An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

  The astronomical number of firearms owned by US civilians, with the Second Amendment as a sacred mandate, is also intricately related to militaristic culture. Everyday life and the culture in general are damaged by ramped-up militarization, and this includes academia, particularly the social sciences, with psychologists and anthropologists being recruited as advisors to the military. Anthropologist David H. Price, in his indispensable book Weaponizing Anthropology, remarks that “anthropology has always fed between the lines of war.” Anthropology was born of European and US colonial wars. Price, like Enloe, sees an accelerated pace of militarization in the early twenty-first century: “Today’s weaponization of anthropology and other social sciences has been a long time coming, and post-9/11 America’s climate of fear coupled with reductions in traditional academic funding provided the conditions of a sort of perfect storm for the militarization of the discipline and the academy as a whole.”21

  In their ten-part cable television documentary series and seven-hundred-page companion book The Untold History of the United States, filmmaker Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick ask: “Why does our country have military bases in every region of the globe, totaling more than a thousand by some counts? Why does the United States spend as much money on its military as the rest of the world combined? Why does it still possess thousands of nuclear weapons, many on hair-trigger alert, even though no nation poses an imminent threat?”22 These are key questions. Stone and Kuznick condemn the situation but do not answer the questions. The authors see the post–World War II development of the United States into the world’s sole superpower as a sharp divergence from the founders’ original intent and historical development prior to the mid-twentieth century. They quote an Independence Day speech by President John Quincy Adams in which he condemned British colonialism and claimed that the United States “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” Stone and Kuznick fail to mention that the United States at the time was invading, subjecting, colonizing, and removing the Indigenous farmers from their land, as it had since its founding and as it would through the nineteenth century. In ignoring that fundamental basis for US development as an imperialist power, they do not see that overseas empire was the logical outcome of the course the United States chose at its founding.

  NORTH AMERICA IS A CRIME SCENE

  Jodi Byrd writes: “The story of the new world is horror, the story of America a crime.” It is necessary, she argues, to start with the origin of the United States as a settler-state and its explicit intention to occupy the continent. These origins contain the historical seeds of genocide. Any true history of the United States must focus on what has happened to (and with) Indigenous peoples—and what still happens.23 It’s not just past colonialist actions but also “the continued colonization of American Indian nations, peoples, and lands” that allows the United States “to cast its imperialist gaze globally” with “what is essentially a settler colony’s national construction of itself as an ever more perfect multicultural, multiracial democracy,” while “the status of American Indians as sovereign nations colonized by the United States continues to haunt and inflect its raison d’etre.” Here Byrd quotes Lakota scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, who spells out the connection between the “Indian wars” and the Iraq War:

  The current mission of the United States to become the center of political enlightenment to be taught to the rest of the world began with the Indian wars and has become the dangerous provocation of this nation’s historical intent. The historical connection between the Little Big Horn event and the “uprising” in Baghdad must become part of the political dialogue of America if the fiction of decolonization is to happen and the hoped-for deconstruction of the colonial story is to come about.24

  A “race to innocence” is what occurs when individuals assume that they are innocent of complicity in structures of domination and oppression.25 This concept captures the understandable assumption made by new immigrants or children of recent immigrants to any country. They cannot be responsible, they assume, for what occurred in their adopted country’s past. Neither are those who are already citizens guilty, even if they are descendants of slave owners, Indian killers, or Andrew Jackson himself. Yet, in a settler society that has not come to terms with its past, whatever historical trauma was entailed in settling the land affects the assumptions and behavior of living generations at any given time, including immigrants and the children of recent immigrants.

  In the United States the legacy of settler colonialism can be seen in the endless wars of aggression and occupations; the trillions spent on war machinery, military bases, and personnel instead of social services and quality public education; the gross profits of corporations, each of which has greater resources and funds than more than half the countries in the world yet pay minimal taxes and provide few jobs for US citizens; the repression of generation after generation of activists who seek to change the system; the incarceration of the poor, particularly descendants of enslaved Africans; the individualism, carefully inculcated, that on the one hand produces self-blame for personal failure and on the other exalts ruthless dog-eat-dog competition for possible success, even though it rarely results; and high rates of suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, sexual violence against women and children, homelessness, dropping out of school, and gun violence.

  These are symptoms, and there are many more, of a deeply troubled society, and they are not new. The large and influential civil rights, student, labor, and women’s movements of the 1950s through the 1970s exposed the structural inequalities in the economy and the historical effects of more than two centuries of slavery and brutal genocidal wars waged against Indigenous peoples. For a time, US society verged on a process of truth seeking regarding past atrocities, making demands to end aggressive wars and to end poverty, witnessed by the huge peace movement of the 1970s and the War on Poverty, affirmative action, school busing, prison reform, women’s equity and reproductive rights, promotion of the arts and humanities, public media, the Indian Self-Determination Act, and many other initiatives.26

