An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

12. See Sides, Blood and Thunder, 92–101; Chaffin, Pathfinder, 33–35.

  13. Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, 14.

  14. Lamar, Far Southwest, 7–10.

  15. See Vlasich, Pueblo Indian Agriculture.

  16. See Sando and Agoyo, Po’Pay; Wilcox, Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest; Dunbar-Ortiz, Roots of Resistance, 31–45; Carter, Indian Alliances and the Spanish in the Southwest.

  17. Anderson, Conquest of Texas, 4, 18–29. See also “4th Largest Tribe in US? Mexicans Who Call Themselves American Indian,” Indian Country Today, August 5, 2013, http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/ (accessed September 27, 2013).

  18. Anderson, Conquest of Texas, 18–29. For a fascinating and historically accurate fictional account of Texas’s independence from Mexico, see Russell, Escape from Texas.

  19. See Anderson, Conquest of Texas. For the Texas Rangers’ continuation of their counterinsurgent role in the twentieth century, see Johnson, Revolution in Texas; Harris and Sadler, Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution.

  20. Tinker, Missionary Conquest, 42.

  21. For documentation of California Indian resistance, see Jackson and Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization, 73–86.

  22. Murguía, Medicine of Memory, 40–41.

  23. See Heizer, Destruction of California Indians. See also Cook, Population of the California Indians.

  24. See Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas.

  25. See Kiser, Dragoons in Apacheland.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: “INDIAN COUNTRY”

  Epigraph: Ortiz, from Sand Creek, 20.

  1. “Selected Statistics on Slavery in the United States,” Causes of the Civil War, http://www.civilwarcauses.org/stat.htm (accessed December 10, 2013).

  2. Chang, Color of the Land, 36.

  3. See Confer, Cherokee Nation in the Civil War; Spencer, American Civil War in the Indian Territory; McLoughlin, After the Trail of Tears.

  4. See Katz, Black Indians; Duvall, Jacob, and Murray, Secret History of the Cherokees.

  5. See Wilson and Schommer, Remember This!; Wilson, In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors; Anderson, Kinsmen of Another Kind, 261–81; Anderson, Little Crow.

  6. From Charles Eastman, Indian Boyhood (1902), quoted in Nabokov, Native American Testimony, 22.

  7. West, Contested Plains, 300–301.

  8. Ortiz, from Sand Creek, 41.

  9. See Kelman, Misplaced Massacre.

  10. From A. N. Ellis, “Reflections of an Interview with Cochise,” Kansas State Historical Society 13 (1913–14), quoted in Nabokov, Native American Testimony, 177.

  11. Utley, Indian Frontier of the American West, 82. Also see Carleton, Prairie Logbooks, 3–152.

  12. From Condition of the Indian Tribes, Senate Report no. 156, 39th Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1867), quoted in Nabokov, Native American Testimony, 197–98.

  13. See Denetdale, Long Walk; and Denetdale, Reclaiming Diné History.

  14. See Gates, History of Public Land Law Development.

  15. For a booster version of the relationship between the land acts and colonization, see Hyman, American Singularity.

  16. White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own,” 139.

  17. Westphall, Public Domain in New Mexico, 43.

  18. See White, Railroaded.

  19. This is the total number of treaties signed by both parties, ratified by the US Congress, and proclaimed by US presidents. Many more treaties negotiated between the United States and Indigenous nations and signed by the president were not ratified by Congress, or if ratified were not proclaimed, the California Indigenous peoples’ treaties being the most numerous, so there are actually around six hundred treaties that are considered legitimate by the Indigenous nations concerned. See Deloria, Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties; Deloria and DeMallie, Documents of American Indian Diplomacy; Johansen, Enduring Legacies.

  20. See 16 Stat. 566, Rev. Stat. Sec. 2079; 25 U.S. Code Sec. 71.

  21. Hanson, Memory and Vision, 211.

  22. From Marriott and Rachlin, American Indian Mythology, quoted in Nabokov, Native American Testimony, 174–75.

  23. Parish, Charles Ilfeld Company, 35.

  24. Sherman to Grant, May 28, 1867, quoted in Fellman, Citizen Sherman, 264.

  25. Sherman to Herbert A. Preston, April 17, 1873, quoted in Marszalek, Sherman, 379.

  26. See Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 57–103.

  27. See Hahn, Nation under Our Feet.

  28. See Enloe, Ethnic Soldiers.

  29. Stanford L. Davis, “Buffalo Soldiers & Indian Wars,” Buffalosoldier.net, http://www.buffalosoldier.net/index.htm (accessed September 30, 2013).

