American Settler Colonialism

HONOR NATIVE LAND: A GUIDE AND CALL TO ACKNOWLEDGMENT

IN COUNTRIES SUCH AS NEW ZEALAND, AUSTRALIA, CANADA, AND AMONG TRIBAL NATIONS IN THE U.S., it is commonplace, even policy, to open events and gatherings by acknowledging the traditional Indigenous inhabitants of that land. While some individuals and cultural and educational institutions in the United States have adopted this custom, the vast majority have not. Together, we can spark a movement to change that.

We call on all individuals and organizations to open public events and gatherings with acknowledgment of the traditional Native inhabitants of the land.

Acknowledgment is a simple, powerful way of showing respect and a step toward correcting the stories and practices that erase Indigenous people’s history and culture and toward inviting and honoring the truth. Imagine this practice widely adopted: imagine cultural venues, classrooms, conference settings, places of worship, sports stadiums, and town halls, acknowledging traditional lands. Millions would be exposed—many for the first time—to the names of the traditional Indigenous inhabitants of the lands they are on, inspiring them to ongoing awareness and action.

For more than five hundred years, Native communities across the Americas have demonstrated resilience and resistance in the face of violent efforts to separate them from their land, culture, and each other. They remain at the forefront of movements to protect Mother Earth and the life it sustains. Today, corporate greed and federal policy push agendas to extract wealth from the earth, degrading sacred land in blatant disregard of treaty rights. Acknowledgment is a critical public intervention, a necessary step toward honoring Native communities and enacting the much larger project of decolonization and reconciliation. Join us in adopting, calling for, and spreading this practice. 

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Source: teachandtransform

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Research The Native History of Your Land

https://native-land.ca/

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Table of Contents

Colonialism
Native American Colonialism
Native Issues Today
Whitewashing Native Atrocities
Columbus Day – Thanksgiving – Redskins
African American Colonialism

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Colonialism

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Guardian: The West was Built on Racism

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Colonialism

“Colonialism the control by one power over a dependent area or people. In practice, colonialism is when one country violently invades and takes control of another country, claims the land as its own, and sends people “settlers” to live on that land.” Jamila Osman – Teen Vogue

Major waves of Western colonialism

• Doctrine of Discovery (1450s – 1800s)
  • Began 15th century when European countries colonized lands in North/South America
    • 1493 Catholic Doctrine of Discovery allowed any land inhabited by non-Christians could be “discovered”, legally conquered, and exploited by Christian rulers became the basis of all
    • Millions of Native Americans, over 90% population, died from European diseases and brutality
• Scramble for Africa (1881 – 1914)
  • Occupation, division, colonization of African territory by European powers during New Imperialism period
    • Artificial borders split cultural groups, resulting in fierce ethnic tensions and conflicts
    • Among the most brutal of colonial regimes was Belgium King Leopold II “the Butcher of Congo”
      • Well-documented acts of violence against the Congolese people resulted in an estimated 10 million deaths
• American Imperialism (1890s to present)
  • 19-20^th century US policy extending political, economic, military control over areas beyond its boundaries
    • Manifest Destiny, Monroe Doctrine, Westward Expansion, Hawaii, Spanish American War, Mexican–American War
      • Past US colonies: Philippines (1898-1946), Cuba (1899–1902), 1903–79  Panama Canal Zone (1903–79), Río Rico, Tamaulipas (1906–72), Corn Islands (1914–7), Dominican Republic (1916–24,1965–66), Haiti (1915–34)
      • Current US colonies: Puerto Rico, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, 9 uninhabited places
• Colonialism brought
  • Diseases, genocide, ethnic cleansing, the slave economy, settler colonialism, apartheid laws, cultural assimilation, starvation and manifest destiny
  • Indigenous political, economic, social institutions and culture was decimated

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Colonialism

• Roots of racism today
• Colonialism is based on the institutional theft, exploitation, dehumanization, genocide and enslavement of people of color by Western Civilizations
• Many of our institutions today were established by colonialism, entrenched with colonial values such as white supremacy and exploitation
• Many injustices still felt in our economic, political, and social institutions can be directly trace back to colonialism

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Settler Colonialism

Specific formation of colonialism in which people come to a land inhabited by (Indigenous) people and declare that land to be their new home. Settler colonialism is about the pursuit of land, not just labor or resources. Settler colonialism is a persistent societal structure, not just an historical event or origin story for a nation-state. Settler colonialism has meant genocide of Indigenous peoples and the reconfiguring of Indigenous land into settler property. In the United States and other slave estates, it has also meant the theft of people from their homelands (in Africa) to become property of settlers to labor on stolen land.” Aimee Carrillo Rowe and Eve Tuck

“Settler colonialism is a structure, not an historic event, whose endgame is always the elimination of the Natives in order to acquire their land, which it does in countless seen and unseen ways.” Dina Gilio-Whitaker, Beacon Broadside

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Teen Vogue: Colonialism, Explained

“Colonialism is defined as “control by one power over a dependent area or people.” In practice, colonialism is when one country violently invades and takes control of another country, claims the land as its own, and sends people — “settlers” — to live on that land.

There were two great waves of colonialism in recorded history. The first wave began in the 15th century, during Europe’s Age of Discovery. During this time, European countries such as Britain, Spain, France, and Portugal colonized lands across North and South America. The motivations for the first wave of colonial expansion can be summed up as God, Gold, and Glory: God, because missionaries felt it was their moral duty to spread Christianity, and they believed a higher power would reward them for saving the souls of colonial subjects; gold, because colonizers would exploit resources of other countries in order to bolster their own economies; and glory, since European nations would often compete with one another over the glory of attaining the greatest number of colonies.

Colonial logic asserted that a place did not exist unless white people had seen it and testified to its existence, but European colonists did not actually discover any land. The “New World,” as it was first called by Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian navigator and cartographer, was not new at all: People had been living and thriving in the Americas for centuries.

Yet, in many history books, Europe’s expansion is remembered as exploration, and the men who helmed ships that landed in foreign countries — and proceeded to commit violence and genocide against native peoples — are remembered as heroes. One of these men, an Italian explorer named Christopher Columbus, even has a federally recognized holiday to honor him. Columbus thought he was on his way to Asia, but found himself in the Caribbean instead. The first indigenous people he came across were the Taíno, who accounted for the majority of people living on the island of Hispaniola (which is now divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic). They had a highly evolved and complex culture. But this did not stop Columbus from claiming the island and its inhabitants for Spain. By 1550, a mere 58 years after he first landed on the island, what was once a thriving culture and community was severely decimated by European diseases and the brutality of a newly instated slave economy.

The second wave of colonial expansion began during the 19th century, centering around the African continent. In what is called the Scramble for Africa, European nations such as Britain, France, Portugal, and Spain sliced up the continent like a pie, creating arbitrary borders and boundaries, and claiming large swaths of land for themselves. These artificial borders split cultural groups, resulting in fierce ethnic tensions that have had devastating ramifications throughout the continent. Indigenous political, economic, and social institutions were decimated, as were traditional ways of life, which were deemed inferior.

Among the most brutal of colonial regimes was that of Belgium under King Leopold II, known as “the Butcher of Congo.” His well-documented acts of violence against the Congolese people resulted in an estimated 10 million deaths. Belgium, like a lot of the white Western world, can directly attribute much of its wealth and prosperity to the exploitation and deaths of indigenous people of color.

The treatment of the indigenous people on the land now known as the United States is just as horrifying. The primarily British Europeans who settled here — just like the Europeans who settled in Africa and the rest of the Americas — overall did not care that there were people already living on the land. The majority did not want peace and harmony between cultures; they wanted the land for themselves. They did not want to share the abundant resources; they wanted to generate wealth to fill their own pockets. Most had no respect for indigenous cultures or histories; they wanted to enforce their own instead. These colonizers did not care that land was considered sacred and communal. Most believed that everything, including the earth, was meant to be bought and sold.

The Europeans who first settled along the East Coast of the United States believed it was their Manifest Destiny, or God-granted right, to claim territory for themselves and their posterity. As they spread across the entirety of the continental U.S., they pushed the indigenous populations — who had lived on and tended to the land for millennia — farther and farther west. Native Americans were moved to reservations — parcels of land that were barren and far from economic opportunities. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson, hailed by President Donald Trump and commemorated on the U.S. $20 bill, signed the Indian Removal Act, which led to the forced removal, relocation, and mass death of thousands of indigenous people. In 1838, the Cherokee were forced west by the U.S. government, which seized control of their land. Forced to walk thousands of miles, an estimated 4,000 Cherokees died on what would later come to be called the “Trail of Tears.” This historic loss of lives, land, and culture has led to what Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, social worker and professor, describes as historical trauma — intergenerational emotional and psychological damage.

