American Settler Colonialism: A History

by Walter L. Hixson

  In the midst of the global campaign against communism, including massive violence on the Korean peninsula, the United States in collaboration with the Filipino elite denied the Huks access to the political process and launched campaigns of annihilation. “The Filipino military police and civilian guards massacred Huk members and civilians believed to be supporters of the Huk movement,” often as Kathleen Nadeau points out, “with the knowledge of American military officers.”69 Remaining members of the movement went underground and started a guerrilla war of resistance against the US-Filipino security regime. In the mid-1950s, the counterinsurgency campaign led by a shrewd and popular Filipino elite, Ramon Magsaysay, undermined the Huks through reorganization of the Philippine armed forces, economic incentive programs, and various psychological warfare operations devised by Magsaysay’s close adviser, Edward Lansdale of the Central Intelligence Agency. “In a Cold War version of the ‘Injun Warfare’ of several decades earlier,” Hedman and Sidel point out, “this anti-Huk ‘psywar’ campaign involved the mobilization of volunteers into ‘hunter-killer’ units called the Scout Rangers.”70

  After liquidating the Huks, the United States embraced the regime of President Ferdinand Marcos, who came to office in 1965. That same year the United States encouraged mass murder of communists, reformers, and intellectuals by the military dictatorship in Indonesia while unleashing its own bombers and “search and destroy” units in Vietnam.71 Supported by the United States despite blatant corruption and human rights abuses, Marcos ruled under martial law from 1972 to 1986. In 1983 the regime assassinated exiled senator Benigno Aquino when he stepped off the plane in a return to Manila. Marcos tried to smooth over relations with the United States, where Aquino had lived in exile, by contributing US$10 million to President Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign in 1984.72

  Reformers had gained strength in opposition to the Marcos regime but more ominously from the US and elite Filipino perspective, so had the Communist Party of the Philippines. The New People’s Army, the armed wing of the Communist Party, had grown dramatically, establishing armed units and networks in the countryside as well as in urban barrios. The Filipino elite and US national security advisers viewed the NPA as a greater threat than the Huks had been three decades earlier. Another wave of violent repression against the left ensued.

  The counter-subversion campaign unfolded following the ouster of the Marcos family (given asylum in Hawai’i by Reagan) and the ascension to the presidency of Aquino’s widow, Corazon, in 1986. Aquino called for “not social and economic reform but police and military action” to combat the NPA. From 1986 to 1992, Aquino—advised, funded, and equipped by the United States—oversaw a counterinsurgency war against the NPA, social activists, labor organizers, and church and human rights groups. Behind the smiling façade of Aquino’s much trumpeted “People Power” movement was a campaign to re-entrench the oligarchy while containing and destroying leftists and reformers.73

  The Philippine government unleashed paramilitary units and irregular vigilantes to hunt down leftists and reformers in “campaigns of sustained intimidation and spectacular violence.” International human rights monitors cited “a widespread pattern of extra-judicial execution, torture and illegal arrest throughout the Philippines.” This latest cycle of political violence affirmed that the “decentralization and privatization of coercive state apparatuses encouraged under American auspices remained an enduring and powerful legacy under Philippine colonial democracy even several decades after Independence in 1946.”74

  Tension arose to some degree in the 1990s after breakdown in negotiations over re-authorization of the two massive US military bases, but the events that transpired after September 11, 2001, quickly reinvigorated the US-Filipino security relationship. In 1992 the United States closed Subic Bay and Clark Field but in the late 1990s the two countries signed the Visiting Forces Agreement, restoring military ties through joint training and exercises, as both nations cast a wary eye on China. After September 11, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo offered “unqualified support” in the “Global War on Terror,” which eventually brought in hundreds of millions of dollars of security assistance to the Philippines. The United States sent hundreds of elite troops into the southern Philippines where they joined the Philippine security forces in tracking down the Muslim insurgent group Abu Sayyaf and assassinating its leaders. Arroyo exploited the climate of suppression amid the war on terror as she “unleashed military death squads for a lethal assault on the Philippine left.”75

  The US-Philippine postcolonial relationship remains close today more than a century after the original US intervention and establishment of the collaborative security framework. The Philippines served as an “ad hoc laboratory for counterinsurgency,” a colonial space in which the “striking continuity in U.S. policy” spanned more than a century. Philippine society continues to be polarized between an increasingly wealthy minority, a shrinking middle class (many of which are forced to seek work overseas), and an impoverished mass, from the slums of Manila to the southern islands. “For the past half century,” McCoy notes, “Washington has found it far easier to revitalize Philippine security forces than to reform the country’s underlying social reality.”76

  9

  “A Very Particular Kind of Inclusion”: Indigenous People in the Postcolonial United States

  In settler societies colonizing discourse invariably depicted the indigene as a premodern primitive and moreover as a member of a vanishing race. Death and destruction became normalized insofar as the indigene was after all part of a dying race. This rationalizing discourse helped justify dispossession, assuage guilt, and establish a framework for historical denial. To end the discussion with Wounded Knee, ignoring the twentieth century, would be to affirm the colonial mythology of the vanishing race.

