American Settler Colonialism: A History

by Walter L. Hixson

  From annexation of Hawai’i to 1946, a few score haole accumulated massive wealth and power over the Islands. During the Territorial period these men owned outright almost half of the land while the government that they controlled owned most of the rest. It was a more far-reaching concentration of wealth and power than anywhere else in the United States.69

  The colonizing elite supported the maintenance of territorial status for Hawai’i for more than 60 years, as state and federal laws otherwise might preclude ongoing importation of cheap Asian labor. Two waves of Korean immigrants arrived in the first quarter of the twentieth century. As American Indians would do, Asian immigrants led by the Japanese began to employ the colonizer’s own laws and institutions to press for rights and equality. By 1910, workers had begun to unionize and shed the contract labor system. Union leaders now argued that the plantation system was “undemocratic and un-American.”70

  As the Asian immigrant population proliferated, the ruling haole combined ambivalent gestures toward the Kanaka Maoli with continuing dispossession. In 1921, passage of the Native Hawaiian Homes Commission Act (HHCA) set aside land for indigenous people along with provisions to promote assimilation. However, much like the Dawes Act for Indians, the legislation enabled the taking of more land by the haole. The HHCA set aside prime agricultural land for the sugar industry and enabled pineapple corporations to sublease Hawaiian homelands.71

  The HHCA thus ultimately constituted “a colonial project in the service of land alienation and dispossession.” Even the some 200,000 acres set aside for the Kanaka Maoli required that individuals meet a 50 percent blood quantum rule in order to establish their status as “native Hawaiians.” Blood quantum undermined efforts to build Kanaka Maoli political power by excluding rather than including people as Hawaiians.72

  The Japanese attack in December 1941 on US-occupied Hawai’i followed by the Pacific War underscored the strategic importance of the Islands and paved the way for eventual statehood. The status of the Kanaka Maoli continued to decline in the 1940s and 1950s, as their percentage of the electorate and thus their political influence declined. In the postwar era both Asian settlers and indigenous Hawaiians faced growing “pressures to assimilate to the dominant white culture.” Indigenous Hawaiian language fell increasingly out of favor and its use discouraged if not prohibited in schools.73

  With the Kanaka Maoli marginalized and the white mainlanders dramatically outnumbered, the Asian settlers were ascendant. In the 1950s, as the children of the Asian immigrants gained citizenship status, they were primarily responsible for voting out the Republicans, long the party of the plantation elite. The Asian settlers joined with the haole in massive land development projects of mutual economic benefit. By exploiting the law, educational opportunity, unionization, and military service during the war, the Asian immigrants led by the Japanese had overcome segregation and exclusion to gain dominant influence in Hawai’i. In March 1959 Congress passed the Hawai’i Admission Act and President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the fiftieth state into the Union. In subsequent years Japanese-American political influence, as symbolized by the political power accumulated by Senator Daniel Inouye, “left Native Hawaiian interests largely ignored.”74

  Emboldened by global decolonization and the reform spirit of the 1960s, indigenous Hawaiians, like American Indians, called attention to colonialism and injustice, and mounted various strategies of resistance and accommodation (see Chapter 9).

  American Settler Colonialism in Alaska

  When Europeans began to arrive in “Alaska” (derived from the Aleut word meaning “great land”) indigenous people lived in myriad and complex social formations. To simplify the matter Aleuts lived in the island chain now named for them that trickles southeast from Alaska into the Bering Sea; the Inupiat and Yup’ik lived along the Arctic coast; Athabascans were scattered throughout the Alaskan interior; and the Tlingit and Haida occupied the southeast coast, which eventually comprised the population center of American settler colonialism. As with continental Indians, the best evidence suggests these peoples originally crossed from Asia on the once extant Siberian-Alaskan land bridge.