The legacy of colonialism continues to manifest in obvious ways: Many of the world’s poorest countries are former European colonies. Walter Rodney’s groundbreaking book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa makes the claim that poverty on the continent can be traced back to European exploitation of African resources. In the United States, those living on reservations experience extraordinarily high poverty, alcoholism, unemployment, and suicide rates.

In less obvious ways, the violence of colonial thinking continues to shape the trajectories of countries that were once colonizers too. Colonizers believed the world was theirs for the taking, saw the masses of people as disposable, and believed that nothing mattered more than the currency in a white man’s pocket. As the world’s top 1% continue to hoard the majority of the earth’s resources, and the unending quest for profit trumps the needs of the majority of people, it becomes clear that colonialism is not just a relic of the past.”

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ThoughtCO: American Settler Colonialism 101

The term “colonialism” is possibly one of the most confusing, if not contested, concepts in American history and international relations theory. Most Americans would likely be hard-pressed to define it beyond the “colonial period” of US history when early European immigrants established their colonies in the New World. The assumption is that since the founding of the United States everybody who is born within the national boundaries is considered American citizens with equal rights, whether or not they consent to such citizenship. In this regard, the United States is normalized as the dominant power to which all its citizens, indigenous and non-indigenous alike, are subject. Although in theory a democracy “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” the nation’s actual history of imperialism betrays its democratic principles. This is the history of American colonialism.

Two Kinds of Colonialism

Colonialism as a concept has its roots in European expansionism and the founding of the so-called New World. The British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and other European powers established colonies in new places they “discovered” from which to facilitate trade and extract resources, in what can be thought of as the earliest stages of what we now call globalization. The mother country (known as the metropole) would come to dominate indigenous populations through their colonial governments, even when the indigenous population remained in the majority for the duration of colonial control. The most obvious examples are in Africa, such as the Dutch control over South Africa and French control over Algeria, and in Asia and the Pacific Rim, such as British control over India and Fiji and French domination over Tahiti.

Beginning in the 1940s the world saw a wave of decolonization in many of Europe’s colonies as indigenous populations fought wars of resistance against colonial domination. Mahatma Gandhi would come to be recognized as one of the world’s greatest heroes for leading India’s fight against the British. Likewise, Nelson Mandela is today celebrated as a freedom fighter for South Africa where he was once considered a terrorist. In these instances European governments were forced to pack up and go home, relinquishing control to the indigenous population.

But there were some places where colonial invasion decimated indigenous populations through foreign disease and military domination to the point where if the indigenous population survived at all, it became the minority while the settler population became the majority. The best examples of this are in North and South America, the Caribbean islands, New Zealand, Australia, and even Israel. In these cases, scholars have recently applied the term “settler colonialism.”

Settler Colonialism Defined

Settler colonialism has best been defined as more of an imposed structure than a historical event. This structure is characterized by relationships of domination and subjugation that become woven throughout the fabric of society and even becomes disguised as paternalistic benevolence. The objective of settler colonialism is always the acquisition of indigenous territories and resources, which means the native must be eliminated. This can be accomplished in overt ways including biological warfare and military domination but also in more subtle ways; for example, through national policies of assimilation.

As scholar Patrick Wolfe has argued, the logic of settler colonialism is that it destroys in order to replace. Assimilation involves the systematic stripping away of indigenous culture and replacing it with that of the dominant culture. One of the ways it does this in the United States is through racialization. Racialization is the process of measuring indigenous ethnicity in terms of blood degree; when indigenous people intermarry with non-indigenous people they are said to lower their indigenous (Indian or Native Hawaiian) blood quantum. According to this logic, when enough intermarriage has occurred there will be no more natives within a given lineage. It does not take into account personal identity based on cultural affiliation or other markers of cultural competence or involvement.

Other ways the United States carried out its assimilation policy included the allotment of Indian lands, forced enrollment in Indian boarding schools, termination and relocation programs, the bestowal of American citizenship, and Christianization.

Narratives of Benevolence

It can be said that a narrative based on the benevolence of the nation guides policy decisions once domination has been established in the settler colonial state. This is evident in many of the legal doctrines at the foundation of federal Indian law in the US.

Primary among those doctrines is the doctrine of Christian discovery. The doctrine of discovery (a good example of benevolent paternalism) was first articulated by Supreme Court Justice John Marshall in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), in which he opined that Indians had no right to title on their own lands in part because the new European immigrants “bestow[ed] on them civilization and Christianity.” Likewise, the trust doctrine presumes that the United States, as the trustee over Indian lands and resources, will always act with the best interests of Indians in mind. Two centuries of massive Indian land expropriations by the US and other abuses, however, betrays this idea.

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Challenging Christian Hegemony: Why Black Lives Haven’t Mattered: The Origins of Western Racism in Christian Hegemony

Dominant Christianity developed categories of people labeled “Other” going back to the year 381 C.E when the Roman Emperor Theodosius declared that Orthodox Christianity would be the only legitimate religion in the Roman Empire. At that point all pagans, Jews, and Christian heretics lost their civil rights and became targets of systematic violence. In the succeeding centuries, and especially after the first Crusades, able-bodied and healthy European heterosexual males with wealth developed a sense of themselves as the only fully legitimate Christians. Muslims, Jews, Pagans, women, homosexuals, people with disabilities, and the poor were relegated to the category of Other—inferior, polluting, dangerous, and capable of being used by the Devil to undermine God’s work in the world.[i] As historian Winthrop Jordan wrote, “Christianity was interwoven into [an Englishman’s] conception of his own nationality…. Being a Christian was not merely a matter of subscribing to certain doctrines; it was a quality inherent in oneself and in one’s society. It was interconnected with all the other attributes of normal and proper men.”[ii] The major division in the west was between legitimate Christians and others.

It was in Spain during the 14th and 15th centuries, because of concern about the sincerity of Jewish and Muslim conversos (former Jews or Muslims who were forced to converted to Catholicism), that the church developed a theory of biological purity defining who was Christian. For example, Marcos Garcia preached in 1449 that:

“All converts who belong to the Jewish race or those who have descended from  it – that is, who were born as Jews, or are sons, grandsons, great-grandsons, or great-great-grandsons of Jews who were baptized … including those [converts] who descended newly and recently from that most evil and damned stock, are presumed, according to the testimonies of the Scriptures, to be infidels, and suspect of the faith. From which follows that the vice of infidelity is not presumed to be purged until the fourth generation.”[iii]

The racialization of Jews and Muslims soon became legalized under the concept of limpieza de sangre (blood purity).[iv] Jews and Muslims were believed to be separate races than Christians. Even if they converted, the church claimed the taint of their Jewishness or Muslimness took generations to become diluted and to disappear. The policy of the Spanish crown eventually became the complete elimination of all Jews and Muslims, and even of Christians who had a drop of Jewish or Moorish blood in their veins. It was the task of the Inquisition to turn Spain into a pure Christian society by eliminating all inferior races.

Throughout Europe – not just isolated to Spain – the Inquisition became a popular phenomenon orchestrated and enforced by religious authority and state power and with widespread public participation. Crowds of thousands would turn out for hangings, burnings, beheadings and various forms of torture, much as crowds of white Christians turned out for lynchings in the US centuries later. Many times, mobs would apprehend people accused of heresy and murder them on the spot, sometimes destroying entire communities of Jews.

This theory of blood impurity/racial inferiority was subsequently used to justify the inferior treatment, murder and enslavement of Africans, indigenous peoples in the Western hemisphere. For example, after Bacon’s Rebellion when Virginia decreed in 1667 that converted slaves could be kept in bondage because they had heathen ancestry, the justification for Black servitude changed from religious status to a racialized one.²⁹

A series of Papal Bulls declared that Christian nations were free in law and by divine approval to lay claim to what were called unoccupied lands (terra nullius) or lands belonging to so-called heathens or pagans. Slavery was divinely sanctioned in these statements. Again the intertwined economic and religious motivation is clear. Slavery would be of economic benefit to the colonizers, but this was justified by their responsibility to convert and thereby civilize the enslaved people.

