I remember having a debate with a history teacher from a school in Dublin. He was dead set against conflating events from the past with the ones we are living in. I respectfully disagreed. History is not consigned to the past. For me, the past is a continuous force that shapes our present. Tradition, custom, habits are all derived from behaviours of those who proceeded us. So too are attitudes. Take the USA’s current unequivocal support for Israel. It is more than a strategic ideal of having a ‘friendly’ country to destabilise the Middle East, for the benefit of US foreign policy. If it were only that simple. There is something in the USA’s historical attitude that has always believed they are somehow a chosen people and, like the Israelis, nothing must hinder that advancement. Isreal and the USA share a common attitude, forged in their desire to create their nation states – to do so at any cost, even if it means they have to destroy the native peoples to do this. South Africa last year brought a case to the International Court of Justice against Isreal for what it has claimed is a genocide against the Palestinians. Genocide is a big claim, because amongst many things, it means one must prove a mass, forced, displacement and the deliberate destruction of an ethnic group. The USA doesn’t support the South African case. Is it because they themselves have perpetrated one of the worst genocides in history – against the Native Americans?
Let us begin with who was on the continent that we now call the USA, before the arrival of the Europeans. Archaeologists place the golden age of the indigenous people of North America to 1200 BC. Agriculture and irrigation were practised and, as a result of a consistent food supply, population grew steadily. Within that growth, towns and villages developed and flourished. This was to last for over two millennia when, about 1400 AD, the tribes became more nomadic and started to follow bison and buffalo as their major food sources instead of farming like their ancestors. There are theories that the native’s loss of productivity in their food production, was due to an ignorance of crop rotation (of which Europeans were also guilty of at that time), making their farmlands less and less productive over the centuries. Another theory is that dramatic climatic changes were the cause for the transformation in their way of life, but archaeologists so far, cannot be certain. The nomadic types of ‘Indians’ that the Europeans found, didn’t adhere to the European culture of private landownership, that ties one down to a specific plot. It was this lifestyle that made them vulnerable to Europeans, whose land greed and belief in their racial superiority, allowed them to think that the land was theirs for the taking. In 1500, when the Spanish started on the fringes of what we now call Florida and California, it was (conservatively) estimated there were four to five million natives already living on the continent, consisting of 600 tribes. By 1900 there were less than 250,000 left, living in confined reservations.
It has been well-documented that the Native Americans’ biggest enemy in that first mass wave of 16th century Spanish Europeans, was disease. Seventy-five percent of the natives in the southern area that encountered them, died from European diseases. Their immune systems simply had no protection from what were treatable conditions for Europeans.
The French made up the main body of explorers in the northern regions, mainly looking to dominate the lucrative and endless well, that was the fur trade. They were more interested in working with or manipulating the natives of those regions in their pursuit of wealth but came to trade first and foremost rather than colonies. It didn’t stop many deadly confrontations such as the French massacre of 1,000 Mesquakie ‘Indians’, in Wisconsin in 1712.
However, the Spanish were particularly brutish in the 16th century. The greatest irony was their attempt to bring a Christian faith, that had at its core mercy, love and charity, were the very principles lacking from their fellow Spaniards in the military. Gold rather than colonisation was their ‘God’ when Juan de Oñate led a force of one hundred men up the Rio Grande. Frustrated by their failures and skirmishes with natives, they attacked the village of Acoma, where the natives defended their village successfully, killing twelve of the Spanish militia. What happened next would become an all-too-familiar pattern carried out by Spanish Conquistadors. De Oñate returned with a larger force, slaughtering 800 of them, hacking off a limb of surviving males before enslaving the women. The greatest advantage the native people got from these early encounters was the horse, which up until then did not exist on that continent. Within a century, they had mastered the art of horsemanship, which ironically led to greater warfare between fellow tribes. It was somewhere within these fissures, slipped in the greatest curse up to then – the English colonisers.
