American Settler Colonialism: A History

by Walter L. Hixson

  131. “Sioux War, 1890–1891—Correspondence Relating to Wounded Knee”; “Sioux War, 1890–1891-Investigation of Wounded Knee,” both Box 2, Miles Papers, Carlisle Barracks; McIver, Participation in Sioux Campaign.

  132. Lt. Col. W. F. Drum, “Report on the Sitting Bull Affair” [order for arrest and killing], December 17, 1890; Capt. E. G. Fecht, “Report on the Sitting Bull Affair” [order for arrest and killing], December 17, 1890, both in Box 6, OIW, Carlisle Barracks.

  133. Lieut. Alexander R. Paper, 8th Infantry to Marie Cozzens Piper, December 29, 1890, Box 6, OIW, Carlisle Barracks; “James Mooney Documents the Ghost Dance Religion and its Consequence, 1890,” in Christopher Waldrep and Michael Bellesiles, eds., Documenting American Violence: A Sourcebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 238–243.

  134. Ostler, Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism, 303, 360; “Scattered confrontations” between the US Army and Indians continued throughout the 1890s and irregular violence continued sporadically as well. Wooster, Military and U.S. Indian Policy, 174.

  Chapter 7

  1. Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 24.

  2. Steven Haycox, Alaska: An American Colony (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2002), 175.

  3. The “Pacific World” framework has been extensively and engagingly developed by Bruce Cumings in Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). Gary Y. Okihiro places Hawaiian history within a larger frame of Oceania in Island World: A History of Hawai’i and the United States (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 2008.

  4. This brief portrait of indigenous Hawai’i draws on the works cited hereafter.

  5. Houston Wood, Displacing Natives: The Rhetorical Production of Hawai’i (Lanham, MD.: Rowan and Littlefield, 1999), 32.

  6. Marshall Sahlins, Island of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 136.

  7. Wood, Displacing Natives, 23.

  8. Sahlins, Island of History, 104–135.

  9. Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawai’ian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 2004), 23.

  10. Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 24; Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, eds., Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai’i (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), 5; see also Eleanor C. Nordyke, The Peopling of Hawai’i (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 1989; 1977).

  11. Tom Coffman, Nation Within: The History of the American Occupation of Hawai’i (2d ed., Kihei, HI: Koa Books, 2009; 1998), 54.

  12. Linda S. Parker, Native American Estate: The Struggle over Indian and Hawaiian Lands (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 1989), 6.

  13. Okihiro, Island World, 96, 114; Jonathan K. Osorio, Dismembering Lahui: A History of the Hawai’i an Nation to 1887 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), 60–65.

  14. Parker, Native American Estate, 89, 93; Ronald Takaki, Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835–1920 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 1983), 4–6.

  15. Merry, Colonizing Hawai’i, 20, 260.

  16. Jennifer Fish Kashay, “From Kapus to Christianity: The Disestablishment of the Hawaiian Religion and Chiefly Appropriation of Calvinist Christianity,” Western Historical Quarterly 39 (Spring 2008), 17–39.

  17. Ibid., 13.

  18. Osorio, Dismembering Lahui,3.

  19. Marshall Sahlins, “Hawai’i in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Kingdom and the Kingship,” in Robert Borofsky, ed., Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), 189.

  20. Parker, Native American Estate, 97, 100.

  21. Takaki, Pau Hana,6–7.

  22. Osorio, Dismembering Lahui, 13.

  23. Parker, Native American Estate, 125.

  24. Osorio, Dismembering Lahui, 251, 73.

  25. Osorio, Dismembering Lahui, 65.

  26. Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 128–162.

  27. Parker, Native American Estate, 115.

  28. Merry, Colonizing Hawai’i, 26.

  29. Parker, Native American Estate, 21.

  30. Takaki, Pau Hana,8.

  31. Patrica Grimshaw, Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Hawai’i (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 1989), 154–178.