As Africans and Native Americans began to be converted to Christianity, such a simple distinction between Christian and non-Christian was no longer useful – at least as a legal and political difference. In addition, because Europeans, Native Americans and Africans often worked and lived together in similar circumstances of servitude, and resisted and rebelled together against the way they were treated, the landowning class began to implement policies to separate European workers from African and Native-American workers. Even in this early colonial period, racism was used to divide workers and make it easier for those in power to control working conditions. Drawing on already established popular classifications, whiteness, now somewhat separate from Christianity, was delineated more clearly as a legal category in the United States in the 17th century, and the concept of life-long servitude (slavery) was introduced from the West Indies and distinguished from various forms of shorter-term servitude (indenture). In response to Bacon’s rebellion and other uprisings, the ruling class, especially in the populous and dominant territory of Virginia, began to establish a clear racial hierarchy in the1660s and 70s.⁴ By the 1730s racial divisions were firmly in place legally and socially. Most blacks were enslaved and even free blacks had lost the right to vote, the right to bear arms and the right to bear witness. Blacks were also barred from participating in many trades during this period.

Meanwhile, whites had gained the right to corn, money, a gun, clothing and 50 acres of land at the end of indentureship. In other words, poor whites “gained legal, political, emotional, social, and financial status that was directly related to the concomitant degradation of Indians and Negroes.”[v]

Subsequently, slavery in the US became so widely accepted by Christian institutions, and so deeply intertwined with the economic interests of all whites, that for a long time it was dangerous to challenge. Few white Christians did so.

Some abolitionists used Christian texts to decry slavery, but they were countered by other texts sanctioning it, mostly written by ministers who, by one estimate, wrote nearly half of all pro-slavery tracts published in the US.[vi] Christian denominations, with only a few exceptions, supported slavery or claimed to be neutral.

Christianity blessed slavery at every step of the trade. For example, in present-day Ghana,a small church for baptizing Africans before they were taken onto ships was situated above Elmina Castle’s slave pens. Many of the ships had names such as Jesus, Good Ship Jesus, Angel, Grace of God,[vii] Christ the Redeemer, Blessed, John Evangelist, The Lord Our Savior and Trinity.[viii] In the early days of the slave trade the Portuguese branded every woman on her right arm with a cross.[ix] As Frederick Douglas so concisely explained:

“Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave-trade go hand in hand together. The slave prison and the church stand near each other. The clanking of fetters and the rattling of chains in the prison, and the pious psalm and solemn prayer in the church, may be heard at the same time. The dealer in the bodies and souls of men … gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit, and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity.”[x]

Eventually more Christians, including some denominations as a whole, joined the struggle against slavery. But even today, the lack of acknowledgment of and reparations for slavery continues to plague US society and the integrity of dominant Christianity. While slavery ended as a legal system after the Civil War, the enslavement of African-Americans in the US continued by another name, Jim Crow: a system of legal, social and economic bondage violently enforced, most notoriously by chain gangs, white race riots and lynching.

During the post Civil War era incidents of racial violence were sometimes spontaneous actions carried out by small groups of people. However, in the tradition of the Inquisition, more often lynchings were deliberate, organized, public Christian spectacles lasting days or even weeks. Flyers were printed, newspapers advertised them, and thousands attended, bringing families and friends, picnic food, cameras and buying memorabilia and souvenirs. Businesses closed down, public officials and church leaders were present and local police kept order.[xi]

Lynchings, as well as the white riots that murdered African-Americans and destroyed their houses and businesses (especially when they thrived) were a form of collective terrorism occurring periodically throughout the US. Just like witch burnings and Christian riots against Jews centuries earlier, they served to bond white communities to white Christian supremacy, reminding them as well what might happen if they protested its norms.

White Christian men are still in control and state-sponsored and sanctioned racial violence continues today in the form of police murder of African Americans and others, the disproportionate incarceration of people of color, lack of access to health care, educational and work opportunities, land grabs, residential segregation and gentrification, the elimination of communities of color from areas that whites desire to live in. The roots of racial and other forms of exploitation, discrimination, and violence today lie in the centuries of demonization of all those considered Other by dominant Christianity. The assertion that Black Lives Matter by African Americans and their allies is one current and powerful attempt to disrupt business as usual and claim full participation in our society. Now is the time for each of us to challenge this dominant Christian narrative because truly silence equals complicity.

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Native American Colonialism

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American Progress (1872) by John Gast

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Native Colonialism: Pre-US

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Interactive GIF on Stolen Native Land

• Population of the Americas pre-Columbus was 10-100 million
  • 2-7 million in North America
• Over 90% of the population was killed
  • Mostly by disease but many by European brutality
• North American Colonialism
  • Expansion of European corporations, backed by government armies, into foreign areas, with subsequent expropriation of lands and resources through brutal tactics such as:
    • Slavery
      • First American slaves were Native Americans
    • Massacres
      • Thanksgivings for the first century of colonialism were mainly about celebrating massacring Native Americans
    • Racism
      • Indigenous were inferior/not deserving of equal rights or protections
        • which justified taking their land and killing them
    • Dependencies
      • Destruction of sustainable societies and ecosystems creating dependency on European goods
        • Assimilation and Termination Policies
• Major reasons for the American Revolution
  • Westward expansion
    • First law of the US wasn’t the constitution but the Northwest Ordinance (2 months before)
      • Blueprint for colonizing “British protected” Native American land West of Appalachia mountain
    • Slavery
      • Majority Southern slave states were against the revolution until England outlawed slavery in 1772

“Although the reference to the “merciless Indian savages” (in Declaration of Independence) appealed to the “inhabitants of our frontiers,” Jefferson and others who signed the Declaration had their own reasons for detesting British policies relating to Native Americans and their lands. More than a decade earlier, in order to end a costly war to suppress an indigenous resistance movement led by the Ottawa war leader Pontiac, the king issued the Proclamation of 1763, which recognized indigenous ownership of lands west of the Appalachian mountains’ crest and prevented colonists from settling there. At first glance, ordinary settlers might be expected to have been the proclamation’s major opponents. Some settlers did object, but the most potent source of opposition came from colonial elites, especially in Virginia and Pennsylvania, who had invested in companies with claims to lands west of the boundary set by the proclamation. Unless those lands could be legally settled, land companies could not gain secure title to their claims. Investors would be left with nothing but the debts they had incurred to bet on getting rich. In 1767, George Washington, one of the era’s most passionate land speculators, predicted that the proclamation “must fall … in a few years.”…

…From 1776 to 1783, U.S. troops and colonial militias destroyed more than 70 Cherokee towns, 50 Haudenosaunee towns, and at least 10 multiethnic towns in the Ohio Valley, killing several hundred people (including civilians) and subjecting refugees to starvation, disease, and death. In the decades to come, U.S. presidents, Washington and Jefferson included, would call for the extermination of Native Americans who fought against dispossession. Several U.S. armies would try to do precisely that.” Jeffrey Ostler, The Shameful Final Grievance of the Declaration of Independence

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US Continued Oppressive Colonial Policies

• Brutality
  • Torture, Terror, Sexual abuse, Enslavement, Kidnapping
  • Californian Act for the Government and Protection of Indians (1850)
    • Vagrancy law that sold Natives into temporary slavery and removed their civil rights
• Ethnic cleansing
  • Military occupations, Reservations, treaties, allotments, massacres
  • Between 1776 – present, the US seized 1.5 billion acres from Natives
  • The Indian Removal Act (1830)
    • Military enforced ethnic cleansing of Cherokee, Creek other eastern Native American tribes to relocate west of the Mississippi River to give white settlers 25 million acres
• Settler Colonialism
  • Northwest Ordinance, Westward expansion, manifest destiny
  • The Homestead Act (1862)
    • Stole 270 million acres of Native land to white settlers
• Genocide
  • Massacres, forceful removals to places with no food, US policies eradicating the buffalo (military, bounties, etc), bounty hunting
    • California, Minnesota, Dakotas, etc. had at one time bounties on Native scalps

