Top Quotes: “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Pre-19th Century

“Ceramic trade goods involved interconnected markets from Mexico City to Mesa Verde, Colorado. Shells from the Gulf of California, tropical bird feathers from the Gulf Coast area of Mexico, obsidian from Durango, Mexico, and flint from Texas were all found in the ruins of Casa Grande (Arizona), the commercial center of the northern frontier. Turquoise functioning as money was traded to acquire macaw and parrot feathers from tropical areas for religious rituals, seashells from coastal peoples, and hides and meat from the northern plains. The stone has been found in precolonial sites in Texas, Kansas, and Nebraska, where the Wichitas served as intermediaries, carrying turquoise and other goods farther east and north. Crees in the Lake Superior region and communities in what is today Ontario, Canada, and in today’s Wisconsin acquired turquoise through trade.

Traders from Mexico were also transmitters of culture and features such as the Sun Dance religion in the Great Plains, and the cultivation of corn by the Algonquin, Cherokee, and Muskogee (Creek) peoples of the eastern half of North America were transmitted from Central America. The oral and written histories of the Aztecs, Cherokees, and Choctaws record these relations. Cherokee oral history tells of their ancestors’ migrations from the south and through Mexico, as does Muskogee history.

Although Aztecs were apparently flourishing culturally and economically, as well as being militarily and politically strong, their dominance was declining on the eve of Spanish intrusion. Being pressed for tribute through violent attacks, peasants rebelled and there were uprisings all over Mexico. Montezuma Il, 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 opportunity. The Mexican state was crushed and its cities leveled in Cortés’s three-year genocidal war. Cortés’s recruitment of resistant communities all over Mexico as allies aided in toppling the central regime. Cortés and his two hundred European mercenaries could never have overthrown the Mexican state without the Indigenous insurgency he co-opted. The resistant peoples who allied with Cortés to overthrow the oppressive Aztec regime could not yet have known the goals of the gold-obsessed Spanish colonizers or the European institutions that backed them.”

“The famed Anasazi people of Chaco Canyon on the Colorado Plateau — in the present-day Four Corners region of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah — thrived from AD 850 to 1250. Ancestors of the Pueblos of New Mexico, the Anasazi constructed more than four hundred miles of roads radiating out from Chaco. Averaging thirty feet wide, these roads followed straight courses, even through difficult terrain such as hills and rock formations. The highways connected some seventy-five communities. Around the thirteenth century, the Anasazi people abandoned the Chaco area and migrated, building nearly a hundred smaller agricultural city-states along the northern Rio Grande valley and its tributaries. Northernmost Taos Pueblo was an important trade center, handling buffalo products from the plains, tropical bird products, copper and shells from Mexico, and turquoise from New Mexican mines. Pueblo trade extended as far west as the Pacific Ocean, as far east as the Great Plains, and as far south as Central America.

Other major peoples in the region, the Navajos (Diné) and Apaches, are of Athabascan heritage, having migrated to the region from the subarctic several centuries before Columbus. The majority of the Diné people did not migrate and remain in the original homeland in Alaska and northwestern Canada.”

“Bison herds roamed the East from New York to Georgia (it’s no accident that a settler city in western New York was named Buffalo). The American bison was indigenous to the northern and southern plains of North America, not the East, yet Native peoples imported them east along a path of fire, as they transformed forest into fallows for the bison to survive upon far from their original habitat.”

“The first thing to note about early Native American trails and roads is that they were not just paths in the woods following along animal tracks used mainly for hunting. Neither can they be characterized simply as the routes that nomadic peoples followed during seasonal migrations. Rather they constituted an extensive system of roadways that spanned the Americas, making possible short, medium and long distance travel. That is to say, the Pre-Columbian Americas were laced together with a complex system of roads and paths which became the roadways adopted by the early settlers and indeed were ultimately transformed into major highways.

Roads were developed along rivers, and many Indigenous roads in North America tracked the Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri, Columbia, and Colorado Rivers, the Rio Grande, and other major streams. Roads also followed seacoasts. A major road ran along the Pacific coast from northern Alaska (where travelers could continue by boat to Siberia) south to an urban area in western Mexico. A branch of that road ran through the Sonora Desert and up onto the Colorado Plateau, serving ancient towns and later communities such as those of the Hopis and Pueblos on the northern Rio Grande.”

“In the seventeenth century the English conquered Ireland and declared 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 population and plant settlers in their place as in Ireland. The ancient Irish social system was systematically attacked, traditional songs and music forbidden, whole clans exterminated, and the remainder brutalized. A “wild Irish” reservation was even attempted.”

“The English government paid bounties for the Irish heads. Later only the scalp or ears were required. A century later in North America, Indian heads and scalps were brought in for bounty in the same manner. Although the Irish were as “white” as the English, transforming them into alien others to be exterminated previewed what came to be perceived as racialist when applied to Indigenous peoples of North America and to Africans.”

The 19th Century

“In the Ohio Country, the Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa began building a concerted Indigenous resistance in the early nineteenth century. From their organizing center, Prophet’s Town, founded in 1807, Tenskwatawa and his fellow organizers traveled throughout Shawnee towns calling for a return to their cultural roots, which had been eroded by the assimilation of Anglo-American practices and trade goods, especially alcohol.”

“Significantly, Tecumsen did not limit his vision to the Ohio Country but also envisaged organizing all the peoples west to the Mississippi, north into the Great Lakes region, and south to the Gulf of Mexico. He visited other Indigenous nations, calling for unity in defiance of the squatters’ presence on their lands. He presented a program that would end all sales of Indigenous land to settlers. Only then would settlers’ migrations in search of cheap land cease and the establishment of the United States in the West be prevented. An alliance of all Indigenous nations could then manage Indigenous lands as a federation. His program, strategy, and philosophy mark the beginning of pan-Indigenous movements in Anglo-colonized North America that established a model for future resistance. Joseph Brant and Pontiac had originated the strategy in the 1780s, but Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa forged a pan-Indigenous framework made all the more potent by combining Indigenous spirituality and politics while respecting the particular religions and languages of each nation.”

