multiculturalism paper

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

We are here to educate, not.forgive. We are here to enlighten, not accuse.

INTRO DUCTION

THIS LAND

- \Villie Johns, Brighton Seminole Reservation, Florida

Under the crust of that portion of Earth called the United States of America-" from Cali- fornia ... to the Gulf Stream waters"- are interred the bones, villages, fields, and sacred object s of American Indians. 1 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 civ ilization s of the Western Hemisphere, the very evidence of the Western Hemisphere, were wanto nly destroyed, the gradual progre ss of humanity interrupted and set upon a path of greed and destruc tion. 2 Choices were made that forged that path toward destruction of life itself-t he mom ent in which we now live and die as our planet shrivels, over-heated. To learn and know this history is both a necessity and a responsib ility to the ancestors and descendants of all partie s.

What historian David Chang has written about the land that became Oklahoma applies to the whole United States: "Nat ion, race, and class converged in land."3 Every- thing in US history is about the land-w ho oversaw and cultivated it, fished its waters, maintain ed its wildlife; who invaded and stole it; how it became a commo dity ("real estate") broken into pieces to be bought and sold on the market.

US polici es and actions related to Indigenous peoples, though often termed " racist" or "discriminatory," are rarely depict ed as what they are: classic cases of imperialism and a particu lar form of colonialism-se ttler colonia lism. As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe writes, "The question of genocide is never far from discussions of sett ler colonialism. Land is life-o r, at least, land is necessary for life."4

The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism-t he found ing of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slav- ery, and a policy of genocide and land theft. Those who seek histo1y with an upbeat end-

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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

ing, a history of redemption and reconc iliation, may look around and observe that such a conclu sion is not visible, not even in utopian dreams of a better society.

Writing US history from an Indigenous peop les' perspect ive requires rethinkin g the consensual national narrative . That narrativ e 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 que stions that chal- lenge the core of the scripted narrative of the origin story. How might acknowledging the reality of US history work to transform soc iety? That is the central question this book pursues.

Teaching Nativ e American studies, I always begin with a simple exercise. I ask stu- dents to quick ly draw a rough outline of the United States at the time it gained indepen- dence from Britain. Invariably most draw the approx imate present shape of the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific- the continental territory not fully appropria ted until a century after independence. What became independent in 1783 were the thirteen British colonies hugging the Atlan tic shore. When ca lled on this, students are embar- rassed because they know better. I assure them that they are not alone. I call this a Rorschach test of unconsciou s "manifest destiny," embedded in the minds of nearly everyone in the United States and around the world. This test reflects the seeming inevitabi lity of US extent and power, its destiny, with an implication that the contin ent had previously been terra nullius, a land without people.

Woody Guthri e's "This Land Is Your Land" celebrates that the land belongs to every- one, reflecting the unconscious manifest destiny we live with. But the extension of the United States from sea to shining sea was the intention and design of the country 's founders. "Free" land was the magnet that attracted European settlers. Many were slave owners who desired limitless land for lucrative cash crops . After the war for indepen- dence but preceding the writing of the US Constitution, the Continental Congress pro- duced the Northwest Ordinanc e. This was the first law of the incipient republic, revea ling the motive for those desiring independence. It was the blueprint for gobbling up the British-protec ted Indian Territory ("Oh io Country") on the other side of the Appalachians and Alleghenies . Britain had made settlement there illegal with the Proclamation of 1763.

In 180 I , President Jefferson aptly described the new settler-state's intentions for hori- zontal and vertical continenta l 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 multiplicatio n will expand itse lf beyond those limits and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a peop le speaking the same language, gov- erned 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 for-

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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

mer Spanish colonial terr itories 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 unifyin g identity and of the values that guide them. In the United States , the founding and deve lopment of the Anglo-Ame ri- can sett ler-state involves a narrative about Puritan settlers who had a covenant with God to take the land. That part of the origin story is support ed and reinforced by the Columbus myth and the "Doctrine of Discovery." According to a series of late-fifteent h-centu ry papal bulls , European nations acquired title to the lands they "discovered" and the Indige- nous inhabitants lost their natural right to that land after Europeans arrived and claimed it.5 As law professor Robert A. Williams observes about the Doctrine of Discovery:

Responding to the requir ements of a paradoxical age of Renaissance and Inquisi- tion , the West 's first modem discourses of conquest articulated a vision of all humankind united under a rule of law discoverab le solely by human reason. Unfortunately for the American Indian, the West's first tentative steps towards this noble vision of a Law of Nat ions contained a mandate for Europe's subjuga- tion of all peoples whose radical divergence from European-derived nom1s of right conduct signified their need for conques t and remediation. 6

The Columbus myth suggests that from US independence onward, colonial sett lers saw themselves as part of a world system of colonization. "Columbia ," the poetic, Lati- nate name used in reference to the United States from its founding throughout the nine- teenth cent ury, 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 institution s such as Columbia University, and by countless place names, includ ing that of the national capi tal, the District of Columbia.7 The 1798 hymn "Hail, Columbia" was the early national anthem and is now used whenever the vice president of the United States makes a publ ic appearan ce, and Columbus Day is still a federa l hol iday despite Columb us never having set foot on the continent claimed by the United States .

Traditionally, historians of the United States hopin g to have successful careers in academia and to author lucrative school textbook s became protector s o f this orig in myth. With the cultural upheaval s in the academ ic world during the 1960s, engender ed by the civil rights movement and student activism, historians came to call for objectiv ity and fairness in revising interpre tat ions of US history. They warned aga inst morali zing, urging instead a dispassionate and culturally relative approach . Histor ian Bernard Sheehan, in an influent ial essay, called for a "cultural conflict" under standing of Nat ive- Euro-Ame rican relations in the early United States, writ ing that this approach "diffuses the locus of gui lt."8 In striving for "balance," howeve r, histor ians spouted platitudes: "There were good and bad peop le on both sides." "American culture is an ama lgamation of all its eth-

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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

nic groups." "A frontier is a zone of interact ion between cultures, not merely advancing European settlements."

Later, trendy postmodernist studies insisted on Indigenous "agency" under the guise of individual and collec tive empowem1ent, making the casualt ies of colonialism responsi- ble for their own demise. Perhaps worst of all, some cla imed (and still cla im) that the col- onizer and colonized experienced an "encounter" and engaged in "dialogue," thereby masking real ity with ju stifications and rationalizations- in short, apo logies for one-sided robbery and murder. In focusing on "cultural change" and "co nflict between cultures," these studies avoid fundame ntal questions abo ut the formation of the United States and its implication s for the present and future. This approac h to history allows one to safely put aside present responsib ility for continued harm done by that past and the questions of reparation s, restitution, and reordering soc iety. 9

Multiculturali sm became the cutt ing edge of post-civil-rights-movement US history revisionism. For this scheme to work- and affirm US historical progress- Indigenous nations and communit ies had to be left out of the picture. As territor ially and treaty-based peop les in North America, they did not fit the grid of multicu lturalism but were included by transform ing them into an inchoa te oppresse d racial group, wh ile colonized Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans were dissolved into another such group, variously called "H ispan ic" or "Latino." The multicultural approach emphasiz ed the "co ntributions" of individua ls from oppressed groups to the country 's assumed greatness. Indigenous peo- ples were thus credited with com , beans, buckskin, log cab ins, parkas , maple syrup, canoes, hundreds of place names, Thank sgiving, and even the concepts of democracy and federa lism. But this idea of the gift-giving Indian helping to estab lish and enrich the deve lopment of the United States is an insidious smoke screen meant to obscure the fact that the very existence of the country is a result of the looting of an entire continent and its resources. The fundamental unreso lved issues of Indigenous lands, treaties, and sover- eignty could not but scuttle the premises of multiculturalism.

With multiculturali sm, manifest destiny won the day. As an example, in 1994, Pren- tice Hall (part of Pearson Educat ion) publi shed a new college- level US history textbook, authored by four members of a new generat ion of revisionist historians. These radical social historians are all brilliant scholars with posts in prestigious universities. The book 's title reflects the intent of its authors and pub lisher: Out of Many : A History of the Ameri- can People. The origin story of a supposedly unitary nation, albeit now multicultural , remained intact. The original cover design featured a multicolored woven fabr ic- this image meant to stand in place of the discredited "melting pot." Inside, facing the title page, was a photograph of a Nav ajo woman, dressed formally in velvet and adorned with heavy ster ling silver and turquo ise j ewelry. With a traditional Navaj o dwell ing, a hogan, in the background, the woman was shown knee ling in front of a tradi tional loom, weav ing

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a nearly finished rug . The design? The Stars and Stripes! The authors, upon hearing my objection and explanation that Navajo weavers make their livings off commissioned work that includes the desired design, responded: "But it's a rea l photograph." To the authors' credit , in the second edition they replaced the cover photograph and removed the Navajo picture inside, although the narrative text remains unchang ed.

Awareness of the settler-colonia list context of US history writin g is essential if one is to avoid the laziness of the defau lt position and the trap of a mythological unconscious belief in manifest destiny. The fonn of colonialism that the Indigenous peoples of North America have experienced was modern from the beginning: the expansion of European corporat ions, backed by government armies, into foreign areas, with subsequent expropri- ation of lands and resources. Settler colonial ism is a genocida l policy. Native nations and communit ies, while struggling to maintain fundamental va lues and collectivity, have from the beginn ing resisted modern colonialism using both defensive and offensive techniqu es, including the modern forms of armed resistance of national liberation movements and what now is called terrorism. In every instance they have fought for survival as peoples. The objective of US colonialist authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples- not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide as contrasted with premodern instances of extreme violence that did not have the goal of extinction. The United States as a socioeco nomic and politica l entity is a result of this centuri es-long and ongoing colonial process . Modern Indigenous nations and communities are soc ieties fonned by their resistance to colonialism, through which they have carried their practices and histories. It is breathtaking, but no miracle, that they have survived as peoples.

To say that the United States is a colonialist settler-state is not to make an accusat ion but rather to face historical reality, without which cons ideration not much in US history makes sense, unless Indigenous peoples are erased. But Indigenous nations, through resis- tance, have survived and bear witness to this history. In the era of worldwid e decoloniza- tion in the second half of the twentiet h century, the fonner colonial powers and their intellectual apologists mounted a counterforce, often called neocoloniali sm, from which multiculturalism and postmodernism emerged . Although much revisionist US history reflects neocoloniali st strategy-a n attempt to accommodate new realities in order to retain the dominan ce- neoco lonia list methods signal victory for the colonized . Such approac hes pry off a lid long kept tightly fastened. One result has been the presence of significant numbers of Indigenous scholars in US universities who are changing the terms of analysis . The main challenge for scholars in revising US history in the context of colo- nialism is not lack of informat ion, nor is it one of methodo logy. Certainly difficulties with documentation are no more prob lematic than they are in any other area of resea rch. Rather, the source of the problems has been the refusal or inability of US historians to

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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

comprehend the nature of their own history, US history. The fundamenta l problem is the absence of the colonia l framework.

Throu gh economic penetration of Indigenous socie ties, the Europ ean and Euro-Amer- ican colonial powers created economic dependency and imbalance of trade, then incorpo- rated the Indigeno us nations into spheres of influence and controlled them indirectly or as protectorates, with indispensable use of Christian missionaries and alcohol. In the case of US sett ler colon ialism, land was the primary commodity. With such obvious indicators of colonialism at work, why should so many interpretations of US political-economic devel- opment be convoluted and obscure, avoiding the obvious? To some extent, the twentieth- century emergence of the field of "US West" or "Borderlands" history has been forced into an incompl ete and flawed settler-co lonialist framework. The father of that field of history, Frederick Jackson Turner, confessed as much in 190 I: "Our colonial system did not start with the Spanish War [ 1898]; the U.S. had had a colonia l history and policy from the beginning of the Republic ; but they have been hidden under the phraseology of ' inter- state migration' and 'territorial organization."' 1 O

Settler colonial ism, as an institution or system, requires violence or the threat of vio- lence 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 . ln employing the force neces- sary to accompl ish its expan sionist goals, a colonizing regime institutionaliz es v iolence. The notion that settler-indigenous conflict is an inevitable product of cultural differences and misunder standings, or that violence was committed equally by the colonized and the colonizer, blurs the nature of the historical processes . Euro-American colonialism, an aspect of the capitalist economic globalization, had from its beginnings a genocidal ten- dency.

The term "ge nocide" was coined followin g the Shoah, or Holocaust, and its prohibi- tion was enshrined in the United Nations convent ion adopted in 1948: the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genoc ide. The convention is not retroac tive but is applicable to US-Indigenous relations since 1988, when the US Senate ratified it. The terms of the genocide convention are also usefu l tools for historical analy- sis of the effects of colonialism in any era. In the conven tion, any one of five acts is con- sidered genocide if "committ ed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racia l or religious group":

killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. 11

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In the 1990s, the term "ethnic cleansing" became a useful descript ive term for genocide. 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 entai led tortur e, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, remova ls of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories , and removals of Indigenou s 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.

Settler colonialism is inherently genocidal in terms of the genocide conven tion. In the case of the British Nort h American colonies and the United States , not only extem1ination and removal were practic ed but also the disappearing of the prior ex istence of Indigenous peoples-and this continues to be perpetuated in local historie s. Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) historian Jean O'Brien names this practic e of writing Indians out of existence "first ing and lasting." All over the continent, loca l histor ies, monuments , and signage narrat e the story of first settlement: the founder(s), the first school, first dwelling , first everyt hing, as if there had never been occupants who thrived in those places before Euro-Americans. On the other hand, the national narrative te lls of " last" Indian s or last tribes, such as "the last of the Mahicans," " lshi , the last Indian ," and End of the Trail , as a famous sculptur e by James Earle Fraser is titled. 12

Document ed policies of genocide on the part of US administrations can be identified in at least four distinct periods: the Jacksonian era of forced removal; the California gold rush in Northern California; the post-Civil War era of the so-ca lled Indian wars in the Great Plains; and the 1950s term ination period, all of which are discussed in the follow- ing chapters. Cases of genocide carr ied out as policy may be found in historica l docu - ments as well as in the ora l histories of Indigenous communiti es. An examp le from I 873 is typical, with General William T. Sherman writing , "We must act with vind ictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to thei r exterm ination , men, women and children ... during an assau lt, the sold iers can not pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age." 13 As Patrick Wolfe has noted , the pecul iarity of settler co lo- nialism is that the goa l is elimination of Indigenous populations in order to make land avai lable to settlers. That project is not limited to government policy, but rather involves all kind s of agencies, voluntary militias, and the settler s themse lves acting on their own. 14

In the wake of the US 1950s termination and relocatio n policies , a pan-Indigenous movement arose in tandem with the powerful African American civil rights movement and the broad-based socia l justice and antiwar movements of the I 960s. The Indigenous rights movement succeeded in reversing the US term ination policy. However, repression , armed attacks, and legis lative attempts to undo treaty rights began again in the late I 970s,

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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

giving rise to the internationa l Indigenous movemen t, which greatly broadened the sup- port for Indigenous sovereignty and territorial rights in the United States.

The early twenty-first century has seen increased exploitati on of energy resources begetting new pressures on Indigenous lands. Exploitation by the largest corporations , often in collusion with politicians at local, state, and federal leve ls, and even within some Indigenous governments, could spell a final dem ise for Indigenous land bases and resources . Streng thening Indigenou s sovereig nty and self-determination to prevent that result wi ll take general public outrage and demand, whic h in tum will require that the general population , those descended from settler s and immigrants, know their history and assume responsibility. Resista nce to these powerful corporate forces continues to have profound implicat ions for US socioeco nomic and political development and the future.

