Native American Nakba
1776-1917 Book Excerpt 3
So I’ve spent the past six years working on a book, tentatively called “American Empire: the first 100 years”. Each chapter is focused on a decade since the US took over the world in 1917.
This week I’ve been focusing on the 1940s and the 1950s, to the point where I don’t want to distract myself with contemporary commentary. So I’m publishing a third excerpt from the first chapter, which covers US history up until 1917. Here are the links to parts 1 and 2 if you missed them:
This excerpt picks up right where part 2 leaves off. I hope you find it worthwhile! I’ve been working on this for a while…
This book is not interested in the first century or so of US history, because back then we lacked one of the most crucial aspects of US empire: world control. Heck, we didn’t even control Central America. Prior to 1917, the United States is best understood as being part of the “informal” British Empire. We didn’t have a world-beating navy. We didn’t have a world reserve currency. We didn’t even have a central bank for most of the time before 1913. We were a very dispensable nation. We did not matter to most of the world.
A Continental Empire
We did matter to Native Americans, however. If you drop the “global” or “world” prefix to empire, you can say we were an empire from the very start. In fact, you can make a pretty strong argument that the United States is the most impressive and durable of the 19th century mini-empires. In 1789, the year the constitution was ratified, the United States were a network of settlements a few tens of miles, or at most a few hundreds of miles away from the Atlantic Coast. We obviously didn’t get to be a continental nation-state of 48 separate jurisdictions without some serious old school imperial-style growth.
The US-Soviet conflict of the 20th century was set up by 19th century expansion. Tsarist Russia rolled up Central Asia and kicked China around almost as devastatingly as the US rampaged across North America and expropriated parts of Mexico. As this was happening in the 1800s, people could see that Russia and the US were big winners, and they could see the shape of the 20th century conflict to come. But at the end of that conflict, after 1989, the Russians had to give away 300 years worth of their winnings, east and west. All the other 19th century empires are now dead and buried, but not the United States. Only the more fantastical sorts of science fiction can imagine a Soviet-style crack up in North America.
The period between the US civil war and 1910 saw some very serious imperial steps beyond the continental United States. The purchase of Alaska in 1867, the Annexation of Hawaii in 1898, and most importantly the Spanish-American war of 1898 added significantly to formal US empire. Beating the Spanish added Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico to official US territory. Suddenly the US became a serious imperial player in Latin America and the Pacific in ways it had not been before. “Informal” US empire in these regions, involving unbalanced trade relations, gunboat diplomacy, and semi-colonial investment projects, was already a factor in the second half of the 1800s, but the 1898 war against Spain super-charged all of this. Deeply invasive US relations with Cuba, China, Japan, and many other countries predated 1898, but were all accelerated by the Spanish war. These interactions would have tremendous later implications.
But we will only briefly deal with these regions and countries in this preliminary chapter for two reasons. The first reason is a simplified narrative. Rather than cover each country decade by decade in 12 different chapters, I will tell each story at the point at which it became central to the wider narrative of US empire. Cuba’s centuries long intertwined history with the US will be covered in the chapter dedicated to the 1960s. Israel and Iran will be covered in the 1990s chapter, the decade that conflict began to absorb way too much US attention. Unlucky Mexico’s story will be presented in two different chapters. First the 1910s, covering the period up to and including the Mexican Revolution, and then in the chapter dedicated to the 2000s, covering the 20th century and the disastrous fiction that is the US-Mexico border.
The second reason we are not covering these regions in detail is because, again, the United States was simply not the dominant player anywhere. Before 1917, the United States empire, like the French Empire, the Russian, the Japanese, the German and all the others, was not the most important factor anywhere. The United States was probably not even the most important factor in its own economy. The power that mattered most was the British empire.
The formation of the smaller, continental US Empire is not the focus of this book. But there are two things I want to mention. First a similarity to what is going on today, and then a stark difference between 19th century US empire, and the US imperial world system of this century and the last. The similarity is in the way we have treated rivals, since the first Englishmen landed in the 1600s to swindle a Pequot, down to “great power competition” with Russia and China today. The difference is in the processes and beneficiaries of continental vs. global empire. It’s a difference that offers the tantalizing possibility that global US empire doesn’t have to be as genocidal as continental US empire was.