“Harrison, now convinced that Tecumseh’s brother Tenskwatawa, the Prophet, was the source of the renewed Indigenous militancy, reasoned that destroying Prophet’s Town would crush the resistance. It would present a clear choice to the many Indigenous people who supported the militant leaders: cede more land to the United States and take the money and trade goods, or suffer further annihilation. He decided to strike in Tecumseh’s absence. Having served as General Wayne’s aide-de-camp in the Fallen Timbers attacks, Harrison knew how to keep his regular army forces from being ambushed. He assembled Indiana and Kentucky rangers — seasoned Indian killers — and some US Army regulars. At the site of what is today Terre Haute, Indiana, the soldiers constructed Fort Harrison on Shawnee land — a symbol of their intention to remain permanently. The people in Prophet’s Town were aware of the military advance, but Tecumseh had warned them not to be drawn into a fight, because the alliance was not yet ready for war. Tenskwatawa sent scouts to observe the enemy’s movements. The US forces arrived on the edge of Prophet’s Town at dawn on November 6, 1811. Seeing no alternative to overriding his brother’s instructions, Tenskwatawa led an assault before dawn the following morning. Only after some two hundred of the Indigenous residents had fallen did the troops overpower them, burning the town, destroying the granary, and looting, even digging up graves and mutilating the corpses. This was the famous “battle” of Tippecanoe that made Harrison a frontier hero to the settlers and later helped elect him president.

The US Army’s destruction of the capital of the alliance outraged Indigenous peoples all over the Old Northwest, prompting fighters of the Kickapoos, Winnebagos, Potawatamis, and even Creeks from the South to converge on a British garrison at Fort Malden in Canada to obtain supplies with which to fight. Contrary to the false US assumption that Tecumseh was a mere tool of the British, he had been unwilling to enter into a British alliance because Europeans had proved so unreliable in the past. But now he spoke for unified and coordinated Indigenous-led war on the United States that the British could support if they wished but not control.”

“During the summer of 1812, the Indigenous alliance struck US installations and squatter settlements with little help from the British. The US forts at present-day Detroit and Dearborn fell. Among the inhabitants of Fort Dearborn, Kentucky ranger William Wells was killed and his body mutilated as that of a despised turncoat. In the fall, Indigenous forces attacked Anglo-American squatter settlements all over Illinois and Indiana Territories. The US rangers attempting to track and kill the Indigenous fighters found destroyed and abandoned Anglo-American settlements, with thousands of settlers driven from their homes. In response, Harrison turned the militias loose on Indigenous fields and villages with no restrictions on their behavior. The head of the Kentucky militia mustered two thousand armed and mounted volunteers to destroy Indigenous towns near today’s Peoria, Illinois, but without success. A reversal came in the fall of 1813, when Tecumseh was killed in the Battle of the Thames and the Indigenous army was destroyed. Throughout the eighteen-month war, militias and rangers attacked Indigenous civilians and agricultural resources, leaving behind starving refugees.”

“The Seminoles never sued for peace, were never conquered, and never signed a treaty with the United States, and although some were rounded up and sent in 1832 to Oklahoma, where they were given a land base, the Seminole Nation has never ceased to exist in the Everglades.”

“The state of Georgia saw Jackson’s election as a green light and claimed most of the Cherokee Nation’s territory as public land. The Georgia legislature resolved that the Cherokee constitution and laws were null and void and that Cherokees were subject to Georgia law. The Cherokee Nation took a case against Georgia to the US Supreme Court. With Chief Justice John Marshall writing for the majority, the Court ruled in favor of the Cherokees. Jackson ignored the Supreme Court, however, in effect saying that John Marshall had made his decision and Marshall would have to enforce it if he could, although he, Jackson, had an army while Marshall did not.

While the case was working its way through the courts, gold was discovered in Georgia in 1829, which quickly brought some forty thousand eager gold seekers to run roughshod over Cherokee lands, squatting, looting, killing, and destroying fields and game parks. Under authority granted by the Indian Removal Act, passed by Congress in 1830, the United States drew up a treaty that would cede all Cherokee lands to the government in exchange for land in “Indian Territory.” The US government held Cherokee leaders in jail and closed their printing press during negotiations with a few handpicked Cherokees, who provided the bogus signatures Jackson needed as a cover for forced removal.”

“Against all odds, some indigenous peoples refused to be removed and stayed in their traditional homelands east of the Mississippi. In the South, the communities that did not leave lost their traditional land titles and status as Indians in the eyes of the government, but many survived as peoples, some fighting successfully in the late twentieth century for federal acknowledgment and official Indigenous status. In the north, especially in New England, some states had illegally taken land and created guardian systems and small reservations, such as those of the Penobscots and Passamaquoddies in Maine, both of which won lawsuits against the states and attained federal acknowledgment during the militant movements of the 1970s. Many other Native nations have been able to increase their land bases.”

“Traversing the continent “from sea to shining sea” was hardly a natural westward procession of covered wagons as portrayed in Western movies. The US invasion of Mexico was carried out by US marines, by sea, through Veracruz, and the early colonization of California initially progressed from the Pacific coast, reached from the Atlantic coast by way of Tierra del Fuego. Between the Mississippi River and the Rockies lay a vast region controlled by Indigenous nations that were neither conquered nor colonized by any European power, and although the United States managed to annex northern Mexico, large numbers of settlers could not reach the Northern California goldfields or the fertile Willamette Valley region of the Pacific Northwest without army regiments accompanying them.”