There are more than five hundred federally recog nized Indigenous commu nities and nations, comprising nearly three million people in the United States . These are the descenda nts of the fifteen million original inhabitants of the land, the majority of whom were farmers who lived in towns. The US esta blishment of a system of Indian reserva- tions stemmed from a long Briti sh colonial practice in the Americas. In the era of US treaty-making from independence to 187 1, the concept of the reservation was one of the In<ligenuus naliun reserving a narruw e<l lan<l base frurn a rnui;h larger une in exd 1ange fur US governme nt protection from settlers and the provision of socia l services. In the late nineteenth century, as Indigenous resistance was weakene d, the concept of the reservatio n changed to one of land being carved out of the public domain of the United States as a benevolent gesture, a "gift" to the Indigenous peoples. Rhetoric changed so that reserva- tions were said to have been "given" or "c reated" for Indian s. With this shift , Indian reserva tions came to be seen as enclaves within state ' boundarie s. Despite the political and econom ic reality, the impression to many was that Indigenous people were taking a free ride on public domain.

Beyond the land bases within the limits of the. 3 IO federa lly recognized reservations -amo ng 554 Indigenous groups- Indigenous land , water, and resource rights extend to all federally acknowledged Indigenous commun ities within the borders of the United States. Thi s is the case whether "w ithin the orig inal or subseque ntly acquired territory thereof , and whether within or without the limits of a state," and includes all allotments as we ll as rights-of-way running to and from them. 15 Not all the federally recognized Indigenous nation s have land bases beyond government buildings , and the lands of some Nat ive nations, including those of the Sioux in the Dakotas and Minnesota and the Ojib- wes in Minnesota , have been parceled into multiple reservations , while some fifty Indige- nous nation s that had been removed to Oklahoma were ent irely allotted--d ivided by the

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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

federal govern ment into individual Native-owned parcel s. Attorney Walter R. Echo-Hawk writes:

In 188 1, Indian landholdings in the United States had plummeted to 156 million acres . By 1934, only about 50 million acres remained (an area the size of Idaho and Washington) as a result of the General Allotment Act of 1887. During World War II, the government took 500,000 more acres for military use. Over one hun- dred tribes, bands , and Rancherias relinquished their lands under various acts of Congress during the termination era of the 1950s. By 1955, the indigenous land base had shrunk to ju st 2.3 percent of its original size. 16

As a result of federal land sales, seizures, and allotments, most reservations are severe ly fragmented. Each parcel of tribal , trust, and private ly held land is a separate enclave under multipl e laws and juris dictions. The Dine (Navajo) Nation has the largest contemporary contiguous land base among Nat ive nations: nearly sixteen million acres, or nearly twenty-five thousand square miles, the size of West Virginia. Each of twelve other reserva tions is larger than Rhode Island, wh ich comprises nearly eight hundred thousand acres, or twelve hundred square miles, and each of nine other reservations is larger than Delaware, which covers nearly a million and a half acres, or two thou sand square miles. Other reserva tions have land bases of fewer than thirty-two thousand acres, or fifty square miles. 17 A number of independent nation -states with seats in the United Nations have less territory and smaller populations than some Indigenous nat ions of North America.

Following World War II, the United States was at war with much of the world, just as it was at war with the Indigenous peoples of North America in the nineteenth century. This was total war, demanding that the enemy surrender uncondi tionally or face annihila- tion. Perhaps it was inevitable that the earlier wars against Indigenous peop les, if not acknowledged and repud iated, ultimately would include the world. According to the ori- gin narrative, the United States was born of rebellio n against oppression-agains t empire - and thus is the product of the first anticolonial revolution for national liberatio n. The narrative flows from that fallacy: the broadening and deepe ning of democracy; the Civil War and the ensu ing "seco nd revolution ," which ended slavery; the twentieth-century mission to save Europe from itself- twice; and the ultimat ely triumphant fight aga inst the scourge of communism, with the United States inheriting the difficult and burdensome task of keeping order in the world. It's a narrative of progress . The 1960s social revolu- tions, ignited by the African Amer ican liberation movement , complicated the origin nar- rative , but its structure and periodizat ion have been left intact. After the 1960s, historians incorporated women, African Americans, and immigrants as con tributors to the common- weal. Indeed , the revised narrat ive produced the "nation of immigrants" framework ,

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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

which obscures the US practice of colonization , merging sett ler colonialism with immi- gration to metropolitan centers during and after the industrial revolution. Native peoples, to the extent that they were included at all , were renamed "First Americans" and thus themselves cast as distant immigrants.

The provincia lism and national chauvinism of US history production make it difficult for effective revis ions to gain authority. Scholars , both Indigenous and a few non-Indige- nous, who attempt to rectify the distortions , are labeled advocates , and their findings are rej ected for publication on that basis . Indigenous scholars look to research and thinkin g that has eme rged in the rest of the European-co lonized world . To understand the historical and current experiences of Indigenous peop les in the United States, these thinkers and writers draw upon and creatively apply the historical materialism of Marxism, the libera- tion theology of Latin Amer ica, Frantz Fanon 's psychosocial ana lyses of the effects of colonia lism on the colonizer and the colonized , and other approaches, including develop- ment theory and postmodern theory. While not abandonin g insights gained from those sources, due to the "exceptio nal" nature of US coloni alism among nineteenth-century colonial powers, Indigenous scholars and activists are engaged in exploring new approaches .

This book claims to be a history of the United States from an Indigenous peoples ' per- spective but there is no such thing as a collect ive Indigenous peop les' perspective , ju st as there is no monolithic Asian or European or African peop les' perspect ive. This is not a history of the vast civilizations and commu nities that thrived and survived between the Gulf of Mexico and Canada and between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific. Such histo- ries have been written, and are being wr itten by historians of Dine, Lakota, Mohawk, Tlingit, Muskogee , An ishinaabe, Lumbee, Inuit, Kiowa , Cherokee, Hopi, and other Indigenous communit ies and nations that have survived colon ial genocide. This book attempts to tell the story of the United States as a colonial ist settler-state, one that, like colonialist European states, crushed and subjugated the original civi lizations in the terri- tories it now rules. Indigenous peoples, now in a colonia l relationship with the United States, inhabited and thrived for millennia before they were displaced to fragmented reserva tions and economi cally decimated.

Thi s is a history of the United States.

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ONE

FOLLOW THE CORN

Carrying their flints and torclzes, Native Americans l-vere living in balance with Nature-but they had their thumbs 011 the scale.

- Charles C. Mann, 149 I

Humanoids existed on Earth for around four million years as hunters and gatherers living in small communal groups that throu gh their movements found and populated every con- tinent. Some two hundred thousand years ago, human societies, having originated in Sub- Saharan Africa, began migrating in all directions, and their descendants eventually popu- lated the globe. Around twelve thousand years ago, some of these people began staying put and developed agriculture-mainly wome n who domesticated wild plants and began cultivating others.

As a birthplace of agriculture and the towns and cit ies that followed , America is ancient, not a "new world." Domestication of plants took place around the globe in seven locales during approxi mately the same period , around 8500 BC. Three of the seven were in the Amer icas, all based on com: the Valley of Mexico and Centra l Amer ica (Mesoame rica); the South-Central Andes in South America; and eastern North America . The other early agricu ltural centers were the Tigris-Euphrate s and Nile River syste ms, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Yellow River of northern China , and the Yangtze River of south- ern China. During this time, many of the same human soc ieties began domesticating ani- mals. Only in the American continents was the para llel domestication of anima ls eschewed in favor of game management , a kind of animal husbandry different from that developed in Africa and As ia. In these seven areas, agriculture-based "civ ilized" societies developed in symbios is with hunting, fish ing, and gatheri ng people s on their peripherie s, gradually enveloping many of the latter into the realms of their civilizations, except for those in regions inhosp itable to agriculture.

THE SACRED CORN FOOD

Indigenous American agr iculture was based on com. Traces of cultivated com have been identified in central Mexico dating back ten thousand years. Twelve to fourtee n centuries

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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

later, com production had spread throughout the temperate and tropical Americas from the southern tip of South America to the subarct ic of North America, and from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean on both continents . The wild grain from wh ich corn was cultivated has never been identified with certainty, but the Indigenou s peoples for whom com was and is their sustenance believe it was a sacred gift from their gods. Since there is no evi- dence of com on any other continent prior to its post-Columbus dispersal, its develop- ment is a unique invention of the original American agriculturali sts. Unlike most grains , com cannot grow wild and cannot exist witho ut attentive human care .

Along with multiple varieties and colors of com , Mesoamericans cultivated squash and beans, which were extended throug hout the hemisphe re, as were the many varieties and colors of potato cultivated by Andean farmers beginning more than seven thousand years ago. Corn, being a summ er crop, can tolerate no more than twenty to thirty days without water and even less time in high temperatures. Many of the areas where com was the staple were arid or semiar id, so its cultivation required the design and constructio n of complex irrigation systems- in place at least two thousand years before Europeans knew the Americas existed. The proliferation of agric ulture and cultigens could not have occurred without centur ies of cultura l and comme rcial interchange among the peoples of North , Central, and South America, whose traders carried seeds as well as other goods and cultural practices.

The vast reach and capacity of Indigenous grain production impressed colonialist Europeans. A trave ler in French-occupied North America related in 1669 that six squa re miles of cornfields surround ed each Iroquoi s village . The governo r of New France, fol- lowing a milita ry raid in the 1680s, reported that he had destroyed more than a million bushels (forty- two thousand tons) of com belonging to four Iroquois villages. 1 Thanks to the nutrit ious triad of corn, beans , and squash-w hich provide a comp lete protein-t he America s were densely populated when the European monarchies began sponsoring colo- nizat ion projects there.

The total population of the hemisphere was about one hundred million at the end of the fifteenth century, with about two-fift hs in North America, including Mexico. Central Mexico alone supported some thirty million people. At the same time , the population of Europe as far east as the Ural Mountains was around fifty million. Experts have observ ed that such population densities in precolonial America were supportable because the peo- ples had created a relatively disease-fre e paradise. 2 There certain ly were diseases and health problems , but the practice of herbal medicine and even surgery and dentistry, and most importantly both hygienic and ritual bathing, kept diseases at bay. Settler observers in all parts of the Americas marveled at the frequent bathing even in winter in cold cli- mates. One commented that the Native people "go to the river and plunge in and wash themselves before they dress daily." Another wrote: "Men , women, and children, from

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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

early infancy, are in the habit of bathing." Ritual sweat baths were common to all Native North Americans, having originated in Mexico. 3 Above all, the majority of the Indige- nous peoples of the Americas had healthy, most ly vegetarian diets based on the staple of com and supplemented by wild fish, fowl , and four-legged animals . People lived long and we ll with abundant ceremonial and recreational periods.

UP FROM MEXICO

As on the two other major continental landmasses-Eurasia and Africa--civilization in the Americas emerged from certain population cente rs, with periods of vigorou s growth and integration interspersed with periods of decline and disintegration. At least a dozen suc h centers were functioning in the Americas when Europeans intervened. Although this is a history of the part of North America that is today the United States, it is important to follow the corn to its orig ins and briefly consider the peop les' history of the Valley of Mexico and Central America , often called Mesoamerica. Influences from the south pow- erfully shaped the Indigenous peoples to the north (in what is now the United States) and Mexicans cont inue to migrate as they have for millennia but now across the arb itrary bor- der that was estab lished in the US war against Mexico in 1846-48.

The first great cultivators of com were the Mayans, initially centered in present-day northern Guatemala and the Mexican state of Tabasco . Extending to the Yucatan peninsu- la, the Mayans of the tenth century built city-states-Chichen-ltza, Mayapan , Uxmal, and many others-as far sou th as Belize and Hondura s. Mayan villages, farms, and cities extended from tropical forests to alpine areas to coastal and interior plain s. During the five-century apex of Mayan civilization , a comb ined priesthood and nobility gove rned . There was also a distinct com mercial class , and the cities were densely populated , not simp ly bureaucratic or religious centers . Ordinary Mayan villages in the far-flung region retained fundamenta l features of clan struc tures and com munal social relat ions. They worked the nobles' fields, paid rent for use of land, and contr ibuted labor and taxes to the building of roads, temp les, nobl es ' houses, and other structu res. It is not clear whether these relations were explo itative or cooperatively deve loped. However, the nobility drew servants from gro ups such as war prisoners, accused criminals, debtor s, and even orphans . Although serv ile status was not hereditary, this was forced labor. Increasingly burdensome exploitation of labor and higher taxes and tribute produced dissension and uprisings , resulting in the collapse of the Mayan state, from which decentrali zed politie s emerge d.

Mayan culture astonishes all who study it, and it is often com pared to Greek (Athen- ian) culture. At its core was the cultivation of com; religion was constructed around this vital food . The Mayan people developed art, architec ture , sculpture, and painting , employing a variety of mater ials, including gold and silver, which they mined and used

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for jewelry and sculpture, not for use as currency. Surrounded by rubber trees, they invented the rubber ball and court ball games similar to modern socce r. Their achieve- ments in math ematics and astronomy are the most impressive. By 36 BC they had devel- oped the concept of zero. They worked with numbers in the hundred s of millions and used extens ive dating systems, making possible both their observations of the cosmos and their unique calendar that marked the passage of time into the future. Modern astronomer s have marve led at the accuracy of Mayan charts of the movements of the moon and planets , which were used to predict eclipses and other events. Mayan culture and science , as well as governmen tal and econom ic practices, were influentia l throughout the region.

During the same period of Mayan deve lopment, the Olmec civilization reigned in the Valley of Mexico and built the grand metropolis of Teotihuacan. Beginn ing in AD 750, Toltec civilization dominated the region for four centuries , absorbing the Olmecs . Colos- sal buildings, sculptures , and markets made up the Toltec cities , whic h housed extens ive librari es and universities . They created multiple cities, the largest being Tula. The Toltecs ' written language was based on the Mayan form, as was the ca lendar they used in scien- tific research , particularly in astronomy and medicine . Another nation in the Valley of Mexico, the Culhua, built the city-state of Cu lhuacan on the southe rn shore of Lake Tex- coco, as well as the city-state of Texcoco on the eastern shore of the lake. In the late four- teenth century, the Tepanec people rose in an expans ionist drive and subjugated Culhuacan, Texcoco, and all their subject peoples in the Valley of Mexico . They pro- ceeded to conquer Tenochtitlan, which was located on an island in the middle of the immense Lake Texcoco and had been built around 1325 by the Nahuatl- speaking Aztecs who had migrated from northern Mexico (today 's Utah). The Aztecs had entered the va l- ley in the twelfth century and been involved in toppling the Toltecs .4

In 1426, the Aztecs of Tenochtit lan formed an alliance with the Texcoco and Tlaco- pan peop les and overthrew Tepanec rule. The allies proceeded to wage war against neigh- boring peoples and eventua lly succeede d in gaining control over the Valley of Mexico . The Aztec s emerged as dominant in the Triple Alliance and moved to bring all the peo- ples of Mexico under their tributa ry authority . These events para lleled ones in Europe and Asia during the same period, when Rome and other city-states were demolished and occupied by invading Gem1anic people s, while the Mongol s of the Eurasian steppe over- ran much of Russia and China. As in Europe and Asia, the invad ing peoples assimilated and reproduced civ ilizat ion.

The economic basis for the powerful Aztec state was hydraulic agricult ure, with com as the central crop . Beans, pumpkin s, tomato es, cocoa, and many other food crops flour- ished and supported a dense popu lation, much of it concen trated in large urban centers . The Aztec s also grew tobacco and cotto n, the latter provid ing the fiber for all cloth and

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clothing. Weaving and metalwork flourished , provid ing useful commodities as well as wor ks of art. Buildin g techniques enabled construction of enom1ous stone dam s and canals, as well as fortress-like castles made of brick or stone. There were elaborat e mar- kets in each city and a far-flung trade network iliat used route s established by the Toltecs.

