. Also the memory of the 1890 massacre of Wounded Knee of
Lakota women, children and elders. Several hundred Native
Americans were arrested and stood trial in one of the most
remarkable proceedings in judicial history. U.S. District
Judge Warren K. Urbom presided and allowed testimony by
traditional medicine people and Lakota chiefs. Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz prepared a history of the once Great Sioux Nation
from the court records.
“ The
Great Sioux Nation records what the
Sioux people, the scholars, and the
attorneys for the Sioux attempted to bring to the attention of
the federal courts, the administration of that year, and the
American people concerning the nature and status of the Sioux
Nation.... If the moral issues raised by the Sioux people in
the federal courtroom that cold month of December 1974 spark a
recognition among the readers of a common destiny of humanity
over and above the rules and regulations, the codes and statutes,
and the power of the establishment to enforce its will, then the
sacrifice of the Sioux people will not have been in
vain.” —Vine Deloria Jr.
“The oral history in this book represents some of the last
documentation from the Lakota point of view, on the
1868
Fort Laramie Treaty in these modern times. Almost all of the
individuals quoted in the book have passed on and their oral
history was only one generation removed from the actual Treaty
signers. The entire hearing in front of Judge Urbom was a turning
point in U.S. Law, as this was one of the few times in history
where Lakota interpreters were used in U.S. Federal Court to
express the meaning of the Fort Laramie Treaty from Lakota
Peoples to the Judge and the Federal Court. Another highlight in
this historic book was turning the words of the late Henry Crow
Dog into poetry which made his wisdom understandable to future
researchers, Indian and non-Indian. —Bill Means, Lakota,
co-founder, International Indian Treaty Council
“ The Great Sioux Nation transcends its time and place
and speaks to the present as much as the past.”
—Amanda Lynch Morris, Journal of American Culture
-
World Issues Forum,
Fairhaven College, Bellingham, WA, (1:12:20) December 2014
Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred
federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three
million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people
who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal
program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been
omitted from history. I will discuss this history, based on my
new book, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United
States, in which I challenge the founding myth of the United
States and radically reframe US history, tracing US aggressive
militarism and imperialist foreign wars to the earlier wars of
conquest and land-theft against Indigenous nations.
-
Majority Report
with Sam Seder, (42:45) December 18, 2014
Historian and author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the
United States Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz explains how the settler
colonial history of the United States defines it. Why the US
Military is rooted in wars and mass killings against Native
Americans. The Indian wars and our policy and history of never
ending war. Slavery and genocide of the Native American
population and the mentality of white supremacy. Also what we can
learn from “Indigenous socialism”. How labor was
organized in Pueblo City States. Why the great
“inventions” of the United States came from the first
Americans, the core myths the justify the genocides that created
America. Also why you need to understand Andrew Jackson to
understand America...
And portions of the book:
Books by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz:
-
An
Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States,
Boston: Beacon Press, 2014
-
Blood
on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War,
Cambridge, MA.: South End, 2005
Read the Prologue
-
Outlaw
Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975,
SF California: City Lights (2001),
University of Oklahoma Press (2014) revised with a new afterword
About Outlaw Woman
-
James
Joyce and the tradition of anti-colonial revolution,
Pullman, WA: Dept. of Comparative American Cultures,
Washington State University, 1999
-
Red
Dirt: Growing up Okie,
London; New York: Verso (1997), University of Oklahoma Press, 2006
Read Chapter One
-
Roots
of Resistance: Land Tenure in New Mexico, 1680-1980,
Chicano Studies Research Center.
Univ. of California Los Angeles (1980);
revised The University of Oklahoma Press, 2007
Read the Introduction
-
The
Miskito Indians of Nicaragua,
London: Minority Rights Group, 1988
-
Indians
of the Americas: Human Rights and Self-Determination,
New York: Praeger, 1984
-
The
Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America;
An Oral History of the Sioux Nation & Its Struggle for Sovereignty,
(1977) republished by Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, with
new Foreward, 2013
Read 2013
Forward & “Rations Not Fit for Human Consumption”,
pp. vii-ix & 153-156 respectively
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