  The indigenes did not in fact “die off.” In the 2010 US census, 5.2 million people identified as Indian or as indigenous Alaskan; 1.4 million identified as indigenous Hawaiian or Pacific islanders.1 Some 560 indigenous bands exist in the United States though not all receive federal recognition. Nearly 20 percent of the indigenous population lives in Alaska, with Oklahoma and California having the next largest state populations.2

  The postcolonial history of settler colonialism does not come to an end with the dispossession and demographic swamping of indigenous people. Indigenous people survived, many cultures remain intact, and they have continued to struggle variously for land, control of resources, compensation, civil rights, autonomy, and sovereignty. The structure and legacies of settler colonialism remain powerful, as does historical denial, and settler societies typically mobilize to contain indigenous challenges both to history and to the postcolonial condition. “The overall colonialist drive persists, even when expressed ambivalently,” Kevin Bruyneel points out, “and to this day continues to place indigenous people and their sovereignty in a second-class status.”3

  Indians and Hawaiian and Alaskan indigenes variously participated in and resisted colonizing society throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. By the 1960s, in the midst of a global movement trumpeting decolonization, anticolonial revolution, civil rights, and youth and women’s movements, indigenous people gained unprecedented exposure and recognition. They staged protests and occupations but just as importantly they mounted significant challenges to historically exclusive claims to colonial space. Indigenes and their attorneys turned legal frameworks on their heads, as they took the colonizer to court and won several meaningful victories that brought increased visibility, respect, and empowerment. This activism emerged in the context of the global indigenous rights movement, which evolved in tandem with the broader international movement for human rights. The global indigenous rights movement achieved a milestone in September 2007 when the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.4 The Declaration was an important achievement, yet denial and reaction remained powerful forces within settler colonial soc
ieties.

  Indians within the Postcolony

  By 1890, disease and warfare had reduced the indigenous population from some 18 million living north of Mexico when the Europeans arrived to about one quarter of a million, yet Indians refused to play out the scripted role of a vanishing race. The settler state continued to express its sovereignty over Indians and over geographic space after the cessation of hostilities. Throughout the twentieth century and to the present, indigenous people have engaged in anticolonial resistance while simultaneously pursuing civil rights. “Indian people reworked a sense of distinctiveness and difference,” Philip Deloria explains, “fighting off the colonizing ways the United States sought to include them, and demanding a very particular kind of inclusion, one based on unique political status.”5

  In the early twentieth century, the US Supreme Court in a series of decisions known as the Insular Cases upheld US sovereignty over the “unincorporated territories” seized in the context of the Spanish-American War. Around the same time—and underscoring the continuities of domestic and overseas colonialism— the high court ruled in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903) that Congress had complete authority over Indian affairs, including the power to abrogate treaty rights. This decision, sometimes called the Dred Scott decision for Indians, brought them into the new century, like Puerto Ricans and Hawaiians, as colonized subjects under the law.

  Despite rigid racial lines and legal constraints, “Some Indian people—more than we’ve been led to believe—leapt quickly into modernity,” Deloria notes, and became “acculturated into the educational, political, and economic order of twentieth century America.”6 As Americans began to cultivate the mythology of the frontier, Indians participated in the “Wild West” shows made famous by William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. However hackneyed, the shows were wildly popular and many of the “show Indians” enjoyed playing their roles as well as the travel and other opportunities.7

  Indians achieved regional and national reputations in sports. Louis Sockalexis, a member of the Penobscot tribe from Maine, distinguished himself in baseball before succumbing to alcoholism. Sockalexis inspired the Cleveland franchise to adopt in 1915 the Indians moniker that it still sports today (along with the racially charged “Chief Wahoo” logo). Jim Thorpe, born in Oklahoma in 1887 to the Sauk and Fox tribe and a survivor of Carlisle, was an accomplished multisport athlete who won two gold medals for the United States in the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm.8

  Indians, like African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans, strove for political participation within the racial state. In 1911, a group of acculturated indigenes known as “Red progressives” founded the Society of American Indians. In 1917, US involvement in World War I created opportunity for thousands of Indian men to assume a role deeply ensconced in their traditions, that of warrior, though other indigenes resisted fighting on behalf of the colonial state. The Iroquois Confederation solved this dilemma by issuing its own declaration of war against Germany.9

  The participation by some 16,000 Indians in the US armed forces during the Great War helped clear the path to voting rights and full citizenship, which came in 1924 by an act of Congress. Many of the 300,000 or so Indians living in the country at the time did not care to be US citizens and many states for their part did not care to enforce the law granting the indigenes legal equality. Ironically, the national crisis of the Great Depression created new opportunities for Indians through the New Deal reforms under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  John Collier, a reformer with a longtime passion for indigenous affairs, spearheaded the Indian New Deal as commissioner of Indian affairs from 1933 to 1945. In 1934 the Indian Reorganization Act revoked the Dawes Act, bringing an end to the misguided effort at Indian assimilation and the cultural genocide that it entailed. Although paternalistic, and yet another top-down American “solution” to the “Indian problem,” the Indian New Deal brought relief, expanded educational opportunities, and community building. Still, many Indians had no use for such federal initiatives. Influential tribes refusing to participate in the reforms included the Iroquois, the Crows, and the Navajo.10