Aztec merchant s acquired turq uoise from Pueblos who mined it in what is now the US Souiliwest to se ll in central Mexico where it had become the most valued of all mater- ial possessio ns and was used as a means of exc hange or a form of mon ey.5 Sixty- five thou sand turquoise artifacts in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico , are evidence of the impor- tance of turq uoise as a major precolon ial commo dity. Other items were also va luable mar- ketable commoditi es in the area , salt being clo se to turquoi se in value. Cerami c trade goods invo lved interconnected markets from Mexico City to Mesa Verde , Co lorado. Shells from the Gu lf of California, tropical bird feailiers from the Gulf Coas t area of Mexico , obs idian from Durango, Mexico, and flint from Texas we re all found in ilie ruins of Casa Grande (Arizona) , the commerci al center of the northern frontier. Turquoi se func- tioning as money was traded to acquire macaw and parrot feat hers from tropical areas for religious rituals, seashell s from coasta l peoples, and hides and meat from the northern plains. The stone has been found in preco lonial s ites in Texas, Kansas, and Nebraska , where the Wichitas served as intermediari es, carrying turquoi se and other goo ds farther east and north. Crees in the Lake Super ior reg ion and com muniti es in what is today Ontario , Canada, and in today 's Wisco nsin acquir ed turquoi se ilirough trade.6

Traders from Mexico we re also tran smitters of cu lture and features such as the Sun Danc e religion in the Great Plain s, and the cultivat ion of co rn by the Algonquin , Chero- kee, and Muskogee (Cre ek) peopl es of the easte rn half of North America we re tran smit- ted from Central America. The oral and written histories of the Aztec s, Cherokees, and Choctaws record these relations . Cherokee oral history tells of their ancestors' migration s from the south and throu gh Mexico, as does Muskogee history.7

Although Aztec s were apparently flouri shing culturall y and economica lly, as we ll as being mili tarily and politic ally strong, their dominance was declin ing on the eve of Span- ish intru sion. Being pressed for tribute throu gh violent attacks, peasants rebe lled and there were uprisings all over Mexico. Montezuma 11, who came to power in 1503, might have succeeded in his attempt to reform the regime , but the Spanish overthrew him before he had the oppo rtuni ty. The Mexican state wa s crus hed and its cities leve led in Cortes 's three-yea r genoc idal war. Cortes's recruitment of res istant communi ties all over Mexico as allies aided in toppling ilie central reg ime. Cortes and his two hundr ed Europ ean mer- cena ries cou ld never have ove rthrown the Mexican state without the Indigenous insur- gency he co-opted. The res istant peoples who allied with Cortes to overt hrow the oppressive Aztec regime could not yet have known the goals of the gold-obs esse d Span- ish co lonizers or the Europ ean institution s that backed them.

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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

THE NORTH

What is now the US Sout hwest once formed, with today's Mex ican states of Sonora , Sinaloa , and Chihuahua , the north ern periphery of the Aztec regime in the Valley of Mex- ico. Mostly an alpine , arid , and semiar id reg ion cut with rivers , it is a fragile land base with rainfa ll a scarce commodity and drought endemic. Yet, in the Sono ra Desert of present-day southern Arizona , communiti es we re practicing agricu ltur e by 2100 BC and began digg ing irrigation canals as early as 1250 BC. The earliest ev idence of com in the area dates from 2000 BC, introdu ced by trade and migration between north and south . Farther north, peop le began cultivatin g com, beans , squas h, and cotto n around 1500 BC. Their desce ndant s, the Akimel O 'odham people (Pimas), ca ll their ancestors the Huhugam (mean ing "those who have gone"), which English speakers have rendered as "Hohokam. " The Hohokam people left behind ball courts simi lar to those of the Mayans , multistory building s, and agricu ltura l fields . Their mo st striking imprint on the land is one of the most extensive networks of irrigat ion canal s in the world at that time . From AD 900 to 1450, the Hohokams built a canal system of more than eight hundr ed miles of trunk Jines and hundreds more miles of branch es serv ing local sites. The longes t known canal extended twenty miles . The largest were seventy-five to eighty-five feet across and twenty feet deep, and many were leak-proof, lined with clay. One canal system carried enough water to irrigate an estimated ten thou sand acres. 8 Hohokam farmers grew surp lus crops for expo rt and their community became a crossroads in a trade network reaching from Mexico to Utah and from the Pacific Coast to New Mexico and into the Grea t Plains. By the fourteenth century, Hohokams had dispe rsed, living in sm aller communities .

The fam ed Anasazi people of Chaco Canyon on the Co lorado Plateau- in the present-day Four Corner s region of Arizona, New Mex ico, Co lorado, and Utah- thrived from AD 850 to 1250. Ance stors of the Pueblos of New Mexico, the Anasaz i constructed more than four hundred miles of roads radia ting out from Chaco . Averaging thirty fee t wide, these roads follow ed straight courses , even throug h difficult terrain such as hills and rock format ions . The highways connect ed some seventy-five communitie s. Around the thirte enth century, the Anasaz i people abandoned the Chaco area and migrated , build- ing nearly a hundr ed smaller agricultural city-states along the northern Rio Grande valley and its tributaries . Northernmost Taos Pueblo was an important trad e center, handlin g buffalo products from the plains, tropical bird products, copper and shells from Mexico , and turquoise from New Mexica n mines . Pueblo trade extended as far west as the Pacific Ocean, as far eas t as the Great Plains, and as far south as Cent ral America .

Other major peoples in the region , the Navajos (Dine) and Apaches, are of Athaba s- can heritage, hav ing migrated to the region from the subarcti c severa l centuries before Columbu s. The majority of the Dine people did not migra te and remain in the original

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homeland in Alaska and northwestern Canada. Originall y a hunting and trading people, they interacted and intermarried with the Pueblos and became involved in conflicts between villages engendered by disputes over water usage, with Dine and Apache groups allied with one or another of the riverine city-states.9

The island peoples of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Basin were an integral part of the cultural , religious, and economic exchanges with the peoples from today's Guyana, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua , Hondura s, Guatemala, Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida . Water, far from presenting a barrier to trade and cultural relations, served as a means of connecting the region's peo- ples. Precolonial Caribb ean cultures and cultural connections have been very little stud- ied, since many of these peoples, the first victims of Columbu s's colonizing missions, were ann ihilated, enslaved and deported, or later assimilated enslaved African popula- tions with the advent o f the Atlantic slave trade. The best known are the Caribs, Arawaks, Tainos, and the Chibchan-speaking peoples. Throu ghout the Caribbean islands and rim are also descendants of Maroons- mixed Indigenous and Afr ican communiti es- who successfully liberated themselves from slavery, such as the Gari funa people (" Black Caribs") along the coast of the western Caribbean. 10

From the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River and south to the Gulf of Mexico lay one of the most fertile agricultural belts in the world , crisscrossed with great rivers. Natu- rally watered, teeming with plant and animal life, temperate in climate, the region was home to multiple agricultural nations. In the twelfth century, the Mississippi Valley region was marked by one enormous c ity-state, Cahokia, and several large ones built of earthen, stepped pyramids, much like those in Mexico. Cahokia supported a population of tens of thousands, larger than that of London during the same period. Other archit ectural monu- ments were sculpted in the shape of gigantic birds, lizards, bears, alligators, and even a 1,330-foot-long serpent. These feats of monum ental construction testify to the leve ls of civic and social organization. Called "mound builders" by European settlers, the people of this civilization had dispersed before the European invas ion, but their influence had spread throughout the eastern half of the North Ameri can continent through cultural influ- ence and trade. 11 What European colonizers found in the southeastern region of the conti- nent were nations of villages with economies based on agriculture and com the mainstay. This was the territory of the nations of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw and the Muskogee Creek and Seminole, along with the Natchez Nation in the western part , the Mississippi Valley region.

To the north, a remarkable federal state struc ture, the Haudenosaunee confederacy- often referred to as the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy-w as made up of the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk Nations and , from early in the nine- teenth century, the Tuscaroras. This system incorporated six widely dispersed and unique

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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

nations of thousands of agricultural villages and hunting ground s from the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River to the Atlanti c, and as far south as the Carolina s and inland to Pennsylvania. The Haudenosaunee peoples avoided central ized powe r by means of a clan-village system of democracy based on collective stewardship of the land. Com, the staple crop, was stored in granaries and distributed equitably in this matrilineal society by the clan mothers, the oldest women from every extended family. Many other nations flourished in the Great Lakes region where now the US-C anada border cuts through their realms. Among them, the Anishinaabe Nation (called by others Oj ibwe and Chippewa) was the larges t.

The peoples of the prairies of central No rth America spanned an expanse of space from West Texas to the subarctic between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Moun- tains. Several centers of deve lopment in that vast region of farmin g and bison-dependent peop les may be identified: in the prairies of Canada, the Crees; in the Dakotas, the Lakota and Dakota Sioux; and to their west and south, the Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples. Far- ther south were the Ponca, Pawnee, Osage, Kiowa, and many other nations, with buffalo numbering sixty million. Territorial disputes inevitably occurred, and diplomatic skills as well as trade were highly deve loped for conflict resolution.

ln the Pacific Northwest, from present-day Alaska to San Francisco, and along the vast inland waterways to the mountain barriers, great seafaring and fishing peoples flour- ished, linked by culture, common ceremonies, and extensive trade. These were wea lthy peoples living in a comparative paradise of natural resources, including the sacred salmon. They invented the potlat ch, the ceremonial distribution or destruction of accumu- lated goods, creating a culture of rec iprocity. They crafted gigantic wooden totems, masks, and lodges carved from giant sequoias and redwoods. Among these commun ities speaking many languages were the Tlingit people in Alaska and the salmon-fishing Sal- ish, Makah, Hoopa, Pomo, Karok, and Yurok people.

The territory between the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountain s in the West, now called the Great Basin, was a harsh environment that supported small populations before European colonization, as it does today. Yet the Shoshone, Bannock, Paiute, and Ute peo- ples there managed the environment and built permanent villages.

GOVERNANCE

Each Indigenous nation or city-sta te or town comprised an independent, self-gove rning people that held supreme authority over internal affairs and dealt with other peoples on equal footing. Among the factors that integrated each nation, in addition to language, were shared belief systems and rituals and clans of extended families that spanned more than one town. The system of dec ision making was based on consensus, not majority rule. This form of decision making later baffled colonial agents who could not find Indigenous

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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

officials to bribe or manipulate. In terms of international diplomacy, each of the Indige- nous peop les of western North America was a sovereign nation. First the Spanish, French, and British colonizers, and then the US colonizers, made treaties with these Indigenous governments.

Indigenous governa nce varied widely in form. 12 East of the Mississippi River, towns and federations of towns were gove rned by fami ly lineages . The male elder of the most powerfu l clan was the executive. His accession to that position and all his decisions were subject to the approval of a council of elders of the clans that were represented in the town. In this manner, the town had sovereign authority over its internal affairs . In each sovereign town burned a sacred fire symbolizing its relationship with the spir it beings. A town could jo in other towns under the leadership of a single leader. English colonists termed such group ings of towns "confederacies" or "federa tions." The Haudenosaunee people today retain a fully functioning government of this type. It was the Hau- denosaunee constitution, called the Great Law of Peace, that inspired essential elements of the US Constitution. 13 Oren Lyons, who holds the title of Faith-keeper of the Turtle Clan and is a member of the Onondaga Counci l of Chiefs, explains the essence of that constitution: "The first principle is peace. The second principle, equity, ju stice for the people . And third, the power of the good minds, of the collective powers to be of one mind: unity. And health. All of these were involved in the basic principles. And the process of discussion, puttin g aside warfare as a method of reaching decisions, and now using intellect." 14

The Muskogees (Creeks), Seminoles, and other peoples in the Southeast had three branches of government: a civil admini stration, a military, and a branch that dealt with the sacred. The leaders of each branch were drawn from the elite, and other officials were drawn from prominent clans. Over the centuries preceding European colonialism, ancient traditions of diplomacy had deve loped among the Indigenous nations. Societ ies in the eastern part of the continent had an elaborate ceremonial structure for diplomatic meet- ings among representatives of disparate gove rnments. In the federations of sovere ign towns, the leading town 's fire represented the entire group, and each member town sent a representative or two to the federation's council. Thus everyone in the federation was rep- resented in the government's decision making. Agreements reached in such meetings were considered sacred pledges that the representatives made not only to one another but also to the powerful spirit looking on. The nations tended to hold firn1 to such treaties out of respect for the sacred power that was party to the agreements . Relations with the spirit world were thus a major factor in government. 15

The roles of women varied among the socie ties of eastern North America . Among the Muskogees and other southern nations, women hardly participated in governmental affairs . Haudenosaunee and Cherokee women , on the other hand, held more political

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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

authority. Among the Mohawks, Oneidas , Onondagas , Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras, certain female lineages controlled the choice of male representatives for their clans in their governing counci ls. Men were the representatives, but the women who chose them had the right to speak in the counc il, and when the chosen representative was too young or inexperienced to be effective, one of the women might participate in council on his behalf. Haudenosaunee clan mothers held the power to recall unsatisfactory representa- tives. Charles C. Mann, author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Colum- bus, calls it "a feminist dream." 16

According to the value system that drove consensus building and decision making in these societies, the community 's interest overrode individual interests. After every mem- ber of a council had had his or her say, any member who still considered a decision incor- rect might nevertheless agree to abide by it for the sake of the communi ty's cohesion. In the rare cases in which consensus could not be reached, the segment of the community represented by dissenters might withdraw from the community and move away to found a new community. This was similar to the practice of the nearly one hundred autonomous towns of northern New Mexico.

STEWARDS OF THE LAND

By the time of European invasions, Indigenous peoples had occupied and shaped every part of the Americas , established extensive trade networks and roads, and were sustaining their populations by adapting to specific natural environments, but they also adapted nature to suit human ends. Mann relates how Indigenous peoples used fire to shape and tame the preco lonial North American landscape . In the Northeast, Indigenous farmers always carried flints. One English observer in 1637 noted that they used the flints "to set fire of the country in all places where they come." 17 They also used torches for night hunting and rings of flame to encircle animals to kill. Rather than domesticating anima ls for hides and meat, Indigenous communities created havens to attract elk, deer, bear, and other game . They burned the undergrowth in forests so that the young grasses and other ground cover that sprouted the following spring would entice greater numbers of herbi- vores and the predators that fed on them, which would sustain the people who ate them both. Mann describes these forests in 1491: "Rather than the thick, unbroken, monumen- tal snarl of trees imagined by Thoreau, the great eastern forest was an ecological kaleido- scope of garden plots, blackberry rambles, pine barrens, and spacious groves of chestnut, hickory, and oak." Inland a few miles from the shore of present-day Rhode Island, an early European explorer marveled at the trees that were spaced so that the forest "could be penetrated even by a large army." English mercenary John Smith wrote that he had rid- den a galloping horse through the Virginia forest. In Ohio, the first English squatters on

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Indigenou s lands in the mid-eight eenth century encountered forested areas that rese mbled Engli sh park s, as they could drive carriages through the trees .

Bison herds roamed the East from New York to Georg ia (it's no accident that a sett ler city in western New York was named Buffalo). The Ame rican bison was indigenous to the northern and southern pla ins of North America, not the East , yet Native peopl es imported them east a long a path of fire, as they transforn1 ed forest into fallows for the bison to surv ive upon far from the ir origina l habitat. Historian Willi am Crono n has writ- ten that when the Haudenosaunee hunt ed buffalo , they were " harvesting a foodstuff which they had conscious ly been instrumental in creating ." As for the "Great American Desert," as Ang lo-Amer icans called the Great Plains, the occupants transfonned that too into game fanns. Using fire, they extended the giant grass lands and main tained them. When Lewis and Clark began the ir trek up the Mis souri River in 1804, ethnol ogist Dale Lott has observed, they beheld "not a wilderness but a vast pastu re managed by and for Native Americans ." Native Americans created the world 's largest gardens and graz ing lands- and thrived. 18

Native peop les left an indelib le imprint on the land with systems of roads that tied nations and comm uniti es together across the enti re landmass of the Ame ricas . Scho lar David Wade Chambers writes :

The first thing to not e about early Native American trail s and roads is that they were not ju st pat hs in the woods following along animal track s used mainly for hunting. Neither can they be characterized simply as the route s that nomadic peo- ples followed during seasona l migrations. Rath er they constituted an extensive system of roadways that spann ed the Amer icas, making possible short, medium and long distance travel. That is to say, the Pre-Col umbian Americas were laced together with a comp lex system of roads and path s which became the roadways adopted by the early sett lers and indeed were ultimately transfonned into major highways. 19

Roads were deve loped along rivers, and many Indigenous roads in North America tracked the Mississ ippi, Ohio , Misso uri , Columbia , and Colorado Rivers, the Rio Grande, and other major stream s. Road s also followed seacoasts. A major road ran along the Pacific coast from northern Alaska (whe re trave lers could continue by boat to Siberia) sout h to an urban area in western Mexico. A branch of that road ran thro ugh the Sonora Desert and up onto the Colorado Plateau, serving ancient towns and later commun ities suc h as thos e of the Hopis and Pueblos on the northern Rio Grand e.