“The US Army sanctioned and actively endorsed the wholesale slaughter of bison herds. The federal government promoted bison hunting for various reasons, to allow ranchers to range their cattle without competition from other bovines, and to weaken the North American Indian population. The US government even paid a bounty for each bison skull recovered. Military commanders were ordering their troops to kill bison — not for food, but to deny Native Americans their own source of food. One general believed that bison hunters “did more to defeat the Indian nations in a few years than soldiers did in 50 years”. By 1880, the slaughter was almost over. Where millions of bison once roamed, only a few thousand animals remained.” Rare Historical Photos

1863 Winona, Minnesota Native Bounty

• Cultural assimilation and Family Separation
  • Native American boarding schools, Indian Termination Policies, Indian Child Welfare Removals, sterilization policies, systemic destruction of culture
  • Indian Child Welfare Act (1978)
    • Before ICWA, 25-35% Native children forcibly removed from families and placed in white homes or boarding schools to destroy Native culture (Kill Indian, Save Child)
  • Sterilization policies
    • During 1970s Indian Health Service has been accused of sterilizing at least 25% of Native American women who were between the ages of 15 and 44

VOX: How the US stole thousands of Native American children

 

Dennis Zotigh: Native Perspectives on the 40th Anniversary of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act

“Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That henceforth, it shall be the policy of the United States to protect and preserve for American Indians their inherent right of freedom to believe, express, and exercise the traditional religions of the American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut, and Native Hawaiians, including but not limited to access to sites, use and possession of sacred objects, and the freedom to worship through ceremonials and traditional rites.” —American Indian Religious Freedom Act, 1978

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA), Public Law No. 95-341, 92 Stat. 469, passed by a joint resolution of Congress and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on August 11, 1978. The First Amendment of the Constitution—the first article of the Bill of Rights—states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Yet Native Americans were not allowed to practice their religion and were persecuted for conducting tribal ceremonies integral to the continuation of traditional culture. At the same time, the federal government supported Indians’ Christian conversion.

Beginning no later than the early 1800s, the government promoted Christian education among Native Americans. During the 1870s, in what was seen as a progressive decision, the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant assigned 13 Protestant denominations to take responsibility for managing more than 70 Indian agencies on or near reservations (leading the Catholic Church quickly to establish the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions). In 1887, the Dawes Act dividing tribal lands into individual allotments included a provision allowing religious organizations working among Indians to keep up to 160 acres of federal land to support their missions.

The Department of Interior’s 1883 Code of Indian Offenses—de facto laws that applied only to American Indians—punished Indian dances and feasts by imprisonment or withholding food (treaty rations) for up to 30 days. Any medicine man convicted of encouraging others to follow traditional practices was to be confined in the agency prison for not less than 10 days or until he could provide evidence that he had abandoned his beliefs.

The code was amended 50 years after its adoption to remove the ban on dances and other customary cultural practices. Even so, despite the First Amendment’s guarantees, American Indians’ traditional religious practices were not protected until the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. The act also calls on federal departments and agencies to evaluate their policies and procedures in consultation with Native traditional leaders to protect and preserve Native American religious cultural rights and practices. The original law did not contain provisions for civil or criminal penalties for violations. As a result, additional legal protections were legislated, including the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments of 1994.

To find out how Native Americans feel about the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, I asked people from across Indian Country who participate in their ceremonial traditions to share their stories. Here are their responses:

Kenny Frost, Ute Sundance Chief: “Sadly, prior to this law, Native people were prohibited from practicing our Native religion. The meat of the law enacted the basic civil liberties to protect and preserve American Indians’ inherent right of freedom to believe, express, and exercise the traditional religious rights and cultural practices in Indian Country. These rights include, but are not limited to, access to sacred sites, freedom to worship through ceremonials, and the use and possession of objects considered sacred to Native people.

“This act brought to the forefront the need to continue a dialogue about how to safeguard for Native people our way of worshipping in our sacred places. This act was the first step to ensure that Native people can continue to worship. The extent to which this is or isn’t the case, however, depends on federal policies, as Native people today still cannot go to their sacred places on federal lands. More needs to be done in the education of federal agencies.

“Sadly, due to the displacement of Native people to Indian reservations, many grassroots people do not know where their traditional sacred areas and territory lands are located. Manifest Destiny is still alive today. We risk losing the knowledge of traditional places as those people with traditional knowledge leave this world. We must continue to strive to pass this knowledge on to future generations. We must educate our tribal leaders to fund and provide transportation for our people to travel to our traditional homelands and reconnect to our sacred places.”

Casey Camp-Horinek, Ponca Scalp Dance Society leader: “AIRFA is an oxymoron. How can a law be made around a religion and then be called ‘freedom’? Are we free to care for our own Eagle feathers without a permit from the U.S. government? No. Do we still need to prove who we are with a Certificate Degree of Indian Blood (C.D.I.B.)? Yes. Can we live freely within the Natural Laws and honor our one true Mother, the Earth? No, not when laws created by man are defining our relationship with Her. Balance must be restored through prayer and ceremony, not by written words in man’s attempt to override the Great Mystery’s original instructions.”

Katsi Cook, Mohawk elder and midwife: “I can’t help but think about our many elders who made this protection of our Indigenous and human right to Indigenous spiritual expression real and protected. The act codified the religious freedom of Indigenous peoples, including my Mohawk people. My ancestor Col. Louis Cook fought in George Washington’s army to ensure our Indigenous right to our ways of being and knowing. AIRFA is the historical antidote to the U.S. government’s civilization regulations of the 1880s, which wrote into law the deprivation of Indigenous people and nations of our religious freedom.”

Andrew Wakonse Gray, Osage Native American Church leader: “The first thing that comes to mind is that the Native American Church (NAC) is not a religion but a ceremony. At the turn of the 19th century, many tribes had to hide their ceremonial ways within a religious structure called the Native American Church. Back then, the government and non-Indian community were afraid of us, as our ceremonies became associated with rebellion. This misunderstanding resulted in the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890 and many other incidents. Many tribes took notice, including the Osage. We established our NAC ways with the help of John Wilson, a Caddo–Delaware Indian also known as Moonhead, and later of Francis Claremore, Blackdog, and others. We have included the NAC Ceremony into our Osage ways and have practiced our ways quite well. We still name, put our people away, use our pipe way by way of the corn shuck, paint, and follow other Osage ways. We believe in prayer. As my uncle used to say, ‘More prayer, more better.’”

Jackie Yellowtail, Crow Sundancer: “The AIRFA is very important to our traditional ways, which have survived thousands of years, even through times when we had to hide to practice them. Our family has kept these ways strong, as we were taught by those who have gone before us. This is the way it has been done for generations! Our sacred life ways continue so the people can live!”

Tim Tsoodle, Headsman of the Kiowa Gourd Clan: “This law allowed us to openly dance, sing, and mostly pray as our grandfathers did. It is ceremonies like the Kiowa Gourd Dance that make us Kiowa. To be able to do these things without outside interference is what makes the American Indian Religious Freedom Act significant.”

Shirod Younker, Coquille ceremonial woodcarver: “In 1954, Congress terminated the Coquille as a federally recognized tribe. In 1989, the Coquille Indian Tribe was reinstated as a newly ‘restored’ federally recognized tribe. Prior to this, our religion and language had been stripped from us. So at this time, we are trying to replicate what was taken away from us by government policies. We are indebted to our cousin tribes the Tolowa and Siletz who have shared ceremonies with us.”

“The American Indian Religious Freedom Act may not have affected my tribe directly, but it has had an impact on that door of reaffirming our shared ceremonial practices in the open again. It has been 40 years since this act was passed. The practices to remove and destroy our culture started more than 150 years ago, in the 1840s and ‘50s. It will take at least that amount of time to come close to restoring what we lost. These ceremonies and practices reinforce the need to bring back our many distinct languages from the Oregon Coast. Our ceremonial ways all come from the earth. We cannot effectively understand their importance or details until we restore the environment that helps sustain us physically and spiritually.”

• Oppressive Governance
  • Broken treaties, BIA, Indian Removal Act
  • Dawes Allotment Act of 1884
    • Stole 90 million acres while forcing Natives on small individual allotments

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LOC: Indian Citizenship Act

On June 2, 1924, Congress enacted the Indian Citizenship Act, which granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the U.S. The right to vote, however, was governed by state law; until 1957, some states barred Native Americans from voting. In a WPA interview from the 1930s, Henry Mitchell describes the attitude toward Native Americans in Maine, one of the last states to comply with the Indian Citizenship Act:

One of the Indians went over to Old Town once to see some official in the city hall about voting. I don’t know just what position that official had over there, but he said to the Indian, ‘We don’t want you people over here. You have your own elections over on the island, and if you want to vote, go over there.’

