In 1879, the prototype “school for savages” opened in an abandoned Army barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Under the motto, “Tradition is the Enemy of Progress,” the Carlisle Indian Industrial School relentlessly pursued the “kill the Indian, save the man” strategy of forced acculturation. Directed by an Army disciplinarian, Richard Henry Pratt, and backed by the national organization “Friends of the Indian,” Carlisle provided English-only instruction and forbade any use of indigenous languages. Indian youth, often sick and terrified from their ordeal of capture, transport, and separation from their families, were given new names, had their hair cut, were dressed in military style clothing, and compelled to abandon their own cultural and religious practices and to adopt Christianity. Pratt’s version of ambivalence envisioned “a multiracial society where everyone acted like Anglo-Saxons of the Judeo-Christian persuasion.”120
Carlisle’s legacy can be summed up with these statistics: in its first 24 years, only 158 students graduated while 186 died at the school, mostly of disease, by the time it closed in 1918. Their graves are the only remnant of the school one can find on the Carlisle Barracks today. More of a primary school than a high school, Carlisle did allow scores of Indians to obtain jobs, many of them provided by the federal government, yet the majority of students returned to reservations in the West. Separated from their families for years, if not permanently, many students from Carlisle and other Indian schools could not adapt to an indigenous culture from which they had been removed yet neither could they find a place in white society.121
For all its humanitarian cant, the motive behind the movement for Indian assimilation was dispossession of more indigenous people. “Instead of breaking with the past use of violence and force,” Jacobs explains, the assimilation movement was “part of a continuum of colonizing approaches, all aimed ultimately at extinguishing indigenous people’s claims to their remaining land.”122 To the extent that Indians remained on the land coveted by white Americans, the “Indian problem” remained unsolved even after military conquest. The putatively benevolent assimilation program addressed the problem by removing more Indians from their land and Indian children from their homes.
In 1887 Congress passed the centerpiece of the drive for Indian assimilation, the General Allotment Act or Dawes Act, which subdivided reservation land into 160-acre individual plots while freeing up “surplus” land for sale to settlers by the US Government. The “humanitarian” shift from removal to assimilation thus opened additional colonial space for settlers and speculators while at the same time launching a program of cultural genocide. “Politicians and philanthropists heralded land in severalty as the thing that would finally, definitively solve the nation’s Indian problems,” Andrew Denson notes.123
The patently ethnocentric policy undermined Indian culture and community, including a direct assault on the family. Americans sought to transform Indian gender relations by making men into farmers, women into domestics, and removing Indian children from the family altogether. Theodore Roosevelt accurately described allotment as “a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass.”124
Under the Dawes Act, which prevailed from 1887 to 1934, American Indians lost 86 million of the 138 million acres they possessed in 1887. In the wake of the allotment program, Stuart Banner points out, “the pattern of land tenure in the West had been completely transformed—the Indians retained virtually no land that was not part of a reservation.”125
The ambivalent “reform” movement thus remained a distinctly colonial project, one that echoed the age-old solution of solving the Indian problem by removing Indians from the land desired by settlers. Many tribes, like the Kickapoo, “resisted civilizing attempts and remained unequivocally unchanged at the end of the reservation period.” Rather than achieving assimilation, the Dawes Act instead cemented the status of Indians “as a permanent underclass even more dependent on the federal government.” As a humanitarian measure, “the allotment system proved an unqualified failure,” Philip Weeks sums up.126
After centuries of ethnic cleansing and Indian removal, the Dawes Act allowed Indians to have their own land—but only after they severed relationships with their tribes and thus became non-Indians. Thousands of Indians assumed US citizenship under the legislation when they qualified for an individual allotment. In the ceremony granting citizenship, the Secretary of the Interior called indigenes forward, handed them a bow, and had them shoot an arrow. He then declared, “You have shot your last arrow. That means that you are no longer to live the life of an Indian. You are from this day forward to live the life of a white man. But you may keep the arrow.”127