From the Pueblo communities, roads eastward carried trave lers onto the semiarid plains along tributarie s of the Pecos River and up to the communities in what is now eas t- ern New Mexico, the Texas Panhandl e, and West Texas. There were also roads from the

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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

northern Rio Grande to the southern plains of western Oklahoma by way of the Canadian and Cimarron Rivers. The roads along those rivers and their tributaries led to a system of roads that followed rivers from the Sou theast. They also connected with ones that turned southwe stward toward the Valley of Mexico.

The eastern roads connected Muskog ee (Creek) towns in prese nt-day Georgia and Alabama. From the 'v1uskogee towns , a major route led north through Cherokee lands, the Cumberland Gap, and the Shenandoah Valley reg ion to the confluence of the Ohio and Scioto Rivers. From that north eastern part of the con tinent, a traveler could reach the West Coast by following roads along the Ohio River to the Mississip pi, up the Mississippi to the mouth of the Mis souri , and along the Missouri westward to its headwat ers. From there , a road crossed the Rocky Mountains throu gh South Pass in prese nt-day Wyoming and led to the Columbia River. The Co lumb ia River road led to the large population cen- ter at the river' s mouth on the Pacific Oc ean and connected with the Pacific Coast road.

CORN

North America in 1492 was not a virgin wil derness but a netw ork of Indigenous nations , peopl es of the corn. The link between people s of the North and the South can be seen in the diffusion of corn from Mesoamerica. Both Muskogees and Cherokees , whose original homelands in North America are located in the Southeast, trace their lineage to migration from or through Mexico. Cherokee historian Emm et Starr wrote:

The Chero kees most probab ly preceded by severa l hundr ed years the Muskogees in their exodus from Mexico and swu ng in a wider circle, crossing the Mississippi River many miles north of the mouth of the Misso uri River as indicated by the mound s . ... The Muskog ees were probably driven out of Mexico by the Aztecs, Toltecs or some other of the northw este rn tr ibal inva sions of the ninth or preced- ing centuries . This is evidenced by the customs and devices that were long retained by the Creeks. 20

Another Cherokee write r, Robert Conley, tell s about the ora l tradition that claim s Cherokee origin s in South Am erica and subs equent migration through Mex ico. Later, with US military invasions and relocation s of the Mu skog ee and Cherokee peoples, many groups split off and sought refuge in Mexico , as did others under press ure, suc h as the Kickapoos. 21

Althoug h practi ced traditionally throughout the Indigenous agricultura l areas of North America, the Green Com Dance remain s stronge st among the Muskogee people. The ele- ments of the ritua l dance are simi lar to those of the Valley of Mexico. Although the dance take s various fonn s among diff erent commun ities, the core of it is the same, a commemo-

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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

ration of the gift of com by an ancestra l com woman. The peoples of the com retain great affinit ies under the crust of colonia lism.

This brief overview of preco lonia l North Amer ica suggests the magnitude of what was lost to all humanity and counteracts the sett ler-colonial myth of the wandering Neoli thic hunter. These were civilizations based on advanced agriculture and featuring polit ies. It is essential to understand the migrations and Indigenous peoples' relationships prior to invasion , North and South, and how colonialism cut them off , but, as we will see, the relationships are being reestablished.

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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

TWO

CULTURE OF CONQUEST

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extiqJation, enslavemelll and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of prior accumulation.

- Karl Marx, from "Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist," Capital

HOW IT BEGAN

The late anthropologist Edwa rd H. Spicer wrote that the initial Europeans who partici- pated in coloniza tion of the Americas were heirs to rich and anc ient cultures , soc ial rela- tions , and customs in their lands of origin , whether Spain, France, Holland , or England. In the passage to the Americas and encountering the Indigenous inhabitant s, they largely abandoned the webs of European socia l relations . What each actua lly participated in was a culture of conquest-violence , expropriat ion, destruction , and dehumani zaiion. 1

Spicer's observation is true, but the culture of conques t didn't start with Europeans cross ing the Atlantic. European institutions and the worldview of conquest and colonial- ism had fom1ed severa l centuries before that. From the eleventh thro ugh the thirteenth centuries , Europeans conducted the Crusades to conquer North Africa and the Middle East, leading to unprecede nted wealth in the hands of a few. This profit-based religion was the deadly element that European merchants and settle rs brought to the Amer icas . In addition to seeking personal wea lth, colonizers expressed a Chr istian zeal that justified colonia lism. Along with that came the militaristic tradition that had also developed in western Europe during the Crusades (literally, "carrying of the cros s") . Although the popes , beginn ing with Urban II, called for most of the ventures, the crusading am1ies were mercenary outfits that promised the so ldiers the right to sack and loot Muslim towns and cities , feats that would gain them wealth and prestige back home. Toward the end of the thirteenth century, the papacy began directing such mercenar ies to crush domestic "enemies " in their midst, as well-pagans and commoners in genera l, especia lly women (as ostens ible witches) and heretics. In this way, knights and noblemen could seize land and force the commoners liv ing on it into servitude. Histor ian Peter Linebaugh notes that

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whereas the anti-Muslim Crusades were attempts to control the lucrative Muslim trade routes to the Far East, the domestic crusades against heretics and commo ners were carried out to terror ize poor people and at the same time to enlist them in the lucrative and adven- turou s yet holy venture: "Crusading was thus a murderous device to resolve a contradic- tion by bringing baron and commoner together in the cau ldron of religious war."2

The first population forcib ly organized under the profi t mot ive-wh ose labor was exploited well before overseas exploitation was poss ible-was the European peasantry. Once forced off their land, they had nothing to eat and nothing to sell but their labor. In add ition, entire nations, such as Scotla nd, Wales, Ireland, Bohemia, the Basque Country, and Cata lonia, were co lonized and forced under the rule of various monarchi es. The Moorish Nation and the Sephardic Jewish minority were conquere d and phys ica lly deporte d by the Cast ilian/Arago n monarchy from the Iberian Peninsula- a long-term project cu lminat ing in group expulsions beginning in 1492, the year Co lumbus sailed to Americ a.

The institutions of co lonia lism and methods for reloca tion, deporta tion, and expropri- ation of land had already been practiced, if not perfected, by the end of the fifteenth cen- tury.3 The rise of the modem state in weste rn Europe was based on the accumu lation of wea lth by means of exploit ing human labor and displacing millions of subsistenc e pro- ducers from their lands. The am1ies that did this work benefited from tech nolog ical inno- vations that allowed the deve lopment of more effective weapons of death and destruction . When these states expanded overseas to obtain even more resources, land, and labor, they were not starting anew. The peoples of the Caribbean, Central America, Mex ico, and the Andes were the first overseas vict ims. West and South Afr ica, North America, and the rest of South Ame rica followed. Then came all of Africa , the Pacific , and As ia.

The sea voyages of European explorers and merchants in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were not the first of their kind . These voyage rs borrowed the tech- niqu es for long-distance sea travel from the Arab world . Before the Arabs ventured into the Indian Ocean, Inuits (Eskimos) plied the Arctic Circle in their kayaks for centuries and made contacts with many peoples, as did Norse, South As ian, Chinese, Japanese, Peruvian, and Melan esian and Polynesian fishing peop les of the Pacific. Egyptian and Greek knowledge of the seas most likely extended beyond the Medite rranean, into the Atla ntic and Ind ian Oceans. Western Europea n seagoi ng merchants and the monarchies that backed them would differ only in that they had deve loped the bases for co lonial dom- ination and exploitation of labor in those co lonies that led to the capture and enslavement of million s of Afr icans to trans port to thei r Ame rican co lonies.

LAND AS PRIVATE PROPERTY

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Along with the cargo of European ships, espec ially of the later Briti sh colonizing ven- tures, came the emerging conce pt of land as private prop erty. Esther Kingston-Mann, a speciali st in Russian land tenure history, has reconstruct ed the elevation of land as private property to "sac red status" in sixteenth-century England.4 The Engli sh used the term "e n- closure " to denote the priva tization of the commons . During th is time, peasa nts, who con- stituted a large majority of the population, were evicted from their anc ient common lands . For centuries the commo ns had been their pastu re for milk cows and for running sheep and their source for wa ter, wood for fuel and cons truction, and edibl e and medic inal wild plants. Without these resources they could not have survived as farmer s, and they did not survive as farmers after they lost access to the commons. Not only were the commons pri- vatized during the sixteenth and seven teenth centuries, they were also transformed into graz ing lands for comme rcial sheep production , wool being the main domestic and export commodity, creating weal th for a few and impoverishment for the many. Denied access to the forme r commons, rural subsistence fam1ers and even thei r children had no choice but to work in the new woolen textile factori es under miserab le cond itions- that is, when they could find such work for unemployment was high . Employed or not , this disp laced population was avai lable to serve as settlers in the North America n Brit ish colonies, many of them as indentured serva nts, with the promi se of land . Afte r serv ing their terms of indenture, they were free to squat on Indigenous land and become farmers again . In th is way, surplus labor created not only low labor costs and great profit s for the woolens man- ufacturer s but also a supply of settler s for the co lonies, which was an "esca pe va lve" in the home country, where impoveris hment could lead to uprisings of the exploited. The sacred status of property in the forms of land taken from Indigenous farmers and of African s as chatte l was seeded into the drive for Anglo-American independence from Britain and the found ing of the United States.

Privatizat ion of land was accompa nied by an ideo logical driv e to paint the com mon- ers who resisted as violent, stupid, and lazy. The English Parliament, under the guise of fighting backwar dness, criminalized former rights to the commons . Accompanying and facil itating the privatization of the commons was the suppre ssion of women, as fem inist theorist Silvia Federici has argued , by conjurin g witc hcraf t. Those accus ed of witchcraf t were poor peasan t women, often widows, while the accuse rs tended to be wea lth ier, either their landlords or employers, individuals who controll ed local institutions or had ties to the national government. Neighbors were encouraged to acc use one another. 5 Witchcraf t was considered mainly a female crime, especia lly at the peak of the witch hunts between 1550 and 1650, when more than 80 percent of those who were charged with witchcraft, tried , convicted, and executed were women. In England, those accused of witchcraft were mostly elderly women, often beggars, sometimes the wives of living laborers but usually widows. Act ions and loca l occurrences said to indicate witchcraft included nonpayment

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of rent, demand for public assistance , giving the "evil-eye," local die-offs of horses or other stock, and mysterious deaths of children. Also among the telltale actions were prac- tices related to midwifery and any kind of contracep tion. The service that women pro- vided among the poor as hea lers was one of a number of vestiges from pre-Christian , matrilineal institutions that once predominated in Europe. It is no surprise that those who had held on to and perpetuated these communal practices were those most resistant to the enclosure of the commons , the economic base of the peasantry, as well as women's auton- omy.6

The traumatized souls thrown off the land, as well as their descendants, became the land-hungry settlers enticed to cross a vast ocean with the promise of land and attaining the status of gentry. English settlers brought witch hunting with them to Jamestown, Vir- ginia, and to Salem, Massachusetts. In language reminiscent of that used to condemn witches , they quickly identified the Indigenou s populations as inherently children of Satan and "serva nts of the devil" who deserved to be killed.7 Later the Salem authorities would justify witch trials by claiming that the English settlers were inhabiting land con- trolled by the devil.

WHITE SUPREMACY AND CLASS

Also part of the Christian colonizers' outlook was a belief in white supremacy. As an 1878 US Protestant evange lical hymn suggests-"A re your garments spotless? / Are they white as snow? / Are they washed in the blood of the lamb?"-w hiteness as an ideology involves much more than skin color, although skin color has been and continues to be a key component of racism in the United States. White supremacy can be traced to the col- onizing ventures of the Christian Crusades in Muslim-controlled territorie s and to the Protestant colonization of Ireland. As dress rehearsals for the colonization of the Americ- as, these projects form the two strands that merge in the geopo litical and soc iocultural makeup of US society.

The Crusades in the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal today) and expulsion of Jews and Muslims were part of a process that created the core ideology for modern colo- nialism-w hite supremacy- and its justificat ion for genoc ide. The Crusades gave birth to the papal law of limpieza de sangre-c leanliness of blood- for which the Inquisition was estab lished by the Church to investigate and determine. Before this time the concept of biologic al race based on "blood" is not known to have existed as law or taboo in Christia n Europe or anywhere else in the world. 8 As scapegoa ting and suspicion of Conversos (Jews who had converte d to Christianity) and Moriscos (Mus lims who had converted to Christianity) intensified over severa l centuries in Christian-controlled Spain, the doctrine of limpieza de sangre was popularized. It had the effect of granting psychological and increasingly legal privileges to "O ld Chr istians," both rich and poor, thus obscur ing the

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class differences between the landed aristocracy and land-poor peasants and shepherds. Whatever their economic station , the "Old Christian " Spanish were enabled to identify with the nobility. As one Spanish historian puts it, "The common people looked upwards , wishing and hoping to climb , and let themselv es be seduced by chivalric ideals: honour, dignity, glory, and the noble life."9 Lope de Vega, a sixteenth-century contemporary of Cervantes, wrote: "Soy un hombre , / aunque de villana casta, / limpio de sangre y jamas / de hebrea o mora manchada " (I am a man , although of lowly status, yet clean of blood and with no mixture of Jewish or Moorish blood).

This cross-class mind-set can be found as well in the stance of descendants of the old settlers of British colonizat ion in Nort h America. This then is the first instance of class level ing based on imagined racial sameness- the origin of white supremacy, the essential ideology of colonial projects in America and Africa. As Elie Wiesel famously observed , the road to Auschwitz was paved in the earl iest day s of Chr istendom. Historian David Stannard, in American Holoca ust, adds the caveat that the same road led straight through the heart of America. IO The ideology of white supremacy was paramount in neutralizing the class antagonisms of the landless against the landed and distributing confiscated lands and properties of Moors and Jews in Iberia, of the Irish in Ulster, and of Native American and African peoples.

Great Britain, emerg ing as an overseas colonial power a century after Spain did, absorbed aspects of the Spanish racial caste system into its colonial ist rationalization s, particularly regarding African slavery, but it did so within the context of Protestan tism, which imagined a chosen people founding and raising a New Jerusa lem. The English did not ju st adapt the habits and experiences of Spanish colonization; they had their own prior experience, which actually constitut ed overseas imperialism. During the early seven teenth century the English conque red Ireland and dec lared a half-million acres of land in the north open to settlement. The settlers who served early settler colonialism came mostly from western Scotland. England had previously conquered Wales and Scotland, but it had never before attempted to remove so large an Indigenous populat ion and plant settlers in their place as in Ireland. The ancient Irish social system was systematically attacked, tra- ditional songs and music forbidden, whole clans exterminated, and the remainder brutal- ized. A "wi ld Irish" reservation was even attempte d. The "p lantation" of Ulster was as much a culmination of, as it was a departure from, centuries of intermittent warfare in Ire- land. In the sixteenth century, the officia l in charge of the Irish prov ince of Munster, Sir Humphrey Gilbert , ordered that

the heddes of all those (of what sort soever thei were) which were killed in the daie, shou ld be cutte off from their bodies and brought to the place whe re he [Gilbert] 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

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any cause but commonly he muste passe throug h a lane of heddes which he used ad terrorem .... [It brought] greate terrour to the people when thei sawe the hed- des of their dedde fathers, brothers, chi ldren, kindsfolke, and friends.11

The English gove rnment paid boun ties for the Irish heads. Later only the scalp or ears were required. A century later in Nort h Amer ica, Indian heads and scalps were bro ught in for bou nty in the same manner . Although the Irish were as "white" as the English, trans- fonn ing them into alien othe rs to be exterm inated prev iewed wha t came to be perceived as racia list when app lied to Indigeno us peop les of North Amer ica and to Africans .