  30. Jace Weaver, “A Lantern to See By,” 315; see also Enloe, Ethnic Soldiers.

  31. Bob Marley, “Buffalo Soldier,” by Bob Marley and Noel G. Williams, recorded 1980, on Confrontation, Island Records, 90085-1, 1983.

  32. See Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.”

  33. Sandoz, Cheyenne Autumn.

  34. See Williams, Empire as a Way of Life.

  35. Child, Boarding School Seasons; also see Christine Lesiak, director, “In the White Man’s Image,” The American Experience, season four, episode twelve (PBS, 1992).

  36. Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins.

  37. From Deloria, Speaking of Indians, quoted in Nabokov, Native American Testimony, 253–55.

  38. See Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee; Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee.

  39. L. F. Baum, “Editorials on the Sioux Nation,” University of Oxford History of Science, Medicine, and Technology website, http://hsmt.history.ox.ac.uk//courses_reading/undergraduate/authority_of_nature/week_7/baum.pdf.

  40. Quoted in Vizenor, Native Liberty, 143–44.

  41. Quoted in Utley, “The Ordeal of Plenty Horses,” 16.

  42. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 28.

  43. Ibid., 35–36.

  44. From New Directions in Indian Purpose, quoted in Nabokov, Native American Testimony, 421.

  45. See Chang, Color of the Land. For well-documented details on widespread corruption involved in using allotment to dispose of the lands of the Native nations and individual Indian allotment holders in Oklahoma, see Debo, And Still the Waters Run.

  46. From Deloria, Speaking of Indians, quoted in Nabokov, Native American Testimony, 249.

  47. Stone, “Report on the Court of Private Land Claims.”

  48. “United States v. Sandoval,” 28. See also Dunbar-Ortiz, Roots of Resistance, 114–18.

  CHAPTER NINE: US TRIUMPHALISM AND PEACETIME COLONIALISM

  Epigraph 1: Theodore Roosevelt, “The Expansion of the White Races,” address at the Methodist Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, January 18, 1909, in “Two Essays by Theodore Roosevelt,” Modern American Poetry, English Department, University of Illinois, http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/espada/roosevelt.htm (accessed December 10, 2013), from Roosevelt, American Problems. See also The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, memorial ed., North American Review 15 (1890).

  Epigraph 2: Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 419. See also Black Elk and Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks.

  1. Williams, Empire as a Way of Life, 73–76, 102–10. Marshall Islands regained full sovereignty in 1986.

  2. See Kinzer, Overthrow.

  3. For photographs and documents, see Arnaldo Dumindin, Philippine-American War, 1899–1902, http://philippineamericanwar.webs.com (accessed October 1, 2013).

  4. Kaplan, Imperial Grunts, 138. On early US imperialism overseas, see Immerman, Empire for Liberty; Zacks, Pirate Coast.

  5. From Condition of the Indian Tribes, quoted in Nabokov, Native American Testimony, 194–95.

  6. Silbey, War of Frontier and Empire, 211.

  7. Williams, “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation.”

  8. See Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression.

  9. See Womac
k and Dunbar-Ortiz, “Dreams of Revolution: Oklahoma, 1917.”

  10. See Eisenhower, Intervention!

  11. Miner, Corporation and the Indian, xi.

  12. Ibid., xiv.

  13. Ibid., 10.

  14. Ibid., 19.

  15. From “Address of Robert Spott,” Commonwealth 21, no. 3 (1926), quoted in Nabokov, Native American Testimony, 315–16.

  16. See Ifill, On the Courthouse Lawn.

  17. McGerr, Fierce Discontent, 305.

  18. See Philip, John Collier’s Crusade for Indian Reform; Kelly, Assault on Assimilation.

  19. Blackman, Oklahoma’s Indian New Deal.

  20. Aberle, Peyote Religion Among the Navaho, 53.

  21. See Lamphere, To Run After Them.

  22. Navajo Community College, Navajo Livestock Reduction, 47.

  23. See Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps. Some of the Japanese concentration camps were built on Native reservations.

