American Settler Colonialism: A History

by Walter L. Hixson

  It is not difficult to see the grinding poverty and dilapidated infrastructure on many Indian reservations, especially those, like the Sioux reservations, that remain isolated from large urban areas. The Sioux have the prospect of providing some redress for their people, including the possibility of sizable cash payments to individual tribal members, on the basis of a 1980 Supreme Court decision, which ruled that the Black Hills had been seized illegally and without compensation. The monetary award for the seizure of Sioux land, held in trust by the Interior Department, now exceeds US$1 billion. But the Great Sioux Nation has thus far rejected the award because it would require renunciation of ownership of the sacred Black Hills. Taking the money would entail acceptance of the colonizer’s claims on colonial space. Various legislative and negotiated settlements remain in play but for now the postcolonial politics of the Sioux rest on principle rather than profit.48

  As the ongoing struggle for the Black Hills underscores, the colonial past persists in the present. The postcolonial framework thus illuminates the past even as it offers a glimmer of hope for a brighter future.

  Conclusion: The Boomerang of Savagery

  American settler colonialism was a winner-takes-all proposition that demanded the removal of indigenous peoples and the destruction of their cultures. Even Americans who empathized with the indigenes urged them to abandon their cultures and vacate colonial space for white settlers. Indians participated at every level of the colonial encounter and, contrary to settler fantasies, the indigenes did not “vanish.” Nonetheless, they overwhelmingly were dispossessed, their cultures and way of life assaulted, and the consequences of this postcolonial history remain apparent in indigenous communities today.

  Americans including scholars shy away from the “c” and “g” words, as if they could not possibly apply to American history, yet colonialism and genocide inhered in the settler project. Dispossession, forced assimilation, compulsory religious conversions, forced reconfiguration of gender roles, child removal, and often-indiscriminate killing aimed to destroy the Indian way of life. Although contextualized by all manner of ambivalent relationships, in the final analysis the United States pursued a continuous “foreign policy” of colonial genocide targeting indigenous North Americans as well as Hawaiians. Americans also carried out indiscriminate campaigns against the Hispanic other, against masses of Filipinos, and even against one another in the American Civil War. Violence between and among Indians, Hispanics, and American settlers occurred more or less continuously across nearly four centuries of borderlands history, with profound consequences for national identity and subsequent foreign policy.

  While the violence of borderlands history can be narrated and documented, its implications for national identity and foreign policy cannot be demonstrated empirically. The argument I construct in this regard ultimately rests on theorization. Postcolonial analysis, although eschewed by most historians, illuminates continuities and historical implications that otherwise elude the discipline.

  I argue that the history of American settler colonialism, and the indiscriminate violence that it entailed, burrowed into US national identity and foreign relations. Colonized peoples invariably resist their colonizers and Indians with their own powerful warrior cultures put up a long and bloody resistance even as they also traded, accommodated, converted, and otherwise responded ambivalently. Indigenous resistance traumatized settlers, hardened the mythology of providential destiny, and fueled an often-indiscriminate response.

  Americans thus internalized a propensity for traumatic, righteous violence, and a quest for total security, which came to characterize a series of future conflicts. Violence against Indians, replete with demonizing colonial discourse and indiscriminate killing, established a foundation for virulent national campaigns against external enemies across the sweep of American history. The long history of settler colonialism also adds depth of understanding to the persistent US affinity for “special relationships” with other “white” settler states such as Great Britain, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and Israel.

  In recent years scholars have begun to call attention to continuities of American history rooted in settler colonization. “Settler exclusion,” Aziz Rana argues, “was more than just a distant period of conquest and subordination; it provided the basic governing framework for American life for over three centuries.” Paul Rosier takes as a “basic premise” that “the United States has practiced imperialism since its founding” and that the colonial encounter with Indians shaped the nation’s subsequent “engagement with new peoples on new global frontiers—’Indian country’ migrating west to the Philippines and beyond.” In settler colonial societies, “aggressive instincts turned towards the outside world remain active” even after indigenous resistance has been overcome, Lorenzo Veracini points out. “Even demographic takeover cannot dissipate settler aggressiveness.”1

  Born of settler colonialism, indiscriminate violence against savage foes forged an American way of war and a pathway first to continental and then to global empire. “When warfare occurs with considerable frequency as it did in early America,” John Ferling points out, “war shapes the character and identity of a people.” As Colin Calloway notes, “The Indian wars, some would say, left a more sinister mark on American culture: a nation built on conquest could not escape the legacy of its violent past.” “If imperial rule had such a profound influence on the colonized we might well ask whether it had an equally significant impact on the colonizer,” Alfred McCoy observes in articulating the evolution of an “imperial mimesis” that grew out of the US-Filipino construction of a postcolonial security state.2