Just why the Indians shouldn’t vote is something I can’t understand.

“The Life of Henry Mitchell.” Robert Grady, interviewer; Old Town, Maine, ca. 1938-1939. American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1940. Manuscript Division

Native Americans During Mathematics Class, Indian School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Frances Benjamin Johnston, photographer, 1901. Johnston (Frances Benjamin) Collection. Prints & Photographs Division

Previously, the Dawes Severalty Act (1887) had shaped U.S. policy towards Native Americans. In accordance with its terms, and hoping to turn Indians into farmers, the federal government redistributed tribal lands to heads of families in 160-acre allotments. Unclaimed or “surplus” land was sold, and the proceeds used to establish Indian schools where Native-American children learned reading, writing, and the domestic and social systems of white America. By 1932, the sale of both unclaimed land and allotted acreage resulted in the loss of two-thirds of the 138 million acres that Native Americans had held prior to the Dawes Act.

In addition to the extension of voting rights to Native Americans, the Secretary of the Interior commissioned the Institute for Government Research to assess the impact of the Dawes Act. Completed in 1928, the Meriam ReportExternal described how government policy oppressed Native Americans and destroyed their culture and society.

The poverty and exploitation resulting from the paternalistic Dawes Act spurred passage of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act. This legislation promoted Native-American autonomy by prohibiting allotment of tribal lands, returning some surplus land, and urging tribes to engage in active self-government. Rather than imposing the legislation on Native Americans, individual tribes were allowed to accept or reject the Indian Reorganization Act. From 1934 to 1953, the U.S. government invested in the development of infrastructure, health care, education, and the quality of life on Indian lands improved. With the aid of federal courts and the government, over two million acres of land were returned to various tribes.

NY Times: In 1920, Native Women Sought the Vote. Here’s What They Seek Now.

The 19th Amendment did not bring the right to vote to all Native women, but two experts in a conversation said it did usher in the possibility of change.

Native women were highly visible in early 20th-century suffrage activism. White suffragists, fascinated by Native matriarchal power, invited Native women to speak at conferences, join parades, and write for their publications. Native suffragists took advantage of these opportunities to speak about pressing issues in their communities — Native voting, land loss and treaty rights. But their stories have largely been forgotten.

After the 19th Amendment was ratified on Aug. 18, 1920, and celebrated by millions of women across the country, the Indigenous suffragist Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, also known as Zitkala-Sa, a citizen of the Yankton Sioux Tribe, reminded newly enfranchised white women that the fight was far from over. “The Indian woman rejoices with you,” she proclaimed to members of Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party, but she urged them to remember their Native sisters, many of whom lacked the right to vote. Not only that, she explained, many were not U.S. citizens, but legally wards of the government, without a political voice to address the many problems facing their communities.

Bonnin and other Native suffragists would continue to remind audiences that federal assimilation policy had attacked their communities and cultures. Despite treaty promises, the United States dismantled tribal governments, privatized tribally-held land, and removed Native children to boarding schools. Those devastating policies resulted in massive land loss, poverty and poor health that reverberate through these communities today.

Native suffragists’ activism contributed to Congress passing the Snyder Act of 1924, which extended U.S. citizenship to all Native people; though in response many states enacted Jim Crow-like policies aimed at disfranchising Indians. The Native suffragists also aided the push for the Wheeler-Howard Act of 1934, which stopped the breakup of tribal lands and emphasized tribal self-governance…

 

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Anti-Indigenous Stereotypes

• Anti-Indigenous racism normalized so much
  • Most people do not see it as racism
  • Native images, symbols, and cultures
    • Used as commodities, novelties, logos for products (Butter, tobacco, baking soda, clothing, etc.) military names for weapons, vehicle names, mascots for sports teams, costumes for Halloween
  • Native Sports Mascots start in early 1900s
    • Professional sports teams as well as thousands of schools use Native-themed mascots and names.
      • Cleveland Indians one of the first in 1915
    • During a time when Native people were essentially outlawed rom practicing their cultures and religion
      • While all white teams used their culture as mascots
  • Costumes
    • Thousands of people dress up in Native costumes every year for Halloween
      • Native Male costumes – stereotypes of savage warriors
        • Same stereotypes used by white people to dehumanize Native in order to take their land, destroy their culture, and commit genocide
      • Native Women costumes – stereotypes of hyper-sexualized Native women
        • Same stereotypes used by White people to justify mass rape of Native women which continues today
        • Native women experience the highest rates of violence and sexual assaults out of any racial group in the United States (MMIW)
        • According to DOJ over 70% of violence experienced by Native women is committed by non native people
  • Indigenous racist stereotypes of any form increases the dehumanization of Native People
    • Which increases violence against Native people
    • While increasing negative impacts on Native people’s mental health, which is already suffering from many other abuses
      • Suicide is the second most common cause of death for Native youth ages 15 to 24 (2.5x the national rate for that age group

“Racist stereotypes of Native people are seemingly ingrained into the psyche of people starting in childhood, some subliminal, some direct. Most of this Native imagery is constructed and controlled by non-Natives. While there is a constant omnipresence of such imagery, it is severely lacking real Native representation. People see more Native depictions created by non-Natives in media than they do of real Native people. This is how negative stereotypes and misconceptions are formed. This, whether consciously or not, embeds the notion that Native cultures are here for consumption. It suggests it is perfectly normal and acceptable to use Natives for products and profit, and to most people, it is — except to the very people being exploited.” Heather Davidson, How Racism Against Native People Is Normalized, From Mascots to Costumes

Further Readings

Ian Gordon, Matt Connolly: Timeline: A Century of Racist Sports Team Names

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Colonial Policies that Justified Brutalities

• Catholic 1493 Doctrine of Discovery
  • Allowed land inhabited by non-Christians to be “discovered”
    • Legally conquered, enslaved and exploited by Christian rulers
  • Became the basis of all European claims
    • Jefferson later used for westward expansion
    • US Supreme Court upheld in 1823 case Johnson v. McIntosh denying Natives and right to their land
  • Still law of the land that prevents any land returned to Natives
• Manifest Destiny
  • Westward expansion, Monroe Doctrine
• Capitalism plantation economy
  • Put profit over human suffering
• Christianity
  • Justified white supremacy and assimilation
• Racism
  • Justified white supremacy, exploitation, brutality and dehumanization

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1989 – American Indian Activist Russell Means testifies at Senate Hearing

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Truthout: Yes, Native Americans Were the Victims of Genocide

“US policies and actions related to Indigenous peoples, though often termed “racist” or “discriminatory,” are rarely depicted as what they are: classic cases of imperialism and a particular form of colonialism — settler colonialism. As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe writes, “The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life — or, at least, land is necessary for life.” The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism.

The extension of the United States from sea to shining sea was the intention and design of the country’s founders. “Free” land was the magnet that attracted European settlers. After the war for independence but preceding the writing of the US Constitution, the Continental Congress produced the Northwest Ordinance. This was the first law of the incipient republic, revealing the motive for those desiring independence. It was the blueprint for gobbling up the British-protected Indian Territory (“Ohio Country”) on the other side of the Appalachians and Alleghenies. Britain had made settlement there illegal with the Proclamation of 1763.

In 1801, President Jefferson aptly described the new settler state’s intentions for horizontal and vertical continental expansion, stating: “However our present interests may restrain us within our own limits, it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar form by similar laws.” This vision of manifest destiny found form a few years later in the Monroe Doctrine, signaling the intention of annexing or dominating former Spanish colonial territories in the Americas and the Pacific, which would be put into practice during the rest of the century.

The form of colonialism that the Indigenous peoples of North America have experienced was modern from the beginning: the expansion of European corporations, backed by government armies, into foreign areas, with subsequent expropriation of lands and resources. Settler colonialism requires a genocidal policy. Native nations and communities, while struggling to maintain fundamental values and collectivity, have from the beginning resisted modern colonialism using both defensive and offensive techniques, including the modern forms of armed resistance of national liberation movements and what now is called terrorism. In every instance they have fought and continue to fight for survival as peoples.

The objective of US colonialist authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples — not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide as contrasted with premodern instances of extreme violence that did not have the goal of extinction. The United States as a socioeconomic and political entity is a result of this centuries-long and ongoing colonial process. Modern Indigenous nations and communities are societies formed by their resistance to colonialism, through which they have carried their practices and histories. It is breathtaking, but no miracle, that they have survived as peoples.