Native American Nakba
On March 8, 1782, 96 Christians were murdered by a band of bloodthirsty savages. 39 of the victims were children. On the night of March 7th these pacifist men, women and children were allowed by their executioners to gather together to pray and sing hymns. The next morning they were all killed, and some of the 29 women were also raped before they were clubbed to death. The murdered Christians were Native Americans. The bloodthirsty savages were members of the Pennsylvania militia who were of European origin.
The Gnadenhauten massacre always sticks with me. It shouldn’t bother me more that these indigenous victims were Christians, but it does. These people had done everything that they had been asked. They had given up their heritage. They had decided to worship European gods, and fashion their lives in European ways. And they were slaughtered anyway.
Both the standard and revisionist histories of settler-indigenous relations emphasize conflict. Whether you prefer a more John Wayne “heroic cowboys v. savage Indians” view, a more Howard Zinn “agonize about genocide” approach, or the recently (inexplicably) celebrated historian Pekka Hamalainen’s “Akshully the Indians won” approach, you are talking about fighting. But most of the history of Native American and European interaction in the United States was not fighting.
Massacres are a defining characteristic of this founding American genocide. But most of them were clustered around particularly fraught regions and times. Horrors like Gnadenhauten were much more likely to happen during a war. Gnadenhauten was just one of many bloody apocalypses inflicted on North America’s indigenous during the American Revolution. The Iroquois confederacy, a centuries old rival and partner of the British and French empires was wiped out almost as an afterthought. In 1779, American General John “…Sullivan laid waste the greatest Indian civilization in eastern America to no strategic purpose at all.”[1] But in between wars there were years, even decades, when peaceful coexistence and a sort of assimilation were the norm. Consider for a moment how much peaceful development and trade there must have been, and for how long, for entire communities of Christian indigenous pacifists to spring up.
Recent revisionist histories focused on Native American power go too far, but they carry an important truth. From the fur industry to frontier security, none of the initial centuries of British or French imperial development in North America would have been possible without the eager participation of Native American populations. In South America the Spanish found cities of gold and mountains of silver that they could smash and grab. The English had to be more strategic. They had to warp indigenous economies around European fur and farming interests to profit. And that’s exactly what they did.
From the perspective of Boston, the two greatest 17th century conflicts with Native Americans were the Pequot war from 1636-1638 and King Philip’s war between 1675-1678. From most of four centuries on, those dates can seem quite close, but two generations were born between those wars! Lucrative trading relationships were built up between tribes and settlers, leading to a brisk exchange in goods and ideas. King Philip, or Metacom, was the Native American leader who led the conflict that was probably the Indians’ last real chance to kick out the English. Metacom was known to wear European clothes and sell farm products in Boston prior to the war.[2]
Much is made of the way that colonists forced Native Americans into dependence on alcohol, a substance that indigenous societies had as little resistance to as they did to smallpox. But the economic life of North America was forced into dependence on colonial priorities long before white people got anywhere near the center of the continent. European demands for fur were reorganizing far reaches of modern-day Canada and the United States a century before those countries were even imagined. European horses and guns penetrated the continent much faster than European people did. These European tools built new indigenous empires that stood for centuries before being crushed in the late 1800s.
In a certain light this can make US history seem even grimmer than the relentless genocide litany we get from folks like Howard Zinn. The US crushing of Native Americans wasn’t just those great storms of disease and massacre. The lived experience for most of those four centuries was one of prosperous economic interdependence… until the US decided we could make more money by cutting out a particular group and turned overnight from friendly traders back into genocidaires.
The history of US treatment of Native Americans is a serial story of largely successful integration and assimilation, followed by crushing betrayal. Over and over again, indigenous people have done what was asked of them, found a way to mold themselves into an economic niche, found prosperity on the white man’s terms… and then had it ripped away from them.
[1] P. 267 McDougall, Walter A. Freedom Just Around the Corner, A New American History 1585-1828
[2] P. 125 Peterson, Mark The City State of Boston
I hope you enjoyed that (rather depressing) excerpt! Let me know what you think in the comments.