An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

  The Seventh Cavalry attack on a group of unarmed and starving Lakota refugees attempting to reach Pine Ridge to accept reservation incarceration in the frozen days of December 1890 symbolizes the end of Indigenous armed resistance in the United States. The slaughter is called a battle in US military annals. Congressional Medals of Honor were bestowed on twenty of the soldiers involved. A monument was built at Fort Riley, Kansas, to honor the soldiers killed by friendly fire. A battle streamer was created to honor the event and added to other streamers that are displayed at the Pentagon, West Point, and army bases throughout the world. L. Frank Baum, a Dakota Territory settler later famous for writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, edited the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer at the time. Five days after the sickening event at Wounded Knee, on January 3, 1891, he wrote, “The Pioneer [sic] has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”39

  Three weeks before the massacre, General Sherman had made clear that he regretted nothing of his three decades of carrying out genocide. In a press conference he held in New York City, he said, “Injins must either work or starve. They never have worked; they won’t work now, and they will never work.” A reporter asked, “But should not the government supply them with enough to keep them from starvation?” “Why,” Sherman asked in reply, “should the government support 260,000 able-bodied campers? No government that the world has ever seen has done such a thing.”40

  The reaction of one young man to Wounded Knee is representative but also extraordinary. Plenty Horses attended the Carlisle school from 1883 to 1888, returning home stripped of his language, facing the dire reality of the genocide of his people, with no traditional or modern means to make a living. He said, “There was no chance to get employment, nothing for me to do whereby I could earn my board and clothes, no opportunity to learn more and remain with the whites. It disheartened me and I went back to live as I had before going to school.”41 Historian Philip Deloria notes: “The greatest threat to the reservation program … was the disciplined Indian who refused the gift of civilization and went ‘back to the blanket,’ as Plenty Horses tried.”42 But it wasn’t simple for Plenty Horses to find his place. As Deloria points out, he had missed the essential period of Lakota education, which takes place between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. Due to his absence and Euro-American influence, he was suspect among his own people, and even that world was disrupted by colonialist chaos and violence. Still, Plenty Horses returned to traditional dress, grew his hair long, and participated in the Ghost Dance. He also joined a band of armed resisters, and they were present at Pine Ridge on December 29, 1890, when the bloody bodies were brought in from the Wounded Knee Massacre. A week later, he went out with forty other mounted warriors who accompanied Sioux leaders to meet Lieutenant Edward Casey for possible negotiations. The young warriors were angry, none more than Plenty Horses, who pulled out from the group and got behind Casey and shot him in the back of his head.

  Army officials had to think twice about charging Plenty Horses with murder. They were faced with the corollary of the recent army massacre at Wounded Knee, in which the soldiers received Congressional Medals of Honor for their deeds. At trial, Plenty Horses was acquitted due to the state of war that existed. Acknowledging a state of war was essential in order to give legal cover to the massacre.

  As a late manifestation of military action against Indigenous peoples, Wounded Knee stands out. Deloria notes that in the preceding years, the Indian warrior imagery so prevalent in US American society was being replaced with “docile, pacified Indians started out on the road to civilization.”

  Luther Standing Bear, for example, recounts numerous occasions on which the Carlisle Indian Industrial School students were displayed as docile and educable Indians. The Carlisle band played at the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883 and then toured several churches. Students were carted around East Coast cities. Standing Bear himself was placed on display in Wanamaker’s Philadelphia department store, locked in a glass cell in the center of the store and set to sorting and pricing jewelry.43

  GREED IS GOOD

  During the final phase of military conquest of the continent, surviving Indigenous refugees were deposited in Indian Territory, piled on top of each other in smaller and smaller reservations. In 1883, the first of several conferences were held in Mohonk, New York, of a group of influential and wealthy advocates of the “manifest destiny” policy. These self-styled “friends of the Indians” developed a policy of assimilation soon formulated into an act of Congress written by one of their members, Senator Henry Dawes: the General Allotment Act of 1887. Arguing for allotment of collectively held Indigenous lands, Dawes said: “The defect of the [reservation] system was apparent. It is [socialist] Henry George’s system and under that there is no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbors. There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization. Till this people will consent to give up their lands, and divide among their citizens so that each can own the land he cultivates they will not make much more progress.” Although allotment did not create the desired selfishness, it did reduce the overall Indigenous land base by half and furthered both Indigenous impoverishment and US control. In 1889, a part of Indian Territory the federal government called the Unassigned Lands, left over after allotment, was opened to settler homesteading, triggering the “Oklahoma Run.”