From the seventeenth century came a wave of predominantly English and Scots settlers who were not interested in short-term fixes of boom or bust, gold or fur. Land was their calling. Within two centuries from when they landed and founded Jamestown in 1607, til they declared independence in 1776 from Britain, the eastern seaboard was now dominated by settlers. But it was merely a slither of land, while the vast bulk of the continent remained in the hands of the indigenous natives. With frightening speed, this was to change over the next one hundred years. After independence in 1783 and the formation of the United States, Thomas Jefferson’s looked west and conceived ‘Manifest Destiny’, a quasi-spiritual, romantic and political belief of their entitlement to spread their nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But what to do with the hundreds of thousands of land dwellers, who occupied the space, that stood between them and Jefferson’s American dream? And so began a policy to defraud and cheat the natives from their land, through military force, physical displacement or most damaging of all through land treaties, the majority of them illegal and many other agreed under coercion. The first trick is to declare the land empty. It means the Native Americans were perceived at not having any real claim on the land, ignoring the fact that native Americas had evolved into nomadic people who followed the hunt and used the season’s bounty to navigate their journeys. A land for a people, for a people without a land. This was the catch phrase the Zionists used to justify their own expansion into the middle east after World War II. The Arab natives of Palestine, like the Native Americas, would see a trickle turn into a tsunami, with deadly consequences.
The treaty issue is central to debate even today in America where Native American tribes are looking for the reinstatement of their lands, particularly areas of spiritual importance such as their burial grounds. Perhaps an obvious question to ask is why bother with treaties at all? Just take it by force. At that point the USA had to share the continent with the Spanish in Florida and California, the French from the gulf of Mexico to Canada, the Russians in Alaska and British stronghold of Oregon. Acquiring new lands, ‘legally,’ would ensure rightful claim to the lands for the USA. Treaties were agreed by government officials, local community leaders, conmen and speculators. But what weakened the Indian resolve was that the aforementioned would oftentimes negotiate with Native Americans who had no authority to do so in the first place, without consultation with their elders or community. Sadly, the Native Americans own rivalry and individual culture, and different languages meant they lacked a united approach in who to stop the land grab. Take just one example. Three million acres were purchased by US officials in Ohio and Indiana for pennies per acres, when three chiefs acted independently of their communities’ consent. Even where treaties were made legally, they were voided and broken by the advancing Americans. A discovery of gold or minerals, an easier route found going west, an abundant valley of nature’s riches, would lead to a redefining of the borders and yet another treaty would be made forcing the natives into a westward retreat. They themselves now were in direct conflict with other tribes whom territories they trespassed on. This is only the beginning of one of the darkest chapters in history. Forced marches, deliberate starvation, military campaigns and the attempt to erase the native American culture – in a new nation that promised land, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as long as you were not a Native American – will be discussed next month.
In last month’s article, Kieran Doyle looked at the period when Europeans began to colonise North America and the aggressive targeting of native tribes after the formation of the United States, In the second of this two-part article, he examines the factors that led to the detrimental effect this had on the indigenous peoples.
Let’s put it in context. By the time George Washington finished up as president in 1797, the territorial expanse of the US was approximately fifteen to twenty percent of what it would become. Indeed, both the French and Spanish, dominated two thirds of the landmass, more in name more than any concrete settlement. Within these spaces and huge sways of what was still defined as ‘unclaimed’ territory – as if it was just there for the taking – lived hundreds of thousands of native Americans. Washington has already forced eastern tribes to agree that their land ‘lay within’ the United States. It was a terrible precedent to set, one they had no idea would unleash the hungry beast that was American imperialism.
The French territories were bought under the ‘Louisiana Purchase’ of 1804, (This French territory ran from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border). It was sold by Napoleon so he could raise money to wage wars on the European continent, one he was much more interested in colonising. What was hitherto a French territory in nothing more than name, became the next area of potential expansion for the millions that were flooding into USA, fuelling its appetite for resources, people power and control over the continent. Within a decade, Florida, formerly of Spain, was in their hands. As Spanish fortunes continued to plummet, this former world power crumbled, losing their massive share to Mexico and the Texas Republic. The juggernaut of the US was not to be stopped. It ate steadily into that Mexican landmass and the northwestern regions, creating ‘territories’ that by mid-century would officially become states. In the decades after the civil war that ended in 1865, many more lands were given statehood, in the ever-expanding behemoth that was the USA. If one was to look at a map of the continent in 1907, it looks almost like the map we see today, save a few territories including one called ‘Indian territory’ (modern day Oklahoma). It’s a striking image. The Indian Territory is suffocated, surrounded and assaulted on all sides. The image itself is an embodiment of their retreat and herding into a land pen, away from the great lands they once roamed. But that too in time, would be taken.