  32. Ibid., 38; Likikala Kame’eleihiwa, “U.S. Merchants, Missionaries, and the Overthrow of the Hawaiian Government,” in Ward Churchill and Sharon H. Venne, eds., Islands in Captivity: The Record of the International Tribunal on the Rights of Indigenous Hawaiians (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004), 81.

  33. Okihiro, Island World, 99.

  34. Wood, Displacing Natives, 37–39.

  35. Grimshaw, Paths of Duty, 172; Wood, Displacing Natives, 166; Merry, Colonizing Hawai’i, 25.

  36. Merry, Colonizing Hawai’i, 22.

  37. Takaki, Pau Hana, 19; Coffman, Nation Within, 62.

  38. Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea, 176–177; Takaki, Pau Hana, 20.

  39. Coffman, Nation Within, 63–64.

  40. Blaine to Comly, December 1, 1881, Department of State, Papers Relating to Foreign Relations of the United States for 1881 (Washington, D.C, 1882), 635–636.

  41. Coffman, Nation Within, 69–90; Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea, 136–141.

  42. Banner, Possessing the Pacific, 158.

  43. Osorio, Dismembering Lahui, 224.

  44. Parker, Native American Estate, 120–211.

  45. Coffman, Nation Within, 91–92, 108.

  46. Ibid., 79; Osorio, Dismembering Lahui, 240.

  47. Osorio, Dismembering Lahui, 156.

  48. Coffman, Nation Within, 79–83.

  49. Silva, Aloha Betrayed,1–2.

  50. Ibid., 5, 163.

  51. Parker, Native American Estate, 130.

  52. Wood, Displacing Natives, 87; Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea, 185.

  53. Coffman, Nation Within, 52, 177, 182.

  54. William Michael Morgan, Pacific Gibraltar: U.S.-Japanese Rivalry over the Annexation of Hawai’i, 1885–1898 (New York: Naval Institute Press, 2012), 241.

  55. Parker, Native American Estate, 130; Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea, 185.

  56. Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 123–163.

  57. Coffman, Nation Within, 261, 217; Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea, 184–188.

  58. Coffman, Nation Within, 208, 243.

  59. Lanny Thompson, Imperial Archipelago: Representation and Rule in the Insular Territories Under U.S. Dominion after 1898 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2010), 185, 9.

  60. Ibid., 185.

  61. Ibid., 113, 66, 79.

  62. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 7.

  63. Fujikane, “Introduction: Asian Settler Colonialism in the U.S. Colony of Hawai’i,” 1–42.

  64. Ibid., 7.

  65. Coffman, Nation Within, 64.

  66. Morgan, Pacific Gibraltar; see also Eric Love, Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

  67. Takaki, Pau Hana, 25.

  68. Coffman, Nation Within, 234, 198, 202.

  69. Sally Engle Merry, “Law and Identity in an American Colony,” in Merry and Donald Brenneis, eds., Law and Empire in the Pacific: Fiji and Hawai’i (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2003), 135.

  70. Ibid., 138.

  71. Parker, Native American Estate, 191.

  72. J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 10.

  73. Merry, “Law and Identity in an American Colony,” 139.

  74. M
ililani B. Trask, “Hawaiian Sovereignty,” in Fujikane and Okamura, eds., Asian Settler Colonialism, 73; see also, George Cooper and Gavan Davis, Land and Power in Hawai’i: The Democratic Years (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 1985); Merry, “Law and Identity in an American Colony,” 142–143.

  75. Haycox, Alaska: An American Colony,3–33.

  76. Walter R. Borneman, Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 33–89.

  77. James R. Gibson, “Russian Dependence on the Natives of Alaska,” in Stephen W. Haycox and Mary Childers Mangusso, eds., An Alaska Anthology: Interpreting the Past (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1996), 27; Haycox, Alaska: An American Colony, 115–146; Borneman, Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land, 60–73.