“Simon Bolívar was a major leader of the independence movements in South America. He visited liberated Haiti in 1815, a trip that sharpened his hatred for slavery and led to its abolishment in the independent nations that formed in South America. Bolívar and liberator José de San Martín were founders of the unitary republic they named Gran Colombia, which survived from 1819 to 1830 with Bolívar as president. Subsequently, Gran Colombia splintered into the nation-states of Venezuela, Colombia (whüch then included Panama), Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. A similar unitary nation formed in Central America called the United Provinces of Central America, with its capital in Guatemala City, which existed from 1821 to 1841, thereafter splitting into the present separate small states. In both cases the larger and stronger unitary federations were subject to economic intervention and domination by the British and US empires.

Father Miguel Hidalgo, a priest who was instrumental in the Mexican independence movement, was deeply assimilated into Indigenous society in Mexico, and the majority of the movement’s insurgent fighters were drawn from Indigenous nations. Most of the actual fighters in the independence movements led by San Martín and Bolívar in South America were also Indigenous, representing their communities and nations, fighting for their own liberation as peoples. In striking contrast, the US war of independence targeted the Indigenous nations as enemies.”

“US forces fought their way from Mexico’s main commercial port of Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico to the capital, Mexico City, nearly three hundred miles away. The US Army occupied the capital until the Mexican government agreed to cede its northern territories, codified in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Texas had become a US state at the end of 1845. California quickly acquired statehood in 1850, followed by Nevada in 1864, Colorado in 1876, Wyoming in 1890, Utah in 1896, but the more densely populated Arizona and New Mexico not until 1912.

The Land Ordinance of 1785 had established a national system for surveying and distributing land, and as one historian has noted, “Under the May 1785 ordinance, Indian land would be auctioned off to the highest bidder.” The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, albeit guaranteeing Indigenous occupancy and title, set forth an evolutionary colonization procedure for annexation via military occupation, territorial status, and finally statehood. Conditions for statehood would be achieved when the settlers outnumbered the Indigenous population, which in the cases of both the Mexican cession area and the Louisiana Purchase territory required decimation or forced removal of Indigenous populations.”

“As Spanish repression and labor exploitation intensified, the Pueblos organized a revolution that also was supported by the unconquered Navajos, Apaches, and Utes, and the Hopi towns to the west in what is now Arizona. They were joined by the servant and laboring class of captive Indigenous and Mestizos in the Spanish capital at Santa Fe. In 1680, they drove the Spanish out of New Mexico, leaving the Pueblos free for twelve years before a new and permanent colonizing mission arrived. During another 130 years of Spanish rule before Mexico’s independence, the Pueblos were strictly controlled and forced to provide foot soldiers for Spanish forays against the Navajos, Apaches, and Utes who were never colonized by the Spanish. Mexico ousted the Franciscans and left the Pueblos to their own lives, although much of their territory had been lost to permanent settlers.”

“During the first decade of Mexican independence, some ten thousand Cherokees, Seminoles, Shawnees, and many other indigenous communities east of the Mississippi avoided forced removal to Indian Territory and escaped the iron heel of the United States, taking refuge in Mexico. One such community was the people of the Coahuila Kikapú (Kickapoo) Nation, forced out of their homeland when Wisconsin was opened for settlement. TheO’odam Nation did not move anywhere, but the redrawn border split their homeland. The independent Republic of Mexico provided land grants for their various communities. With Texas independence from Mexico, then US annexation, many moved south of the imposed new border.”

“In a true reign of terror, US occupation and settlement exterminated more than one hundred thousand California Native people in twenty-five years, reducing the population to thirty thousand by 1870–quite possibly the most extreme demographic disaster of all time. Here too, against impossible odds, the Indigenous resisted and survived to tell the story. Had they not done so, there would be no Indigenous peoples remaining in Northern California, because the objective was to eradicate them. From the onset of the California gold rush, crazed “gold bugs” invaded Indigenous territories, terrorizing and brutally killing those who were in their path. These settlers seemed to require no military assistance in running roughshod over unarmed Indigenous residents of fishing communities in a bountiful paradise of woods, rivers, and mountains. The role left for the US Army was to round up the starving indigenous refugees to transport them to established reservations in Oregon and Oklahoma.”

“During the period between the Mexican War and the Civil War, Indigenous resistance was led by Gila Apache leader Mangas Coloradas to maintain the Apaches’ traditional lands and way of life. The dragoons employed the “first way of war,” total war, encouraging field units to attack Apache villages and destroy crops and kill livestock, slaughtering women and children and old men left in the villages while the young men were engaged elsewhere fighting the dragoons. This kind of warfare against Indigenous peoples continued throughout the Civil War and ratcheted up in the northern plains and Southwest afterward, producing the term that the US military use to this day all over the world when referring to enemy territory: “Indian Country.””

“Abraham Lincoln’s campaign for the presidency appealed to the vote of land-poor settlers who demanded that the government “open” Indigenous lands west of the Mississippi. They were called “freesoilers,” in reference to cheap land free of slavery. New gold rushes and other incentives brought new waves of settlers to squat on Indigenous land. For this reason, some Indigenous people preferred a Confederate victory, which might divide and weaken the United States, which had grown ever more powerful. Indigenous nations in Indian Territory were more directly affected by the Civil War than anywhere else. the southeastern nations — the Cherokees, Muskogees, Seminoles, Choctaws, and Chickasaws (“Five Civilized Tribes”) — were forcibly removed from their homelands during the Jackson administration, but in the Indian Territory they rebuilt their townships, farms, ranches, and institutions, including newspapers, schools, and orphanages. Although a tiny elite of each nation was wealthy and owned enslaved Africans and private estates, the majority of the people continued their collective agrarian practices. All five nations signed treaties with the Confederacy, each for similar reasons. Within each nation, however, there was a clear division. based on class, often misleadingly expressed as a conflict between “mixed-bloods” and “full-bloods.” That is, the wealthy, assimilated, slave-owning minority that dominated politics favored the Confederacy, and the non-slave-owning poor and traditional majority wanted to stay out of the Anglo-American civil war. Historian David Chang found that Muskogee nationalism and well-founded distrust of federal power played a major role in bringing about that nation’s strategic alliance with the Confederacy. Chang writes: “Was the Creek council’s alliance with the South a racist defense of slavery and its class privileges, or was it a nationalist defense of Creek lands and sovereignty? The answer has to be both.”

