An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

  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. The Indigenous communities in the new South American republics were soon dominated economically and politically by national landed elites that consolidated their power following the wars of independence. However, Indigenous peoples whose ancestors fought for liberation from Spanish colonialism have never forgotten their important role in those revolutionary movements and realize that the liberation process continues. The Indigenous peoples of Latin America feel they own those revolutions, whereas the US secession from Great Britain was the intentional founding of a white republic that planned elimination of the Indigenous peoples as territorial-based, collective societies.

  The period of US intervention to annex and dominate former Spanish territories in the Americas began not in 1898 with the Spanish-American War, as most history texts claim, but rather nearly a century before, during Jefferson’s presidency, with the Zebulon M. Pike expedition of 1806–7. Those historians who track “continental expansion” separately from clear actions of US imperialism rarely note the juxtaposition in time and presidential administration of the interventions in North Africa and Mexico on the eve of its liberation from Spain. Like the Lewis and Clark expedition, completed the same year that Pike set off, the Pike expedition was a military project ordered by President Jefferson. Lewis and Clark had headed into the far reaches of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory to gather intelligence on the Mandan, Hidatsa, Paiute, Shoshone, Ute, and many other nations in the huge swath of territory between the Rockies and the Pacific, bordered by Spanish-occupied territory on the west and south and British Canada on the north.6 Pike and his small force of soldiers and Osage hostages had orders to illegally enter Spanish territory to gather information that would later be used for military invasion. Under the guise of having gone astray, Pike and his contingent found themselves inside Spanish-occupied northern New Mexico (today’s southern Colorado), where they “discovered” Pikes Peak and built a fort. Ultimately, as they had undoubtedly planned, they were taken into custody by Spanish authorities who transported them to Chihuahua, Mexico, allowing Pike and his men to observe and make notes about northern Mexico on the way. More important, they collected information on Spanish military resources and behavior and the location of and relations among civilian populations. Pike was released, and in 1810 published his findings. Later titled The Expeditions of Zebulon Montgomery Pike, the book was a best seller.7

  US COLONIZATION OF NORTHERN MEXICO

  The instability of the impoverished new republic of Mexico, as it emerged in 1821 from more than three centuries of Spanish colonialism and an exhausting war of national liberation, put it in a weak position to defend its territory against US aggression. With Spain out of the way, the United States could pursue its own policy of imperialism without risking a difficult war with European imperialist powers—what George Washington had referred to in his farewell address when he warned against “foreign entanglements.” Once Mexico was independent, its newly formed government immediately opened its borders to trade, something Spanish authorities had never allowed. US trader William Becknell arrived at Taos in the Mexican province of Nuevo México from St. Louis in 1821, and a US trading party led by Sylvester Pattie arrived in 1824.8 Traders based in St. Louis, at the time the effective western frontier outpost of the United States, began extending their business to New Mexico. Until the publication of Pike’s book in 1810, US merchants had shown little interest in trading in Mexico. Pike’s account of the potential profits to be made inspired them to set out to capture that trade.9

  US traders would help pave the way to US political control of northern Mexico through what came to be known as the “American party of Taos.” Christopher Houston “Kit” Carson would play a major role in the success of the US invasion of northern Mexico as he continued work as a colonial mercenary. Born in 1809 in Kentucky, Carson was a fur trapper and entrepreneur, as well as a noted Indian hater and killer, who had left his family’s homestead in Missouri for New Mexico at age sixteen. Most of the US citizens who made up the American party, including Carson, married into wealthy Spanish-identified families in New Mexico who had not favored independence from Spain, creating a strong Anglo affinity within the local ruling class. The goal of this clique was to attract, and thus monopolize, the trade in furs with Indigenous and other trappers, with the ultimate goal of US annexation. As a magnet, the traders would offer low-priced manufactured goods, from clothing to kitchenware, tools, and furniture. St. Louis was connected to transatlantic trading houses in cities on the East Coast, so it had the advantage of better variety and quality of goods than those of Chihuahua traders, who relied on the declining port of Veracruz. Bent’s Fort (near present-day La Junta, Colorado) became the economic center for the fur trade in northern New Mexico, rivaling only John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company in North America. Missouri merchants circumvented the Mexican prohibition against exports of silver and gold (lifted briefly for silver between 1828 and 1835) through smuggling and bribery.10

  St. Louis soon replaced Chihuahua as the entrepôt for the northern Mexico trade, and the elite of Mexico’s northern provinces became parties to the US objective of incorporating the territory into the United States. As early as 1824, Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton introduced a bill in the US Senate on behalf of citizens of Missouri for a US government survey of the Santa Fe Trail to the Mexican border. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson began using US troops to protect caravans of merchandise on the Santa Fe Trail going to northern Mexico from possible interference by Indigenous peoples whose territories they crossed without permission.