  78. Gibson, “Russian Dependence on the Natives of Alaska,” 21–42.

  79. Borneman, Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land, 60–66.

  80. Gibson, “Russian Dependence on the Natives of Alaska,” 35–37.

  81. Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea, 191–196; Borneman, Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land, 106–112; Haycox, Alaska: An American Colony, 170–175; See also Paul S. Holbo, Tarnished Expansion: The Alaska Scandal, The Press, and Congress, 1867–1871 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1983).

  82. Haycox, Alaska: An American Colony, 175.

  83. The Treaty of Cession can be accessed online at http://www.usgennet.org/usa/ak/state/1867cession_treaty.htm. See Article 3 on the citizenship provision.

  84. Banner, Possessing the Pacific, 295.

  85. Donald Craig Mitchell, Sold American: The Story of Alaska Natives and their Land, 1867–1959 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 6–7.

  86. Haycox, Alaska: An American Colony, 175.

  87. Ibid., 179–180.

  88. Jon Reyhner and Jeanne Eder, American Indian Education: A History (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 34–35.

  89. Borneman, Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land, 128–232.

  90. Haycox, Alaska: An American Colony, 200.

  91. Ibid., 209.

  92. Ibid., 201–235.

  93. Mitchell, Sold American, 395.

  94. Donald Craig Mitchell, Take my Land, Take my Life: The Story of Congress’s Historic Settlement of Alaska Native Land Claims, 1960–1971 (Fairbanks, AK: University of Alaska Press, 2001).

  95. Mitchell, Sold American, 7; Borneman, Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land, 116–118.

  96. David S. Case and David A. Voluck, Alaska Natives and American Laws (Anchorage, AK: University of Alaska Press 2012), 26–33.

  97. Mitchell, Sold American, 345–346.

  98. Ibid., 7.

  99. See Barry Scott Zellen, On Thin Ice: The Inuit, the State, and the Challenge of Arctic Sovereignty (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009).

  100. Haycox, Alaska: An American Colony, 257–272; Borneman, Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land, 395–403.

  Chapter 8

  1. Myriad histories continue to frame the Spanish-American War as discontinuous, as if it were the nation’s first foray into imperialism. See, for example, Chapter 9, “The Birth of an American Empire, 1898–1902,” in the recent military history by Allan Millett, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States from 1607–2012 (New York: Free Press, 2012). It remains a common practice to begin surveys of diplomatic history with the Spanish-American War as the fulcrum of empire. See, for example, Jerald A. Combs, The History of American Foreign Policy from 1895 (New York:M.E.Sharpe, 4th ed., 2012).

  2. Julian Go, “Imperial Power and Its Limits: America’s Colonial Empire in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper, and Kevin Moore, eds., Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power (New York: The New Press, 2006), 204.

  3. Lanny Thompson, Imperial Archipelago: Representation and Rule in the Insular Territories Under U.S. Dominion after 1898 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2010), 4.

  4. Paul Kramer concludes, “The estimate of 250,000 Filipino war deaths appears conservative” whereas Julian Go declares “no less than 400,000 Filipino lives” were lost in the war. Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 157; Go, “Imperial Power and Its Limits,” 212. In Arc of Empire: America’s Wars in Asia from the Philippines to Vietnam (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), Michael H. Hunt and Stephen I. Levine aver, The best guess is that between 1899 and 1903 the death rate exceeded normal mortality by 750,000. This figure reflects war-related hardships such as severe food shortages and outbreaks of diseases such as malaria, dysentery, typhoid, smallpox, and cholera that shortened the lives of adults, raised infant mortality, disrupted pregnancies, and reduced fertility. These effects persisted well into peacetime.(58)

  5. Both Brian M. Linn and John M. Gates offer well-researched studies published more than a generation apart that emphasize the success of US Army pacification and civic action programs in ultimately winning the Philippine War. These authors trumpet the success of the army’s counterinsurgency campaign while marginalizing the indiscriminate violence of the war as aberrant rather than intrinsic to the colonial project. In a more recent work, Linn condemns “non-specialists” for perpetuating “clichés,” “dogma,” and the “myth” that violence, torture, and devastation lay behind the US war effort. Linn frames his own interpretation as objective scholarship whereas he finds it “distressing” that “many Americans, particularly in academia, interpret the Philippine War through an ideological perspective developed during the 1960s,” which we are left to infer renders them automatically discredited. See Brian McAllister, The Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 324–328; and John M. Gates, Schoolbooks and Krags: The United States Army in the Philippines, 1899–1902 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973).