John Ross, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, at first called for neutrality, but changed his mind for reasons similar to the Muskogees and asked the Cherokee council for authority to negotiate a treaty with the CSA. Nearly seven thousand men of the five nations went into battle for the Confederacy.”

“During the war, however, many Indigenous soldiers became disillusioned and went over to the Union forces, along with enslaved African Americans who fled to freedom.

Another story is equally important, though less often told. A few months after the war broke out, some ten thousand men in Indian Territory, made up of Indigenous volunteers, along with African Americans who had freed themselves and even some Anglo-Americans, engaged in guerrilla warfare against the Confederate Army. They fought from Oklahoma into Kansas, where many of them joined unofficial Union units that had been organized by abolitionists who had trained with John Brown years earlier.”

“To free the professional soldiers posted in the West to fight against the Confederate Army in the East, Lincoln called for volunteers in the West, and settlers responded, coming from Texas, Kansas, California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Nebraska, Utah, and Nevada. Having few Confederates to fight, they attacked people closer to hand, Indigenous people. Land speculators in the trans-Mississippi West sought statehood for the occupied former Mexican territories in order to attract settlers and investors. Their eagerness to undertake the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous residents to achieve the necessary population balance to attain statehood generated strong anti-Indian hysteria and violent actions. Preoccupied with the Civil War in the East, the Lincoln administration did little to prevent vicious and even genocidal actions on the part of territorial authorities consisting of volunteer Indian haters such as Kit Carson.

The mode of maintaining settler “law and order” set the pattern for postwar genocide. In the most infamous incident involving militias, the First and Third Colorado Volunteers carried out the Sand Creek Massacre. Although assigned to guard the road to Santa Fe, the units mainly engaged in raiding and looting Indigenous communities. John Chivington, an ambitious politician known as the “Fighting Parson,” led the Third Colorado.

By 1861, displaced and captive Cheyennes and Arapahos, under the leadership of the great peace seeker Black Kettle, were incarcerated in a US military reservation called Sand Creek, near Fort Lyon in southeastern Colorado. They camped under a white flag of truce and had federal permission to hunt buffalo to feed themselves. In early 1864, the Colorado territorial governor informed them that they could no longer leave the reservation to hunt. Despite their compliance with the order, on November 29, 1864, Chivington took seven hundred Colorado Volunteers to the reservation. Without provocation or warning, they attacked, leaving dead 105 women and children and 28 men. Even the federal commissioner of Indian affairs denounced the action, saying that, the people had been “butchered in cold blood by troops in the service of the United States.” In its 1865 investigation, the Congress Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War recorded testimonies and published a report that documented the aftermath of the killings, when Chivington and his volunteers burned tepees and stole horses. Worse, after the smoke had cleared, they had returned and finished off the few survivors while scalping and mutilating the corpses — women and men, young and old, children, babies. Then they decorated their weapons and caps with body parts — fetuses, penises, breasts, and vulvas — and, in the words of Acoma poet Simon Ortiz, “Stuck them / on their hats to dry / Their fingers greasy / and slick. Once back in Denver, they displayed the trophies to the adoring public in Denver’s Apollo Theater and in saloons. Yet, despite the detailed report of the deeds, neither Chivington nor any of his men were reprimanded or prosecuted, signaling a free field for killing.”

“He enlisted the now-seasoned killing machine of Colorado Volunteers to attack the Navajos, on whom he declared total war. He enlisted as his principal commander in the field the ubiquitous Indian killer Kit Carson. With unlimited authority and answering to no one, Carleton spent the entire Civil War in the Southwest engaged in a series of search-and-destroy missions against the Navajos. The campaign culminated in March 1864 in a three-hundred-mile forced march of eight thousand Navajo civilians to a military concentration camp at Bosque Redondo in the southeastern New Mexico desert, at the army base at Fort Sumner, an ordeal recalled in Navajo oral history as the “Long Walk.” One Navajo named Herrero said,

Some of the soldiers do not treat us well. When at work, if we stop a little they kick us or do something else…. We do not mind if an officer punishes us, but do not like to be treated badly by the soldiers. Our women sometimes come to the tents outside the fort and make contracts with the soldiers to stay with them for a night, and give them five dollars or something else. But in the morning they take away what they gave them and kick them off. This happens most every day.

At least a fourth of the incarcerated died of starvation. Not until 1868 were the Navajos released and allowed to return to their homeland in what is today the Four Corners area. This permission to return was not based on the deadly conditions of the camp, rather that Congress determined that the incarceration was too expensive to maintain. For these noble deeds, Carleton was appointed a major general in the US Army in 1865. Now he led the Fourth Cavalry in scorched-earth forays against Plains Indians.”

“Under the Homestead Act, 1.5 million homesteads were granted to settlers west of the Mississippi, comprising nearly three hundred million acres (a half-million square miles) taken from the Indigenous collective estates and privatized for the market. This dispersal of landless settler populations from east of the Mississippi served as an “escape valve,” lessening the likelihood of class conflict as the industrial revolution accelerated the use of cheap immigrant labor.