  In the Arctic indigenes relied on seals for food and other fur-bearing animals for clothing and shelter. They hunted whales, walrus, and sea lion at sea and caribou, moose and polar bear on land. The interior Athabaskans hunted and built reliable birch canoes to facilitate fishing and riverine travel. Wherever it was possible the indigenes of Alaska worked the streams for migrating salmon. In southeastern Alaska indigenes benefited from a rich environment with plentiful food sources. Like Indians Alaskan spirituality was closely linked with the natural environment. Although some societies operated on the basis of matrilineal kinship, generally women were not much empowered in the indigenous cultures of Alaska.75

  The colonial encounter began in the eighteenth century when the Dane Vitus Bering “discovered” Alaska for Europeans. Bering explored and mapped Alaska and the northern Pacific Coast along Puget Sound and down the coast of modern-day Oregon. Bering sailed for Tsar Peter the Great thus laying the foundation for the Russian claim to Alaska and the Aleutian islands. In 1741, Bering died on an island near the Kamchatka Peninsula that is now named for him, as are the Bering Strait and the Bering Sea between Russia and Alaska. Following in Bering’s wake was the ubiquitous Captain Cook, first joined and then succeeded by fellow British explorer George Vancouver. These expeditions laid the foundation for competing British claims to the region.76

  From 1799 to 1867, the Russian-American Company, a joint stock company authorized by the tsar, dominated the Alaskan fur trade. The Russians encountered and “subdued quickly and easily” the Aleuts and Kodiaks living in small coastal villages, but the Tlingit would be a different story. The Aleuts suffered extensively from disease, forced labor, rape, and murder at the hands of Russian fur hunters. The Russians expanded their forts and settlements as far south as Sonoma County, California. Competition from the British and then the Americans led to treaties in the mid-1820s. As with the Indians, the modernist nations negotiated their trade and occupation rights in the northwest Pacific without involvement or consideration of indigenous interests.77

  Colonial ambivalence materialized from the start as the Russians, despite their episodic violence against the indigenes, became “dependent upon the Aleuts, Kodiaks, and Tlingit for such basics as furs, provisions, labor, and sex.” Like the first Europeans on the Atlantic coast, the colonizers did not know how to fend for themselves in the new environment. They depended on the indigenes to provide meat, primarily from deer hunting, and fish to eat until the Russians learned better how to secure these on their own. As relatively few Russians proved willing to migrate to Alaska, the Russian-American Company depended on indigenous labor. Moreover, only the indigenes knew how to hunt the elusive sea otters from their kayaks on the open sea.

  The Tlingit, a coalescence of competing clans, resisted colonization and proved to be tenacious fighters. Moreover, they had traded for arms from Americans passing through on “Yankee coasters” and they learned to “shoot very accurately.” The Tlingit “hated the Russians for having seized their ancestral lands, occupied their best fishing and hunting grounds, desecrated their burial sites, and seduced their women.” Like the American colonists in their “stations” on the borderlands, the Russians had to hole up in forts, as the “well-armed savages” were “always ready to take advantage of our negligence.” No Russian “dared to go fifty paces from the fort.”78

  By the 1830s and 1840s, smallpox and other diseases had weakened the Tlingit but colonial ambivalence also ameliorated the relationship between the Russians and the indigenes. The Russians traded flour, rice, molasses, tobacco, and vodka and showed the indigenes how to grow potatoes. In a pattern familiar to the ambivalent Indian history on the mainland, the Aleuts allied with Russians in battles against their indigenous rivals the Tlingit.79 With precious few Russian women willing to migrate to the “barbarous, desolate” realm, the Russian m
en established sexual relationships with indigenous women. As many of the hardened Russian colonizers were “depraved, drunk, violent, and corrupted,” many of these relationships were coerced. Within the first generation, a substantial number of “creoles” began to appear.80

  In the mid-1850s the Crimean War pitting Russia against the allied nations of Britain and France marked a turning point leading to the eventual sale of Alaska to the United States. Defeated in the Crimean War, the Russians feared further encroachments in the northern Pacific by the British and also cast a wary eye on the United States, which was attempting to reinvigorate Manifest Destiny now that the Civil War had come to an end. The Russians had gone to Alaska for the fur trade not to establish a settler colony. With only 658 Russians in residence, and the fur trade having peaked, the Russians were open to selling Alaska.