  A more sophisticated version of the race to innocence that helps perpetuate settler colonialism began to develop in social movement theory in the 1990s, popularized in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth, the third volume in a trilogy, is one of a number of books in an academic fad of the early twenty-first century seeking to revive the Medieval European concept of the commons as an aspiration for contemporary social movements.27 Most writings about the commons barely mention the fate of Indigenous peoples in relation to the call for all land to be shared. Two Canadian scholar-activists, Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright, for example, do not mince words in rejecting Native land claims and sovereignty, characterizing them as xenophobic elitism. They see Indigenous claims as “regressive neo-racism in light of the global diasporas arising from oppression around the world.”28

  Cree scholar Lorraine Le Camp calls this kind of erasure of Indigenous peoples in North America “terranullism,” harking back to the characterization, under the Doctrine of Discovery, of purportedly vacant lands as terra nullis.29 This is a kind of no-fault history. From the theory of a liberated future of no borders and nations, of a vague commons for all, the theorists obliterate the present and presence of Indigenous nations struggling for their liberation from states of colonialism. Thereby, Indigenous rhetoric and programs for decolonization, nationhood, and sovereignty are, according to this project, rendered invalid and futile.30 From the Indigenous perspective, as Jodi Byrd writes, “any notion of the commons that speaks for and as indigenous as it advocates transforming indigenous governance or incorporating indigenous peoples into a multitude that might then reside on those lands forcibly taken from indigenous peoples does nothing to disrupt the genocidal and colonialist intent of the initial and now repeated historical process.”31

  BODY PARTS

  Another aspect of the demand for US public dominion appears under the guise of science. Despite the passage in 1990 of the Nati
ve American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), some researchers under the cloak of science have fought tooth and nail not to release the remains and burial offerings of some two million Indigenous people held in storage, much of it uncataloged, in the Smithsonian Institution and other museums and by universities, state historical societies, National Park Service offices, warehouses, and curio shops. Until the 1990s, archaeologists and physical anthropologists claimed to need the remains—which they labeled “resources” or “data,” but rarely as “human remains”—for “scientific” experimentation, but most were randomly stored in boxes.32

  In doing so, they also challenge the definition of “Native American” and the claimants’ right to sovereignty. They even accuse Native Americans of being anti-science for seeking to repatriate the remains of their relatives.33 However, since anthropologist Franz Boas in 1911 discredited the theories of racial superiority and inferiority upon which such research was premised, little actual examination of the Indigenous body parts has taken place. When Ishi—identified by Anglos in 1911 as the last of the Yahi people of Northern California—died in 1916, the University of California at Berkeley anthropologist who had studied him and his culture, Arthur Kroeber, insisted on an Indigenous traditional burial and no autopsy, according to Ishi’s wishes. When asked about the cause of science, Kroeber said: “If there is any talk about the interest of science, say for me that science can go to hell. . . . Besides I cannot believe that any scientific value is materially involved. We have hundreds of Indian skeletons that nobody ever comes to study.”34

  Despite Kroeber’s stance, Ishi’s brain was removed and preserved and sent to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. As anthropologist Erik Davis observes, the bodies have never had scientific value. Rather, they have become a fetish, “a marker of value, the power of which derives specifically from the obscuring of the referent to which it originally referred. It is my claim that Indian identity, and its material form, the dead Native body, has functioned for a very long time, and with increasing power, as a fetish marking the possession of land by those who have conquered it already.”35

  The “Kennewick Man” phenomenon of the 1990s revealed much about the pathology Davis references. In 1996, a nearly complete skeleton and skull were found on a riverbank on traditional land of the Umatilla Nation near Kennewick, Washington. The county coroner determined that the bones were ancient—at least nine thousand years old—and therefore Native American. Under NAGRA they should be handed over to the Umatilla authorities. But a local archaeologist, James C. Chatters, asked to examine the remains. Several weeks later Chatters called a press conference at which he proclaimed the remains to be “Caucasoid” and with a story to tell. Up to that moment, little attention had been paid to the find, but with Chatters’s claims it became a public sensation fueled by headlines such as “Europeans Invade America: 20,000 BC” (Discover), “Was Someone Here before the Native Americans?” (New Yorker), “America before the Indians” (US News and World Report), and “Hunt for the First Americans” (National Geographic). The archaeologist had made a series of logical conclusions from a bogus premise: the remains were ancient; the skeleton and skull were said not to resemble those of living Natives, and might be more akin to those of modern Europeans, therefore, Europeans were the “first Americans.” The Archaeological Institute of America dismissed such claims, denouncing the already discredited “science” of determining racial characteristics projected back in time. Yet the claims stuck in the public mind and media bias.

