Modern definitions of genocide emanate from World War II and the Nazi Holocaust. In 1944 Raphael Lemkin published Axis Rule in Occupied Europe,which defined genocide in essence as a conscious plan to destroy a defined group by killing them or undermining their ability to sustain life, through military, cultural, economic, biological, or psychological means. The UN drew on Lemkin’s work in its 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, defined as “any of a number of acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” These acts included “killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;” and other deliberate actions to destroy a group, notably attempting to prevent births or “forcibly transferring children.”80 Under this framework there seems little doubt that Euro-Americans—as well as Australians, South Africans, Argentinians, and other settler colonials—carried out genocidal campaigns against indigenous peoples.81
Part of the reason the G-word has been avoided is the all-consuming shadow cast by the Nazi Holocaust. The Eurocentric genocide convention established a framework singling out the Holocaust while obscuring the histories of colonial genocide. Modernist and Orientalist colonial discourses thus remained unpacked in the early postwar era. Killing of Asians, Africans, Native Americans, and Australian Aborigines was seen as an “inevitable” chapter in the evolution of human “progress” whereas the slaughter of Europeans by the Nazis was truly shocking. Perceiving the Holocaust as utterly without precedent elided the history of European colonialism, including the enrichment of Europeans through colonial violence and exploitation. This ongoing occlusion of other holocausts enabled the continuing exploitation of the “developing” world in the postwar era. Moreover, the Holocaust frame became “sacred” to Jews, unifying their religious community in pursuit of the Zionist settler colonial project in occupied Arab territories in the wake of the Nazi genocide.82
While the Nazi Holocaust, like all genocides, entailed unique features, scholars now interpret it within a broader frame of colonial genocide. The Holocaust was “an extreme, radical form of behavior that was not unfamiliar in the history of colonialism,” Jürgen Zimmerer explains. The scope, intensity, and industrial style distinguished the Nazi genocide, making it “an extremely radicalized variant” yet still part of a broader history of colonial genocide.83
Similarities between the American West and the “German East” were not lost on Adolf Hitler and are belatedly being acknowledged by scholars today. “The Early American and Nazi-German national projects of territorial expansion, racial cleansing, and settler colonization—despite obvious differences in time and place—were strikingly similar projects of ‘space’ and ‘race,’ with lethal consequences for ‘alien’ ‘out-groups,’ ” Kakel points out. American settler colonialism and removal policies against the “Red Indians” served as “the primary model” for Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, the two chief architects of Nazi aggression to the east. “The overwhelming success of the American expansionist project invited repetition in a Nazi-German project which, in their fantasies, would one day dwarf its American predecessor,” Kakel notes.84
The absence of studies of “third space hybridity” reflecting ambivalence between Jews and the Nazi regime is also notable. While the pathological Nazi worldview left little room for ambivalence, scholars do not hesitate to explore ambivalence and ambiguities pertaining to non-Western “natives” who lived under genocidal colonial regimes. While Indians and Aborigines are said to have had agency under colonial rule—and indeed they often did have—Jews function purely as victims within the frame of the Holocaust, which thus continues to be viewed as unique and unparalleled. The chillingly rational Nazi style of slaughter after 1941 was indeed sui generis yet it often obscures that in the end more people were summarily executed or starved to death than funneled through the gas chambers.85
Often wrongly perceived as incidental or merely punitive, massacres furthered the eliminationist project not only of the Nazis but also in all genocidal regimes. Scholars make a distinction between massacres and genocide, pointing out for example that the former can exist without the latter but not vice versa. Massacres that occur in a genocidal context are not merely retributive or aberrational but rather advance the ultimate goal of annihilating the targeted population. While often justified as retribution or preemption, massacres are typically “more eliminationist than simply punitive in intent.”86 As in other genocidal campaigns, and illustrated in the chapters that follow, American settler colonials carried out indiscriminate assaults and massacres, perpetrated rape, conducted summary executions, confiscated and destroyed property, engaged in collective punishment, removed children, and almost never punished the perpetrators of these war crimes.
Massacres in the United States and other settler societies often targeted women, children, and animals. The killing of women and children was not merely incidental or spur of the moment but rather intrinsic to the ethnic cleansing project. Settlers and military officials understood that Indian cultures depended on the work performed by women such as tanning skins to make lodges, bedding, and clothing as well as gathering, processing, and preserving food. Women of course had the capacity to bear and raise children, which only complicated the ultimate goal of removing indigenous people from the land, thus affirming the logic of killing both women and children. Settler colonials, volunteers, and military officers often openly advocated just that. Similarly, slaughtering buffaloes and horses and the destruction of housing, crops, and food supplies were incorporated into US counterinsurgency warfare. All of these actions served to facilitate the ultimate goal of driving indigenous people out of colonial spaces desired by Americans.