  Some 25,000 indigenous warriors fought in World War II and thousands more including Indian women took part in war related industries. Service in the armed forces helped develop a “hybrid American patriotism” in which Indians “imagined an American nationalism that drew upon rather than destroyed their values,” Paul Rosier points out. Indigenous people thus “defended their right to be both American and Indian.” As with other minorities, participation in US militarism abroad carved out cultural space to pursue rights and opportunities at home.11

  Following World War II, the Indian Claims Commission, established in 1946, took up tribal grievances over treaty violations and other state actions affecting indigenous people. Over the next three decades the Commission settled scores of cases and paid out millions of dollars in settlements. While the Crows, for example, received a US$10 million payment, other tribes refused to settle for monetary compensation and demanded instead the return of colonized space.12

  With the New Deal gone and conservatism on the rise in the 1950s, Congress terminated federal oversight of Indian affairs with scores of tribes deemed to have made the most “progress” toward assimilation. Once again, as with allotment, termination denied indigenous autonomy and subjected Indians to legal jurisdiction of the various states. The removal of government services hurt many tribes, forcing some to sell land to raise revenue. During this time hundreds of thousands of Indians moved into cities, a migration facilitated by federal relocation funding, though not enough of it to ward off poverty, inadequate housing, and disease. The Indian urban migration continued; by 2000 more than two-thirds of Indians lived in cities.13

  The history of crimes and injustices against Indians, as well as activism on the part of indigenous people, received widespread visibility amid the reform and countercultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s. As the civil rights, youth, and antiwar movements gained strength, the Red Power movement also flourished, educating many Americans for the first time about indigenous cultures, the long history of racism, violent dispossession, violation of indigenous treaty rights, and resistance to colonial rule. The American Indian Movement (AIM), created in 1968, spurred indigenous activism, though many indigenes did not agree with AIM nor accept the group as their representative. Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970) and the popular book and film “Little Big Man” (1970) made vast audiences more aware of the colonial past. Vine Deloria’s classic Custer Died for Your Sins: An American Indian Manifesto (1969) emphasized that Indians remained very much alive, as he illuminated indigenous worldviews with biting insight and some humor as well.

  Indians remained heavily marginalized in the colonial state, hence the Red Power movement gained strength from the support and solidarity provided albeit unevenly and haltingly from other activists and organizations. As Sherry Smith points out, “The political and social movements of the 1960s and 1970s were very much intercultural and interracial.”14 The diverse array of supporters included Ken Kesey, Marlon Brando, Peter Coyote, Dick Gregory, Jane Fonda, the Black Panthers, Stokely Carmichael, Quakers and other church groups, the Whole Earth Catalog, Chicano activists, hippies, counterculturalists, Vietnam War protesters, and even the Nixon administration.

  Like civil rights and antiwar activists, Indians mounted protests and occupations calling attention to the colonizing past while demanding reforms and autonomy in the present. In 1969, indigenes embarked on a 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island calling attention to “broken treaties and broken promises” and calling for self-determination for the tribes. In 1972, AIM, the Native American Rights Fund, and other groups organized the “Trail of Broken Treaties,” a march on Washington, D.C. patterned along the lines of the massive 1963 civil rights demonstration in the nation’s capital. Indian activists occupied—and trashed—the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters before negotiations ended the occupation.15

  Indian
direct action peaked with an occupation of Wounded Knee, on the bitterly divided Pine Ridge Reservation. The tribal leader, Dick Wilson, opposed the activists, mounted “goon squads” to carry out violent attacks against them, and then collaborated with federal authorities in a massive display of militancy, as the US government dispatched riot control units, Phantom jets, and armored personnel carriers to the impoverished rural reservation in the South Dakota Badlands. The occupation lasted 71 days, featured hundreds of arrests, and commanded national attention. As Smith notes, “Many Americans—probably for the first time in the twentieth century—now knew this was a place where something had gone terribly wrong eighty years before.”16 The reservation remained the site of simmering resentments between the rival Sioux factions and on the part of the activists toward the federal government. In 1975, two FBI agents died in a shootout as they approached a farmhouse on the reservation.17

  The Red Power movement succeeded in drawing unparalleled national attention to the North American indigenous past but also to the demands of the present. Indians pursued civil rights and treaty rights but also put forward an anticolonial agenda emphasizing self-determination. “The Red Power movement refused the false choice of either the assimilatory aims of the civil rights movement or the nationalist separatism of Third World anti-colonialism,” Bruyneel explains. Instead Indians occupied an ambivalent “third space” in an effort to “work across spatial and temporal boundaries demanding rights and resources from the liberal democratic settler state while also challenging the imposition of colonial rule on their lives.”18

  “Multicultural” Hawai’i

  Indigenous Hawaiians like American Indians derived inspiration from the reform spirit of the 1960s and from the global decolonization movement. The unique feature in postcolonial Hawai’i of a non-white, Asian majority gives the appearance of a “multicultural” immigrant success story. However, the “fantasy” of Hawaiian multiculturalism elides the dispossession and marginalization of the indigenous people.19