  The American way of war carried beyond the wars narrated in this study, through the twentieth century, and to the present day. Although obscured by the trope of the “good war,” indiscriminate violence characterized the United States’ role in World War II, particularly in the relentless bombing of civilian targets in Germany and Japan. The indiscriminate killing in the Pacific War, culminating in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, came naturally to the traumatized Americans, as “the treacherous Japs” like the skulking Indian savages had attacked without warning in the US-occupied colonial space of Hawai’i. Few Americans know the extent of “collateral damage” that occurred during the supposedly “limited war” in Korea, a war characterized by saturation bombing and indiscriminate killing of civilians. Little more than a decade later the United States invaded Indochina, conducting lethal search and destroy operations into the “Indian country” of Vietnam, defoliating the countryside, and subjecting the region to the most intensive bombing in human history, causing the deaths of at least a million people and perhaps twice that number. American Apache and Black Hawk helicopters along with Tomahawk missiles have conveyed US militarism to Iraq where hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of the US interventions.3

  Americans have a remarkable capacity, as John Tirman points out, to elide “the deaths of others” in warfare. “One salient effect of indifference or callousness toward large-scale human suffering in U.S. wars,” Tirman notes, “is to permit more such wars.” As other scholars have pointed out, despite the ubiquity of violence in popular culture, regular occurrence of public mass killings, as well as a comparatively high homicide rate, “the history of American violence as a whole has attracted relatively little attention.”4

  American history is not a simple story of brutal and relentless violence against other peoples but brutal and relentless violence is undeniably a critically important part of American history. When we deny it, or decline to study it, or marginalize it, we are complicit in its recurrence. American drives and ambitions have made possible many great things, countless historic achievements, but they have also made possible the destruction of other peoples who got in the way of those drives, who resisted the imposition of American imperial will, who challenged the nation’s towering hubris.

  Americans, like other peoples throughout history, have rationalized warfar
e and glossed over extreme violence by emphasizing the ultimate justification of the cause, whether the wars were for civilization or against communism or terrorism. As Americans ultimately were performing good works, almost any level of violence could be rationalized and justified. Such rationalizations and exceptionalist mythologies must be unpacked and violence over the longue dureé systematically chronicled and analyzed. As the Lacanian scholar Jennifer Rutherford notes, by “speaking against the grain of the good and its incumbent fantasies” we can better recognize “the propinquity of our most moral ideals and sordid deeds.”5

  A long overdue genuine reckoning with the nation’s propensity for indiscriminate violence against other peoples must begin with early American history and work its way forward, but this is something that settler colonial societies resist with a vengeance. It is important to remember that the United States is not exceptional but rather part of a broader settler colonial and global history. Historical denial is intrinsic to settler colonial societies no matter how “free” that they think they might be, as cultural campaigns against “revisionist history” and “black armband” versions of the past attest.

  American willingness to take responsibility for destruction of indigenous cultures has been limited, belated, muted in comparison to other countries, and designed to deflect meaningful restitution. Most Americans are not even aware of official US apologies for the colonial past. Tellingly, in December 2010 the official US apology to Indians was squirreled away deep inside a defense appropriations bill wherein the United States expressed “official apologies for the past ill-conceived policies by the U.S. government toward native peoples of this land and reaffirm our commitment toward healing our nation’s wounds and working toward establishing better relationships rooted in reconciliation.” Like the apology in 1993 to indigenous Hawaiians, the United States took no legal responsibility and offered no relief or compensation.

  The “quiet” of the US apology stands out, as Audra Simpson notes, in comparison with the “apologies of the Australian and Canadian states to indigenous peoples in February 2008 and June 2008, respectively.” These apologies were directed toward survivors and descendants and “performed in Parliament and received extensive national and international coverage.” Critics wonder, “Is an apology that is not said out loud really an apology?”6

  On September 13, 2007, the United States, joined by Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, settler colonial states all, cast the four negative votes—compared with 143 in favor—against the UN General Assembly’s historic Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.7 The United States has since offered a tepid, carefully qualified endorsement with a “finalizing disclaimer” reasserting its ultimate sovereignty over indigenous people.8 The legacies of settler colonialism including the hoary legal Doctrine of Discovery continue to impede reform and judicial adjustments.9

  Unlike “conventional” colonialism, which at least since World War II has evolved a narrative of decolonization and self-determination, a definitive narrative of settler colonial decolonization has yet to take hold. This absence leaves “a narrative gap that contributes crucially to the invisibility of anti-colonial struggles.” Settler colonialism first must be broadly acknowledged and its significance grasped before narratives of settler decolonization and rectification can take hold..10 “It is not about shaming or ‘guilting’ or blaming,” Larissa Behrendt points out. “It is about acknowledging the truth, and with that acknowledgement will come reconciliation, healing, empowerment and pride … It is a mistake to think of Indigenous rights and well-being as merely an ‘Indigenous issue’ or ‘Indigenous problem.’ “11

  As other scholars note, by identifying the United States as a settler state “we can more effectively work toward justice for Native people and, by extension, for settlers as well.”12 Especially for the United States—with its driving sense of mission, its incomparable military power and global influence, but also its propensity for destruction—a more honest reckoning with the past is an indispensable prelude to the construction of a more peaceful future.

