American Settler Colonialism: A History

by Walter L. Hixson

  72. Richter, Facing East; Bernard DeVoto Introduction to Joseph K. Howard, Strange Empire: A Narrative of the Northwest (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974; 1952), 8–9.

  73. Kerwin Lee Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890–1990 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 211.

  74. Hoxie, “Red Continent;” Ian Tyrrell, “Beyond the View from Euro-America: Environment, Settler Societies, and the Internationalization of American History,” in Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in Global Age, 168–191; Michael Adas, “From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon: Integrating the Exceptionalist Narrative of the American Experience into World History,” American Historical Review 106 (December 2001), 1692–1720; Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Going West and Ending Up Global,” Western Historical Quarterly 32 (2001), 5–23; Elizabeth A. Fenn, “Whither the Rest of the Continent?” Journal of the Early Republic 24 (2004), 167–175; for a survey of relevant literature, see Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” American Historical Review 116 (December 2011), 1348–1391.

  75. Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 2; Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 3; Richard White, “The American West and American Empire,” in MayburyLewis and Macdonald, eds., Manifest Destinies and Indigenous Peoples, 204.

  76. Carroll P. Kakel, III, The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 179; Gray H. Whaley, Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee: U.S. Empire and the Transformation of an Indigenous World, 1792–1859 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 226.

  77. In addition to the works cited below see the broad range of essays in Dan Stone, ed., The Historiography of Genocide (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Other comprehensive studies include Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (New York: Public Affairs, 2009).

  78. John Docker, The Origins of Violence: Religion, History and Genocide (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 2. “The hour hand, which historians largely ignore, is the evolution of human beings as a species,” David Courtwright reminds us. See David T. Courtwright Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 7. The apes that are our human forbears engage in indiscriminate violence, aggressive raids, even search and destroy operations. With human evolution thousands of years ago, as expanding agricultural-commercial societies encountered hunter-gatherer societies, settler colonial type violent conflicts erupted over possession of the land. See Jane Goodall, 50 Years at Gombe (New York: Stewart, Tobaori and Chang, 2010); Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (New York: Harper-Collins, 1992); and Hugh Brody, The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers, and the Shaping of the World (New York: North Point Press, 2000).

  79. Docker, Origins of Violence, 130, 115, 122.

  80. United Nations, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” 1948, http://www.un.org/millennium/law/iv-1.htm

  81. On Argentina, see Claudio N. Briones and Walter Delrio, “The ‘Conquest of the Desert’ as a Trope and Enactment of Argentina’s Manifest Destiny,” in Maybury-Lewis, Macdonald, and Maybury-Lewis, eds., Manifest Destinies and Indigenous Peoples, 51–83 and Ricardo D. Salvatore, “The Unsettling Location of a Settler Nation: Argentina from Settler Economy to Failed Developing Nation.” South Atlantic Quarterly 107, 755–789. In the late nineteenth century, Argentinians drove indigenes out of Pampa and Patagonia through settlement and direct military aggression memorialized in Argentine history as the “Conquest of the Desert” (eliding the conquest of people). When Argentines did acknowledge indigenous people, they depicted them, as in other settler colonial settings, as savages doomed to extinction. Argentines conducted murders and massacres, massive deportations and confinement as well as separation of families and other de-tribalization measures, all of which have been obscured in Argentine history.

  82. Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide; Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso, 2000); Gudrun Kramer, A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Schlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (London: Verso, 2010); Lorenzo Veracini, Israel and Settler Society (London: Pluto Press, 2006); and Avi Shlaim, Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (London: Verso, 2009).

  83. Jürgen Zimmerer, “The Birth of Ostland out of the Spirit of Colonialism: a Postcolonial Perspective on the Nazi Policy of Conquest and Extermination,” in Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide, 115; Kakel, American West and Nazi East, 218.

  84. Kakel, American West and Nazi East, 7, 216–218; see also Jens-Uwe Guettel, “From the Frontier to German South-West Africa: German Colonialism, Indians, and American Westward Expansion,” Modern Intellectual History, 7 (2010), 523–552.