At tha t conju ncture, both in the Chr istian Crusa des aga inst Muslims and England's invas ion of Ireland, the trans ition from religious wars to the genoc idal mode of colonial- ism is apparent. The Irish under British colonial rule, well into the twentieth century, con- tinued to be regarded as biologica lly infer ior. During the mid-nineteent h ce ntury, influenced by social Darw inism, some Englis h scient ists peddled the theory that the Irish (and all people of color) had desce nded from apes , wh ile the English were desce ndants of "man ," who had been created by God " in his own image." Thus the English were "an- ge ls" and the Irish (and othe r co lonized peop les) were a lower spec ies, which today US "Christian Identity" white supremac ists call "m ud people," inferior products of the process of evolut ion. 12 The same Sir Humphrey Gi lbert who had been in charge of the co lonizat ion of Ulster planted the first Eng lish colo nial settle ment in North Ame rica in Newfound land in the summer o f 1583. In the lead- up to the format ion of the United States, Protesta ntism uniquely refined white supremacy as part of a politico- religious ideology.

TERMINAL NARRATIVES

Accord ing to the curre nt consens us among historians, the wholesa le transfer of land from Indigenous to Euro-Ame rican hands that occu rred in the Amer icas after 1492 is due less to European invas ion, warfa re, and mate rial acquisitiveness than to the bacte ria that the invaders unwittingly brought with them. Historian Colin Calloway is amo ng the propo- nents of this theory, and he writes that "epidem ic diseases wou ld have caused mass ive depo pulation in the Americas whether broug ht by European invade rs or brought home by Nat ive Amer ican traders ." 13 Such an abso lutist assertio n renders any othe r fate for the Indigenous peoples improbable. Professor Calloway is a careful and wide ly respected his- torian of Indigenou s No rth Ame rica, but his conclus ion artic ulates a default assumption. The thinkin g beh ind the assumpt ion is both ahistor ical and illogica l in that Europe itself lost a third to one-half of its popu lation to infectious disease during medieva l pandem ics. The principal reason the consens us view is wrong and ahistorical is tha t it erases the effects of settler colonia lism with its anteceden ts in the Spanish "Reconq uest" and the

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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

English conquest of Scot land, Ireland, and Wales. By the time Spain, Portugal, and Britain arr ived to colonize the Amer icas, their methods of eradicating peoples or forcing them into dependency and serv itude were ingraine d, streamlined, and effective. If disease cou ld have done the job , it is not clear why the European colonizers in America found it necessary to carry out unrelent ing wars aga inst Indigeno us com munit ies in order to gain every inch of land they took from them- nearly three hundred years of colon ial warfare, followed by continued wars waged by the independent republics of the hemisphere.

Whatever disagree ment may exist about the size of precolon ial Indigenous popu la- tions , no one doubts that a rapid demograph ic decline occurred in the sixtee nth and seven- teenth centuries, its timing from region to reg ion depending on when conquest and co lonization began . Nearly all the popu lation areas of the Amer icas were reduced by 90 percent follow ing the onse t of colonizing projec ts, decreas ing the targeted Indigenous populations o f the Americas from one hundred million to ten million. Commo nly referred to as the most extreme demogra phic disaster-framed as natura l- in human history, it was rarely called genoc ide until the rise of Indigeno us movemen ts in the mid-twentie th century forged questions .

US scholar Benjami n Keen acknowledges that histor ians "accept uncri tically a fata lis- tic 'e pidemic plus lack of acquired immun ity' exp lana tion for the shr inkage of Ind ian populations, without sufficient attention to the soc ioeconom ic factors ... which predis- posed the natives to succumb to even slight infections." 14 Other scho lars agree. Geogra- pher William M. Denevan, whi le not ignoring the ex istence of widesp read epidem ic diseases, has emphasized the role of warfare, which reinforced the lethal impact of dis- ease. There were mil itary engageme nts directly betwee n Europea n and Indigenous nations, but many more saw European powe rs pitt ing one Indigenous nation agai nst another or fact ions within nations, with European allies aiding one or both s ides, as was the case in the co lonizat ion of the peop les oflre land, Africa , and Asia. Other killers cited by Denevan are overwo rk in mines , freque nt outright butchery, malnutrition and starva- tion resulting from the breakdown of Ind igenous trade netwo rks, subsistence food pro- duction and loss of land, loss of wi ll to live or reproduce (and thus suicide, abortion, and infant icide), and deportation and enslavement. 15 Anthropo logist Henry Dobyns has pointed to the interruption of Indigeno us peop les' trade networks . When colon izing pow- ers seized Indigenous trade routes, the ensuing acute shortages, including food products , weakened populations and forced them into depe ndency on the colonizers, with European manufactured goods replac ing Indigenous ones. Dobyns has estima ted that all Indigenous groups suffered serious food shortage s one year in four . In these circumstances, the intro- duction and promo tion of alcoho l proved addic tive and dead ly, adding to the breakdown of social order and respo nsibi lity. 16 These rea lities render the myth of " lack of immuni- ty," includ ing to alcohol, pernicious.

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Historian Woodrow Wilson Borah focused on the broader arena of European colo- nization, which also brought depopulation in the Pacific Islands, Australia , western Cen- tral America, and West Africa. 17 Sherburne Cook-ass ociated with Borah in the revisionist Berkeley School, as it was called-s tudied the attempted destruction of the Californi a Indians. Cook estimated 2,245 deaths among peoples in Northern California - the Wintu, Maidu, Miwak, Omo, Wappo, and Yokuts Nations- in late-eighteenth-century armed conflicts with the Spanish, while some 5,000 died from disease and another 4,000 were relocated to missions. Among the same people in the second half of the nineteenth century, US armed forces killed 4,000, and disease killed another 6,000. Between 1852 and I 867, US citizens kidnapped 4,000 Indian children from these groups in California. Disruption of Indigenous social structures under these conditions and dire economic necess ity forced many of the women into prostitution in goldfield camps, further wreck- ing what vestiges of family life remained in these matriarchal societies. 18

Proponents of the default position emphasize attrition by disease despite other causes equally deadly, if not more so. In doing so they refuse to acce pt that the colonization of America was genocidal by plan, not simply the tragic fate of populations lacking immu- nity to disease. In the case of the Jewish Holocaust, no one denies that more Jews died of starvat ion, overwork, and disease under Nazi incarcera tion than died in gas ovens, yet the acts of creating and maintainin g the conditi ons that led to those deaths clearly constitute genocide.

Anthropologist Michael V. Wilcox asks, "What if archaeologists were asked to explain the continued presence of descendant communi ties five hundred yea rs after Columbus instead of their disappearance or marginality?" Cox calls for the active disman- tling of what he tenn s "terminal narratives"-" accounts of Indian histories which explain the absence, cultural death, or disappearance of Indigenous peoples." 19

GOLD FEVER

Searching for gold , Columbu s reached many of the islands of the Caribbean and mapped them. Soon, a dozen other soldier-merchants mapped the Atlantic coast from the northern Maritimes to the tip of South America. From the Iberian Peninsula came merchants, mer- cenaries, criminals, and peasants. They seized the land and property of Indigenous popu- lations and declared the territories to be extensions of the Spanish and Portuguese states. These acts were confirmed by the monarchies and endorsed by the papal authority of the Roman Catholic Church. The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 divided the "New World" between Spain and Portugal with a line drawn from Greenland south through what is now Brazil. Called the Doctrine of Discovery, it claimed that possessio n of the entire world west of that line would be open to Spanish conquest and all east of it to Portuguese con- quest.

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The story is well known. In 1492, Columbus sailed with three ships on his first voy- age at the behest of Ferdinand, King of Aragon, and Isabella, Queen of Castille. The mar- riage of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1469 had led to the merger of their kingdoms into what would become the core of the Spanish state. Columbus planted a colony of forty of his men on "Espanola" (now the Dominican Republic and Hait i) and returned to Spain with Indigenous slaves and gold. In 1493, Columbus returned to the Caribbean with seventeen ships, more than a thousand men, and supplies. He found that the men he had left on the first trip had subsequently been killed by the Indigenous inhabitants. After planting another settlement, Columbus returned to Spain with four hundred Arawak slaves . With seven ships, Columbus returned to the Caribbean in 1498, reaching what is now Venezuela, and he made a fourth and final voyage in 1502, this time touching the Car- ibbean coast of Central America. ln 1513, Vasco Nunez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and charted the Pacific coast of the Americas . Juan Ponce de Leon claimed the Florida peninsula for Spain in 1513. In 152 1, following a three-year bloodbath and over- throw of the Aztec state, Hernando Cortes proclaimed Mexico as New Spa in. Para llel with the crushing of Mexican resistance were Ferdinand Magellan 's explorations and charting of the Atlantic coast of the South American continent, followed by Spanish wars against the Inca Nation of the Andes. In both Mexico and Peru, the conquistadors confis- cated elaborate artwork and statuary made of gold and silver to be melted down for use as money. During the same period, the Portuguese laid waste to what is today Brazil and began a thriving slave trade that would funnel millions of enslaved Africans to South America, beginning the lucrative Atlantic slave trade.

The consequences of this amassing of fortunes were first felt in the catastrophe expe- rienced by small farmers in Europe and England. The peasants became impoverished, dependent workers crowded into city slums. For the first time in human history, the majority of Europeans depended for their livelihood on a small wealthy minority, a phe- nomenon that capitalist-based colonialism would spread worldwide . The symbol of this new development, indeed its currency, was gold. Gold fever drove colonizing ventures, organized at first in pursuit of the metal in its raw fonn. Later the pursuit of gold became more sophisticated, with planters and merchants establishing whatever conditions were necessary to hoard as much gold as possible. Thus was born an ideology: the belief in the inherent value of gold despite its relative uselessness in reality. Investors, monarchies, and parliamentarians devised methods to control the processes of wealth accumulation and the power that came with it, but the ideology behind gold fever mobilized settlers to cross the Atlantic to an unknown fate. Subjugating entire societies and civilizations, enslaving whole countries, and slaughtering people village by village did not seem too high a price to pay, nor did it appear inhumane. The systems of colonization were modern and rational, but its ideological basis was madness.

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THREE

CULT OF THE COVENANT

For all 1/,e land wl,ich 1/,011 sees t, to thee will I g ive it and to 1/,y seedforevei:

-Ge nesis 13:15

And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and 10 thy seed after tl,ee.

-Ge nesis 17:7

MYTH OF THE PRISTINE WILDERNESS

With the onset of colonialism in North America , control of the land was wrenc hed away from the Indigenous peoples, and the forests grew dense, so that later European settlers were unaware of the fonn er cultivation and sculpting and manicuring of the landscape. Abandoned fields of com turned to weeds and bushes. Sett lers chopped down trees in New Englan d until the landscape was nearly bare. 1 One geograp her notes, "Paradoxical as it may seem , there was undoubtedly much more 'for est primeval ' in 1850 than in 1650."2 Anglo-Amer icans who did observe Native habitat management in action misun- derstood what they saw. Capta in John Palliser, traveling through the prairie s in the 1850s, comp lained about the Indians' "disastrous habit of setting the prairie on fire for the most trivial and worse than useless reasons." In 1937, Harvard naturali st Hugh Raup claime d that the "open, park-like woods" written about in earlier times had been, "from time immemorial, characteristic of vast areas in North America" and could not have been the result of human management.3

In the founding myth of the United States, the coloni sts acquired a vast expanse of land from a scattering of benighted peoples who were hardly using it-an unforgivabl e offense to the Puritan work ethic. The historical record is clear , however, that European colonists shoved aside a large network of small and large nations whose govern ments, commerce , arts and science s, agriculture, technologie s, theologies, philo sophies, and institution s were intricately developed, nations that maintained sophisticated relations with one another and with the environments that supported them. By the early seven- teenth century, when British colon ists from Europe began to settle in Nort h America , a large Indigenous population had long before created "a humaniz ed landscape almost

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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

everyw here," as William Denevan puts it.4 Native peoples had created town sites, farms, monum ental earthw orks, and networks of roads , and they had devised a wide variety of governments , some as comp lex as any in the world. They had developed sophisticated philosop hies of governm ent, traditions of diplomacy , and policies of international rela- tions. They conducted trade along roads that crisscrossed the landmasses and waterways of the American continents. Before the arrival of Europeans , North Ame rica was indeed a "co ntinent of villages," but also a conti nent of nations and federa tions ofnations. 5

Many have noted that had North America been a wilderness, undeveloped, without roads , and uncultivated , it might still be so, for the European colon ists cou ld not have sur- vived . They appropriated what had already been created by Indigenou s civilizations. They stole already cultivated farmland and the com , vegetab les, tobacco , and other crops domest icated ove r centuries, took control of the deer parks that had been cleared and maintain ed by Indigenous communitie s, used exist ing roads and water routes in order to move armies to conquer, and relied on captured Indigenous people to identify the loca- tions of water, oyste r beds , and medicinal herbs. Historian Francis Jennings was emphatic in addressing wha t he ca lled the myth that "America was virgin land , or wilderness, inhabited by nonpeople called savages":

Europ ean exp lorers and invaders discovered an inhabited land. Had it been pris- tine wilderness then, it would poss ibly be so still today, for neither the technology nor the social organization of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth 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 disp laced a resident population.

This is so simple a fact that it seems self-ev ident. 6

THE CALVINIST ORIG IN STORY

All modern nation- states claim a kind of rationalized origin story upon which they fash- ion patriotism or loyalty to the state. When citizens of modern states and their anthropolo- gists and historian s look at what they consider "primitive" soc ieties, they identify their "origin myths," quaint and endearing stories, but fantastic ones, not grounded in "reality." Yet many US scholars seem unable (or unwillin g) to subject their own nation-state's founding story to the same objective examination. The United States is not unique among nations in forging an origin myth, but most of its citizens believe it to be exce ptional among nation-states, and this except ionalist ideology has been used to ju stify appropria- tion of the continent and then domination of the rest of the world. It is one of the few

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states founded on the covenant of the Hebrew Torah, or the Christian borrow ing of it in the Old Testament of the Bible. Other covenant states are Israel and the now-defunct apartheid state of South Africa, both of which were founded in 1948.7 Although the ori- gin stories of these three covenant states were based on Judeo-Christian scripture, they were not founded as theocracies. According to the myths, the faithful citizens come together of their own free will and pledge to each other and to their god to form and sup- port a godly society, and their god in turn vouchsafes them prosperity in a promised land.