Settler-colonialism requires violence or the threat of violence to attain its goals, which then forms the foundation of the United States’ system. People do not hand over their land, resources, children, and futures without a fight, and that fight is met with violence. In employing the force necessary to accomplish its expansionist goals, a colonizing regime institutionalizes violence. The notion that settler-indigenous conflict is an inevitable product of cultural differences and misunderstandings, or that violence was committed equally by the colonized and the colonizer, blurs the nature of the historical processes. Euro-American colonialism, an aspect of the capitalist economic globalization, had from its beginnings a genocidal tendency…

…US history, as well as inherited Indigenous trauma, cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against Indigenous peoples. From the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the twentieth century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, forced removal of Native American children to military-like boarding schools, allotment, and a policy of termination.

Within the logic of settler-colonialism, genocide was the inherent overall policy of the United States from its founding, but there are also specific documented policies of genocide on the part of US administrations that can be identified in at least four distinct periods: the Jacksonian era of forced removal; the California gold rush in Northern California; during the Civil War and in the post Civil War era of the so-called Indian Wars in the Southwest and the Great Plains; and the 1950s termination period; additionally, there is the overlapping period of compulsory boarding schools, 1870s to 1960s. The Carlisle boarding school, founded by US Army officer Richard Henry Pratt in 1879, became a model for others established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Pratt said in a speech in 1892, “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.”

The so-called “Indian Wars” technically ended around 1880, although the Wounded Knee massacre occurred a decade later. Clearly an act with genocidal intent, it is still officially considered a “battle” in the annals of US military genealogy. Congressional Medals of Honor were bestowed on twenty of the soldiers involved. A monument was built at Fort Riley, Kansas, to honor the soldiers killed by friendly fire. A battle streamer was created to honor the event and added to other streamers that are displayed at the Pentagon, West Point, and army bases throughout the world. L. Frank Baum, a Dakota Territory settler later famous for writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, edited the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer at the time. Five days after the sickening event at Wounded Knee, on January 3, 1891, he wrote, “The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one or more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”

Whether 1880 or 1890, most of the collective land base that Native Nations secured through hard fought for treaties made with the United States was lost after that date.

After the end of the Indian Wars, came allotment, another policy of genocide of Native nations as nations, as peoples, the dissolution of the group. Taking the Sioux Nation as an example, even before the Dawes Allotment Act of 1884 was implemented, and with the Black Hills already illegally confiscated by the federal government, a government commission arrived in Sioux territory from Washington, DC, in 1888 with a proposal to reduce the Sioux Nation to six small reservations, a scheme that would leave nine million acres open for Euro-American settlement. The commission found it impossible to obtain signatures of the required three-fourths of the nation as required under the 1868 treaty, and so returned to Washington with a recommendation that the government ignore the treaty and take the land without Sioux consent. The only means to accomplish that goal was legislation, Congress having relieved the government of the obligation to negotiate a treaty. Congress commissioned General George Crook to head a delegation to try again, this time with an offer of $1.50 per acre. In a series of manipulations and dealings with leaders whose people were now starving, the commission garnered the needed signatures. The great Sioux Nation was broken into small islands soon surrounded on all sides by European immigrants, with much of the reservation land a checkerboard with settlers on allotments or leased land. Creating these isolated reservations broke the historical relationships between clans and communities of the Sioux Nation and opened areas where Europeans settled. It also allowed the Bureau of Indian Affairs to exercise tighter control, buttressed by the bureau’s boarding school system. The Sun Dance, the annual ceremony that had brought Sioux together and reinforced national unity, was outlawed, along with other religious ceremonies. Despite the Sioux people’s weak position under late-nineteenth-century colonial domination, they managed to begin building a modest cattle-ranching business to replace their former bison-hunting economy. In 1903, the US Supreme Court ruled, in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, that a March 3, 1871, appropriations rider was constitutional and that Congress had “plenary” power to manage Indian property. The Office of Indian Affairs could thus dispose of Indian lands and resources regardless of the terms of previous treaty provisions. Legislation followed that opened the reservations to settlement through leasing and even sale of allotments taken out of trust. Nearly all prime grazing lands came to be occupied by non-Indian ranchers by the 1920s.

By the time of the New Deal–Collier era and nullification of Indian land allotment under the Indian Reorganization Act, non-Indians outnumbered Indians on the Sioux reservations three to one. However, “tribal governments” imposed in the wake of the Indian Reorganization Act proved particularly harmful and divisive for the Sioux.”  Concerning this measure, the late Mathew King, elder traditional historian of the Oglala Sioux (Pine Ridge), observed: “The Bureau of Indian Affairs drew up the constitution and by-laws of this organization with the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. This was the introduction of home rule. . . . The traditional people still hang on to their Treaty, for we are a sovereign nation. We have our own government.”  “Home rule,” or neocolonialism, proved a short-lived policy, however, for in the early 1950s the United States developed its termination policy, with legislation ordering gradual eradication of every reservation and even the tribal governments.  At the time of termination and relocation, per capita annual income on the Sioux reservations stood at $355, while that in nearby South Dakota towns was $2,500. Despite these circumstances, in pursuing its termination policy, the Bureau of Indian Affairs advocated the reduction of services and introduced its program to relocate Indians to urban industrial centers, with a high percentage of Sioux moving to San Francisco and Denver in search of jobs.

The situations of other Indigenous Nations were similar.

Pawnee Attorney Walter R. Echo-Hawk writes:

In 1881, Indian landholdings in the United States had plummeted to 156 million acres. By 1934, only about 50 million acres remained (an area the size of Idaho and Washington) as a result of the General Allotment Act of 1887. During World War II, the government took 500,000 more acres for military use. Over one hundred tribes, bands, and Rancherias relinquished their lands under various acts of Congress during the termination era of the 1950s. By 1955, the indigenous land base had shrunk to just 2.3 percent of its [size at the end of the Indian wars].

According to the current consensus among historians, the wholesale transfer of land from Indigenous to Euro-American hands that occurred in the Americas after 1492 is due less to British and US American invasion, warfare, refugee conditions, and genocidal policies in North America than to the bacteria that the invaders unwittingly brought with them. Historian Colin Calloway is among the proponents of this theory writing, “Epidemic diseases would have caused massive depopulation in the Americas whether brought by European invaders or brought home by Native American traders.”[11] Such an absolutist assertion renders any other fate for the Indigenous peoples improbable. This is what anthropologist Michael Wilcox has dubbed “the terminal narrative.” Professor Calloway is a careful and widely respected historian of Indigenous North America, but his conclusion articulates a default assumption. The thinking behind the assumption is both ahistorical and illogical in that Europe itself lost a third to one-half of its population to infectious disease during medieval pandemics. The principle reason the consensus view is wrong and ahistorical is that it erases the effects of settler colonialism with its antecedents in the Spanish “Reconquest” and the English conquest of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. By the time Spain, Portugal, and Britain arrived to colonize the Americas, their methods of eradicating peoples or forcing them into dependency and servitude were ingrained, streamlined, and effective.

Whatever disagreement may exist about the size of precolonial Indigenous populations, no one doubts that a rapid demographic decline occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its timing from region to region depending on when conquest and colonization began. Nearly all the population areas of the Americas were reduced by 90 percent following the onset of colonizing projects, decreasing the targeted Indigenous populations of the Americas from a one hundred million to ten million. Commonly referred to as the most extreme demographic disaster — framed as natural — in human history, it was rarely called genocide until the rise of Indigenous movements in the mid-twentieth century forged new questions.