  Notes

  Preface

  1. For the sake of clarity, I employ the English names of indigenous tribes, hence the Lenni Lenape will be referred to as the Delaware, the Ani–yun Wiya as the Cherokee, the Haudensaunee as the Iroquois, and so on. Likewise, individual Indians will be referenced through their English names; hence Thayendanegea will be referred to as Joseph Brant, Mishikinakwa as Little Turtle, and so on. As all names and designations ultimately are problematic, in this study I apply commonly used terms such as “Indians,” “indigenous people,” or “indigenes.” I try to avoid the term “Native,” which seems to me to connote primitivism. Though terms such as “tribes” and “bands” also are problematic, so are most alternatives; hence I use such references for the sake of clarity and convenience.

  2. Stephen Warren, “The Ohio Shawnees’ Struggle against Removal, 1814–30,” R. David Edmunds., ed., Enduring Nations: Native Americans in the Midwest (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 73–88.

  3. See the evidence and literature cited throughout this book.

  4. Leonard Sadosky, “Rethinking the Gnadenhutten Massacre: The Contest for Power in the Public World of the Revolutionary Pennsylvania Frontier,” in David C. Skaggs and Larry Nelson, eds., The Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes, 1754–1814 (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2001), 187–214; Rob Harper, “Looking the Other Way: The Gnadenhutten Massacre and the Contextual Interpretation of Violence,” in Philip G. Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan, “Introduction: The Massacre in History,” in Dwyer and Ryan, eds., Theatres of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killing and Atrocity Throughout History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 81–93; R. Douglas Hurt, The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720–1830 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 91; Earl P. Olmstead, David Zeisberger: A Life Among the Indians (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997), 325–337.

  5. Hurt, Ohio Frontier, 92; Colin Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 294.

  6. Sadosky, “Rethinking the Gnadenhutten Massacre,” 201.

  7. Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 2.

  8. Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings With Some of the Indian Tribes (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995; 1881); Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Bantam, 1970).

  9. Amié Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972; 1950), 41.

  Chapter 1

  1. The term ethnic cleansing, which arose in the context of the former Yugoslavia, can be defined as a systematic effort to remove a defined group of people from a given territory based on ethnic or religious grounds. Ethnic cleansing invariably entails violence including massacres, rape, collective punishment, and other violations of human rights. The term is gaining credence among scholars, as demonstrated by the citations throughout this and other works. See also the forthcoming book by Gary C. Anderson tentatively entitled The Ethnic Cleansing of the Indian (University of Oklahoma Press).

  2. The American way of war is an important interpretive concept for understanding American history, but at this point it has been undertheorizied and poorly developed. American military history was long disdained by the vast majority of social and cultural historians, hence the historical profession bears some responsibility for the failure to develop an adequate intellectual foundation for assessing the most powerful and consequential military state—the United States—in human history. The phrase “American way of war” originated with Russell F. Weigley’s classic though now outdated military history. See Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973). More
recent studies that emphasize unconventional and indiscriminate warfare while arguing for an “American way of war” rooted in the colonial era and carrying to the present include Eliot A. Cohen, Conquered into Liberty: Two Centuries of Battles along the Great Warpath That Made the American Way of War (New York: Free Press, 2011); John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814 (New York: Cambridge, 2005); and Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000 (New York: Viking, 2005).

  3. Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 8–14; Anders Stephanson argues that dispossession “reached its purest and most lethal expression” in colonial America and the United States. See “An American Story? Second Thoughts on Manifest Destiny,” in David Maybury-Lewis, Theodore Macdonald, and Biorn Maybury-Lewis, eds., Manifest Destinies and Indigenous Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 33.

  4. See Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty, eds., Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Joanne P. Sharpe, Geographies of Postcolonialism: Spaces of Power and Representation (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2009); Sankaran Krishna, Globalization and Postcolonialism: Hegemony and Resistance in the Twenty-first Century (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2009); Henry Schwarz, “Mission Impossible: Introducing Postcolonial Studies in the U.S. Aacdemy,” in Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Roy, eds., A Companion to Postcolonial Studies (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000); and the citations below.