  Oil had been discovered in Indian Territory, but the Dawes Allotment Act could not be applied to the five Indigenous nations removed from the South, because their territories were not technically reservations, rather sovereign nations. In contradiction to the terms of the removal treaties, Congress passed the Curtis Act in 1898, which unilaterally deposed the sovereignty of those nations and mandated allotment of their lands. Indigenous territories were larger than the sum of 160-acre allotments, so the remaining land after distribution was declared surplus and opened to homesteading.

  Allotment did not proceed in Indian Territory without fierce resistance. Cherokee traditionalist Redbird Smith rallied his brethren to revive the Keetoowah secret society. Besides direct action, they also sent lawyers to argue before Congress. When they were overridden, they formed a community in the Cookson Hills, refusing to participate in privatization. Similarly, the Muskogee Creeks resisted, led by Chitto Harjo, who was lovingly nicknamed Crazy Snake. He led in the founding of an alternate government, with its capital a settlement they called Hickory Ground. More than five thousand Muskogees were involved. Captured and jailed, when freed Harjo led his people into the woods and carried on the fight for another decade. He was shot by federal troops in 1912, but the legacy of the Crazy Snake resistance remains a strong force in eastern Oklahoma. Muskogee historian Donald Fixico describes a contemporary enclave: “There is a small Creek town in Oklahoma which lies within the Creek Nation. The name of this town is Thlopthlocco. Thlopthlocco is a small independent community which operates almost independently. They are not very much dependent on the federal government, nor are they dependent on the Creek Nation. So they’re kind of a renegade group.”44

  In 1907, Indian Territory was dissolved and the state of Oklahoma entered the Union. Under the Dawes and Curtis Acts, privatization of Indigenous territories was imposed on half of all federal reservations, with a loss of three-fourths of the Indigenous land base that still existed after decades of army attacks and wanton land grabs. Allotment continued until 1934, when it was halted by the Indian Reorganization Act, but the land taken was never restored and its former owners were never compensated for their losses, leaving all the Indigenous people of Oklahoma (except the Osage Nation) without effective collective territories and many families with no land at all.45

  The Hopi Nation resisted allotment with partial success. In 1894, they petitioned the federal government with a letter
signed by every leader and chief of the Hopi villages:

  To the Washington Chiefs:

  During the last two years strangers have looked over our land with spy-glasses and made marks upon it, and we know but little of what it means. As we believe that you have no wish to disturb our Possessions we want to tell you something about this Hopi land.

  None of us were asked that it should be measured into separate lots, and given to individuals for they would cause confusion.

  The family, the dwelling house and the field are inseparable, because the woman is the heart of these, and they rest with her. Among us the family traces its kin from the mother, hence all its possessions are hers. The man builds the house but the woman is the owner, because she repairs and preserves it; the man cultivates the field, but he renders its harvest into the woman’s keeping, because upon her it rests to prepare the food, and the surplus of stores for barter depends upon her thrift.

  A man plants the fields of his wife, and the fields assigned to the children she bears, and informally he calls them his, although in fact they are not. Even of the field which he inherits from his mother, its harvests he may dispose of at will, but the field itself he may not.46

  The petition continues, explaining the matriarchal communal society and why dividing it up for private ownership would be unthinkable. Washington authorities never replied and the government continued to carve up the lands, finally giving up because of Hopi resistance. In the heart of New Mexico, the nineteen Indigenous city-states of the Pueblo Indians organized resistance under US occupation using the legal system as a means of survival, as they had under Spanish colonialism and in their relationship with the republic of Mexico. In the decades after they had lost their autonomous political status under Mexico and were counted as former Mexican citizens under US law, both Hispanos and Anglo squatters encroached upon the Pueblos’ ancestral lands. The only avenue for the Pueblos was to use the US court of private land claims. The following report reflects their status in the eyes of the Anglo-American judiciary:

  Occasionally the court room at Santa Fe would be enlivened by a squad of Indians who had journeyed thither from their distant Pueblos as witnesses for their grant. These delegations were usually headed by the governor of their tribe, who exhibited great pride in striding up to the witness stand and being sworn on the holy cross; wearing a badge on his breast, a broad red sash round his waist, and clad in a white shirt, the full tail of which hung about his Antarctic zone like the skirt of a ballet dancer, and underneath which depended his baggy white muslin trousers, a la Chinese washee-washee. The grave and imperturbable bow which the governor gave to the judges on the bench, in recognition of their equality with himself as official dignitaries, arrayed in that grotesque fashion, was enough to evoke a hilarious bray from a dead burro.47

  Without redress for their collective land rights under the claims court, the Pueblos had no choice but to seek federal Indian trust status. After they lost in their first attempt, finally in 1913 the US Supreme Court reversed the earlier decision and declared the Pueblos wards of the federal government with protected trust status, stating: “They are essentially a simple, uninformed, inferior people.”48

  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.

  With utter military triumph on the continent, the United States then set out to dominate the world, but the Indigenous peoples remained and persisted as the “American Century” proceeded.

  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 expansion 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 of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered 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 beautiful dream … the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.

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

  Although US imperialism abroad might seem at first to fall outside the scope of this book, it’s important to recognize that the same methods and strategies that were employed with the Indigenous peoples on the continent were mirrored abroad. While the Indigenous Americans were being brutally colonized, eliminated, relocated, and killed, the United States from its beginning was also pursuing overseas dominance. 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 between 1831 and 1896, on all continents, and the United States dominated most of Latin America economically, some countries militarily. The forty interventions and occupations between 1898 and 1919 were conducted with even more military heft but using the same methods and sometimes the same personnel.

  CONNECTIONS

  US colonies established during 1898–1919 include Hawai‘i (formerly called the Sandwich Islands), Alaska, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, the Marshall Islands, and Northern Mariana. Most of these, and dozens more islands depopulated in the Pacific and Indian Oceans and the Caribbean for military bases and bomb testing, remain colonies (called “territories” and “common-wealths”) in the twenty-first century.1

  One of the first outspoken proponents of transoceanic imperialism was former abolitionist William H. Seward who was Lincoln’s secretary of state and who considered it the destiny of the United States to dominate the Pacific Ocean. Seward did everything possible to fulfill that perceived destiny, including arranging the purchase of Alaska in 1867. In early 1874, the United States began military control of Hawai‘i, and in 1898 it annexed the islands after overthrowing the Hawai‘ian queen, Liliuokalani. Following post–World War II ascendancy to statehood, Indigenous Hawai‘ians and Alaskan Natives were brought under similar US colonial rule as Native Americans.2

  Overseas ventures gained increasingly exuberant public support in the late nineteenth century. In the best-selling book Our Country (1885) the Reverend Josiah Strong of the American Home Missionary Society argued that the United States had inherited the mantle of Anglo-Saxonism and, as a superior race, had a divine responsibility to control the world. By 1914 there were six thousand US Protestant missionaries in China and thousands of others in every other part of the non-European world, and they remained, as from the early seventeenth century, ensconced in Native American communities.

  The United States built 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 ongoing independence movement against Spain there. While US troops were headed to Havana Harbor in 1898, Admiral George Dewey led the US Navy to intervene in the Philippines—purportedly to assist a force of thirty thousand indi
genous Filipino rebels who had won and declared their independence 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 Filipino “Indian” resistance to US occupation, the army using counterinsurgency techniques practiced against the Indigenous nations of the North American continent, including new forms of torture such as water-boarding, and under many of the same army commanders. Twenty-six of the thirty US generals in the Philippines had been officers in the “Indian wars.”4 Major General Nelson A. Miles, who had commanded the army in campaigns against Indigenous peoples, was put in general command of the army in the Philippines war.