The influence of the scriptures was pervas ive among many of the Western social and polit ical thinkers whose ideas the founders of the first British colonies in North Amer ica drew upon. Historian Donald Harman Akenson points to the way that "ce rtain societies, in certain eras of their deve lopment," have looked to the scriptures for guidance, and likens it to the way "the human genetic code operates physiologically. That is, this great code has, in some degree, directly determined what people would believe and when they would think and what they would do."8 Dan Jacob son, a citizen of Boer-ruled South Africa , whose parents were immigrants, observes that,

like the Israelites, and their fellow Calvinists in New England, [the Boers] believed that they had been called by their God to wander through the wilderness, to meet and defeat the heathen, and to occupy a promised land on his behalf. . .. A sense of their having been summoned by divine decree to perform an ineluctable historical duty has never left the Boers, and has contributed to both their strength and their weakness.9

Founders of the first North American colonies and later of the United States had a similar sense of a providential opportunity to make history. Indeed, as Akenson reminds us, " it is from [the] scriptures that western society learned how to think historica lly." The key moment in history according to covenant ideology "involves the winning of 't he Land ' from alien, and indeed evil, forces ." 10

The principal conduit of the Hebrew scriptures and covenant ideology to European Christians was John Calvin, the French religious reformer whose teachings coincided with the advent of the European invasion and colonization of the Americas. The Puritans drew upon Calvinist ideology in founding the Massachusetts Bay Colony, as did the Dutch Calvinist settlers of the Cape of Good Hope in founding their South African colony during the same period . Calvinism was a Protestant Christian movement with a strong separatist political component. In accord with the doctrine of predestinat ion, Calvin taught that human free will did not exist. Certain individuals are "ca lled" by God and are among the "elect." Salvation therefore has nothing to do with one's actions; one is born as part of the elect or not, according to God's will. Although individuals could not know for certain if they were among the elect, outward good fortune , espec ially material wealth,

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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

was taken to be a manifestation of election; converse ly, bad fortune and poverty, not to speak of dark skin, were taken as evidence of damnation. "The attractiveness of such a doctrine to a group of invading colonists ... is obvious ," Akenson observes, "fo r one could easily define the natives as immutab ly profane, and damned, and oneself as predes- tined to virtue." 11

Since another sign of just ification was a person 's ability to abide by the laws of a well-ordered society, Calvin preached the obligation of citizens to obey lawful authority. In fact, they should do so even when that authority was lodged in poor leaders (one of the seeds for "my country right or wrong"). Calvin led his Huguenot followers across the bor- der into Geneva, took political control of the city-state, and established it as a republic in 1541. The Calvinist state enacted detailed statutes governing every aspect of life and appointed functionaries to enforce them. The laws reflected Calvin 's interpretation of the Old Testament; dissenters were forced to leave the republic, and some were even tortured and execu ted.

Although the US Constitution represents for many US citizens a covenant with God, the US origin story goes back to the Mayflower Compact, the first governing document of the Plymouth Colony, named for the ship that carried the hundred or so passengers to what is now Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in Novemb er 1620. Forty-one of the "Pilgrim s," all men, wrote and signed the compact. Invoking God' s name and declaring themselves loyal subjects of the king, the signatories announced that they had jo urneyed to northern "Virginia," as the eastern seaboa rd of North America was called by the English, "to plant the First Colony" and did therefore "Covenant and Combine ourselves together in a Civil Body Politic" to be gove rned by "just and equal Laws" enacted " for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience." The original set- tlers of Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1630, adopted an offic ial seal designed in England before their jo urney. The central image depicts a near-naked native holding a harmless, flimsy-looking bow and arrow and inscribed with the plea, "Come over and help us." 12 Nearly three hundred years later, the official seal of the US military veterans of the "Spanish-American War" (the invasion and occupation of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines) showed a naked woman kneeling before an armed US soldier and a sailor, with a US battleship in the background. One may trace this recurrent altruistic theme into the early twenty-first century, when the United States still invades countries under the guise of rescue.

ln other modern constitutiona l states , constitutions come and go, and they are never conside red sacred in the manner patriotic US citizens venerate theirs. Great Britain has no written consti tution. The Magna Carta arguably comes close, but it does not reflect a covenant. US citizens did not inherit their cult-like adherence to their constitution from the English. From the Pilgrims to the founders of the United States and continuing to the

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present, the cultural persistence of the covenant idea, and thus the bedrock of US patrio- tism, represents a deviation from the main course in the development of national identi- ties. Arguably, both the 1948 birth of the state of Israel and advent of Nationalist Party rule of South Africa were emulations of the US founding; certain ly many US Americans closely identify with the state of Israe l, as they did with Afrikaner-ruled South Africa . Patriotic US politicians and citizens take pride in "exceptiona lism." Historians and legal theorists characterize US statecraft and empire as those of a "nation of laws," rather than one dominated by a particular class or group of interests, sugges ting a kind of holiness .

The US Constitution, the Mayflowe r Compact, the Declarat ion of Independence , the writings of the "Founding Fathers," Lincoln 's Gettysburg Address, the Pledge of Alle- giance, and even Martin Luther King Jr. 's "I Have a Dream" speech are all bundled into the covenant as sacred documents that express the US state religion. An aspect of this most visible in the early twenty-first century is the burgeoning "gun lobby," based on the sanctity of the Second Amendment to the Constitution. In the forefront of these Second Amendment adherents are the descendants of the old settlers who say that they represent "the people" and have the right to bear arms in order to overthrow any governme nt that does not in their view adhere to the God-given covenant.

Parallel to the idea of the US Constitution as covenant, politicians, journalists, teach- ers, and even professional historians chant like a mantra that the United States is a "nation of immigrants." From its beginning , the United States has welcomed-indeed , often solicited, even bribed-immigrants to repopulate conquered territories "c leansed" of their Indigenous inhabitants. From the mid-nineteenth century, immigrants were recruited to work mines, raze forests, construct canals and railroads , and labor in sweatshops, facto- ries, and commerc ial farm fields. In the late twentieth century, technical and medical workers were recruited. The requirements for their formal citizensh ip were simple: adhere to the sacred covenant through taking the Citizenship Oath, pledging loya lty to the flag, and regarding those outs ide the covenant as enemies or potential enemies of the excep- tional country that has adopted them, often after they escaped hunger, war, or repression, which in tum were often caused by US militarism or economic sanctions. Yet no matter how much immigrants might strive to prove themse lves to be as hardworking and patri- otic as descendants of the original settlers, and despite the rhetoric of E pluribus unwn , they are suspect. The old stock against which they are judged inferior includes not only those who fought in the fifteen-year war for independence from Britain but also, and per- haps more important, those who fought and shed (Indian) blood , before and after indepen- dence, in order to acquire the land. These are the descendant s of English Pilgrims, Scots, Scots-Irish, and Huguenot French-Calv inists all-w ho took the land bequeathed to them in the sacred covenan t that predated the creation of the independent United States. These were the settlers who fought their way over the Appalachian s into the fertile Ohio Valley

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region, and it is they who claimed blood sacrifice for their country. Immigrants, to be accepted, must prove their fidelity to the covenant and what it stands for.

SETTLER COLONIALISM AND THE ULSTER-SCOTS

The core group of frontier settlers were the Ulster-Scots- the Scots-Irish , or "Scotc h- Irish," as they called themselves. 13 Usually the descendants of these Scots-Irish say their ancestors came to the British colonies from Ireland , but their journey was more circuitous than that. The Scots-Irish were Protestants from Scotland who were recruited by the British as settlers in the six counties of the province of Ulster in northern Ireland. The British had seized these half-million acres from Ireland in the early seventeenth century, driven the indigenous Irish farmers from it, and opened it to sett lement under English pro- tection. This coincided with the English plantation of two colonies on the Atlant ic coas t of North America and the beginning of settler colonialism there. These early sett lers came mostly from the Scottish lowlands . Scotland itself, along with Wales, had preceded Ire- land as colonial notches in the belt of English expansion . Britain 's colonization of Indige- nous lands in North America was foreshadowed by its colonization of northern Ireland. By 1630 the new settlers in Ulster-2 1,000 Britons , including some Welsh, and 150,000 Lowland Scots- were more numerous than British settlers in all of North America at the time. In 1641, the indigenous Irish rebelled and killed ten thousand of the settlers , yet Protestant Scots settlers continued to pour in. In some formerly Irish areas, they formed a majority of the populat ion. They brought with them the covenant ideology of Calvinism that had been the work of the Scotsman John Knox. Later John Locke, also a Scot, would secularize the covenant idea into a "contract," the socia l contract , whereby individuals sacrifice their liberty only through conse nt. An insidiously effective example, the US eco-

d k , h - 14 nomic system, was base on Loe e s t eones. So it was that the Ulster-Scots were already seasoned settler colon ialists before they

began to fill the ranks of settlers streaming toward the North American British colonies in the early eighteenth century, many of them as indentured servan ts. Before ever meeting Indigenous Americans, the Ulster settlers had perfected scalping for bounty, using the indigenou s Irish as their victims. As this chapter and the following one show, the Scots- Irish were the foot soldiers of British empire building, and they and their descendants formed the shock troops of the "westward movement" in North America, the expansion of the US continental empire and the colon ization of its inhabitants. As Calvinists (mostly Presbyterian) , they added to and transformed the Calvinism of the earlier Puritan settlers into the unique ideology of the US settler class. 15

In one of history 's great migrations, nearly a quarter-million Scots-Irish left Ulster for British North America between 1717 and 1775. Although a number left for religious rea- sons, the majority were losers in the struggle over Britain 's Irish policies , which brought

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econom ic ruin to Ireland's wool and linen industries . Hard times were magnified by pro- longed drought, and so the settlers pulled up stakes and moved across the Atlantic . This is a story that would repeat itself time and time again in settler treks across North America, the majority of migrants ending up landless losers in the Monopo ly game of European settle r colonialism.

The majority of Ulste r-Scot sett lers were cash-poor and had to indenture themselves to pay for their passage to North America. Once settled, they came to predominate as sol- dier-settlers . 'vlost initially landed in Pennsy lvania, but large numbers soon migrated to the southern colon ies and to the backcountry, the British colonies' western borde rs, where they squatted on unceded Indigenous lands. Among frontier settlers, Scots-Irish predomi- nated among settlers of English and German descent. Although the majority remained landless and poor, some became merchants and owners of plantations worked by slaves, as well as politically powerfu l. Seventeen presidents of the United States have been of Ulster-Scots lineage, from Andrew Jackson, founder of the Democratic Party, to Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama on his mother's side. Theodo re Roosevelt characterized his Scots-Irish ancestors as "a stern, virile, bold and hardy people who forn1ed the kerne l of that American stock who were the pioneers of our people in the march westwards ." 16 Perhaps as influential as their being presidents, educators, and busi- nessmen, the Scots-Irish engendered a strong set of individualist values that included the sanctity of glory in warfare. They made up the officer corps and were so ldiers of the regu- lar army, as well as the frontier-rang ing milit ias that cleared areas for settlement by exter- minating Indigenous farmers and destroying their towns.

The Seven Years' War between the British and the French (1754-63) was fought both in Europe and in North America, where the British colonists called it the French and Indian War because it was mainly a British war against the Indigenous peoples, some of whom forn1ed alliances with the French. The British colonial militias cons isted largely of frontier Scots-Irish settlers who wanted access to Indigeno us farmland in the Ohio Valley region. By the time of US independence, Ulster-Scots made up 15 percent of the popu la- tion of the thirteen colon ies, and most were clustered in majority numbers in the back- country . During the war for settler independence from Britain, most settlers who had emigrated directly from Scotland remai ned loyal to the British Crown and fough t on that side. In contrast, the Scots-Irish were in the forefront of the struggle for independence and fonned the backbone of Washington's fighting forces. Most of the names of soldiers at Valley Forge were Scots- Irish. They saw themselves , and their descendants see them- selves, as the true and authent ic patriots, the ones who spi lled rivers of blood to secure independence and to acquire Indigenous lands-gaining blood rights to the latter as they left bloody footprints across the cont inent. 17

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During the last two decades of the eighteenth cent ury, first- and second-ge neration Scots- Irish continued to pour westward into the Ohio Valley region, West Virginia, Ken- tucky, and Tennessee . They were the largest ethnic group in the westward migration, and they maintained many of their Scots-I rish ways. They tended to move three or four times, acquir ing and losing land before settling at least somew hat permanently. Scots-Irish set- tlers were overwhelming ly farmers rather than exp lorers or fur traders . They cleared forests, built log cabins, and killed Indians, forming a human wall of colon ization for the new United States and, in warti me, employing their fighting skills effectively. Histor ian Carl Degler writes that "these hardy, God-fearing Calvinists made themse lves into a veri- table human shie ld of colonial civilization." 18 The next chapter explores the kind of counterinsurgent warfare they perfected, which formed the basis of US militarism into the twenty-first century.

The Calvinist religion of the Scots- Irish, Presbyte rianism, was in numbers of faithful soon second only to those of New England 's Congregationa list Church . But on the fron- tier, Scots-lrish devotion to the formal Presbyte rian Church waned. New evangelica l off- shoots refashio ned Calvinist doctrines to decentralize and do away with the Presbyter ian hierarchy . Although they conti nued to regard themse lves as chosen people of the covenant, commanded by God to go into the wilderness to build the new Israel, the Scots- Irish also saw themselves , as their descendan ts see themselves, as the true and authent ic patriots, entit led to the land through their blood sacrifice.

SACRED LAND BECOMES REAL ESTATE

The land won through North American bloodshed was not necessari ly conceived in terms of particular parce ls for a farm that would be passed down through generat ions. Most of the sett lers who fought for it kept moving on nearly every generat ion. In the South many lost their holdings to land companies that then sold it to planters seeking to increase the size of their slave-wor ked plantations. Without the unpaid forced labor of ens laved Africans, a farmer growing cash crops could not compete on the market. Once in the hands of settlers, the land itself was no longer sacred, as it had been for the Indigenous . Rather, it was private property, a commodity to be acquired and sold-every man a possi- ble king, or at least wealthy . Later, when Anglo-Ame ricans had occupied the con tinent and urbanized much of it, this quest for land and the sanctity of private property were reduced to a lot with a house on it, and "the land" came to mean the country, the flag, the military, as in "the land of the free" of the national anthem, or Woody Guthrie 's "T his Land ls Your Land." Tho se who died fighting in foreign wars were said to have sacrificed their lives to protect "this land" that the old sett lers had spilled blood to acquire . The blood spilled was largely Indigenous .

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These then were the sett lers upon whic h the national myths are based, the ultimately dispensable cannon fodder for the taking of the land and the continent, the foot soldiers of empi re, the "yeo man farmers" romanticized by Thomas Jeffe rson . They were not of the ruling class, although a few slipped through and later were drawn in by the ruling class as elected officials and military officers, thereby maintainin g the facade of a class less soci- ety and a democratic empire. The founders were English patr icians, slave owners, large land barons, or otherwise successful businessmen dependent on the slave trade and exports produced by enslaved Africans and on property sales. When descendants of the settler class, overwhelmingly Presbyte rian or otherwise Calv inist Protestan t, were acce pted into the ruling class, they usually became Episcopalians, members of an elite church linked to the state Church of England . As we look at the bloody deeds of the set- tlers in acquiring and maintaining land, the social class context is an essential element.

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FOUR

BLOODY FOOTPRINTS

For the first 200 years of 011r mi/ita,y heritage, then, Americans depended on arts of war that comempora,y professional soldiers supposedly abhorred: razing and destroying enemy villages and fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlements for captives; intimidating and b111talizing enemy noncombatants; and assassinating enemy leaders . .. . In the Ji-on tier wars between 1607 and 1814, Americans forged two e/e111ents-11nlimited war and irregular war-into their.first way ofwa,:

-Joh n Grenier, The First Way of War

Within days of the assass ination of Osama bin Laden, on May 2, 20 11, it was revea led that the Navy SEA L team executing the mission had used the code name Geroni mo for its target. 1 A May 4 report in the New York Daily News commented, "A long with the unseen pictures of Osama Bin Laden 's corpse and questions about what Pakistan knew, intelli- gence officia ls' reasons for dubbing the Al Qaeda boss 'Geroni mo' remai n one of the big- gest mysterie s of the Black Ops mission." The choice of that code name was not a mystery to the mil itary, which also uses the term "Indian Country" to designate enemy territory and identifies its killing machines and operations with such names as UH- I B/C Iroquois, OH-58D Kiowa, OV- 1 Mohawk , OH-6 Cayuse, AH-64 Apache, S-58/H-34 Choctaw, UH-60 Black Hawk, Thunderbird , and Rolling Thund er. The last of these is the military name given to the relentles s carpe t-bombing of Vietnam peasants in the mid- I 960s. There are many other current and recent examples of the persistence of the colo- nialist and imperia list sensibiliti es at the core of a military groun ded in wars against the Indigeno us nations and commun ities of North Ame rica.