Little of the land appropriated under the Homestead Acts was distributed to actual single-family, homesteaders. It was passed instead to large operators or land speculators. The land laws appeared to have been created for that result. An individual could acquire 1,120 or even more acres of land, even though homestead and preemption (legalized squatting) claims were limited to 160 acres. A claimant could obtain a homestead and secure title after five years or pay cash within six months. Then he could acquire another 160 acres under preemption by living on another piece of land for six months and paying $1.25 per acre. While acquiring these titles, he could also be fulfilling requirements for a timber culture claim of 160 acres and a desert land claim of 640 acres, neither of which required occupancy for title. Other men within a family or other partners in an enterprise could take out additional desert land claims to increase their holdings even more. As industrialization quickened, land as a commodity, “real estate,” remained the basis of the US economy and capital accumulation. The federal land grants to the railroad barons, carved out of Indigenous territories, were not limited to the width of the railroad tracks, but rather formed a checkerboard of square-mile sections stretching for dozens of miles on both sides of the right of way. This was land the railroads were free to sell in parcels for their own profit. The 1863–64 federal banking acts mandated a national currency, chartered banks, and permitted the government to guarantee bonds. As war profiteers, financiers, and industrialists such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan used these laws to amass wealth in the East, Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker in the West grew rich from building railroads with eastern capital on land granted by the US government.

Indigenous nations, as well as Hispanos, resisted the arrival of railroads crisscrossing their farms, hunting grounds, and homelands, bringing settlers, cattle, barbed wire fencing, and mercenary buffalo hunters in their wake. In what proved a prelude to the genocidal decades to follow, the Andrew Johnson administration in 1867–68 sent army and diplomatic representatives to negotiate peace treaties with dozens of Indigenous nations. The 371 treaties between Indigenous nations and the United States were all promulgated during the first century of US existence. Congress halted formal treaty making in 1871, attaching a rider to the Indian Appropriation Act of that year stipulating “that hereafter no Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe, or power with whom the United States may contract by treaty. Provided, further, that nothing herein contained shall be construed to invalidate or impair the obligation of any treaty heretofore lawfully made and ratified with any such Indian nation or tribe.” This measure meant that Congress and the president could now make laws affecting an Indigenous nation wwithout negotiations or consent. Nevertheless, the provision reaffirmed the sovereign legal status of those Indigenous nations that had treaties. During the period of US-Indigenous treaty making, approximately two million square miles of land passed from Indigenous nations to the United States, some of it through treaty agreements and some through breach of standing treaties.

In an effort to create Indigenous economic dependency and compliance in land transfers, the US policy directed the army to destroy the basic economic base of the Plains Nations — the buffalo. The buffalo were killed to near extinction, tens of millions dead within a few decades and only a few hundred left by the 1880s. Commercial hunters wanted only the skins, so left the rest of the animal to rot. Bones would be gathered and shipped to the East for various uses. Mainly it was the army that helped realize slaughter of the herds. Old Lady Horse of the Kiowa Nation could have been speaking for all the, buffalo nations in her lament of the loss:

Everything the Kiowas had came from the buffalo…. Most of all, the buffalo was part of the Kiowa religion. A white buffalo calf must be sacrificed in the Sun Dance. The priests used parts of the buffalo to make their prayers when they healed people or when they sang to the powers above.

So, when the white men wanted to build railroads, or when they wanted to farm or raise cattle, the buffalo still protected the Kiowas. They tore up the railroad tracks and the gardens. They chased the cattle off the ranges. The buffalo loved their people as much as the Kiowas loved them.”

“After the war many Black soldiers, like their or white counterparts, remained in the army and were assigned to segregated regiments sent west to crush Indigenous resistance.

This reality strikes many as tragic, as if oppressed former slaves and Indigenous peoples being subjected to genocidal war should magically be unified against their common enemy, the white man. In fact, this is precisely how colonialism in general and colonial warfare in particular work. It is not unique to the United States, but rather a part of the tradition of European colonialism since the Roman legions. The British organized whole armies of ethnic troops in South and Southwestern Asia, the most famous being the Gurkhas from Nepal, who fought as recently as Margaret Thatcher’s war against Argentina in 1983. The buffalo soldiers were such a specially organized colonial military unit. As Stanford L. Davis, a descendant of a buffalo soldier, writes:

Slaves and the black soldiers, who couldn’t read or write, had no idea of the historical deprivations and the frequent genocidal intent of the U.S. government toward Native Americans. Free blacks, whether they could read and write, generally had no access to first-hand or second-hand unbiased information on the relationship. Most whites who had access often didn’t really care about the situation.”

“The United States had its own motives for assigning Black troops to the West. Southerners and the eastern population did not want thousands of armed Black soldiers in their communities. There was also fear that if they demobilized, the labor market would be flooded. For US authorities, it was a good way of getting rid of the Black soldiers and the Indians.”

“In 1878, the great Cheyenne resistance leaders Little Wolf and Dull Knife led more than three hundred Cheyenne civilians from a military reservation in Indian Territory, where they had been forcibly confined, to their original homeland in what is today Wyoming and Montana. They were eventually intercepted by the military, but only following a dramatic chase covered by newspaper reporters. So much sympathy was aroused in eastern cities that the Cheyennes were provided a reservation in a part of their original homeland. A similar feat was that of the Nimi’ipuu (Nez Perce) under Chief Joseph, who tried to lead his people out of military incarceration in Idaho to exile in Canada. In 1877, pursued by two thousand soldiers of the US cavalry led by Nelson Miles, Nimi’ipuu led eight hundred civilians toward the Canadian border. They held out for nearly four months, evading the soldiers as well as fighting hit-and-run battles, while covering seventeen hundred miles. Some were rounded up and placed in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, but they soon left on their own and returned to their Idaho homeland, eventually securing a small reservation there.