During president Jefferson’s term, followed by presidents Adams and Monroes – coercion, bribes, demonstrations and threats of force were already eroding Indian lands at pace. But not quick enough, as the colonists swarmed west demanding more and more land and access. They needed something more radical. The three ways the Native Americans lost their tribal land were through treaties, legislation passed by Congress and forced removal. In the 1820s, Congress had set up the ‘Indian Civilisation Fund’. Its aim was to break up the tribal lands and communal ownership by introducing an alien concept to the indigenous peoples – private ownership. This was not a benign move or one created for the benefit the Indians. If they could get Indians to settle on plots and farms, then they hoped they would remain there and open up massive sways of ‘unclaimed land’. The treaties were employed to undermine that sense of community, which was problematic for westerners who believed in individualism and private ownership. This practice carried right up to the early 20th century and was enshrined in Dawes Act, which officially opened up the last reservations land, to be used for white purposes.
It was under the ambitious and immoral leadership of Andrew Jackson, where we begin to see the first steps towards the ethnic cleansing of the Indian nations. Like all clever politicians, wrapping it up in both legislation and legal rulings, he legitimised it in ways that absolved it from what it really was – the deliberate attempt to eradicate these people. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 gave powers to the federal government to forcibly remove whole tribes despite their occupation of those territories. The supreme court of the USA, (which even today makes outlandish decisions like granting Trump political immunity) decided, in the Cherokee Nation v Georgia ruling, that Indians were merely ‘domestic and dependent nations’ meaning they were not independent of the USA so could not make legitimate land claims against any state authority. This ultimately squeezed the Indians into ever-shrinking territories in the worst land and remotest places, until, gold or the increasing growth of train transport, would uproot them all over again.
One of the more infamous episodes of the forced removal was the ‘trail of tears’ deportations. Officially the US government were returning Black Hawk Indians who had the audacity to return ‘home’ to their tribal lands in what is today Illinois. It wasn’t simply a homing instinct that drew them, but more a necessity. Their example is symptomatic of so many others. It began when they were moved to lands where the soil was worthless and infertile. Soon starvation took over. They moved home. But their pleas to remain on their tribal lands in Illinois fell on deaf ears and, in 1840, the 2,000-strong tribe was forced at gunpoint to leave on foot and under pain of death in terrible weather conditions. Travelling hundreds of miles with infants, children and hungry masses of bodies, only a couple of hundred survived. Ninety per cent of the Black Hawks perished.
After brutalisation and many years of wars and induced starvation, there were still many Indians that continued to live in the USA. The next phase to eradicate Indians involved attempts to erase their culture. In 1891, Congress passed legislation forcing all Indian children to attend classes at home or in the boarding schools, where they were forced to abandon their own tribal culture, dress sense and languages in exchange for western ones, including the mandatory learning of English. Ironically, this move transpired to be a unifying force for that generation. Up to that time, many native Americans spoke a variety of languages and had no common tongue to progress their common grievances. Learning English allowed them to find one voice to communicate their problems and unite for civil rights in the 20th century.
With the days of the wild west well and truly over in the 20th century, the indigenous peoples of the plains were either ensnared inside their reservations or forced to assimilate into white culture. As bad as things were and continued to be for black people and former slaves, the 14th amendment that was added to the constitution in 1868, at least allowed former slaves to become citizens of the country. But not Indians. Successive governments had manoeuvred around any concession because the constitution did not cover ‘tribal lands’. It wasn’t until 1924 that Indians were recognised as citizens with the passing of the Synder Act. Even then, it took decades more for them to attain voting rights. In 1928, when the average income per capita for Americas was $1,360, Indians were earning between $100 and $200. Living conditions were so bad on reservations that health issues became epidemic. The US government’s response was to give an annual budget of $760,000, which amounted to fifty cent per person to cover their health treatment. You didn’t misread that. 50 cents per person. The sands of time were shifting in the 1960s, most famously with Martin Luther king who helped secure two civil rights bills, which hugely improved life for black people. In 1968 the Indian Civil Rights bill was a groundbreaking one for Indians but only brought them on par with rights that Americans had enjoyed for centuries – giving them, freedom of assembly, of religion and the right to be tried in court by a jury.
Cowboy and Indian movies were a staple of my youth. Inevitably savage Indian tribes would attack the harmless wagons of settlers going west, before being saved by John Wayne and the Cavalry. Cowboy and Indian figurines were the toys of that era and we endlessly played out what we saw on the big screens; massacring our Indian figurines painted in various shades of red. The natural order had been realigned and civilised life could continue. I often wonder if the subliminal colonisation of brains began in childhood, with these images and narratives presented as cultural norms. Perhaps these musings are for Freud and the psychologists of the world but this supposition is not without merit. The white supremacy mindset, despite the fact that white people globally, are in the minority, has found ways to thrive and exist. No doubt these early childhood experiences helped lay the foundation for generations of people.