  In 1867, as a result of late-night meetings and questionable financial arrangements involving the Russians and a handful of congressmen, Secretary of State Seward secured the Alaska Purchase at a cost of US$7.2 million. Despite scattered references to “Seward’s folly” and “Walrussia,” most Americans approved of the extension of the nation’s power into the Arctic northwest. As noted, together with Hawai’i the Alaska Purchase anchored American power in the northern Pacific, enabling the eventual rise of the United States as a global power.81

  As with settler colonialism on the mainland, the United States had once again expanded by virtue of signing a treaty in which a European power handed over vast lands inhabited by indigenous people. As the bearers of civilization, the Americans, consistent with the history of settler colonialism over the longue durée,had no intention of respecting indigenous land rights. In October 1867 when the US Army arrived in Sitka to set up administration, the United States had neither recognized the indigenous Alaskans as American citizens nor entered into any treaties with them. In fact the Americans knew virtually nothing about the local tribes.82

  The 1867 Treaty of Cession had provided a path to US citizenship for any Russians or other Europeans who wished to remain in Alaska, but the provision pointedly excluded “uncivilized native tribes.” Under this colonial discourse, the indigenous people would be “subject to such laws and regulations as the United States may, from time to time, adopt in regard to aboriginal tribes.”83 In 1869, after leaving office and visiting his prized possession, Seward applied the indigenous “vanishing race” discourse to Alaskans. He declared that the indigenes though “vigorous” would “steadily decline in numbers” as they “can neither be preserved as a distinct social community, nor incorporated into our society.”84

  Protected by the US Army, American settlers confiscated islands that the Tlingit and Haida had occupied for a millennium. “Vagabonds, adventurers, and not a few criminals” ascended on southeastern Alaska. Capitalists from Seattle and San Francisco built salmon canneries and fish traps that “made their absentee owners millions of dollars by overharvesting the Indians’ most important subsistence resource.” While the Army, the capitalists, and the adventurers took possession of colonial space, Congress provided enabling legislation “with slight regard for the impact of their decision making on the indigenous population.”85

  Like indigenous people everywhere, the southeastern indigenes resented the encroachment of the technologically advanced invaders. In 1869 the Army commander at Sitka reported that the Tlingit “frequently take the occasion to express their dislike at not having been consulted about the transfer of the territory. They do not like the idea of whites settling in their midst without being subjected to their jurisdiction.”86

  Much like Hawai’i and in contrast to the mainland, only scattered violent clashes rather than indiscriminate killing characterized American settler colonialism in Alaska. US soldiers generally coexisted peacefully with the indigenes, but as usual settlers proved more likely to get into direct conflict. The army invariably defended the settlers and not the indigenous people in such clashes. On at least two occasions, the Army opted for collective punishment by burning down entire villages when the indigenes failed to turn over to the Americans those alleged to have killed individual white men. Consistent with most histories of settler colonialism, white men were immune from punishment for killing, raping, or injuring indigenous people. When the Army went so far as to jail a Sitka settler after he committed his second killing of indigenous men, “the settler community demanded his release,” to which the Army promptly acquiesced.87

  Playing their accustomed role as agents of colonial ambivalence, Protestant missionaries ventured north to civilize and save the souls of indigenous Alaskans. The Russian Orthodox Church had laid the groundwork, as it had some 50 missions in Alaska at the time of the sale to the United States. As the Russians departed, American Presbyterians, Quakers, and Catholics assumed the proselytizing mission.88

  As in Hawai’i and on the mainland, the missionaries undermined indigenous culture by insisting on the primacy of their own spiritual beliefs. They prized individualism over group identity and demanded reshaping of gender roles. Most missionaries sympathized with the indigenes, however, and in 1884 their influence helped spur Congress to pass the Organic Act, which terminated US military rule, provided for the establishment of schools to educate the indigenous people, and included some tepid provisions intended to safeguard Alaska indigenes on their land. The Organic Act perceived Alaska as a “district” and not as a territory on the road to eventual statehood.89