Unsanctioned Fantasy and the Massacre at Wounded Knee
As dispossession and genocide advanced in tandem, any effort by reservation Indians to revivify their traditional cultures—or even fantasize about reviving them—ultimately brought on violent retribution. Having come in or been rounded up in the months and years after their triumph at the Greasy Grass, the Sioux gradually adapted to life on the reservation. “Progressives” among the Sioux urged education and acculturation. Many men had become successful cattle and horse herders. However, with the eruption of the “Great Dakota Boom,” American settlers demanded that additional land be carved out of the Sioux reservation. At the same time, the division of the territory into the states of North and South Dakota in 1889 set off political anxieties and infighting in Washington.128
Lacking the capacity for violent resistance to the renewed campaign of dispossession, the Sioux responded with the spiritually inspired Ghost Dance. Not unique to the Sioux, the Ghost Dance envisioned the revival of their culture, prosperity, and autonomy. The Ghost Dance, as Jeffrey Ostler suggests, is “best understood as an anti-colonial movement” albeit a nonviolent one.129
The Ghost Dance defied both the assimilation and settler colonial projects through its revival of Indian spirituality and cultural autonomy. Indian traditionalists subverted the colonial regime by violating reservation rules, keeping their children out of schools to teach them Indian ways, and practicing their own religion rather than Christianity. Moreover, the Ghost Dance envisioned the disappearance of the white man accompanied by the return of the bison and the revival of the Indian way of life. As with the Shawnee Prophet in the 1810s, Americans could not tolerate even the vision of such a turn of events. Only one fantasy was sanctioned on the “American frontier,” the fantasy of American providential destiny to monopolize colonial space.
The Lakota ghost dancers “never contemplated using arms” to bring about the new world. The new religion “was not in any way warlike or calculated to provoke war since it taught the doctrine of non-resistance,” recalled General G. W. McIver, who served in the Sioux wars with the Seventh Cavalry. “The Ghost Dances were religious in character, bearing a resemblance to Methodist revival meetings,” McIver observed, “and were not war dances intended to inspire a warlike spirit.”130
As the Ghost Dance flourished, Miles informed Red Cloud that he had “no objections as far as I am individually concerned to you enjoying yourselves, as long as it does not go too far.” Red Cloud responded that the Ghost Dance was not unique to the Sioux, that other tribes around the country were practicing the same form of spiritual awakening. “If there is nothing in it, it will go away like the snow under the hot sun,” the Sioux leader explained, counseling patience. As Miles’s patience wore thin “the clamor raised by white settlers” prompted the decision to bring in masses of troops to forcibly disarm Indians who were not in rebellion.131
On December 15, 1890, after the largest US military force sent anywhere since the Civil War arrived on the Pine Ridge reservation, tensions escalated with the murder of the revered Sitting Bull, roused out of his sleep in his cabin, and killed along with one of his sons.132 On December 29, as the disarmament campaign unfolded, an Indian rifle was accidentally fired skyward, setting off the massacre. The panicked cavalry “began shooting in every direction, killing not only Indians but also
their own comrades on the other side of the circle,” an infantryman recalled. “The Indians were then being hunted down and killed.” Five-barrel Hotchkiss guns “sent a storm of shells and bullets among the women and children, who had gathered in front of the tipi to watch the unusual spectacle … mowing down everything alive.” Some 150 Indians died in the initial outburst and another hundred or so were hunted down and killed in the next few days.
“There can be no question,” an investigator determined, “that the pursuit was simply a massacre, where fleeing women, with infants in their arms, were shot down after resistance had ceased.” No one knows the precise death toll, as the Indian men, women, and children were buried in a mass grave. Twenty-five troopers died, mostly from friendly fire in the initial outburst.133
A century later a congressional resolution acknowledged the massacre and expressed the “deep regret” of the United States, but offered no compensation. At the time of the slaughter, Miles, in an effort to justify the violence as well as the unprecedented 18 Congressional Medals of Honor handed out for bravery in “battle,” mendaciously claimed to have uncovered “a more comprehensive plot than anything ever inspired by the prophet Tecumseh.” The general claimed that “a hungry, wild, mad horde of savages” had been preparing a pan-Indian uprising.