  In addition to New Mexico, US citizen residents laid groundwork for the annexation of Mexico in Texas and California as well. The Spanish Cortes (parliament) had enacted a law in 1813 that authorized provincial authorities to make private property land grants, and this practice of granting land to individuals, including foreigners, was continued under the independent Mexican government until 1828. In 1823, Mexico’s despotic ruler Agustín de Iturbide enacted a colonization law authorizing the national government to enter into a contract granting land to an empresario, or promoter, who was required to recruit a minimum of two hundred families to settle the grant. Only applied in the province of Texas, many such grants were sought by and granted to slave-owning Anglo-American entrepreneurs, despite slavery being illegal in Mexico, making possible their dominance in the province and leading to Mexico’s loss of Texas in 1836.11

  Senator Benton, his son-in-law Captain John C. Frémont, and Kit Carson also helped pave the way for the invasion of Northern California. In the early 1840s, Benton and his daughter, Jessie—Frémont’s wife—built a booster press to entice settlers to the Oregon Territory as well as to settle in the Mexican province of California. At the same time, Frémont and his guide Carson mounted five expeditions to gather information, laying the groundwork for military conquest. The third expedition illegally entered the Sacramento Valley region from the north in early 1846, just before the United States declared war against Mexico. Frémont encouraged Anglo settlers in the Central Valley to side with the United States, promising military protection if war broke out. Once a US warship was positioned for war, Frémont was appointed lieutenant colonel of the California Battalion, as if it had all been planned in advance.12

  Exploration and intelligence gathered by Pike, followed by infiltration and settlement of northern Mexican provinces preceded by US entrepreneurs, finally culminated in military invasion and war. 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.”13 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. In this US system, unique among colonial powers, land became the most important exchange commodity for the accumulation of capital and building of the national treasury. To understand the genocidal policy of the US government, the centrality of land sales in building the economic base of the US wealth and power must be seen. Apologists for US expansionism see the 1787 ordinance not as a reflection of colonialism, but rather as a means of “reconciling the problem of liberty with the problem of empire,” in historian Howard Lamar’s words.14

  Following the Mexican War, the United States faced problems more pressing than that of reconciling conflicting ideologies. For one thing, the vast majority in the annexed territory were Indigenous peoples or Mexican farmers and ranchers, landed communities. As for the Navajos, Apaches, and Utes who had resisted for centuries all colonization efforts by the Spanish and then the Mexican authorities, they continued to resist the new colonial regime. To understand how the peoples of these regions responded to the US invasion and conquest, and to understand their particular relationship with the United States today, it is essential to understand their history under Spanish colonization.

  INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OF OCCUPIED NORTHERN MEXICO

  Although the Spanish Crown had dispatched explorers such as Coronado, Cabeza de Baca, and others, and had established trading and military posts and towns along the North American Atlantic Coast and in Florida and along the Gulf Coast as far as the Mississippi, Spanish settler-colonialist rule did not begin north of the Rio Grande until 1598. The soldier-settler colonizing mission launched a brutal military assault on the Pueblo towns in New Mexico and imposed state and church institutions. The colonizers found a thriving irrigation-based agriculture supporting a population living in ninety-eight interrelated city-states (pueblos, the Spanish called them), and within two decades they reduced the towns to twenty-one.15 Perhaps most provocative, given the Pueblos’ extensive rituals and numerous religious feast days, the Franciscan missionaries forbade Pueblo religious practices and forced Christianity upon them. 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.16 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.

  The two largest Mexican provinces annexed by the United States, Coahuila y Tejas (Texas) and California, were more sparsely populated and not as tightly centralized and organized as New Mexico. After 1692, as the Spanish Crown sent an army to invade and reoccupy the Rio Grande Pueblos, it also sought effective control and settlement of California and Texas, in part to create a large buffer with competing French, British, and Russian imperialism. After two centuries of dominance in the Americas, the Spanish state was crumbling politically and economically. Having experienced a depression in silver production in their American colonies and growing competition from other European powers, the Spanish settled on maintaining and expanding its northern holdings to hold back French and British encroachment into the mining areas of the interior of New Spain (Mexico).

  In what is now the state of Texas, Spain built forts and expropriated land from the local Indigenous people, granting it to Spanish settlers to farm and ranch. The first Spanish town in Texas, San Antonio, was established in 1718, and Franciscan missionaries founded the Mission San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo). Spanish forts, missions, and settlements dotted the territory, especially along the Rio Grande from Matamoras to Laredo. The Indigenous peoples of Texas included the Lupin Apaches, Jumanos, Coahuiltecans, Tonkawas, Karankawas, and Caddos, all of whom were more vulnerable to colonization than the more mobile Comanches and Wichitas in West Texas. By the time of Mexican independence, the Indigenous population of the province was around fifty thousand, while Spanish settlers numbered around thirty thousand.