Indians as well as Hispanics on the American borderlands also conducted brutal attacks to further their self-interest. They targeted rival tribes as well as settlers, and these assaults were often both indiscriminate and atrocious. Indigenous violence “played into allegations of savagery” and thereby served to justify retribution and removal policies. Violence on the borderlands thus precipitated a boomerang of savagery, traumatizing settler society, and forging an American way of war.87
Psychoanalytic Dimensions
Many scholars and perhaps especially historians have been reluctant to explore psychoanalytic frames, which are often summarily dismissed through application of the derisive trope “psychohistory.” As with any serious psychological issue, however, ignoring the problem will not make it go away. Anne McClintock among others has criticized the “disciplinary quarantine of psychoanalysis from history.” As Geoff Eley points out, historians “have begun only slowly to explore” the “key role” that “the critical and eclectic appropriation of psychoanalytic theory of various kinds has played” in advancing historical understanding.88
Psychological drives and conditions such as trauma, denial, repression, projection, fantasy, guilt, rationalization, narcissism, victimization, and others permeate the history of colonialism and therefore must be considered, however imperfectly, in any effort to gain a comprehensive understanding. “Colonialism colonizes minds in addition to bodies,” Ashis Nandy points out, hence it “cannot be identified with only economic gain and political power.” Settler collectives are “traumatized societies par excellence, where indigenous genocide and/or displacement interact with other traumatic experiences,” Veracini points out. The contradictions inherent within settler colonial societies combine “perpetrator trauma” with “stubborn and lingering anxieties over settler legitimacy.” These anxieties produce “long-lasting psychic conflicts and a number of associated psychopathologies.”89
The colonizer, no more than the colonized, could escape the legacies of settler colonial violence. This was the genius of Joseph Conrad’s (and Francis Ford Coppola’s) Kurtz. Carried to its logical extreme, as Kurtz reveals, colonial violence overwhelms the psyche of the perpetrator. Colonizers “are at least as much affected by the ideology of colonialism”
as the colonized, Nandy points out. “Their degradation, too, can sometimes be terrifying.”90 While much has been learned about colonialism and its impact on the colonized peoples, the cultural and psychological pathologies produced within the colonizing societies are equally important. Accordingly, I probe here into the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and colonial violence.
Fantasy played an important role in the evolution of settler societies and the genocidal violence that accompanied them. For the Americans, the fantasies of “American exceptionalism” and “Manifest Destiny” were driving forces replete with psychic contradictions and traumatic repercussions. In Australia the “national fantasy” of “mateship” obscured the destruction of Aboriginal societies, with attendant psychic consequences. The same phenomenon played out in South Africa, where the trekboers viewed themselves as destined, and in modern Israel under the settlement compulsions of Zionism.91
In attempting to carry out their fantasies, to realize their dreams, settler colonials perceived their actions as the performance of good works. Settlement required the courage to cross the sea, enter into the unknown, build cabins, hew out farms, overcome obstacles, raise families, forge communities, worship God, and build the imagined community of the nation. Settlers could take pride in their good works and identify with those perceived as being of the same race and religion who shared their pride and experiences. Those of different (inferior) races and cultures who posed an obstacle to the settlement project manifestly were engaged in wrongdoing. By intruding into settler fantasies and disrupting their good works, the indigenous people were responsible for the consequences that followed—removal, destruction of their societies, death. In these ways fantasy, rationalization, narcissism, projection, and guilt permeated the conscious and unconscious mind of the colonizer, enabling genocidal violence as well as historical denial.
The psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan illuminate these points. “The domain of the good is the birth of power,” Lacan explained. “To exercise control over one’s goods is to have the right to deprive others of them.” Jennifer Rutherford elaborates, “This paradox, identified by Freud and articulated by Lacan, is the manifestation of aggression at the very moment we set out to do good.” As the Americans set out to build their farms and communities or the Australians to tame the outback, “an aggressive jouissance—a will to destruction”—set in at the expense of those who impeded these projects, namely the indigenous and borderland peoples.92
The persistent violence of the colonial encounter, as narrated throughout this volume, stemmed from the repeated disruption of the settler colonial fantasies and projects on the part of the indigenous populations. Not merely the ambivalence and resistance of the indigenous people but ultimately their very presence ruptured the settler colonial fantasy. As indigenous peoples appeared to impede the path of the new chosen peoples they menaced the good that inhered in the rational, civilized, progressive, and providentially destined settler project. “Within the frameworks of psychoanalytic discourse, anti-colonial resistance is coded as madness, dependency or infantile regression,” Ania Loomba points out. “The inferior being always serves as a scapegoat,” the French psychoanalytic theorist Octave Mannoni pointed out, “our own evil intentions can be projected onto him.”93
As the indigene becomes the force of evil pitted against the good of the colonizing project, the psychic drives within the colonizer rationalize violent repression. Despite all ambivalent efforts to work with him, to share culture, religion, and the benefits of civilization, by putting up resistance the indigene shows that in the end he is a savage who understands only the exercise of power. Righteous violence, however lamentable, is therefore justified. “A true Stalinist politician loves mankind, yet carries out horrible purges and executions—his heart is breaking while he does it, but he cannot help it, it is his Duty towards the Progress of Humanity,” the Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Zizek explains. “It is not my responsibility, it is not me who is really doing it. I am merely an instrument of the higher Historical Necessity. The obscene enjoyment of this situation is generated by the fact that I conceive of myself as exculpated for what I am doing: I am able to inflict pain on others with the full awareness that I am not responsible for it.”94
Settler communities are both “civilized” and “savage” and therefore must walk a fine psychic line in forging a collective identity and institutions. In the case of the United States, “There was, quite simply, no way to make a complete identity without Indians,” Phlip Deloria explains. “At the same time, there was no way to make a complete identity while they remained.”95 Considerable psychic gymnastics arise from the contradictions involved in cleansing the land of the indigenes while appropriating their desirable characteristics within the maw of the dominant culture, all the while eliding the genocidal past. The colonizer’s claims of indigeneity and authenticity require long-term effort but also entail “a cognitive dissonance, a gap between knowledge and belief,” a repression of knowledge. Thus the unresolved “historical legacy of violence and appropriation is carried into the present as traumatic memory, inherited institutional structures, and often unexamined assumptions.”96
In the narrative history that follows, I have made limited yet persistent efforts to incorporate the psychoanalytic drives that permeated the settler colonial project. However challenging for the historian, some effort at incorporating psychological approaches to the postcolonial past “may enable the understanding of the traumatic present.”97
The history of American settler colonialism sheds light on the past, yet the essence of postcolonial studies is the connection between past and present. As the philosopher Tzvetan Todorov once noted, even as one writes history the present is ultimately more important than the past.98 The hope is that by interrogating the past we can wedge a small brick into the mortar of a postcolonial future.