  85. Shelley Baranowski argues that the Nazi “Final Solution” evolved from a “confluence of roadblocks” to the colonial project in the quest for Lebensraum.See Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 297. See also Kakel, American West and Nazi East, 212–228; Zimmerer, “Birth of Ostland: Postcolonial Perspective on Nazi Policy of Conquest and Extermination”; and Arno Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The Final Solution in History (New York: Pantheon, 1988).

  86. Philip G. Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan, “Introduction: The Massacre in History,” in Dwyer and Ryan, eds., Theatres of Violence: Massacre, xi–xxv; Tatz, “Genocide in Australia,” 60.

  87. Weaver, Great Land Rush, 148.

  88. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 8; Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor,MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 155; See also Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

  89. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi, New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), xi, xxi; Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 76–81; see also Maria Teresa Savio Hooke and Salman Akhtar, The Geography of Meanings: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Place, Space, Land, and Dislocation (London: International Psychoanalytic Association, 2007).

  90. Nandy, Intimate Enemy, 30.

  91. Pease, New American Exceptionalism; Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York: Harper Collins, 1995); Rutherford, The Gauche Intruder, 26; on Zionism see footnote 83 above.

  92. Rutherford, The Gauche Intruder, 10; see also Richard Feldstein, Maire Jaanus, and Bruce Fink, eds., Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996); Sean Homer, Jacques Lacan (New York: Routledge, 2005); Slavoj Zizek, How to Read Lacan (New York: Norton, 2006); Zizek, “Superego by Default,” in The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London and New York: Verso, 2005; 1994); Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1991); Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989).

  93. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 119; Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sandra Teresa Hyde, Sarah Pinto, and Byron J. Good, eds., Postcolonial Disorders (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 106; Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1990; 1950), vi, 98, 10
6; see also Philip Chassler, “Reading Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban Before Reading Black Skin, White Masks,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5 (June 2007), 71–81.

  94. Zizek, How to Read Lacan, 105.

  95. DeLoria, Playing Indian, 37.

  96. Johnson and Lawson, “Settler Colonies,” 374; DelVecchio Good, Hyde, Pinto, and Good, eds., Postcolonial Disorders,6.

  97. Abigail Ward, “Psychological Fomulations,” in McLeod, ed., Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies, 201.

  98. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 4.

  Chapter 2

  1. No one knows precisely when human habitation began in North America. The most common estimates are 12,000–14,000 years ago, very likely as a result of migration across the Bering Strait land bridge.

  2. Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas (New York: Vintage Books, 2006).

  3. The above generalizations are based on readings cited through the chapter.

  4. Timothy Pauketat, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi (New York: Penguin, 2009), 13; Pauketat and Thomas R. Emerson, Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 267, 269, 278.

  5. John F. Scarry, ed., Political Structure and Change in the Prehistoric Southeastern United States (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1996), 245.

  6. Matthew Jennings, “Violence in a Shattered World,” in Robbie Ethridge, “Introduction,” in Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall, eds., Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 272.

  7. Ibid., 274; Robbie Ethridge, “The Making of a Militaristic Slaving Society,” in Alan Gallay, ed., Indian Slavery in Colonial America (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 245; Scarry, Political Structure and Change in Prehistoric Southeastern United States, 181.

  8. Robbie Ethridge, “Afterword,” in Ethridge and Shuck-Hall, eds., Mapping Mississippian Shatter Zone, 421.

  9. These generalizations are drawn from the scores of works cited throughout this and subsequent chapters. See especially Armstrong Starkey, European and Native American Warfare (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998); and Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York: Penguin, 2001), 3–66.

  10. Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 308.

  11. David H. Dye, “Warfare in the Protohistoric Southeast, 1500–1700,” in Cameron B. Wesson and Mark A. Rees, eds., Between Contacts and Colonies: Archaeological Perspectives in the Protohistoric Southeast (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 141.

  12. See Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996) and Nancy Shoemaker, “Categories,” in Shoemaker, ed., Clearing a Path: Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies (New York: Routledge, 2002), 51–74;); for a classic account of the colonial binary see Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953).

  13. Jerald T. Milanich, Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1995).

  14. Jennings, “Violence in Shattered World,” 278, 279; Patricia Galloway, ed., The Hernando de Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, and “Discovery” in the Southeast (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); for a first-hand account of the Soto expedition see Rodrigo Rangel, “Account of the Northern Conquest and Discovery of Hernando de Soto (c. 1546),” in Colin G. Calloway, ed., First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History (New York: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 3d ed., 2008), 108–112.