  Settler colonialism evolved slowly in Alaska before accelerating in the 1890s. Until that time settlers frequently expressed anxiety about being outnumbered by the indigenes that comprised some 90 percent of the population at the passage of the Organic Act. A federal land act in 1891 authorized homesteading and town sites to encourage settlement and capitalist development, especially in the salmon canning and sawmill industries. The act “facilitated the beginning of a permanent pioneer population in Alaska.”90

  In 1896, the discovery of gold in the Klondike region transformed Alaska much as the allure of gold had spurred settler colonial expansion onto Cherokee lands in the 1830s and especially to California in 1849. The familiar “gold fever” incited a stampede of some 100,000 men from the mainland to the Yukon Territory in northwestern Canada. The majority of Americans traveled through Alaska and had a dramatic impact on the land and people. Most of them failed, of course, to fulfill their dreams of unearthing overnight riches and many of the disappointed prospectors settled in Alaska.

  At the outset of the Klondike gold rush, indigenous people got work as packers, stevedores, and woodcutters while others sold indigenous arts and crafts to the incomers. However, “Whites quickly and easily replaced the Indians in nearly all aspects of economic life.” Thus most of the indigenes were soon unemployed and segregated with many turning to alcohol and prostitution. They became “increasingly dependent on white goods and the white economy” and were “regularly subject to segregation and discrimination.” Prospectors and developers “ignored Native land use patterns, appropriating land and water and forcing the Natives to relocate.” Missionaries helped to mitigate the impact of indigenous social problems but could not eliminate them.91

  The influx of prospectors and developers spread diseases and impacted the environment through removal of vegetation; building of roads; construction of homes, stores, and taverns; and poisoning of streams. Indigenous Alaskans had suffered the effects of the new diseases in earlier years but the rapid six- to seven-fold increase in the settler population now made a devastating impact, as thousands of indigenes succumbed to influenza, measles, and other diseases. The Americans reduced the game populations, mainly caribou and moose, upon which the Alaskans depended for food. While indigenous population growth stagnated, the US population in Alaska grew to about 30,000 by 1910.92

  In contrast to the approach to Indians on the mainland, until the twentieth century there were no treaties, no reservations, and no demand that the indigenous Alaskans renounce a tribe. “What really set Alaska’s ex
perience apart,” Donald C. Mitchell explains, “was its very low population, enormously high percentage of federal lands, and lack of any provision made over the years—dictatorial or otherwise—for Alaska Native land ownership claims.”93

  In 1906, the situation began to change when the US Congress passed the Alaska Native Allotment Act. Based loosely on the Dawes Act, the legislation aimed to give indigenous Alaskans possession of individual plots of land. However, most indigenous Alaskans probably did not know about or understand the provisions of the allotment act yet many signed on the dotted line as instructed. In 1912 the Alaska Native Brotherhood was founded as a self-help organization to assist the indigenous people in responding to the settler influx. That same year Alaska officially became an American territory but one that lacked local autonomy, as major decisions still emanated from Washington, D.C. In 1924 the United States granted citizenship under the law to all indigenous peoples, including Alaskans.94

  While American settler colonialism took hold mostly in southeastern Alaska, the northern reaches and the Bering Sea had long been the province of whale and seal hunters. European whalers depleted this vital indigenous resource and compounded the problem by trading whiskey at their ports, which had the predictable “malevolent effect on the northern Eskimos.” The Americans sought with limited success to contain pelagic sealing—the killing on the open sea of fur-bearing seals, which had a severe impact on the population as the female seals did most of the open-water hunting. In 1911, the North Pacific Fur Seal Convention signed by the United States, Russia, Britain, and Japan, the first of its kind, ended pelagic sealing (at least de jure) and recognized US primacy in managing the on-shore slaughter of the animals.95