  24. Myer quoted in ibid., 235.

  25. See Cobb, Native Activism in Cold War America.

  26. House Concurrent Resolution 108, 1953, Digital History, http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=3&psid=726 (accessed October 1, 2013). See also Getches, Wilkinson, and Williams, Cases and Materials on Federal Indian Law; Wilkinson, Blood Struggle. For a survey of federal Indian policy, see O’Brien, American Indian Tribal Governments, 84–85.

  27. See Zinn, People’s History of the United States, 420–28.

  28. Kinzer, Overthrow, 111–47.

  CHAPTER TEN: GHOST DANCE PROPHECY

  Epigraph 1: “Sioux Ghost Dance Song Lyrics,” documented and translated by James Mooney in 1894, Ghost Dance, http://www.ghostdance.com/songs/songs-lyricssioux.html (accessed December 10, 2013).

  Epigraph 2: Quoted in Zinn, People’s History of the United States, 525.

  1. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 1–2.

  2. Ibid., 3.

  3. “Blue Lake,” Taos Pueblo, http://www.taospueblo.com/blue-lake (accessed October 2, 2013).

  4. From the statement of James E. Snead, president of the Santa Fe Wildlife and Conservation Association, “Taos Indians—Blue Lake,” in “Hearings before the Subcommittee on Indian Affairs of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, U.S. Senate, 91st Congress, 2nd Session (September 19–20, 1968),” in Primitive Law—United States Congressional Documents, vol. 9, pt. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1968), 216.

  5. For the senators’ arguments against the return of Blue Lake, see “Pueblo de Taos Indians Cultural and Ceremonial Shrine Protection Act of 1970,” Proceedings and Debates of the 91st Congress, 2nd Session (December 2, 1970), Congressional Record 116, pt. 29, 39, 587, 589–90, 594. Nielson, “American Indian Land Claims,” 324. The senators on the subcommittee were concerned about the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (later renamed the Alianza Federal de Pueblos Libres), formed in 1963 to pressure the federal government for reconsideration of land-grant settlements and the loss of the commons. The organization claimed that colonialism had robbed resources, depopulated communities in northern New Mexico, and impoverished the people. The Alianza was composed of many poor land-grant heirs and was identified primarily with a Texas-born Mexican, Reies López Tijerina. In June 1967, the National Guard was dispatched with tanks, helicopters, and infantry to Rio Arriba County in search of the agrarian Mexican rebels who had participated in the “Courthouse Raid” at Tierra Amarilla. The incident and the government’s response briefly focused national and international attention on northern New Mexico, and the land-grant issue, which had been resolved in the courts over sixty years before, once again became a live issue.

  Several federal Spanish and Mexican land-grant cases have been brought in federal courts, one to the Supreme Court in 1952 that was denied a hearing: Martínez v. Rivera, 196 Fed. 2nd 192 (Circuit Court of Appeals, 10th Circuit, April 16, 1952). In 2001, following more than a century of struggle by Hispanic land grantees who were deprived of most of their landholdings after the United States occupied New Mexico in 1848, the US General Accounting Office began a study of the New Mexico land grants. The GAO issued its final report in 2004, but no action has yet ensued. US General Accounting Office, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

  6. Cobb, Native American Activism in Cold War America, 58–61. For a full history of the NIYC, which still thrives, see Shreve, Red Power Rising.

  7. Quoted in Zinn, People’s History of the United States, 516–17.

  8. Cobb, Native American Activism in Cold War America, 157.

  9. Mantler, Power of the Poor.

  10. Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane, 28–29.

  11. Ibid., 29–30.

  12. On the founding of the American Indian Movement, see ibid., 114–15, and Waterman and Bancroft, We Are Still Here.

  13. Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane, 111.

  14. “Trail of Broken Treaties 20-Point Position Paper,” American Indian Movement, http://www.aimovement.org/ggc/trailofbrokentreaties.html (accessed December 10, 2013).

  15. Robert A. Trennert, Alternative to Extinction: Federal Indian Policy and the Beginnings of the Reservation System, 1846–51 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1975), 166.

  16. See testimony of Pat McLaughlin, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux government, Fort Yates, ND (May 8, 1976), at hearings of the American Indian Policy Review Commission, established by Congress in the act of January 3, 1975.