The longest military counterinsurgency in US history was the war on the Apache Nation, 1850–86. Goyathlay, known as Geronimo, famously led the final decade of Apache resistance. The Apaches and their Diné relatives, the Navajos, did not miss a beat in continuing resistance to colonial domination when the United States annexed their territory as a part of the half of Mexico taken in 1848. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo between the United States and Mexico, which sealed the transfer of territory, even stipulated that both parties were required to fight the “savage” Apaches. By 1877 the army had forced most Apaches into inhospitable desert reservations. Led by Geronimo, Chiricahua Apaches resisted incarceration in the San Carlos reservation designated for them in Arizona, When Geronimo finally surrendered — he was never captured — the group numbered only thirty-eight, most of those women and children, with five thousand soldiers in pursuit, which meant that the insurgents had wide support both north and south of the recently drawn US-Mexico border. Guerrilla warfare persists only if it has deep roots in the people being represented, the reason it is sometimes called “people’s war.” Obviously, the Apache resistance was not a military threat to the United States but rather a symbol of resistance and freedom. Herein lies the essence of counterinsurgent colonialist warfare: no resistance can be tolerated. Historian William Appleman Williams aptly described the US imperative as “annihilation unto total surrender.”

Geronimo and three hundred other Chiricahuas who were not even part of the fighting force were rounded up and transported by train under military guard to Fort Marion, in St. Augustine, Florida, to join hundreds of other Plains Indian fighters already incarcerated there. Remarkably, Geronimo negotiated an agreement with the United States so that he and his band would surrender as prisoners of war, rather than as common criminals as the Texas Rangers desired, which would have meant executions by civil authorities. The POW status validated Apache sovereignty and made the captives eligible for treatment according to the international laws of war. Geronimo and his people were transferred again, to the army base at Fort Sill in Indian. Territory, and lived out their lives there.”

The 20th Century

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, sculptor James Earle Fraser unveiled the monumental and iconic sculpture The End of the Trail, which he had created exclusively for the triumphal 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, California. The image of the near naked exhausted, dying Indian mounted on his equally exhausted horse proclaimed the final solution, the elimination of the Indigenous peoples of the continent. The following year, Ishi, the California Yani who had been held captive for five years by anthropologists 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 Indians were killed over and over on screens viewed by millions of children, including Indian girls and boys.”

“Roosevelt referred to Aguinaldo as a “renegade Pawnee” and observed that Filipinos did not have the right to govern their country just because they happened to occupy it. Two hundred thousand US soldiers fought in the Philippines, suffering seven thousand casualties (3.5 percent). Twenty percent of the Philippine population died, mostly civilians, as a result of the US Army’s scorched-earth strategy (food deprivation, targeting civilians for killing, and so on) and displacement. In 1904 Roosevelt pronounced what has come to be known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. It mandated that any nation engaged in “chronic wrong-doing” — that is, did anything to threaten perceived US economic or political interests — would be disciplined militarily by the United States, which was to serve as an “international police power.””

“Industrialization affected farming as machinery replaced farmers’ hands and cash crops came to prevail. Large operators moved in and banks foreclosed on small farmers, leaving them landless. Farmers’ movements, most of them socialist-leaning and anti-imperialist, opposed military conscription and US entry into World War I — the “rich man’s war,” as they called it. Tens of thousands protested and carried out acts of civil disobedience. In August 1917, white, Black, and Muskogee tenant farmers and sharecroppers in several eastern and southern Oklahoma counties took up arms to stop conscription, with a larger stated goal of overthrowing the US government to establish a socialist commonwealth. These more radically minded grassroots socialists had organized their own Working Class Union (WCU), with Anglo-American, African American, and Indigenous Muskogee farmers forming a kind of rainbow alliance. Their plan was to march to Washington, DC, motivating millions of working people to arm themselves and to join them along the way. After a day of dynamiting oil pipelines and bridges in southeastern Oklahoma, the men and their families created a liberated zone where they ate, sang hymns, and rested. By the following day, heavily armed posses supported by police and militias stopped the revolt, which became known as the Green Corn Rebellion. Those who didn’t get away were arrested and received prison sentences. The rebellion is today considered as the waning voice of the people pushed off the land, but it also reflects the crisis induced by the forced allotment of Indigenous territories and the reality of a multiethnic resistance movement, a rare occurrence in US colonialist history.”

“Entering the 1920s, Indigenous peoples were at their lowest point — both in population and possibility for survival after decades of violent military operations during and following the Civil War, along with federal theft of Indigenous treaty-guaranteed funds and then two decades of allotment of Indigenous lands. Then the US government imposed unsolicited citizenship on American Indians with the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, gesturing toward assimilation and dissolving the nations.”

“The US government had no constitutional or other legal authority to deprive federally recognized Native nations of their inherent sovereignty or territorial boundaries. It could only make it nearly impossible for them to exercise that sovereignty, or, alternatively, eliminate Indigenous identity entirely through assimilation, a form of genocide. The latter was the goal of the 1956 Indian Relocation Act (Public Law 949). With BIA funding, any Indigenous individual or family could relocate to designated urban industrial areas — the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, Denver, Cleveland — where BIA offices were established to make housing and job training and placement available. This project gave rise to large Native urban populations scattered among already poor and struggling minority working-class communities, holding low-skilled jobs or dealing with long-term unemployment. Yet many of these mostly young migrants were influenced by the civil rights movement emerging in cities in the 1950s and 1960s and began their own distinct intertribal movements organized around the urban American Indian centers they established. In one of the largest of the relocation destinations, the San Francisco Bay Area, this would culminate in the eighteen-month occupation of Alcatraz in the late 1960s.”