US scholar Benjamin Keen acknowledges that historians “accept uncritically a fatalistic ‘epidemic plus lack of acquired immunity’ explanation for the shrinkage of Indian populations, without sufficient attention to the socioeconomic factors . . . which predisposed the natives to succumb to even slight infections.”  Other scholars agree. Geographer William M. Denevan, while not ignoring the existence of widespread epidemic diseases, has emphasized the role of warfare, which reinforced the lethal impact of disease. There were military engagements directly between European and Indigenous nations, but many more saw European powers pitting one Indigenous nation against another or factions within nations, with European allies aiding one or both sides, as was the case in the colonization of the peoples of Ireland, Africa and Asia, and was also a factor in the Holocaust. Other killers cited by Denevan are overwork in mines, frequent outright butchery, malnutrition and starvation resulting from the breakdown of Indigenous trade networks, subsistence food production and loss of land, loss of will to live or reproduce (and thus suicide, abortion, and infanticide), and deportation and enslavement.  Anthropologist Henry Dobyns has pointed to the interruption of Indigenous peoples’ trade networks. When colonizing powers seized Indigenous trade routes, the ensuing acute shortages, including food products, weakened populations and forced them into dependency on the colonizers, with European manufactured goods replacing Indigenous ones. Dobyns has estimated that all Indigenous groups suffered serious food shortages one year in four. In these circumstances, the introduction and promotion of alcohol proved addictive and deadly, adding to the breakdown of social order and responsibility.  These realities render the myth of “lack of immunity,” including to alcohol, pernicious.

Historian Woodrow Wilson Borah focused on the broader arena of European colonization, which also brought severely reduced populations in the Pacific Islands, Australia, Western Central America, and West Africa.  Sherburne Cook — associated with Borah in the revisionist Berkeley School, as it was called — studied the attempted destruction of the California Indians. Cook estimated 2,245 deaths among peoples in Northern California — the Wintu, Maidu, Miwak, Omo, Wappo, and Yokuts nations — in late eighteenth-century armed conflicts with the Spanish while some 5,000 died from disease and another 4,000 were relocated to missions. Among the same people in the second half of the nineteenth century, US armed forces killed 4,000, and disease killed another 6,000. Between 1852 and 1867, US citizens kidnapped 4,000 Indian children from these groups in California. Disruption of Indigenous social structures under these conditions and dire economic necessity forced many of the women into prostitution in goldfield camps, further wrecking what vestiges of family life remained in these matriarchal societies.

Historians and others who deny genocide emphasize population attrition by disease, weakening Indigenous peoples ability to resist. In doing so they refuse to accept that the colonization of America was genocidal by plan, not simply the tragic fate of populations lacking immunity to disease. If disease could have done the job, it is not clear why the United States found it necessary to carry out unrelenting wars against Indigenous communities in order to gain every inch of land they took from them — along with the prior period of British colonization, nearly three hundred years of eliminationist warfare…

…As military historian John Grenier points out in his First Way of War:

For the first 200 years of our military heritage, then, Americans depended on arts of war that contemporary professional soldiers supposedly abhorred: razing and destroying enemy villages and fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlements for captives; intimidating and brutalizing enemy noncombatants; and assassinating enemy leaders. . . . In the frontier wars between 1607 and 1814, Americans forged two elements — unlimited war and irregular war — into their first way of war.

Grenier argues that not only did this way of war continue throughout the 19th century in wars against the Indigenous nations, but continued in the 20th century and currently in counterinsurgent wars against peoples in Latin America, the Caribbean and Pacific, Southeast Asia, Middle and Western Asia and Africa.

Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part: Forced removal of all the Indigenous nations east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory during the Jackson administration was a calculated policy intent on destroying those peoples ties to their original lands, as well as declaring Native people who did not remove to no longer be Muskogee, Sauk, Kickapoo, Choctaw, destroying the existence of up to half of each nation removed. Mandatory boarding schools, Allotment and Termination — all official government policies–also fall under this category of the crime of genocide. The forced removal and four year incarceration of the Navajo people resulted in the death of half their population.

Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group: Famously, during the Termination Era, the US government administrated Indian Health Service made the top medical priority the sterilization of Indigenous women. In 1974, an independent study by one the few Native American physicians, Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri, Choctaw/Cherokee, found that one in four Native women had been sterilized without her consent. Pnkerton-Uri’s research indicated that the Indian Health Service had “singled out full-blooded Indian women for sterilization procedures.” At first denied by the Indian Health Service, two years later, a study by the U.S. General Accounting Office found that 4 of the 12 Indian Health Service regions sterilized 3,406 Native women without their permission between 1973 and 1976. The GAO found that 36 women under age 21 had been forcibly sterilized during this period despite a court-ordered moratorium on sterilizations of women younger than 21.

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group: Various governmental entities, mostly municipalities, counties, and states, routinely removed Native children from their families and put them up for adoption. In the Native resistance movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the demand to put a stop to the practice was codified in the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. However, the burden of enforcing the legislation lay with Tribal Government, but the legislation provided no financial resources for Native governments to establish infrastructure to retrieve children from the adoption industry, in which Indian babies were high in demand. Despite these barriers to enforcement, the worst abuses had been curbed over the following three decades. But, on June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling drafted by Justice Samuel Alito, used provisions of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) to say that a child, widely known as Baby Veronica, did not have to live with her biological Cherokee father. The high court’s decision paved the way for Matt and Melanie Capobianco, the adoptive parents, to ask the South Carolina Courts to have the child returned to them. The court gutted the purpose and intent of the Indian Child Welfare Act, missing the concept behind the ICWA, the protection of cultural resource and treasure that are Native children; it’s not about protecting so-called traditional or nuclear families. It’s about recognizing the prevalence of extended families and culture.

So, why does the Genocide Convention matter? Native nations are still here and still vulnerable to genocidal policy. This isn’t just history that predates the 1948 Genocide Convention. But, the history is important and needs to be widely aired, included in public school texts and public service announcements. The Doctrine of Discovery is still law of the land. From the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, most of the non-European world was colonized under the Doctrine of Discovery, one of the first principles of international law Christian European monarchies promulgated to legitimize investigating, mapping, and claiming lands belonging to peoples outside Europe. It originated in a papal bull issued in 1455 that permitted the Portuguese monarchy to seize West Africa. Following Columbus’s infamous exploratory voyage in 1492, sponsored by the king and queen of the infant Spanish state, another papal bull extended similar permission to Spain. Disputes between the Portuguese and Spanish monarchies led to the papal-initiated Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which, besides dividing the globe equally between the two Iberian empires, clarified that only non-Christian lands fell under the discovery doctrine.  This doctrine on which all European states relied thus originated with the arbitrary and unilateral establishment of the Iberian monarchies’ exclusive rights under Christian canon law to colonize foreign peoples, and this right was later seized by other European monarchical colonizing projects. The French Republic used this legalistic instrument for its nineteenth- and twentieth-century settler colonialist projects, as did the newly independent United States when it continued the colonization of North America begun by the British.

In 1792, not long after the US founding, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson claimed that the Doctrine of Discovery developed by European states was international law applicable to the new US government as well. In 1823 the US Supreme Court issued its decision in Johnson v. McIntosh. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Marshall held that the Doctrine of Discovery had been an established principle of European law and of English law in effect in Britain’s North American colonies and was also the law of the United States. The Court defined the exclusive property rights that a European country acquired by dint of discovery: “Discovery gave title to the government, by whose subjects, or by whose authority, it was made, against all other European governments, which title might be consummated by possession.” Therefore, European and Euro-American “discoverers” had gained real-property rights in the lands of Indigenous peoples by merely planting a flag. Indigenous rights were, in the Court’s words, “in no instance, entirely disregarded; but were necessarily, to a considerable extent, impaired.” The court further held that Indigenous “rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished.” Indigenous people could continue to live on the land, but title resided with the discovering power, the United States. The decision concluded that Native nations were “domestic, dependent nations.”

The Doctrine of Discovery is so taken for granted that it is rarely mentioned in historical or legal texts published in the Americas. The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples, which meets annually for two weeks, devoted its entire 2012 session to the doctrine.  But few US citizens are aware of the precarity of the situation of Indigenous Peoples in the United States.”

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AEON:The invasion of America

Between 1776 and the present, the United States seized some 1.5 billion acres from North America’s native peoples, an area 25 times the size of the United Kingdom. Many Americans are only vaguely familiar with the story of how this happened. They perhaps recognise Wounded Knee and the Trail of Tears, but few can recall the details and even fewer think that those events are central to US history.

Their tenuous grasp of the subject is regrettable if unsurprising, given that the conquest of the continent is both essential to understanding the rise of the US and deplorable. Acre by acre, the dispossession of native peoples made the US a transcontinental power. To visualise this story, I created ‘The Invasion of America’, an interactive time-lapse map of the nearly 500 cessions that the US carved out of native lands on its westward march to the shores of the Pacific.