On February 19, 1991, Brigad ier General Richard Neal, briefing report ers in Riyadh, Saud i Arabia, stated that the US military wanted to be certain of speedy victory once it comm itted land forces to "Indian Country." The following day, in a little-pu blicized state- ment of protest, the Nationa l Cong ress of American Indians pointed out that fifteen thou- sand Native Americans were serving as combat troops in the Persian Gulf. Neither Nea l nor any other milita ry authority apologized for the statement. The term " Indian Country" in cases such as this is not merely an insensit ive racial slur, tastelessly but offhandedly emp loyed to refer to the enemy. It is, rather, a technical military term, like "collatera l

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At the beginning of the twentieth ce ntury, sculptor James Earle Fraser unve iled the monumental and iconic sculptur e The End of the Trail, which he had created exclusively for the triumphal 19 15 Panama-Pacific International Expos ition in San Francisco, Californ ia. The image of the near naked, exhau sted, dy ing Indian mounted on his equall y exhau sted horse proclaimed the final solution , the elimi - nation of the Indigenous peoples of the continent. The following year, Ishi, the Ca lifornia Yani who had been held captive for five years by anthropo logists who studied him, died and was proclaimed "the last Indian ." Dozens of other popular images of "the vanishing Indian" were displayed during this period . The film industry soon kicked in, and Indian s were killed over and over on screens viewed by millions of childr en, including Indian girls and boys .

With utter military triumph on the continent, the United States then set out to domin ate the world, but the Indigenous peoples remained and persisted as the "A merican Century" proc eeded.

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NINE

US TRIUMPHALISM AND PEACETIME COLONIALISM

There is one feature in the expansion of the peoples of white, or European, blood during the past four centuries which should never be lost sight of. especially by those who denounce such expan- sion on moral grounds. On the whole, the movement has been fraught with lasting benefit to most of the peoples already dwelling in the lands over which the expansion took place .

Theodore Roosevelt , "The Expansion of the White Races," 1909

I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill ofmy old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scallered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautifid dream ... the nation's hoop is broken and scallered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.

-Black Elk, 1930, on the massacre at Wounded Knee

Althoug h US imperialism abro ad might seem at first to fall outside the scope of th is book , it' s important to recognize that the same methods and strateg ies that were employed with the Indigenous peoples on the continent were mirrored abroad. While the Indigenous Ame ricans were being brutally colonized, eliminat ed, relocated, and killed, the United States from its beginning was also pursuing overseas dominan ce. Between 1798 and 1827, the United States intervened militarily twenty-three times from Cuba to Tripoli (Libya) to Greece . There were seventy-one overseas interventions betwee n 183 1 and 1896, on all contin ents, and the United States dom inated most of Latin America economi- cally, some countries militarily. The forty interventions and occupations between 1898 and 1919 were conduc ted with even more military heft but using the same methods and sometimes the same personn el.

CONNECT IONS

US colon ies established dur ing 1898- 19 19 include Hawa i' i (forme rly called the Sand- wich Is lands), Alaska, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Is lands, Guam, American Samoa, the Mar- shall Islands, and Northern Mariana. Most of these, and dozens more islands depopulated

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in the Pac ific and Indian Oceans and the Caribbean for military bases and bomb testing, remain co lonies (ca lled "terri tories" and "co mmon -wea lths") in the twenty- first century .1

One of the first outspoken propon ents of transocean ic imper ialism was former aboli- tionist William H. Seward who was Lincoln 's secreta ry of state and who considered it the destiny of the United States to dominat e the Pacific Ocean. Seward did everything possi- ble to fulfill that perceived destiny, includin g arranging the purchase of Alaska in 1867. In early 1874, the United States began military contro l of Hawa i' i, and in I 898 it annexed the islands after overthrowing the Hawa i' ian queen, Liliuokala ni. Following post- World War II ascendancy to statehood, Indigenous Hawai'ia ns and Alaskan Natives were brought under similar US co lonial rule as Native Americans. 2

Overseas ventures gained increasingly exuberant public support in the late nineteenth century. In the best-selling book Our Coun/Jy ( 1885) the Reveren d Josiah Strong of the American Home Miss ionary Soc iety argued that the United States had inheri ted the man- tle of Ang lo-Saxonism and, as a superior race, had a divine responsibi lity to control the world. By 1914 there were s ix thousand US Protestant miss ionaries in China and thou- sands of others in eve ry other part of the non-European world, and they remain ed, as from the early seventeenth century, ensconce d in Na tive American communities .

The United States bui lt the naval "Great White Fleet" and expanded the army from twenty -five thousand to nearly three hundred thousand men by the time it invaded and occupied Cuba, undermining the ongoi ng independence movement aga inst Spain there . While US troops were headed to Havana Harbo r in 1898, Admiral George Dewey led the US Navy to intervene in the Philippin es-purpo rtedly to assist a force of thirty thousand indigenous Filipino rebel s who had won and declared their independe nce from Spain. Dewey referred to the Filipinos as " the Indians" and vowed to "enter the city [Manila) and keep the Indians out." 3 It took the United States three more years to crush the Fil- ipino " Indian" resistance to US occupat ion, the army using counterinsurgency techniqu es practiced against the Indigenous nation s of the North American continent , including new forms of torture such as wate r-boarding, and under many of the same army commanders . Twenty-s ix of the thirty US genera ls in the Philipp ines had been officers in the " Indian wars."4 Major General Ne lson A. Miles, who had command ed the anny in campai gns against Indigenous peoples, was put in genera l command of the army in the Philippin es war.

The continuity between invading and occupying sove reign Indigenou s nations in order to achieve continenta l contro l in North America and employing the same tactics overseas to achieve global contro l is key to under standing the future of the United States in the worl d. The military provided that contin uity. As a colonel in the 1870s, Nelson Miles had been in charge of pursuing every last Sioux and herding them onto reservat ions guar ded by troops or rece ntly trained Indian police. The reserva tions were not safe havens

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for the incarcerated. Struck By the Ree told of multip le horrors of daily life on the Yank- ton Sioux Reservation, which was not out of the ordinary:

Another time when General Sully came up he passed through the middle of our field, turned all his cattle and stock into our com and destroyed the whole of it.. .. The soldiers set fire to the prairie and burnt up four of our lodges and all there was in them .... The soldiers are very drunk en and come to our place-they have arms and guns; they run after our women and fire into our houses and lodges; one soldier came along and wanted one of our young men to drink, but he would not , and turned to go away, and the soldier shot at him . Before the soldiers came along we had good health; but once the soldiers come along they go to my squaws and want to sleep with them, and the squaws being hungry will sleep with them in order to get somethin g to eat, and wi ll get a bad disease , and then the squaws tum to their husbands and give them the bad disease. 5

As related in chapter 8, Miles had also led the army's pursuit of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce as they sought to escape to Canada, and in 1886 Miles took charge of the War Department's efforts to capture Geronimo , commanding five thousan d soldiers, a third of the army's combat force, along with five hundred Apache scouts forced into service and thousands of volunteer settler militiamen . In 1898, now genera l in chief of the army, Miles personally commanded the army forces that seized Puerto Rico. Miles 's seco nd in com mand, General Wesley E. Merritt , was assig ned to head the military invas ion of the Philippin es. He had serve d under Custer, fighting Sioux and Cheyenne resistance. Com- mandin g the army occupation of the Phil ippines was General Henry W. Lawton, to whom Geronimo had turned himself in, making Lawto n an instant hero for "capturin g" Geroni- mo. Lawton had led troops in Cuba before going to the Philippin es. Ironically , Filipino insurgents under the leadership of a man named Geronimo killed Lawton in an attack . What these US officers had learned in counterinsurgency warfare in North America they app lied against the Filipinos. Younger office rs would apply lessons learned in the Philip- pines to future imperial ventures, or in at least one case, pass them to a son. General Arthur MacArthur, father of World War II genera l Douglas MacArthur, chased Filipino guerr illa leader Emilio Aguinaldo , fina lly capturing him.6

By this time, Theodore Rooseve lt was president. His corporate-fr iendly militarism, particu larly his rapid development of the navy and his carefully staged performance as leader of the Rough Riders militia in Cuba , brought him to the pres idency. He was popu- lar w ith both settlers and big business. Rooseve lt referred to Aguina ldo as a "renegade Pawnee" and obse rved that Filip inos did not have the right to gove rn their country ju st becau se they happened to occupy it. Two hundred thousand US soldiers fought in the Philippin es, suffering seven thousand casualties (3.5 percent). Twenty percent of the

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Philippine popu lation died, mostly civilians, as a result of the US Army's scorc hed-ea rth strategy (food deprivation , target ing civi lians for killing, and so on) and displac emen t.7 In 1904 Rooseve lt pronounc ed wha t has come to be known as the Roosevelt Coro llary to the Monroe Doctrine . It mandat ed that any nation engage d in "chron ic wrong-doing"-that is, did anything to threa ten perceived US eco nomic or poli tica l interests-wou ld be disci- plined militarily by the United States, wh ich was to serve as an " internat ional police pow- er."8

As the US economy rapidly industrial ized , the am1y also intervened frequently on the side of big business in dome stic confl icts between corporations and workers. Troops we re used for th is purpose in the Grea t Ra ilroad Strike of 1877-the first natio nwide work stoppage - begun by railroad workers protesti ng wage cuts. Begu n in West Virginia, the strike soo n spread along rail lines from ocean to ocean and from north to south. General Philip Sheridan and his troops were ca lled in from the Great Plains, where they had been campaig ning against the Sioux, to halt the strike in Chicago.

Industrialization affecte d farmi ng as machinery rep laced farmers' hands and cas h crops came to preva il. Large operators moved in and bank s foreclosed on small farmers , leav ing them landles s. Farmer s' movements, most of them soc ialist-leanin g and anti- imperialist , opposed mil itary conscrip tion and US entry into World War I- the "ric h man' s war," as they ca lled it. Tens of thousand s protested and carr ied out acts of c ivil dis- obedience. In Augu st 19 I 7, white, Black, and Muskogee tenant farme rs and sharecrop- pers in severa l easte rn and southern Ok lahoma counties took up arms to stop conscript ion, wi th a larger stated goa l of over throwing the US gove rnment to establish a socia list commonwea lth. These more radi cally mind ed gras sroots soc ialists had orga nized their ow n Work ing Class Union (WCU), with Ang lo-American, African Amer ican, and Indigenous Muskogee farmers fom1ing a kind of rainbow alliance. Their plan was to march to Washington, DC, motivating million s of work ing peop le to arm themse lves and to joi n them along the way. After a day of dynamiting oil pipelines and bridges in south- eastern Ok lahoma, the men and their families created a liberated zone where they ate, sang hymn s, and rested. By the following day, heavily armed posses supp orted by pol ice and m ilitias stopped the revo lt, which became know n as the Green Com Rebellion. Those who didn ' t get away were arrested and rece ived pr ison sentences. The rebe llion is today considered as the waning vo ice of the people pushed off the land, but it also reflects the cris is induc ed by the forced allotment of Indigenou s territor ies and the rea lity of a multi- ethnic res istance moveme nt, a rare occ urrence in US colonialist history.9

At the same time, landle ss Indige nous farmers were launch ing a revolut ion in Mexi- co. Before President Wilson put General John J. Pershing at the head of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe in 19 17, the president had sent him to lead troop s, mainly buffalo sold iers, ins ide Mexico for nearly a year to stop the revo lution in the north led by

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Francisco "Pancho" Villa. The military intervention did not go well. Even the Mexica n federal troops fighting Villa resented the presence of US soldi ers. About the on ly notable success for the US military expe dition was the killing of Villa's seco nd-in -co mmand by a you ng lieutenant named George Patton. IO

MARKETS KILL

The extension of US military power into the Pac ific and Car ibbean was not militarism for its own sake . Rath er, it was all about securing mark ets and natura l resources, deve loping imperialist powe r to protect and exte nd corporate wealth. Indigenous peoples in the United States were severe ly affected by US industrializatio n and the develop ment of co r- porations. In a study of corporat ions in Ind ian Territory , historian H. Cra ig Miner defines the corporatio n as "an organ izatio n legally authorized by charter to act as a sing le individ- ua l, charact er ized by the issuance of stock and the limitation of liability of its stockhold- ers to the amount of their respec tive inves tment ... an artificia l perso n that cou ld not be held accountable in a manner fami liar to the Amer ican Ind ian way of thinking. Individual respo nsibility could be masked in corporate personality ... a lega l abstraction." 11

The burgeoni ng of the corporat ion broug ht about a new era of attacks on Indige nous governme nts, lands, and resou rces . After the military power and resista nce of Indigeno us nations and communit ies were stifl ed by the growing US military machin e follow ing the Civil War, comp liance on the part of Ind igenou s leaders became necessary for surviva l. Miner argues that "indust rial c ivilizatio n" diminishes the re levance of persons or commu- nitie s in its way and also notes that indu strial civ ilizat ion is not exac tly the same as " in- dustrialization ," that it is some thing quite different and more pervasive . Industrial civilization justified exploi tat ion and destructio n of whole societ ies and expansion with- out regar d for the sovere ignty of peoples; it promot ed ind ividua lism, compet ition, and selfishness as right eous character trait s .12 The means by which the US governmen t assured corporate freedom to intrude in Indigenou s territories was federa l trusteeship , the very instrument that was manda ted to protec t them .

Beginning at the end of the Civil War, governme nt funds from Ind ige nous land sales or royalties were not distributed to reservation cit izens or he ld by their governm ents; rather they were held in trust and managed in Wash ingto n. The Bureau of Indian Affa irs, without Indigenous peoples ' consen t, inves ted Indigenous fund s in railroad compa nies and variou s municipa l and state bonds. For instance , the Cherokee natio nal fund and the Muskogee Cree k Orphan Fund were so inve sted . Indigenous leade rs were we ll aware of these practices but were powerless to stop them. They certa inly did prot est, as evidenced by a petition filed by the Chick asaw Nat ion: "The Indian s did not lend this money; the Unite d States lent it, to increa se the va lue of its multip le states . ... But now the attemp t is made to force the Indian to con tribu te his pittance to the growth of a ll this prosperity and

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power; and this, too, when the United States, tr iumphant over the perils that once sur- rounded it, is more than ever able to be libera l, although nothin g more is asked of it than to be ju st." 13

Cherokee officia l Lewis Downing , writing in 1869 that rules would have to be agreed on and adhered to, noted the differences between Indigenous values and those of Ameri- can businessmen, " in that industry, habi t, and energy of character which is the result of the development of the idea of accumulation ." Free deve lopment without restra int of con- sensual policy would not do , Downin g declared: "To us, it appears that once cut loose from our treaty moorings , we will roll and tumble upon the tempestuous ocean of Ame ri- can politics and cong ress ional leg islation , and shipwr eck ( w ill] be our inev itable destina- tion." 14

Entering the 1920s, Indigenous peoples were at their lowes t point- both in popu la- tion and possibility for survival after decades of violent military operations during and following the Civil War, along with federal theft of Indigenous treaty-guara nteed funds and then two decades of allotment of Indigenous lands. Then the US governme nt imposed unsolicit ed citizenship on American Indians with the Ind ian Citizenship Act of 1924, ges- turing towa rd assimilation and disso lving the nation s. It was a boom time for the national economy, but life threatening for Native Americans everyw here. Robert Spott of the Yurok Nation in No rthern California, also an army veteran of World War I, descr ibed his communi ty's situation, which cou ld have been applied to eve ry Nat ive com muni ty. Speak ing before the Com monwea lth Club of San Francisco in 1926, he said:

There are many Indian women that are almost blind, and they only have one mea l a day, becaus e there is no one to look after them. Most of these people used to live on fish, which they cannot get, and on acorns , and they are starving . They hardly have any clothin g to cover them. Many childr en up along the Klamath River have passed away with disease. Most of them from tuberculo sis. There is no road into there where the Indian s are. The only road they have got is the Klamath River.