“Activists’ efforts to end termination and secure restoration of land, particularly sacred sites, included Taos Pueblo’s sixty-four-year struggle with the US government to reclaim their sacred Blue Lake in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. In the first land restitution to any Indigenous nation, President Richard M. Nixon signed into effect Public Law 91–550 on December 15, 1970, which had been approved with bipartisan majorities in Congress. President Nixon stated, “This is a bill that represents justice, because in 1906 an injustice was done in which land involved in this bill — 48,000 acres — was taken from the Taos Pueblo Indians. The Congress of the United States now returns that land to whom it belongs.”“

“The Sioux have never accepted the validity of the US confiscation of Paha Sapa, the Black Hills. Mount Rushmore is controversial among Native Americans because it is located in the Black Hills. Members of the American Indian Movement led occupations of the monument beginning in 1971. Return of the Black Hills was the major Sioux demand in the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee. Due to a decade of intense protests and occupations by the Sioux, on July 23, 1980, in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, the US Supreme Court ruled that the Black Hills had been taken illegally and that remuneration equal to the initial offering price plus interest — nearly $106 million — be paid. The Sioux refused the award and continued to demand return of the Black Hills. The money remained in an interest-bearing account, which by 2010, amounted to more than $757 million. The Sioux believe that accepting the money would validate the US theft of their most sacred land. The Sioux Nation’s determination to repatriate the Black Hills attracted renewed media attention in 2011. A segment of the PBS NewsHour titled “For Great Sioux Nation, Black Hills Can’t Be Bought for $1.3 Billion” aired on August 24. The reporter described a Sioux reservation as one of the most difficult places in which to live in the United States:

Few people in the Western Hemisphere have shorter life expectancies. Males, on average, live to just 48 years old, females to 52. Almost half of all people above the age of 40 have diabetes.

And the economic realities are even worse. Unemployment rates are consistently above 80 percent. In Shannon County, inside the Pine Ridge Reservation, half the children live in poverty, and the average income is $8,000 a year.

But there are funds available, a federal pot now worth more than a billion dollars. That sits here in the U.S. Treasury Department waiting to be collected by nine Sioux tribes. The money stems from a 1980 Supreme Court ruling that set aside $105 million to compensate the Sioux for the taking of the Black Hills in 1877, an isolated mountain range rich in minerals that stretched from South Dakota to Wyoming. The only problem: The Sioux never wanted the money because the land was never for sale.

That one of the most impoverished communities in the Americas would refuse a billion dollars demonstrates the relevance and significance of the land to the Sioux, not as an economic resource but as a relationship between people and place, a profound feature of the resilience of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.”

“The Bureau of Indian Affairs began a program to woo industrial plants to reservations, promising cheap labor and infrastructure investment. The largest such experiment was that of the giant electronics company Fairchild’s assembly plant in the Navajo Nation.

Established at the town of Shiprock (in the northeastern part of the reservation, in New Mexico) in 1969, the plant became the single largest industrial employer in New Mexico by 1975. Twelve hundred Navajos made up the initial workforce. By 1974, the numbers had lessened to a thousand, but still Navajos were 95 percent of the workforce. Then, during 1974–75, the Navajo workforce shrunk to six hundred. Fairchild’s Mountain View, California, headquarters claimed that Navajos were quitting, something very common in the electronics assembly industry. Non-Indians were being hired to replace Navajos. What actually had been happening were layoffs, not resignations. The federal government subsidized the wages for the six-month training period on the job, for which little training is required, and Fairchild was laying off those workers whom they would have to pay and hiring new trainees at no cost. Local Navajo activists and former Fairchild employees, along with help from American Indian Movement leaders, organized a protest at the plant, which led to the workers occupying it. Fairchild decommissioned the plant and moved it overseas. Documents recovered by protesters revealed that Fairchild was seeking a pretext to break its lease. The Navajo Nation had built the plant to Fairchild’s specifications at a cost of three and a half million dollars.”

“But in 1988 Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which gave the states some control over gaming, a dangerous surrender of sovereignty for those Native nations operating casinos. Indigenous gaming operations now constitute a $26 billion industry annually that employs three hundred thousand people, with about half the 564 federally recognized nations operating casinos of various sizes. Profits have been used in myriad ways, some for per capita payments, others earmarked for educational and linguistic development, housing, hospitals, and even investing in larger projects such as the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. A good portion of profits go to lobbying politicians of state and federal governments. The Indian gaming lobby in California, for instance, is second only to the prison guards union in the state.”

“Corporal punishment was unknown in Indigenous families but was routine in the boarding schools. Often punishment was inflicted for being “too Indian” — the darker the child, the more often and severe the beatings. The children were made to feel that it was criminal to be Indian. A woman whose mother experienced boarding school related the results:

Probably my mother and … her brothers and sisters were the first in our family to go to boarding school…. And the stories she told … were horrendous. There were beatings. There [was] a very young classmate — I don’t know how old they were, probably preschool or grade school — who lost a hand in having to clean this machine that baked bread or cut dough or something, and having to kneel for hours on cold basement floors as punishment…. My mother lived with a rage all her life, and I think the fact that they were taken away so young was part of this rage and how it — the fallout — was on us as a family.

Ponca historian Roger Buffalohead verifies that testimony:

The idea of corporal punishment, so foreign to traditional Indian cultures, became a way of life for those students returning from their educational experience.

Yet you find by the thirties and forties in most Native communities, where large numbers of young people had, in the previous years, attended boarding schools, an increasing number of parents who utilized corporal punishment in the raising of their children, so that although you can’t prove a direct connection, I think you can certainly see that boarding school experiences, where corporal punishment was the name of the game, had [their) impact on the next generations of native people.”

