American Settler Colonialism: A History

by Walter L. Hixson

  While Americans trumpeted the nation’s commitment to diversity and democracy both at home and abroad, “The irony of this image in the light of its conquistadorial and slave-holding past required great ideological effort.” The “fantasy” that enabled US citizens “to achieve their national identity through the disavowal of US imperialism was American exceptionalism,” Donald Pease argues.58 Structures of denial, disavowal, and forgetting comingled with fantasies of chosenness provided Americans with “an imaginary relation to actual state colonialism.”59

  To the extent Americans have acknowledged the existence of a colonial empire, it is typically associated with the Spanish-American War and the annexations and taking of colonies after 1898. However, postcolonial analysis illuminates a much longer process of colonialism and empire building, long preceding the American Revolution and rooted in settler colonization.60

  Indigenous Agency and Borderland Studies

  For more than a generation now, ethno-historians and specialists in indigenous American history have brilliantly illuminated the agency and ambivalences of Native American history and culture.61 This scholarship responded in part to a largely one-sided (though nonetheless useful at the time) historiography that emerged from the minority-conscious 1960s, emphasizing the imperial conquest of Indians by white Americans. Under this framing, indigenes functioned purely as victims of aggression, burying their hearts at Wounded Knee following their conquest by whites whose genocidal drives were motivated by “the metaphysics of Indian hating.”62 These works tended to overlook indigenous agency as well as ambivalences and historical complexity, and to accept uncritically the identities of the colonizer and the colonized.

  By contrast, studies, focused on the agency of indigenous Americans and ambivalent cross-cultural relations, represent arguably the most productive field in American history over the past generation. By “facing East” instead of West, historians have unearthed a wealth of knowledge on the indigenous tribes, thus transcending the depiction of Indians as mere victims in the inevitable if lamentable passing of the noble race. Influenced in part by postcolonial frameworks, including Bhaba’s ambivalence, these scholars have appropriately complicated and nuanced white–Indian relations. They have explored Indian agency in terms of spirituality, culture, gender and social relations, trade and economics, intertribal cooperation and conflict with Europeans as well as other Indians, environmental impact, and much else. Perhaps most important, by illuminating times and places in which indigenes and Euro-Americans and mixed bloods interacted and coexisted with some degree of understanding and mutual benefit, these studies suggest that violent removal was not the only option within the colonial encounter.63

  Indigenous people thus not only confronted the European expansion, but also participated in a complex and contested colonial encounter. For many indigenes the colonizer–colonized dyad was not their primary concern, at least not initially, as their attention remained focused on longstanding relationships with other indigenous groups. Rather than simply bloody rivals from the outset, Indians and Euro-Americans frequently were trade and alliance partners, neighbors, wives, employers, and co-religionists. Powerful “tribes” such as the Iroquois, the Comanche, and the Sioux exerted their influence—often through violence— over other indigenous groupings. Indians (the Iroquois are a good early example) often exploited trade and alliance opportunities with Europeans to advance their economic and security interests at the expense of other indigenes. Because they were different peoples, indigenes only belatedly developed pan-Indian consciousness and alliances and these typically succeeded only in achieving short-term gains rather than an effective long-term resistance against settler colonialism.

  Over the past generation scholars tilling the fertile ground of borderlands studies have demolished the concept of static “frontier” in favor of fluid geographical boundaries. Regional and localized conflict and cooperation, drives and aspirations, multiethnic and gendered inclusions and exclusions forged a complex and diverse borderland history. Contravening a simple binary of expansion–resistance, the more recent studies have revealed places and times in which Euro-Americans and indigenes shared an ambivalent albeit often tenuous “middle ground.” Other local and regional studies have emphasized indigenous interaction and conflict, underscoring that whites often were not the central players on the various borderlands.64

  The rich historiography of borderland studies, with its emphasis on blurred boundaries, crossings, and connectivity, transcends traditional preoccupation with the nation-state and thus furthers the agenda of transnational history. Borderlands were by definition places where sovereignty, control over colonial space, was unstable and contested, hence the “centrality of violence in relations within and between borderland communities.” However, borderlands also represented sites for cultural interaction, hybridity, and negotiation as well as conflict. The regional and localized histories characteristic of borderlands studies stand on their own but can also, taken collectively, provide the evidentiary framework for contextualizing the history of North American settler colonialism. They also open up possibilities for linking Indian history with the wider global history of indigenous peoples in postcolonial context.65

  With much of the best work focused on the American southwest, borderlands’ scholarship has incorporated not only indigenes but also Hispanics more fully into histories formerly monopolized by Indians and whites. Borderland studies emphasize Hispanic and indigenous agency, sometimes in cooperation other times in conflict, and reveal myriad examples of ambivalence and ambiguity. As with Indians and Europeans, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were not merely subjects but instead had cultures and agency of their own. Violence between and among indigenes and Hispanics is one of the most significant products of the new borderland scholarship. Until recent years the traditional Turnerian frontier historiography focused overwhelmingly on violence between whites and Indians or whites and Hispanics. But as Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernandez points out, “Mexicans and Indians were not always resisting whites; they often allied with whites against other Indians and Mexicans.”66