  17. See Philip, John Collier’s Crusade for Indian Reform.

  18. King quoted in Dunbar-Ortiz, The Great Sioux Nation, 156.

  19. For a lucid discussion of neocolonialism in relation to American Indians and the reservation system, see Jorgensen, Sun Dance Religion, 89–146.

  20. There is continuous migration from reservations to cities and border towns and back to the reservations, so that half the Indian population at any time is away from the reservation. Generally, however, relocation is not permanent and resembles migratory labor more than permanent relocation. This conclusion is based on my personal observations and on unpublished studies of the Indigenous populations in the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles.

  21. The American Indian Movement convened a meeting in June 1974 that founded the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC), receiving consultative status in the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in February 1977. The IITC participated in the UN Conference on Desertification in Buenos Aires, March 1977, and made presentations to the UN Human Rights Commission in August 1977 and in February and August 1978. It also led the organizing for the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) Conference on Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, held at UN headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, in September 1977; participated in the World Conference on Racism in Basel, Switzerland, in May 1978; and participated in establishing the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations, the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, and the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. See Echo-Hawk, In The Light of Justice; see also Deloria, Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties.

  22. Herr, Dispatches, 45.

  23. Zinn, People’s History of the United States, 521.

  24. Ellen Knickmeyer, “Troops Have Pre-Combat Meal, War Dance,” Associated Press, March 19, 2003, http://www.myplainview.com/article_9c595368-42db-50b3-9647-a8d4486bff28.html.

  25. Grenier, First Way of War, 223–24.

  CHAPTER 11: THE DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY

  Epigraph 1: McNickle, The Surrounded, 49.

  Epigraph 2: Vizenor, “Constitutional Consent,” 11.

  1. The author was present at the proceedings.

  2. See Watson, Buying America from the Indians; and Robertson, Conquest by Law.

  3. Miller, “International Law of Colonialism.” See also Deloria, Of Utmost Good Faith, 6–39; Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land.

  4. Eleventh Session, United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, http://social.un.org/index/IndigenousPeoples/UNPFIISessions/Eleventh.aspx (accessed October 3, 2013).

  5. “Intern
ational: Quakers Repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery,” August 17, 2012, Indigenous Peoples Issues and Resources, http://indigenouspeoplesissues.com/ (accessed October 3, 2013). See also “The Doctrine of Discovery,” http://www.doctrineofdiscovery.org/ (accessed October 3, 2013).

  6. “The Doctrine of Discovery: 2012 Responsive Resolution,” Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, http://www.uua.org/statements/statements/209123.shtml (accessed October 3, 2013).

  7. Vincent Warren, “Government Calls Native American Resistance of 1800s ‘Much Like Modern-Day Al-Qaeda,’” Truthout, April 11, 2011, http://truth-out.org/news/item/330-government-calls-native-american-resistance-of-1800s-much-like-modernday-alqaeda (accessed October 3, 2013).

  8. Sharon H. Venne, “What Is the Meaning of Sovereignty,” Indigenous Women’s Network, June 18, 2007, http://indigenouswomen.org/ (accessed November 11, 2013).

  9. Sanchez, Treaty Council News, 12.

  10. See Dunbar-Ortiz, Indians of the Americas; Dunbar-Ortiz, Roots of Resistance, chapter 7, “Land, Indigenousness, Identity, and Self-Determination.”

  11. Killsback, “Indigenous Perceptions of Time,” 150–51.

  12. UN Commission on Human Rights, Sub-commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, 51st sess., Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Study on Treaties, Agreements and Other Constructive Arrangements between States and Indigenous Populations: Final Report, by Miguel Alfonso Martínez, special rapporteur, June 22, 1999, UN Document E/CN.4/Sub.2/1999/20. See also Report of the Working Group on Indigenous Populations on Its Seventeenth Session, 26–30 July 1999, UN Document E/CN.4/Sub.2/1999/20, August 12, 1999.

  13. Rob Capriccioso, “Cobell Concludes with the Rich Getting Richer,” Indian Country Today, June 27, 2011, http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/ (accessed October 3, 2013). See also “Indian Trust Settlement” (the Cobell v. Salazar settlement website), http://www.indiantrust.com/ (accessed October 3, 2013); and Jodi Rave, “Milestone in Cobell Indian Trust Case,” High Country News, July 25, 2011, http://www.hcn.org/issues/43.12/milestone-in-cobell-indian-trust-case (accessed October 3, 2013).