“Sexual abuse of both girls and boys was also rampant.”

“Indigenous women, in particular, have continued to bear the brunt of sexual violence, both within families and by settler predators. Incidence of rape on reservations has long been astronomical. The colonialist restrictions on Indigenous policing authority on reservations — yet another legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery and the impairment of Indigenous sovereignty — opened the door to perpetrators of sexual violence who knew there would be no consequences for their actions. Under the US colonial system, jurisdiction for crimes committed on Native lands falls to federal and state authorities because Native justice can be applied only to reservation residents, and then only for misdemeanors. One in three Native American women has been raped or experienced attempted rape, and the rate of sexual assault on Native American women is more than twice the national average. For five years after publication of a scathing 2007 report by Amnesty International, Native American and women’s organizations, including the National Organization for Women (NOW), lobbied Congress to add a new section to the 1994 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) addressing the special situation of Native American women living on reservations. The added provision would allow Native nations’ courts jurisdiction to arrest and prosecute non-Native men who enter reservations and commit rape. At the end of 2012, the Republican-dominated US Congress denied reauthorization of the VAWA, because it included the provision. In March 2013, however, that opposition was overcome, and President Barack Obama signed the amended act back into law — a small step forward for Native sovereignty.”

“In 1872, a group of Modoc men led by Kintpuash, also known as Captain Jack, attempted to return to their own country in Northern California after the US Army had rounded them up and forced them to share a reservation in Oregon. The insurgent group of fifty-three was surrounded by US troops and Oregon militiamen and forced to take refuge in the barren and rugged lava beds around Lassen Peak, a dormant volcano, a part of their ancestral homeland that they knew every inch of. More than a thousand troops commanded by General Edward R. S. Canby, a former Civil War general, attempted to capture the resisters, but had no success as the Modocs engaged in effective guerrilla warfare. Before the Civil War, Canby had built his military career fighting in the Second Seminole War and later in the invasion of Mexico. Posted to Utah on the eve of the Civil War, he had led attacks against the Navajos, and then began his Civil War service in New Mexico. Therefore, Canby was a seasoned Indian killer. In a negotiating meeting between the general and Kintpuash, the Modoc leader killed the general and the other commissioners when they would allow only for surrender. In response, the United States sent another former Civil War general in with more than a thousand additional soldiers as reinforcements, and in April 1873 these troops attacked the Modoc stronghold, this time forcing the Indigenous fighters to flee. After four months of fighting that cost the United States almost $500,000–equal to nearly $10 million currently — and the lives of more than four hundred of its soldiers and a general, the nationwide backlash against the Modocs was vengeful. Kintpuash and several other captured Modocs were imprisoned and then hanged at Alcatraz, and the Modoc families were scattered and incarcerated on reservations. Kintpuash’s corpse was embalmed and exhibited at circuses around the country.”

“The Chagos Archipelago comprises more than sixty small coral islands isolated in the Indian Ocean halfway between Africa and Indonesia, a thousand miles south of the nearest continent, India. Between 1968 and 1973, the United States and Britain, the latter the colonial administrator, forcibly removed the indigenous in habitants of the islands, the Chagossians. Most of the two thousand deportees ended up more than a thousand miles away in Mauritius and the Seychelles, where they were thrown into lives of poverty and forgotten. The purpose of this expulsion was to create a major US military base on one of the Chagossian islands, Diego Garcia. As if being rounded up and removed from their homelands in the name of global security were not cruel enough, before being deported the Chagossians had to watch as British agents and US troops herded their pet dogs into sealed sheds where they were gassed and burned. As David Vine writes in his chronicle of this tragedy:

The base on Diego Garcia has become one of the most secretive and powerful US military facilities in the world, helping to launch the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (twice), threatening Iran, China, Russia, and nations from southern Africa to southeast Asia, host to a secret CIA detention center for high-profile terrorist suspects, and home to thousands of U.S. military personnel and billions of dollars in deadly weaponry.

The Chagossians are not the only indigenous people around the world that the US military has displaced. The military established a pattern during and after the Vietnam War of forcibly removing indigenous peoples from sites deemed strategic for the placement of military bases. The peoples of the Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific and Puerto Rico’s Vieques Island are perhaps the best-known examples, but there were also the Inughuit of Thule, Greenland, and the thousands of Okinawans and Indigenous peoples of Micronesia. During the harsh deportation of the Micronesians in the 1970s, the press took some notice. In response to one reporter’s question, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said of the Micronesians: “There are only ninety thousand people out there. Who gives a damn?” This is a statement of permissive genocide.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the United States operated more than 900 military bases around the world, including 287 in Germany, 130 in Japan, 106 in South Korea, 89 in Italy, 57 in the British Isles, 21 in Portugal, and 19 in Turkey. The number also comprised additional bases or installations located in Aruba, Australia, Djibouti, Egypt, Israel, Singapore, Thailand, Kyrgyzstan, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Crete, Sicily, Iceland, Romania, Bulgaria, Honduras, Colombia, and Cuba (Guantánamo Bay), among many other locations in some 150 countries, along with those recently added in Iraq and Af- ghanistan.

In her book The Militarization of Indian Country, Anishinaabe activist and writer Winona LaDuke analyzes the continuing negative effects of the military on Native Americans, considering the consequences wrought on Native economy, land, future, and people, especially Native combat veterans and their families. Indigenous territories in New Mexico bristle with nuclear weapons storage, and Shoshone and Paiute territories in Nevada are scarred by decades of aboveground and underground nuclear weapons testing. The Navajo Nation and some New Mexico Pueblos have experienced decades of uranium strip mining, the pollution of water, and subsequent deadly health effects. “I am awed by the impact of the military on the world and on Native America,” LaDuke writes. “It is pervasive.””