  Indians and Hispanics waged brutally violent assaults and military campaigns. They also participated in captive taking, slave trading, and other odious practices traditionally ascribed to the colonizer alone. “Rituals of violence, exchange, and redemption” permeated borderland societies, James Brooks points out in his influential study of the colonial southwest. In these conflicts women and children became “crucial products of violent economic exchange” yet they also enriched the cultures with which they were forcibly conjoined. Violence, paradoxically, over time eroded ethnic distinctions by creating polyglot communities and providing a basis for reconciliation among turbulent, multiethnic borderland societies.67

  Captive taking, slave trading, and endemic violence were not confined to the southwest or the trans-Mississippi West. Indeed, the mythic allure of “the West” in American cultural memory has established an almost monolithic imagery, obscuring the violent ethnic cleansing, resistance, and ambivalence that unfolded over centuries across the entire eastern half of the future United States. In recent years original borderland scholarship focused on Indian enslavement and indigenous complicity in the slave trade transcends the history not only of “the West” but also of “the South.”68

  Historical, anthropological, and archeological studies show unequivocally that the Euro-American settlers had no monopoly on violence, which had long inhered in indigenous societies. However, colonialism with its vast disruptive power intensified borderland violence and spurred cycles of conflict. Euro-American intrusions into indigenous modes of conflict tended to have an accelerant effect on the preexisting indigenous violence. As other scholars have noted, “The frequent effect of such an intrusion is an overall militarization; that is, an increase in armed collective violence whose conduct, purposes and technologies rapidly adapt to the threats generated by state expansion.”69

  Disease and new technologies—especiall
y firearms and the introduction of the horse—dramatically affected the scope and intensity of borderland conflicts. Colonialism thus introduced new pathogens and technologies, forged new economic relationships, and created new rivalries, alignments, alliances, all of which brought incentives and intensification of violence. Indians could exploit trade opportunities or enhance their own security by allying with Europeans against their indigenous rivals. Indigenes could engage in market driven captive taking in return for trade items and in an effort to preserve their own security.

  Borderland violence also changed the practices and identities of the Euro-American invaders. They quickly learned from and adopted the indigenous guerrilla style of warfare—skulking in the woods, hit and run and surprise assaults—and incorporated these techniques into their own way of war. Over time they learned that the way to defeat the indigenes, who often proved difficult to track down, was a scorched-earth policy of destroying their crops, killing their animals, burning their villages, engaging in collective punishment, keeping them on the run. Indiscriminate borderland violence, as I argue in the chapters that follow, carried over into the Mexican War, the Civil War, and the Philippine intervention and came to inhere in what has been called an American way of war.

  Connecting Disparate Historiographies

  Despite the profusion of a rich and original scholarship on indigenous and borderland history over the past generation, Indian history remains less than fully integrated into the overall narrative of American and global history. Historians of Native American history, like those of many other subfields, frequently lament the disconnectedness and marginalization of their subject area. “American Indian history continues to be characterized more by its intellectual promise than its impact on historical scholarship,” Frederick E. Hoxie observed in 2008. That same year Colin Calloway averred that Indian and ethnohistorians had not yet been unable to “push beyond understanding Indian motivations, perspectives, and agency” to re-center the narrative of American history. Joseph Genetin-Pilaw points out that an overemphasis on indigenous agency “limits ability to synthesize” and thus tends to make Indian history “a marginalized, insular, or even ignorable field.”70

  Thus, no matter how rich and productive, an exclusive focus on Indian agency and localized history tends to marginalize the field while also obscuring the broader framework of settler colonialism. Analysis of the great diversity of Indian experiences should not overshadow the “remarkable continuity of basic objectives and results” in the Euro-American removal policy. Taken too far or to the occlusion of the indiscriminate violence inherent in settler colonialism, a focus limited to indigenous communities and agency can function to perpetuate historical denial by elision. As Peka Håmålåinen points out (albeit buried in an end note), “The recent historiographical focus on cross-cultural crossings and collaborations threatens to obscure a fundamental fact about the history of colonial America—that it is in its essentials a story of conflict, hatred, violence, and virtually insurmountable racial, ethnic, and cultural barriers.”71

  The boundaries that relegate indigenous history to the margins or contain it within regional frameworks such as “The West,” reflect the remarkable staying power of Frederick Jackson Turner’s iconic 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Turner subsumed the “fierce race of savages” within the frame of the “frontier” that he rightly claimed was intrinsic to any meaningful understanding of American history. Turner perceived the importance of violence against Indians in forging unity among the disparate American migrants. As he put it, “The Indian was a common danger, demanding united action.” Facing the West, Turner showed no interest in what it was like to have been an indigene facing the East. By 1952 Bernard DeVoto could point to the consequences of this neglect, noting, “American historians have made shockingly little effort to understand the life, the societies, the cultures, the thinking, and the feelings of Indians, and disastrously little effort to understand how all these affected the white men and their societies.”72

