A Failed Genocide

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz directly confronts all the self-justifying myths and elided history about what happened between the indigenous peoples and European colonizers of North America over the course of 500 years in her book An Indigenous People's’ History of the United States. Her biggest target is the comforting conclusion that somehow the American Indian “problem” has now been resolved, and that this country can put to rest its troubling genocidal history of aggression towards native populations across the globe.

One of her strategies is to employ a corrective language in which, for instance, indigenous peoples are always “nations” and never “tribes,” nations that constituted, at the moments of their encounters with Europeans, mature societies with carefully worked-out political processes, active diplomacy, and sustainable technologies for using natural resources. What they didn’t have was the desperate hunger for land and “precious” metals that characterized the European colonizers, nor the sense of racial superiority that convinced those colonizers their aggression was somehow in keeping with a deity’s will.

Similarly, an “eagle-eyed” scan of the landscape of American history makes the charge of genocide directed towards American Indians difficult to refute. Dunbar-Ortiz argues that the ravages of European diseases for which native populations had no immunity may have conveniently hastened the process but also obscured the colonizers’ intent, and certainly does not excuse their behavior. The indigenous peoples of North America were, and still are to a lesser extent, in the way, an obstacle in need of removal.

The English colonizing strategy began in Ireland, Dunbar-Ortiz contends, where a half-million acres of northern land were declared open for settlement and displaced western Scots were used as the settlers. “The ancient Irish social system was systematically attacked,” reads Dunbar-Ortiz achingly familiar description, “traditional songs and music forbidden, whole clans exterminated, and the remainder brutalized.”

Nearly a quarter-million Ulster Scots then migrated to British North America during a sixty-year stretch of the eighteenth century, and became the vanguard of settlement in the Appalachians, the Ohio River country, and the land beyond the Mississippi when it became available. These “settler-colonialists” were useful as both squatters and as violent para-military eliminators of native peoples in partnership with organized, state-funded armies.

Dunbar-Ortiz traces the U.S. Army’s development back to the strategies and tactics of “counter-insurgency” as directed towards recalcitrant Indian nations, a military approach primarily based on the concept of “total war,” in which populations were either slaughtered (some California and northwest nations rendered practically extinct), or subdued and placed on treaty-determined land that was often expropriated for further white settlement. It is no accident, the author infers, that our contemporary army still specializes in counter-insurgency campaigns in southeast Asia, Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Africa, or that contemporary military personnel still use the phrase “Indian country” and its abbreviation “in country” when referring to so-called “active” combat zones. Army leadership was disproportionately the realm of the Scotch-Irish settlers’ descendants for a very long time.

Despite the taking of land, leaving most indigenous communities occupying small tracts, sometimes hundreds of miles from what was once home territory; despite the brutal attempts at forced assimilation, best symbolized by the notorious Indian boarding schools; despite disease, the scourge of alcoholism, and inter-breeding, millions of people in the current United States identify themselves as Indians and as members of a particular nation. The genocide has not worked, Dunbar-Ortiz observes, because of centuries of both active and passive resistance, because of the preservation against difficult odds of core cultural elements, and because of the development of autonomous governing structures.

Our best recourse now, Dunbar-Ortiz concludes, is to drastically alter the continent “physically and psychologically,” beginning “by honoring the treaties the United States made with indigenous nations, by restoring all sacred sites, starting with the Black Hills and including most federally held parks and land and all stolen sacred items and body parts, and by payment of sufficient reparations for the reconstruction and expansion of Native nations.”

Her vision is stunningly ambitious, and our responses will likely echo the debate now occurring within the Democratic Party, a debate between what is the right thing to do and what is “possible,” between Bernie Sanders’ supposedly “radical” proposals and the self-proclaimed pragmatism of Hillary Clinton. Dunbar-Ortiz forces the question of just what is meant by the concept of “American exceptionalism.” Do we really aspire to moral leadership, to exemplifying how a country should behave towards both its own citizens and, perhaps more tellingly, towards those who have been victimized by historical acts of aggression and greed? Or is our exceptionalism that, as D.H. Lawrence once put it, the “essential American soul” is one of a “killer?” That we keep on our “frock coat” of “civilized hypocrisies” and “bland deceits” while “doing the most impossible things,” like seeking to remove whole peoples from both our consciousness and the face of the earth.

Neil Cosgrove is a member of The NewPeople editorial collective and the Merton Center Board.

#article