By then a septuagenarian, Sherman cheered on the massacre from the sidelines, explaining that the more Miles “kills now, the less he will have to do later.” The wizened American warrior did not know it, but the Indian wars, fittingly punctuated with a massacre of captive peoples, were coming to an end.134
7
“Spaces of Denial”: American Settler Colonialism in Hawai’i and Alaska
In the nineteenth century American settlers systematically dispossessed the indigenous Kanaka Maoli—Hawaiian islanders, or the “true people.” While dispossession of North American Indian tribes is a familiar subject, Hawai’i has occupied “a space of denial in the consciousness of American history.”1 On these volcanic islands of the northern Pacific, the United States launched a global empire while plantation owners reaped massive profits from the sugar industry. Exploiting the spread of devastating disease, enforced labor, legal structures, and the threat of militarism, Americans undermined indigenous authority, leading to a takeover in 1893, annexation of the Islands in 1898, and statehood in 1959.
Settler colonialism in Alaska, analyzed in the latter part of this chapter, inverted the usual pattern of bottom-up settler, squatter, and commercial expansion. Flowing instead from the top down, Americans first purchased Alaska—virtually sight unseen—and only then embarked on settlement into the vast borderlands of the far Pacific Northwest. When the US Army hoisted the American flag over the Russian-American Company headquarters at Sitka in October 1867, the United States had neither recognized indigenous Alaskans as American citizens nor entered into any treaties with them. The Americans knew virtually nothing about the local tribes nor did they care to learn about them. What they did “know” was that the United States had bought the land, was the bearer of civilization, and thus would continue its tradition of deciding the fates of primitive people.2
Although they entered the Union as the 49th and 50th states, Alaska and Hawai’i are typically framed within a context of international diplomacy rather than domestic expansion. Both Pacific states, however, were settler colonies in which the United States took control of noncontiguous colonial space while severely marginalizing the indigenous populations. The absence of mass violence in both Hawai’i and Alaska distinguished the two from the indiscriminate violence of the Indian Wars, the Mexican War, and the Civil War. The impact of colonization on the indigenous peoples of Hawai’i nonetheless constituted a cultural genocide while the impact on the Alaskan natives was deleterious at best.
Colonial discourse justified and rationalized US settler colonialism in Hawai’i and Alaska just as it had on the mainland. Colonial ambivalences, both similar and dissimilar to the cleavages within continental settler colonialism, materialized in both territories. The two states are thus part of the continuous history of American settler colonialism over the longue dureé. Indeed, many argue that they remain colonies today.
The American transition from continental juggernaut to international power pivoted on taking command of the colonial spaces categorized as Alaska and Hawai’i. The settlement projects anchored rising US power in the northern Pacific, thus providing a foundation for the subsequent imperial thrust into the Philippines, Guam, and other commercial, strategic, and cultural outposts across “Oceania.” Settler colonialism in Hawai’i and Alaska deepened American connections with China, Japan, Korea, Russia, Indochina, and the Philippines, with ultimately profound consequences.3
The Creeping Colonization of Hawai’i
Like other indigenous peoples, Hawaiians had long-established linkages between the land, the sea, spirituality, and way of life. In their isolation from other cultures, the islands (collectively about the size of New Jersey) went about their business of farming, fishing, loving, worshipping, and fighting without disruption until the Europeans arrived. Although they would be perceived as primitives in colonial discourse, Hawaiians had developed a diverse agriculture, irrigation systems, and extensive public works, all without any concept of absolute ownership of the land. The Hawaiians did, however, operate a quasi-feudal system in which the monarch possessed ultimate authority over use of the land, which he subdivided between regional chieftains, while commoners labored under often cruel and exploitative conditions.4
The Kanaka Maoli, like many Indian societies, adopted ambivalent strategies of accommodation and appropriation in response to the colonial encounter. Hawaiian leaders chose to accommodate the haole (“whites”) by adopting many of their ways, including Christianity. The Hawaiians employed mimicry and appropriation strategies as a middle way response between capitulation and what would have been a futile violent resistance. Yet appropriation as a strategy of resistance would ultimately prove as futile for the Hawaiians as it had for Indian societies. As on the continent, settler colonialism was a zero-sum game in which the colonizers would settle for nothing less than dispossession of the indigenes and complete authority over the islands.