  Clearly the controversy was not about science, but rather about Native claims of antiquity, sovereignty, and rights, and settler resentment. Chatters made this clear when he was interviewed on the CBS program 60 Minutes: “The tribe’s fight against further testing of Kennewick Man is based largely on fear, fear that if someone was here before they were, their status as sovereign nations, and all that goes with it—treaty rights, and lucrative casinos … could be at risk.” The white supremacist group Asutru Folk Assembly made a similar assessment: “Kennewick Man is our kin. . . . Native American groups have strongly contested this idea, perceiving that they have much to lose if their status as the ‘First Americans’ is overturned. We will not let our heritage be hidden by those who seek to obscure it.”36

  Chatters claimed that Kennewick Man “has so many stories to tell. . . . When you work with these individuals you develop an empathy, it’s like you know another individual intimately.”37 Erik Davis, calling this identification with the remains a scientist studies “pathological ventriloquism,” points out that even the judge who sided with Chatters in the dispute with the Umatilla Nation got into the act, saying that the remains were “a book that they can read, a history written in bone instead of on paper, just as the history of a region may be ‘read’ by observing layers of rock or ice, or the rings of a tree.”38 Forty-five years ago, archaeologist Robert Silverberg wrote about the appeal of “lost tribes” to Anglo-Americans: “The dream of a lost prehistoric race in the American heartland was profoundly satisfying, and if the vanished ones had been giants, or white men, or Israelites, or Danes, or Toltecs, or great white Jewish Toltec Vikings, so much the better.”39 Anything but Indians, for that would provide evidence reminding Anglo settlers’ descendants that the continent was stolen, genocide committed, and the land repopulated by settlers who seek authenticity but never find it because of the lie they live with, suspecting the truth and fearing it.

  GHOSTS AND DEMONS TO HIDE FROM

  A living symbol of the genocidal history of the United States, as well as a kind of general subconscious knowledge of it, is the “Winchester Mystery House,” a tourist site in the Santa Clara (Silicon) Valley of Northern California. Fifty miles south of San Francisco, it is billed as a ghost house on billboards that start appearing in Oregon to the north and San Diego to the south. Sarah L. Winchester, the wealthy widow of William Wirt Winchester, built the Victorian mansion to avoid and elude ghosts, although there is no record of any ghosts ever having found their way into her home. It could be said, perhaps, that Mrs. Winchester’s project from 1884 to her death in 1922 was a success. She likely was well aware of the widely publicized Ghost Dance in 1890, which led to the killing of Sitting Bull and the Wounded Knee massacre. The dancers believed that the dance would bring back their dead warriors.

  It makes sense that Mrs. Winchester felt the need to guard herself from the ghosts of those killed by the Winchester repeating rifle, which her late husband’s father had invented and produced in 1866, with later models being even more lethal. Mrs. Winchester inherited the fortune accumulated by her husband’s family through sales of the rifle. There was one major purchaser: the US Department of War. The chief reason for the War Department’s purchases of the rifle in great quantities: to kill Indians. The rifle was a technological innovation designed especially for the US Army’s campaigns against the Plains Indians following the Civil War.

  The Winchester house amazes all who tour it. There are five floors, more or less, since they are staggered. Each room in itself appears normal, decorated in the late-nineteenth-century Victorian mode. But there is more than meets the eye in getting from parlors to bedrooms to kitchen to closets and from floor to floor. Numerous stairways dead-end, and secret trapdoors hide the actual stairways. Closet doors open to walls, and pieces of furniture are really doors to closets. Huge bookcases serve as entrances to adjoining rooms. Part of the house was unfinished when the widow died, as she had construction workers building every day from dawn to dusk, adding rooms and traps until her death. Visitors trekking through the widow’s home are astounded, and perhaps saddened, by the evidence all around them of the fears and anguish of an obviously mentally disturbed person. Yet there is another possibility: a sense of the scaffolding that supports US society, a kind of hologram in the minds of each and every person on the continent.

  Mrs. Winchester might have been more aware of the truth than most people and therefore fearful of its consequences. Regardless,
in continuing to find or invent enemies across the globe, expand what is already the largest military force in the world, and add to an elaborate global network of military bases, all in the name of national or global “security,” does not the United States today resemble Mrs. Winchester constantly trying to foil her ghosts? The guilt harbored by most is buried and expressed in other ways, on a larger scale, as “regeneration through violence,” in Richard Slotkin’s phrasing.

  THE FUTURE

  How then can US society come to terms with its past? How can it acknowledge responsibility? The late Native historian Jack Forbes always stressed that while living persons are not responsible for what their ancestors did, they are responsible for the society they live in, which is a product of that past. Assuming this responsibility provides a means of survival and liberation. Everyone and everything in the world is affected, for the most part negatively, by US dominance and intervention, often violently through direct military means or through proxies. It is an urgent concern. Historian and teacher Juan Gómez-Quiñones writes, “American Indian ancestries and heritages ought to be integral to K–12 curriculums and university explorations and graduate expositions … [with] full integration of Native American histories and cultures into academic curriculums.” Gómez-Quiñones coins a measure of intelligence in the United States the “Indigenous Quotient.”40

  Indigenous peoples offer possibilities for life after empire, possibilities that neither erase the crimes of colonialism nor require the disappearance of the original peoples colonized under the guise of including them as individuals. That process rightfully starts 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. In the process, the continent will be radically reconfigured, physically and psychologically. For the future to be realized, it will require extensive educational programs and the full support and active participation of the descendants of settlers, enslaved Africans, and colonized Mexicans, as well as immigrant populations.