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New book confronts painful history of indigenous peoples
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IN “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States,” a searing history of the tragic encounter between America’s Native Americans and Western settlers, author Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has succeeded in altering my perception of US history.
While there is very little information in her book that was new to me as an American historian, it was her interpretation of those events that allowed me to see anew.
While I have long regarded the treatment of the Native Americans as one of the most shameful passages in our history, I nonetheless considered that what happened to them was more or less an inevitable outcome of the steady flood of settlers that began pouring into the interior of the United States before the Revolutionary War.
Dunbar-Ortiz has upended this simplistic interpretation of the past by linking the treatment of Native Americans to larger unsettling patterns in both US and European history.
The fate of Native Americans, therefore, cannot be “safely” relegated only to the “dead past,” as the ideas and behavior that ruined the lives of America’s indigenous peoples continue to infect American domestic and foreign policy.
Many Americans tend to view their past through rose-colored lenses. Despite making many mistakes, this interpretation holds, we have nonetheless achieved an ever-greater degree of freedom and equality for our own people, and have faithfully fought to safeguard and achieve the same liberties for others.
Dunbar-Ortiz reminds us that a fuller, more honest, version would include elements that challenge this comfortingly simplistic picture, such as the near genocidal wars against the Native Americans, the many ways the legacy of slavery still weighs upon blacks, the sad fate of those who cannot sufficiently “compete” in our capitalistic society, and all those whose priorities are not determined by money or ownership.
Mythic versions
Unfortunately, however, Americans have an especially difficult time understanding the Native American perspective. A century of mythic versions of the America West (as depicted in novels, TV shows and movies) has conveyed a romanticized, distorted version of the past, in which noble settlers battled hostile Indians — aided by pistol-wielding cowboys and brave federal troopers — in order to subdue an “untamed land.”
In reality, Dunbar-Ortiz writes, it was white settlers in the West who were the intruders and, rather than “taming” the wilderness, they expelled from it people who had lived there for centuries. Rather than “discovering new lands” they seized control over rivers, streams and farm fields that were already productive. The purpose of the US cavalry was less to “protect civilians from ruthless savages” than to ensure the process of eliminating Native American peoples’ presence.
Very significantly, the author views US history in the larger context of Western Europe’s established pattern of aggressively expropriating native lands, then subjecting native peoples to forms of colonial rule, and finally using many of them as their agents in occupying others’ lands. Pointedly, these “native” peoples, as the author uses the term, also included Europe’s own poor.
She illustrates this through a brief overview of Spanish conquests in the southern Americas, the industrialization-driven displacement of rural people throughout Europe who were uprooted from their small land-holdings and economically forced/enticed to work in the cities, and the taking of Ireland’s lands by the British elite.
These last victims were my ancestors who, like other displaced Irish, subsequently immigrated to the United States where they, and other poor people from Europe, became the agents of ongoing colonization of the new country’s interior. In a painful irony, they then became the oppressors as they, in turn, displaced Native Americans from the territory they had long used for hunting and farming.
While this is a different interpretation of “class warfare” than that I had learned from studying Marx, it does explain a lot!
What now?
Another powerful driver of the American myth is that we Americans are a “covenanted people,” a thought interwoven with the image of “a new people coming to a virgin land.”
From the earliest colonial settlements along the East coast, Europeans declared that they were being given a new chance by God to establish a righteous society and that — by extension — their success represented the “last, best hope of mankind.”
There has thus been a definite religious dimension powering American expansion in which many proclaimed that it was our self-proclaimed Manifest Destiny to fill up the continent.
As early as 1823, in the Monroe Doctrine, the new Republic expressed this “destiny” by warning that the entire Western Hemisphere was off-limits to European intervention. Just over 20 years later, these words morphed into violence as the US seized half of Mexico after the Mexican American war of 1846, and — 50 years after that — vaulted overseas with the Spanish-American war of 1898.
Today, American self-interest has expanded to seemingly cover most of the world!
Beneficial reassessments
Dunbar-Ortiz believes that if the American citizenry honestly confronted the reality of their history, it could lead to beneficial reassessments of much that unconsciously influences current domestic and foreign policy. We might even choose to turn from the path of believing that everyone should cherish our understanding of freedom.
But changing attitudes alone, however important, will not suffice. If justice is the measure, then substantial restoration of previous Native American lands to their rightful owners is called for.
The fact that this would result in a substantial reconsideration of what is “American territory,” including the forfeiture to Native Americans of millions of acres of land, including many national parks and forests, could contribute to a renewed sense of inclusive discovery of who constitutes the American people.
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