As in North America many Americans expressed their empathy for the indigenous residents and strove to convert them to Christianity and to lead them to salvation. Inter-ethnic marriages, sexual liaisons, and sexual exploitation were also widespread in Hawai’i even as they became a source of Protestant angst. Missionaries, more influential in Hawai’i than on the mainland, made particular efforts to regulate the Hawaiian body as they campaigned against nakedness and the lack of sexual inhibition in Hawaiian culture.
Although not the first Westerner in Hawai’i, Captain James Cook’s arrival in Waimea Harbor, Kauai, in January 1778 was a turning point. As he had done in Australia several years earlier, Cook, on his third Pacific voyage, continued to establish place names, proclaiming new sites on the world map for the modernist West. Cook named the islands after the 4th Earl of Sandwich, a backer of his voyages, and he and his men etched names on rocks and trees in various sites across the Pacific. By providing place names and sites on the map, Cook and other Western explorers established “discursive possession” with the implied right to return and to colonize.5
Masses of Kanaka Maoli initially welcomed Cook and his men. The common folk provided fresh food while indigenous women made unmistakable “their intentions of gratifying us in all the pleasures the Sex can give,” an officer on board recorded. Hawaiian mythology underwrote perceptions of Cook as Lono, the ancient god of nature, fertility, and music. Cook played along.6 Despite the tumultuous welcome, one of Cook’s lieutenants found cause to kill a Hawaiian man on the Englishmen’s first day on shore, a prelude of violent clashes to come.
The Englishmen were again well received on a return voyage in which they made landfall on the largest Hawaiian Island. This time, however, the sailors wore out their welcome after a month of gorging, pilferin
g souvenirs, and womanizing, of which Cook disapproved but proved powerless to stop. The English departed but returned unexpectedly to Kealakekua Bay after only three days at sea in order to repair a broken foremast on the Resolution.
This time the Kanaka Maoli received Cook and his men with hostility. To some it appeared Lono had returned “to deprive them of part if not the whole of their country,” as a journalist sailing with Cook recorded. Within days an officer recorded, “We have observed in the natives a stronger propensity to theft than we had reason to complain of during our former stay; every day produced more numerous and more audacious depredations.” Livid over the theft of a cutter from his other ship, Discovery, Cook rashly decided to punish the Hawaiian king personally, though the sovereign had no involvement in the theft.
On Sunday, February 14, 1779, defenders of the king intercepted Cook and his undersized punitive force. Cook personally shot to death at least one of the 17 Hawaiians who died in the club, dagger, and gun battle that ensued just offshore. As the British began to retreat a Hawaiian clubbed Cook in the back of the head. He was then stabbed, submerged, and killed along with four of his charges. The enraged British sailors retaliated, as “dozens of unarmed women, children, and men were slaughtered and dismembered by the English in the twenty-four hours after Cook died.”7 The Hawaiians gave Cook a ritual funeral reserved for a chief before handing over some of his bones for a sailor’s burial at sea a few days later.8
The battle at Kealakekua Bay was neither the first nor the last clash between Europeans and Hawaiians. Beginning with Cook and his men, Europeans killed indigenes in episodic clashes, often over charges of theft. The only known massacre reminiscent of the previous American wars occurred in the early 1790s at Olowalu on Maui. In that egregious incident Captain Simon Metcalf, a British-American surveyor and Pacific Northwest fur trader, orchestrated the killing and wounding of perhaps “several hundred” Hawaiians in retaliation for the killing of just one of his own men.9
American Settler Colonialism: A History Page 26