  6. Kramer, Blood of Government, 5; Go, “Imperial Power and Its Limits,” 212.

  7. Kramer, Blood of Government, 94–99; Hunt and Levine, Arc of Empire, 23, 28.

  8. The text of McKinley’s “benevolent assimilation” proclamation of December 21, 1898 can be accessed online at: http://www.historywiz.com/primarysources/benevolentassimilation.htm

  9. Ibid., 91; Thompson, Imperial Archipelago, 252.

  10. David Brody, Visualizing Empire: Orientalism and Imperialism in the Philippines (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 61.

  11. Kramer, Blood of Government, 103–104; David J. Silbey, A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899–1902 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 68.

  12. Linn, Philippine War, 42–52; Linn, The U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 12–16; Kramer, Blood of Government, 111–112.

  13. Samuel B. Young, “Philippine Insurrection, Letters Sent Letters Received,” Box 4; “Remarks Delivered before the Middlesex Club,” Boston, Box 6; Young to Major General Elwell S. Otis, November 17, 1899, all in Samuel B. M. Young Papers, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, PA, hereinafter cited as Carlisle Barracks.

  14. Servando D. Halili, Jr., Iconography of the New Empire: Race and Gender Images and the American Colonization of the Philippines (Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press, 2006), xi, 61, 67.

  15. Susan K. Harris God’s Arbiters: Americans in the Philippines, 1898 to1902 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 180.

  16. Walter L. Williams, “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism,” Journal of American History 66 (March 1980), 810–831; Linn, U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in Philippine War, 23.

  17. Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West: (Vol. I) From the Alleghenies to the Mississippi, 1769–1776 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995; 1889), 90, 92; Roosevelt quoted in Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2007), 363.

  18. Williams, “U.S. Indian Policy and Debate over Philippine Annexation,” 825–827.

  19. Harris, God’s Arbiters, 64–65.

  20. Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 5; Kramer, Blood of Government, 139, 122.

  21. Linn, Philippine War, 1899–1902, 185–224.

  22. Russell Roth, Muddy Glory: America’s ‘Indian Wars’ in the Philippines, 1899–1935 (Hanover, MA: Christina Publishing House, 1981), 54–55; Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (New York: Random House, 1989), 154; Kramer, Blood of Government, 144–145.

  23. Roth, Muddy Glory, 21, 74; Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, eds., Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of and Imperial Dream, 1899– 1999 (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 5–6; Linn, Philippine War, 224.

  24. Linn, Philippine War, 326.

  25. Major Matthew A. Batson to his wife, April 21, 1899, “Letters of Major Matthew A. Batson, Cuban and Philippine Campaigns, 1898–1901,” Box 3, Carlisle Barracks; Karnow, In our Image, 154.

  26. Resil B. Majares, The War against the Americans: Resistance and Collaboration in Cebu, 1899–1906 (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1999), 133–157.

  27. Stuart Creighton Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 199–201; Linn, Philippine War, 306–321.

  28. Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation,” 204; Louise Barnett, Atrocity and American Military Justice in Southeast Asia (New York and London: Routledge, 2010), 65; Linn, Philippine War, 310–312.

  29. Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation,” 196–218.

  30. Silbey, War of Frontier and Empire, 195–196; Barnett, Atrocity and American Military Justice in Southeast Asia, 77.

  31. Kramer, Blood of Government, 135; Glenn Anthony May, Battle for Batangas: A Philippine Province at War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 147.

  32. May, Battle for Batangas, 149; Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, eds., Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of and Imperial Dream, 1899– 1999 (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 15.