  15. J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 38–44; Taylor, American Colonies, 50–90; David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).

  16. David J. Weber, Barbaros: Spaniards and the Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

  17. Gary Clayton Anderson, The Indian Southwest, 1580–1830: Ethnogenesis and Reinvention (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 82, 91; Weber, Barbaros, 84.

  18. Calloway, First Peoples, 88–92; Edward Countryman, “The Pueblo Revolt,” http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/early-settlements/essays/pueblo-revolt.

  19. Weber, Barbaros,5–6.

  20. Galloway, “Introduction,” in Patricia Galloway, ed., LaSalle and His Legacy: Frenchmen and Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1982), xii, xiii.

  21. Cornelius J. Jaenen, “Amerindians View of French Culture in the Seventeenth Century,” in Peter C. Mancall and James H. Merrell, eds., American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal, 1500–1850 (New York: Routledge, 2000), 91; see Taylor, American Colonies, 363–395; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

  22. Timothy J. Shannon, Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (New York: Viking, 2008), 30–38; Calloway, First Peoples, 98.

  23. Thomas S. Abler, “Beavers and Muskets: Iroquois Military Fortunes in the Face of European Colonization,” 151–174; R. Brian Ferguson and Neil L. Whitehead, War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1992), 159.

  24. Shannon, Iroquois Diplomacy, 32–33.

  25. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 38–44; Taylor, American Colonies, 50–90; Weber, Spanish Frontier in North America.

  26. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 47; James Mahoney, Colonialism and Postcolonial Development: Spanish America in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 235.

  27. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “International at the Creation: Early Modern American History” in Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 103–122; Helen C. Rountree and E. Randolph Turner, III, “On the Fringe of the Southeast: The Powhatan Paramount Chiefdom in Virginia,” in Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser, eds., The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521–1704 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 355–372.

  28. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, The Jamestown Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 210–240.

  29. Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 69–78.

  30. Kupperman, Jamestown Project, 253–254; see also Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

  31. Ibid., 287, 295.

  32. Jon Reyhner and Jeanne Eder, American Indian Education: A History (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 25–26; Kupperman, Jamestown Project, 295–299.

  33. John Smith, “Of the Natural Inhabitants of Virginia,” in Brett Rushforth and Paul W. Map, eds., Colonial North America and the Atlantic World: A History in Documents (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2009), 91; John Ferling, Struggle for a Continent: The Wars of Early America (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1993), 19–21.

  34. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 75; Taylor, American Colonies, 135.

  35. Ferling, Struggle for a Continent, 21–27; Kupperman, Jamestown Project, 304–324.

  36. “Nathaniel Bacon Justifies Rebellion,” in Rushforth and Map, eds., Colonial North America and the Atlantic World, 104–105.

  37. Taylor, Ameri
can Colonies, 138–157.

  38. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, Samuel E. Morison, ed., (New York: Knopf, 1952).

  39. Alfred Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 11; Ferling, Struggle for a Continent, 28.

  40. Cave, Pequot War, 1–12.

  41. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 296; Ferling, Struggle for a Continent, 36–38; Calloway, First Peoples, 102.

  42. Cave, Pequot War, 3, 168.

  43. Reyhner and Eder, American Indian Education, 26–34.

  44. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 90–105.

  45. Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 118.

  46. Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King, 134, 190; King Philip’s speech quoted in Calloway, First Peoples, 134.

  47. John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1670–1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 43.

  48. Ann M. Little, Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 7–8; Gina Martino-Trutor, “ ‘Her Extraordinary Sufferings and Services’: Women and War in New England and New France,” PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2013.

  49. Ferling, Struggle for a Continent, 52.

  50. Jill Lepore, In the Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage, 1999), ix–xvi; 173–178; Ferling, Struggle for a Continent, 57; Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King, 236.

  51. Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King, 158; Grenier, First Way of War, 43; “Minister Daniel Gookin Discusses the Dilemmas Confronting Christian Indians,” in Rushforth and Map, eds., Colonial North America and the Atlantic World, 152.

  52. Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King, 112; Daniel R. Mandell, King Philip’s War: Colonial Expansion, Native Resistance, and the End of Indian Sovereignty (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 144; Lepore, In the Name of War,xiv.