2
“People from the Unknown World”: The Colonial Encounter and the Acceleration of Violence
Millions of Indians—probably as many, if not more, as lived in Europe—had been living throughout North America for thousands of years when the colonial encounter began.1 Their cultures and economies differed between places and times but indigenous culture was thriving. The continent was a “stunningly diverse place, a tumult of languages, trade, and culture, a region where millions of people loved and hated and worshipped as people do everywhere.”2
Characteristics of Mississippian culture (roughly 900–1700 CE) included large communities, towns, and maize culture (agriculture-based spirituality revolving mainly around cultivation of the annual corn crop). Men hunted bear, deer, waterfowl, and turkey, and fished in lakes and streams; women raised corn, beans, and squash, and gathered nuts and berries. In Mississippian culture women gained respect as life-givers and many bands operated on the basis of matrilineal descent.
Some tribes migrated while others settled in cities and towns; others did both by migrating during hunting season and returning to their towns for the winter. Most indigenes were highly spiritual, worshipped their ancestors, and took a keen interest in observable astronomy. They cultivated creation myths and oral traditions, created art and architecture, and played sports. They also engaged in warfare.3
In the modern era Americans destroyed indigenous pyramid mounds and other structures while nurturing a Euro-centric history that generally obscured centuries of indigenous civilization in North America. Fortunately Cahokia, Chaco Canyon, and hundreds of other less celebrated sites provide evidence for archeologists, anthropologists, and historians. Cahokia, a planned city near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, “had a major impact on the Mississippian world.” The city featured a huge public square and was home to thousands of people and more than 200 packed earth pyramid mounds as well as thousands of huts and temples. Cahokia was a “political, economic, and social behemoth,” a center from which peoples “scattered across the midcontinent and the Southeast.” Chaco Canyon in northeastern New Mex
ico was “a political-ritual amphitheater, with audiences of believers and pilgrims standing on the canyon’s rim looking down on great houses and up to the sun, the moon, and the stars.”4
Mississippian era politics and diplomacy centered on chieftains who typically lived in impressive homes built atop leveled-off pyramid mounds. Their power depended on their success at cultivating kinship ties linking surrounding villages and communities as well as their ability to establish exchange relationships with other chieftainships. Archeological evidence shows that Indians did not live in isolated villages but rather established long-distance trade and exchange relationships with other indigenes. Conflicts led to warfare with attendant dislocations and power shifts. “Warfare played a major role in the cycling of Mississippian chiefdoms over the region,” John Scarry explains, “and the rise and decline of individual societies.”5
A “culture of violence” prevailed within Mississippian societies. Europeans thus cannot be blamed for introducing war and violence to North America, as they were already well ensconced within indigenous communities. The chieftains went to war to assert power, gain control of agricultural fields and hunting grounds, enforce tribute systems, and to secure advantages in trade and exchange. “Warfare was an integral part of Mississippian worldviews, and sacred art objects often depicted stylized weapons of war, including axes, swords, maces, and arrowheads,” Matthew Jennings observes. The chieftains often consulted priests, as war and spirituality were intimately linked.6
A “cult of war” evolved in Mississippian societies as zealous warriors took part in rituals and ceremonies in which the entire community mobilized in preparation for conflict. The chieftains sometimes fielded large armies, which could be divided into squadrons and accompanied by the pounding of drums. At other times indigenous groups engaged in “skirmish warfare, centered on the ambushing of hunting parties.” Indigenous people engaged in targeted violence and, less frequently, “indiscriminate slaughter” and ritual sacrifice. Evidence includes mass graves, skulls, headless burials, dismemberment, and distinctive wounds.7
American Settler Colonialism: A History Page 5