  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 its homeland when Wisconsin was opened for settlement. The Tohono O’odam Nation did not move anywhere, but the redrawn 1848 border split their homeland. The independent Republic of Mexico provided land grants for their various communities. With Texas’s independence from Mexico, then US annexation, many moved south of the imposed new border.17

  The Republic of Mexico opened a door to US domination by granting land to Anglo immigrants. During the first decade of Mexican independence, some thirty thousand Anglo-American farmers and plantation owners, along with their slaves, poured into Texas, receiving development land grants. By the time Texas became a US state in 1845, Anglo settlers numbered 160,000.18 Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, which affected the Anglo-American settlers’ quest for wealth in building plantations worked by enslaved Africans. They lobbied the Mexican government for a reversal of the ban and gained only a one-year extension to settle their affairs and free their bonded workers—the government refused to legalize slavery. The settlers decided to secede from Mexico, initiating the famous and mythologized 1836 Battle of the Alamo, where the mercenaries James Bowie and Davy Crockett and slave owner William Travis were killed. Although technically an Anglo-American loss, the siege of the Alamo served to stir Anglo patriotic passions, and within a month at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto, Mexico handed over the province. This was a great victory for the Andrew Jackson administration, for Jackson’s brother, Mason, who was one of the Texas planters, and especially for the alcoholic settler-warrior hero Sam Houston. The former governor of Tennessee, Houston was made commander in chief of the Texas army and president of the new “Texas republic,” which he helped guide to US statehood in 1845. One of the first acts of the pro-slavery independent government was to establish a counterinsurgency force that—as its name, the Texas Rangers, suggests—followed the “American way of war” in destroying Indigenous towns, eliminating Native nations in Texas, pursuing ethnic cleansing, and suppressing protest from Tejanos, former Mexican citizens.19

  Mission San Francisco de Asis, also called Mission Dolores, was a Spanish Franciscan mission established on the Pacific Coast at the same time as the Presidio (military base) at San Francisco—1776, the year that Anglo-Americans declared independence from Britain. The purpose of
the garrison was twofold: to protect the mission from Indigenous inhabitants whose territory the Spanish were usurping and to round up those same people and force them to live and work for the Franciscan friars at the mission. Mission Dolores was the sixth of the twenty-one Franciscan missions established between 1769 and 1823, when Mexico disbanded the missions. The establishment of the missions and presidios from San Diego and Los Angeles and Santa Barbara to Carmel, San Francisco, and Sonoma, traces the colonization of California’s Indigenous nations. The five-hundred-mile road that connected the missions was called El Camino Real, the Royal Highway.

  The Spanish military in California was divided into four districts, each with Franciscan missions and strategically located presidios. The 1769 establishment of the first presidio in San Diego coincided with establishment of the first Franciscan mission in California. The second presidio was based in Monterey in 1770, to defend the six missions in the area as well as the mercury mines in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Monterey became the capital and the only port of entry for shipments to and from Spanish California, and it remained so until 1846, when the United States seized California.

  These California Franciscan missions and their founder, Junípero Serra, are extravagantly romanticized by modern California residents and remain popular tourist sites. Very few visitors notice, however, that in the middle of the plaza of each mission is a whipping post. The history symbolized by that artifact is not dead and buried with the generations of Indigenous bodies buried under the California crust. The scars and trauma have been passed on from generation to generation. Putting salt in the wound, as it were, Pope John Paul II in 1988 beatified Junípero Serra, the first step toward sainthood. California Indigenous peoples were insulted by this act and organized to prevent the sanctification of a person they consider to have been an exponent of rape, torture, death, starvation, and humiliation of their ancestors and the attempted destruction of their cultures. Serra would take soldiers with him, randomly kidnapping Indigenous individuals and families, recording these captures in his diaries, as in this instance: “[When] one fled from between their [the soldiers’] hands, they caught the other. They tied him, and it was all necessary, for, even bound, he defended himself that they should not bring him, and flung himself on the ground with such violence that he scraped and bruised his thighs and knees. But at last they brought him.… He was most frightened and very disturbed.”20 In 1878, a old Kamia man named Janitin told an interviewer of his experience as a child: “When we arrived at the mission, they locked me in a room for a week.… Every day they lashed me unjustly because I did not finish what I did not know how to do, and thus I existed for many days until I found a way to escape; but I was tracked and they caught me like a fox.” He was fastened to the stage and beaten to unconsciousness.