To reach doctors they have to take their children down the Klamath Rive r to the mouth of the Klamat h. It is 24 miles to Cresce nt City, where we have to go for doctors . It costs us $25 .00. Where are the poor Indian s to get this money from to get a doctor for their children? They go from place to place to borrow money. If they cannot get it, the poor child dies without aid. Inside of four or five yea rs more there will be hardly any Indians left upon the Klamath River.

I came here to notify you that some thing has to be done. We must have a doc- tor, and we must have a school to educate our children, and we must have a road upon the Klamath River besides the bank of the river ....

My father was an Indian chief, and we used to own everyt hing there. When the land was allotted they allotted him only ten acres, a litt le farm of land which is

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mostly grave l and rock, with little scrubby trees and redwoo d .... Often we see a car go past. It is the Indian Service . Do you suppose the man

driv ing that car would stop? Always he has no tim e for the Indian s, and the car with some one from the U.S.A. Indian Service goes past ju st like a tourist. 15

Natives joined African Americans, Mex ican Americans , and Chinese immigrants as targets of individual racial discrimination between the end of Reconstruction in the South in the 1880s to the mid-twentieth century. Jim Crow seg rega tion reigned in the South, where more than five thousand African Americans were lynched. 16 As Black peop le fled terror and impoverishment in the South , their popu lations grew in northern and midwest- ern cities where they still faced discrimination and violence. Chicago, Tulsa, and dozens of other cities were marred by deadly "race riots" agains t African Americans . 17 The viru- lent and organized racism of the 1920s spilled over to other peoples of darker hue. The pseudoscience of eugenics and racial purity was more robust in the United States than in Europe, further solidifying the ideology of white supremacy. For Indigenous peoples, this was manifest in developme nt of US gove rnment policy measu ring "blood quantum" in order to quali fy for Indigeno usness, replacing culture (especia lly language) and self-iden- tificat ion. While African Americans were cla ssified as such by the measure of "one drop of blood," Indigenous people were increasing ly called to prove thei r degree of ancestry as a sign ificant fraction.

NEW DEAL TO TERMINATION

Some rel ief for Indigenous nations came with the 1930s New Deal. The Rooseve lt admin- istration 's programs to combat econo mic co llapse included an acknowledgment of Indige- nous se.If-determina tion. Rooseve lt appointed anthropo logist and self-identified socia list John Collier as US com missioner of Indian affa irs in 1933 . 18 As a young activist scholar in 1922, Co llier had been hired by the General Federation of Women's Clubs to assist the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico in their land-claims struggle, a project that culmina ted in success when Congress passed the 1924 Pueblo Lands Act. Having lived at Taos Pueblo, whose res idents practiced traditional lifeways, Co llier had developed respect for the com- munal social relat ions he obse rved in Indige nous communities and had confidence that these peoples could govern themselves successfu lly and even influence a move towa rd socialism in the United States. He understood and agreed with Indigenous oppo sition to assimilatio n as individual s into the general soc iety-w hat the ongo ing allotment in sever- alty of Native collective estates and the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 sought to instituti onalize.

As commissioner for Indian affai rs, in consultation with Nat ive communities, Co llier drafted and successfu lly lobb ied for passage of the Wheeler-Howard bill, which became

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the Indian Reorganizat ion Act (IRA) of 1934. One of its provision s was to end further allotment of Indigenous territories, which was immediately implemented, although already allotted land was not restored. Another provision com mitted the federa l govern- ment to purchase available land contiguou s to reservat ions in order to restore lands to rel- evant Native nations. The IRA's main provision was more controversia l with Indigenous peoples, calling for the forma tion of"triba l govern ments ." In a gesture toward self-deter- mination, the IRA did not require any Indigenous nation to accept the law's tern1s, and several, including the Navajo Nation, declined. The IRA was limited in that it did not apply to the relocated Native nations in Oklahoma ; separa te leg islation was later drawn up for their unique circumsta nces. 19

The Navajo Nation , with the larges t land base and population among Indigenous peo- ples in the United States, soundly rejected sign ing off on the IRA. The Great Depression of the 1930s was, in the words of postwar Navajo chairman Sam Ankeah, "the most dev- astat ing experience in [Navajo] history since the imprisonment at Fort Sumner from 1864- 1868 ."20 When Coll ier became commiss ioner in 1933, he pushed for reduction of Navajo sheep and goats as part of a larger New Deal conservation scheme to stem stock overgrazing. He badgered the twe lve Navajo Counci l members into accepting the reduc- tion, promi sing unlikely new jobs under the Civi lian Conservat ion Corps to replace lost income. Collier sugges ted, without basis, that soil erosion in the Navajo Reserv ation was responsible for the silting up of the Bould er Dam site. His act ion likely was influenced by agr ibusinesses that wanted to get rid of all small producers in order to create an advantage to Anglo settler ranchers in New Mexico and Arizona. 21 The process is still bitterly remembered by Navajos. With traumat ized Navajo s watching, government agents shot sheep and goats and left them to rot or cremated them after dousing them with gaso line. At one s ite alone, thirty-five goats were shot and left to rot. One hundred fifty thousand goats and fifty thousand sheep were killed in this manner. Oral history interviews tell of the pressure tactics on the Navajos, includin g arrests of those who resisted , and express bitterness over the destruction of their livestock . As Navajo Counci l member Howard Gorma n said:

All of these incidents broke a lot of heart s of the Navajo people and left them mourning for years . They didn 't like it that the sheep were killed ; it was a total waste. That is what the peopl e said. To many of them livestoc k was a necess ity and meant survival. Some people con sider livestock as sacred because it is life's necess ity. They think of livestock as their mother. The crue l way our stock was handl ed is something that should never have happ ened.22

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In addition to the trauma experienced by the Navajos , the effect of the reductions was to impoveris h the owners of small herds.

For those Native nations , the majority , that did accept the Indian Reorganizat ion Act, a negative consequence was that English-speaking Native elites, often aligned with Chris- tian denominations , signed on to the law and formed authoritarian governmen ts that enr iched a few families and undermined communa l tradition s and traditional forms of governance , a problem that persists . However, the IRA did end allotment and set a prece- dent for acknowledging Indigenous self-determinatio n and recognizing collective and cultura l rights, a legal reality that made it difficult for those who soug ht to undo the incip- ient empowerment of Indige nous peop les in the 1950s.

The Truman administration pushed out John Collier, among many other progress ive Rooseve lt appoin tees. Following the end of World War II, attitudes among the ruling class and Congress regarding Indigenous nations turned from supporting autonomy to their elimination as people s with a new regimen of individual assimilation. In 1946 Congress establ ished the Indian Cla ims Comm ission and the Indian Claims Court to legitimize the prior illegal federal taking oflndigenou s treaty lands. Between 1946 and 1952-the cut- off date for filing cla ims-37 0 petitions represent ing 850 claims were filed on behalf of Indigenous nations. Although the government 's stated purpo se was to clear title for lands illegally taken, the claims mechanism barred restitution of lands taken illegally or acquir - ing new ones to replace the loss . Sett lement was limited to monetary compensation based on the property 's value at the time of the taking, and without interest. Adding insult to injury, any expenditure made by the federal govern ment on behalf of the Indigenous nations making claims was subtracted from the overall award, thereby penalizing the Indigenous people for services they had not requested. The average interval betwe en fil- ing a claim and receiving an award was fifteen years.

In creat ing the Indian Claims Comm ission, Congress was acknow ledgi ng the fact that the fede ral government had illegally seized Indigenous lands guara nteed by treaties. That va lidation became useful in Indigenous strateg ies for strengthe ning sovere ignty and pur- suing restitution of the land rather than monetary compensat ion . On the other hand, the process became a stepp ing-stone to ending federal acknowledgment of Indigenous nations altogether . The Eisenhower administration lost no time in collabora ting with Con- gress to weaken federa l trust respon sibility, transferring Indian educatio n to the states and moving Indian health care from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Department of Health.

This policy trend towar d assimilation culminat ed in the Termination Act (House Con- current Reso lution 108) in 1953, which provided-i n Orw ellian language-t hat Congress should , "as quickly as possible, move to free those tribes listed from Federal supervision and contro l and from all disabiliti es and limitations specially app licab le to Indian s." Under terminatio n, the federal trust protection and tran sfer payments guarante ed by

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treaties and agreements would end . Dillon S. Myer, who had headed the War Relocation Authority that administered the concentration camps for US citizens of Japanese descent, was, significantly, the Eisenhower administration's commissioner of Indian affairs to implement termination. 23 Commissioner Myer noted that Indigenous consent was imma- terial, saying, "We must proceed even though Indian cooperation may be lacking in cer- tain cases." 24 In the same year, Congress imposed Public Law 280 that transferred police power on reservations from the federal government to the states.

Despite the piecemeal eat ing away of Indigenous landholdin gs and sovereign ty and federal trust responsibility based on treaties , the US government had no constitutional or other legal authority to deprive federally recognized Native nations of their inherent sov- ereignty or territorial boundaries. It could only make it nearly impossible for them to exercise that sovereignty, or, alternatively , elim inate Indigenous identity entirely through assimilation , a form of genocide. The latter was the goa l of the 1956 Indian Relocation Act (Public Law 949). With BIA funding, any Indigenous individual or family could relo- cate to designated urban industrial areas- the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles , Phoenix, Dallas , Denver, Cleveland-where BIA offices were established to make hous- ing and job training and placement available. This project gave rise to large Native urban populations scattered among already poor and struggling minority working-class commu- nities , holding low-ski lled jobs or dealing with long-term unemployment. Yet many of these mostly young migrant s were influenced by the civi l rights movement emerging in cities in the 1950s and 1960s and began their own distinct intertribal movements orga- nized around the urban American Indian cente rs they established. In one of the largest of the relocation destination s, the San Francisco Bay Area , this would culminate in the eigh- teen-month occupation of Alcatraz in the late I 960s.

CIVIL RIGHTS ERA BEGINS

The founding of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAJ) in 1944 had marked a surge of Indigenous resistance. An extraord inary group of Native leaders eme rged in the 1950s, including D 'Arcy McNickle (Flathead), Edward Dozier (Santa Clara Pueblo), Helen Peterson (North ern Cheyenne/Lakota), and dozen s of others from diverse nations. Without their efforts, the termination period would have been more damaging than it was, possibly ending Indigenous status altogether. As a result of their organizing , the govern- ment ceased enforc ing tennination in 1961, though the legislatio n remained on the books until its repeal in 1988.25 However, by 1960, more than a hundred Indigenous nations had been terminated. A few were later able to regain federa l trusteeship through protracted court battles and demon strations , which took decade s and financial hardsh ip. Indigenous leaders such as Ada Deer and James White of the terminated Menominee Nation played key roles in the struggle to have Indigenous cases heard by Congress and by the Supreme

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Court in suits and appeals. The restitution movement attracted publicity through commu- nity organizing and direct action. 26 Postwar Indigenous resista nce operated in relation to a United States far wealthier and more powerful than before , but also within the era of decolonization and human rights inaugurated with estab lishment of the United Nations and adoption of its Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. Native leaders paid attention and were inspired.

Native organizing, like the organization of the African American desegregation and voting rights movement , developed within the context of a nationalistic anticommunist ideology that intensified with the Cold War and nuclear arn1s race in the 1950s. This sec- ond great Red Scare (the first had been in the wake of World War I) targeted the labor movement under the guise of combating the "comm unist threat" from the Soviet Union.27

It also attacked the civil rights and self-dete rminati on movements of the period, and racism broadened and flourished. The wars against Japan and then Korea, along with the successful Chinese commun ist revo lution, revived the early-twentie th-century racist fear of a "yellow peril." Mexican migrant worker s largely replaced the Asian agricultural workers displaced by the Japane se American internment, but in 1953 "Operat ion Wet- back," as the federal program was called , forced the deportation of more than a million Mexican workers, in the process subjecting million s of US citizens of Mexican heritage to illegal search and arrest. Native American s cont inued to expe rience brutality , including rape and detention in the border towns on the edges of reservation lands , at the hands of citizens as well as law enforcement officials. The situation of African Americans was one of continued lega lized segregation in the South, and extra legal but open discrimination elsewhe re. Then , thanks to the long and hard work of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1954, the US Supreme Court ordered desegregation of public schools. Years of persistent and little-publicized civil rights orga- nizing, particularly in the South, burst into public view with the bus boycott in Mont- gomery, Alabama, the following year. The white response was murderous: a well-fun ded campaign by White Citizens' Counc ils that formed all over the country, accusing civil rights activists of communist influence and infiltration. When whi te vigi lantes bombed and burned Black churches, it was said that "the communists " were doing it to gain sym- pathy for integration.

As national liberation movements surged in European colonies in Africa and Asia, the United States responded with counterinsurge ncy. The US Centra l Intelligence Agency (CIA) was formed in 1947 and expanded in size and globa l reach during the Eisenhower administration under director Allen Dulles, brother of Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. The CIA instrumentalized the overthrow of the democra tically elected governments oflran in 1953 and Guate mala in 1954.28 Guatemala had been the leading

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light in developing the Inter-American Indian Institute, a 1940 treaty-based initiative that Dave Warren and D' Arey McNickle were involved with. Following the coup, the institute headquart ers relocated from Guatemala City to Mexico City, but there it no longer had the same clout. Covert action cam e to be the primary means of counterinsurgency, while mili- tary invasion remained an option as in Vietnam following a decade of covert count erin- surgency there. In the buildup to the US war in Vietnam, the CIA set the stage with its "secret war" in Laos, organizing the indigenous Hmong as a CIA-sponsored army. After Iran and Guatemala, the CIA engineered coups in Indonesia, the Congo, Greece, and Chile, while attempting assassinat ions or coups that failed in Cuba , Iraq, Laos, and other countries.

Two years before John F. Kennedy took office as president of the United States, the Cuban people , after decades of struggle and years of urban and rural organizing and guer- rilla war, deposed the corrupt and despised dictator Batista, who had been financed and supported by the United States to the bitter end. The CIA spent the next several years try- ing to assassinate revolutiona ry leader Fidel Castro and made many attempts to invade, the most infamous of which was the 196 1 Bay of Pigs fiasco. Many Cubans who left Cuba for the United States after the revolution were rec ruited as CIA operatives . The rev- olution in Cuba, ju st ninety miles off the Florida coast, would be a touchstone for increas- ingly radicalized young people in the United States, but even more so for the Indigenous peoples of Latin America, which resonated with Native American activists seeking self- determinati on to their north.

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TEN

GHOST DANCE PROPHECY

A NATION IS COMING

The whole world is coming, A nation is coming, a nation is coming, The Eag le has brought the message to the tribe.

- from the Lakota Ghost Dance song, "Maka' Sito 'maniyaii"

Lillie Wounded Knee is turned into a giant world.

- Wallace Black Elk, 1973

THE NEW FRONTIER

Seventy years after the Wounded Knee Massacre, when the conquest of the continent was said to have been complete, and with Hawai' i and Alaska made into states, roundin g out the fifty stars on today' s flag, the myth of an exceptional US American people destined to bring order out of chaos , to stimu late economic growth , and to replace savagery with civi- lization- not ju st in North America but throughout the world- proved to have enormous staying power.

A key to John F. Kennedy's political success was that he revived the "frontier" as a trope of populi st imperialism openly based on the drama and popular myth of "set tling" the continent, of "taming" a different sort of "wilderness ." In Kennedy's acceptance speech at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, historian Richard Slotkin writes, the presidential nominee "asked his audience to see him as a new kind of frontiersman confronting a different sort of wilderness: ' I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch 3000 miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West. . .. We stand today on the edge of a new frontier ... a frontier of unknown opportunities and paths, a frontier of unfulfill ed hopes and threats. "' 1

Kennedy's use of "new frontier" to encapsulate his campaign echoed debates about US history that had begun more than six decades earlier. In 1894, historian Frederick Jackson Turner had presented his history- making "frontier thesis," claiming that the crisis

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