  By the 1960s, anthropologists and historians had begun developing the history of indigenous Americans but by that time “racial divisions of the past had been canonized in print and academic ritual,” and the “pedagogic ruts” had been carved deep. “By the time ethno-history had become a recognized specialty it was too late for it to be anything else,” Kerwin Klein explains. “Ethno-history did not transform ‘mainstream’ American history but became another note, paragraph, page, or lecture shoehorned into an already overloaded semester. The relentless westward march of Anglo-Saxons remained the grand narrative framework [without] any hint that things might have worked out differently.”73

  In recent years several scholars have pinpointed postcolonial and settler colonial studies as possible pathways of escape from this long-term pigeonholing of indigenous history. “The postcolonial critique … suggests a new way to imagine the relationship between American Indian history and other areas of scholarship,” Hoxie suggests. “The most promising aspect of this critique,” he adds, “is the formulation of ‘settler colonialism.’ ” Other scholars concur that postcolonial analysis, and specifically the settler colonial framework, offer ways to integrate the indigenous past with not only the broader narrative of American history but world history as well.74

  Both Indian history and diplomatic history—another notoriously marginalized subfield—could benefit from developing the seemingly obvious yet remarkably undeveloped colonial–imperial nexus. Postcolonial analysis of settler colonialism and indiscriminate warfare establishes convergences that have yet to be fully explored. As Ned Blackhawk points out, “Despite an outpouring of work over the past decades, those investigating American Indian history and U.S. history more generally have failed to reckon with the violence on which the continent was built.” Similarly, Richard White notes that scholars of US Indian policy have done “relatively little on what the relentless erosion of Indian land teaches us about the United States in a larger international context.”75

  Through a combination of theory and contextualized narrative, this book directly addresses these perceived conceptual gaps in knowledge.

  Historians of American foreign relations have over the past generation taken the “cultural turn” and are now poised to take an “indigenous turn.” In June 2012, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, to its credit, invited specialists in indigenous American history to a roundtable discussion entitled, “Is Indian History Part of the History of American Foreign Relations?” The answer I believe is a resounding “Yes,” but it is revealing of the insularity of historical subfields (and a dearth of synthetic work) that this question still had to be posed in 2012. As distinct and largely disconnected subfields, American Indian history and US diplomatic history thus are just now beginning to address systematically the connections between continental Indian removal and twentieth-century overseas empire.

  An “indigenous turn” within diplomatic history is much needed to remedy a colonialist historiography. The primary focus within diplomatic history on modern nation-states obscures indigenous polities and the considerable agency they manifested over three centuries of “American” imperial history. Leaving Indians out of diplomatic history thus reaffirms colonialism—the “savages” are denied legitimacy; they were not civilized enough to be encompassed within the study of “foreign policy;” they were part of the conquered wilderness of a still Eurocentric world. Moreover, leaving Indians out limits the understanding of US identity and foreign policy and, especially as I emphasize here, of the penchant for indiscriminate violence embedded within it.

  Colonial Violence and Genocide Studies

  Postcolonial analysis connects American Indian removal not only with diplomatic and military history but also with the global history of colonial genocide. Although American settler colonialism constituted genocide under broadly accepted international definitions (discussed below), scholars of Indian and borderland history have been relucta
nt to apply the term. As Carroll Kakel points out, “an almost universal reluctance on the part of mainstream American historians to consider ‘genocide’ in the case of the American Indians” prevailed until “very recently.” Historian Gray H. Whaley, who explicitly makes the connection in his 2010 study of Indian removal in Oregon, avers, “The fact that Euro-Americans attempted genocide as a central component of settler colonialism makes it a crucial topic for historical analysis, one that should not be denied.”76

  In recent years the “new genocide studies” have expanded both the conceptual and geographic boundaries in assessing removal policies and indiscriminate killing in a global context.77 To some extent these studies begin with the knowledge that, as John Docker puts it, “The history of humanity is the history of violence.”78 With the beginning of recorded history in the Western world, discourses of genocidal violence took a prominent place, as revealed by Thucydides in his classis account of the Peloponnesian War. Genocidal tendencies are apparent in both Greco-Roman polytheistic and Jewish-Christian monotheistic traditions. Genocidal violence, gloriously justified as retribution, permeates the Pentateuch. Similarly, Virgil’s “Aeneid” (29–19 BCE) forged a Western mythology promoting “honorable justification” for violence against indigenous societies. “In their operation, reception and eventual imbrication in Western history, these texts represent an ethical disaster, with highly destructive consequences for humanity as a whole, especially for indigenous peoples and peoples already in a land coveted by others as chosen and promised,” Docker explains. “The practices recommended in these narratives, of ethnic cleansing and extermination of peoples cast as enemies, would now be considered war crimes and crimes against humanity.”79