By the time the Civil War came to an end in 1865, it had consumed the lives of 800,000 Americans, or 2.5 per cent of the population, according to recent estimates. If slavery was a moral failing, said Lincoln in his second inaugural address, then the war was ‘the woe due to those by whom the offense came’. The rupture between North and South forced white Americans to confront the nation’s deep investment in slavery and to emancipate and incorporate four million individuals. They did not do so willingly, and the reconstruction of the nation is in many ways still unfolding. By contrast, there has been no similar reckoning with the conquest of the continent, no serious reflection on its centrality to the rise of the US, and no sustained engagement with the people who lost their homelands.

Demography in part explains why slavery and its legacy are part of America’s national conversation (even if whites sometimes participate in bad faith), while the dispossession of indigenous peoples is not. Since 1776, black Americans have made up between 12 and 19 per cent of the total US population. By contrast, in 1800, though Native Americans accounted for about 15 per cent of the inhabitants in the territory that would later become the US, they constituted a much smaller fraction of the residents in the 16 states that then made up the union. A century later, in 1900, they represented only approximately half of one per cent of the US population, making them a small and politically insignificant minority in their own lands.

Today, over one per cent (3.8 million) of Americans identify as native, an increase that reflects not a substantive demographic shift but a newfound willingness and desire to identify as indigenous. Of this self-identified population, only a fraction are visible minorities, subject to the discrimination that shapes identity and forges political movements. Small in number with limited power at the polls, they have not led the national news since 1972-73, when the American Indian Movement took over the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the FBI laid siege to Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Yet native peoples are central to the nation’s history. As late as 1750 – some 150 years after Britain established Jamestown and fully 250 years after Europeans first set foot in the continent – they constituted a majority of the population in North America, a fact not adequately reflected in textbooks. Even a century later, in 1850, they still retained formal possession of much of the western half of the continent.

Native peoples may be a small minority, but their history poses a fatal challenge to triumphalist narratives of the US

The final assault on indigenous land tenure, lasting roughly from the mid-19th century to 1890, was rapid and murderous. (In the 20th century, the fight moved from the battlefield to the courts, where it continues to this day.) After John Sutter discovered gold in California’s Central Valley in 1848, colonists launched slaving expeditions against native peoples in the region. ‘That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between races, until the Indian race becomes extinct, must be expected,’ the state’s first governor instructed the legislature in 1851.

In the Great Plains, the US Army conducted a war of attrition, with success measured in the quantity of tipis burned, food supplies destroyed, and horse herds slaughtered. The result was a series of massacres: the Bear River Massacre in southern Idaho (1863), the Sand Creek Massacre in eastern Colorado (1864), the Washita Massacre in western Oklahoma (1868), and a host of others. In Florida in the 1850s, US troops waded through the Everglades in pursuit of the last holdouts among the Seminole peoples, who had once controlled much of the Florida peninsula. In short, in the mid-19th century, Americans were still fighting to reduce if not to eliminate the continent’s original residents.

Native peoples may be a small minority, but their history poses a fatal challenge to triumphalist narratives of the US. The most jingoistic of Americans strive to put a positive spin on the nation’s century-long investment in slavery and equally long commitment to white supremacy. After the police shooting of an unarmed black man in Ferguson, Missouri, in August this year, one white woman took the opportunity to chide a group of African American protesters. She yelled, ‘We’re the ones who f***in’ gave all y’all the freedom that you got!’ Imagine a corresponding affront shouted at an assembly of indigenous people: ‘We’re the ones who took all of your land but introduced you to Christianity.’ Many Americans share a deeply held conviction that the US embarked in 1776 on an as-yet unfinished journey to attain the universal ideals of freedom and equality. The history of US-native relations simply does not fit into this national narrative.

Europe’s 20th century atrocities are easier for most people to envision than the dispossession of Native Americans. Stalin’s gulags destroyed millions of people in the 1930s and ’40s; Germany systematically murdered two-thirds of the continent’s Jews during the Second World War; Yugoslavia devolved into a bloodbath of so-called ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the early 1990s. Accounts of those episodes describe the victims as men, women and children. By contrast, the language used to chronicle the dispossession of native peoples – ‘Indian’, ‘chief’, ‘warrior’, ‘tribe’, ‘squaw’ (as native women used to be called) – conjures up crude stereotypes and clouds the mind, making it difficult to see the wars of extermination, forced marches and expulsions for what they were. The story, which used to be celebratory, is now more often tragic and sentimental, rooted in the belief that the dispossession of native peoples was unjust but inevitable.

Some of the cessions cover as much territory as France, others no more than a hundred acres

The most familiar and celebrated Indian images that circulate today reinforce this conviction. They come first and foremost from Edward Curtis’s monumental 20-volume collection of photographs, entitled The North American Indian. Plate 1 in volume 1 pictures Navajos mounted on ponies, heading off into the distance towards the bleak horizon. It is entitled ‘The Vanishing Race’.

The Vanishing Race by Edward Curtis

‘The Invasion of America’ captures not the vanishing Indian but the expansionist US, from its origins in 1776 as a slender band of states pressed along the Atlantic to its coast-to-coast incarnation as the fourth-largest nation in the world. The site allows users to move through the land cessions chronologically or to search by Indian nation (eg, ‘Cherokee’), and to click on any tract to pull up details of the land transfer. Some of the cessions cover as much territory as France, others no more than a hundred acres.

US title to the land depends on legal fiction, crafted by the colonists to benefit themselves. Under the ‘Doctrine of Discovery’, which had its origins in the Crusades and underpinned the pioneering navigators of the 15th century, ultimate sovereignty over any pagan land belonged, courtesy of the Vatican, to the first Christian monarch who discovered it. Embraced by imperial powers around the world, the doctrine was adopted by the US Supreme Court in 1823. The US did not rely on Papal Bulls alone, however. It also extinguished the land title of the continent’s first peoples by treaty, executive order, and federal statute.

As pictured in ‘The Invasion of America’, native land cessions seamlessly blanket the continent, but this tidy arrangement is a fantasy devised in 1899 by the government-chartered Bureau of American Ethnology. In that year, with the assistance of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, it produced 67 maps that plotted every cession since the founding of the nation. In truth, cession boundaries were neither well-defined nor contiguous. On paper, they traced watersheds that no 19th century surveyor could determine with any precision; they extended to foothills (exactly where they were located was anyone’s guess); and they took direct paths to mountain tops that could not be accurately identified. Sometimes it was easier for federal officials to describe not the cession itself but the reduced tract reserved for the indigenous nation. In 1823, for example, the Seminoles relinquished ‘all claim or title which they may have to the whole territory of Florida’ in exchange for a much smaller, clearly delineated area where they were to be ‘concentrated and confined’.

Negotiated under duress or facilitated with bribes, treaties were often violated soon after ratification, despite the language of perpetuity

It is appealing to imagine, as the Bureau of American Ethnology did, that the entire country came into the possession of the US through consistent and well-defined legal mechanisms. But in fact, sometimes it was not clear even to the federal government by what right it owned the land. In 1851, for example, three federal commissioners headed off to California (acquired from Mexico only three years earlier) with vague instructions ‘to conciliate the good feelings of the Indians, and to get them to ratify those feelings by entering into written treaties, binding on them, towards the government and each other’.

Congress remained uncertain whether native Californians constituted a formidable opposition of 300,000, as some said, or a pitiful remnant of 40,000, as others asserted. Nor could it decide whether the US came into full possession of the land by the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed with Mexico, or whether indigenous peoples still had title. The commissioners entered into a series of treaties with small groups and even single families, satisfying neither the advocates of California natives nor the speculators who desired their land. Congress refused to ratify the agreements and instead simply concluded that title no longer rested with native peoples.

Elsewhere, the US employed three legal instruments to dispossess residents. Treaties predominated until 1871, when Congress voted to end the practice. Negotiated under duress or facilitated with bribes, they were often violated soon after ratification, despite the language of perpetuity. Nonetheless, they presume a nation-to-nation relationship, which still informs US Indian policy today. Less well-known are the two other tools of dispossession: federal legislation and executive order.

Both Congress and the president can create reservations and take them away, and the president used this power extensively in the 19th century. In July 1864, for example, President Abraham Lincoln created a reservation within present-day Washington state for the Chehalis people, reducing their once extensive homeland of 5,000,000 acres (by the measure of the Bureau of American Ethnology) to ‘about six sections, with which they are satisfied’ (according to a letter from the Office of Indian Affairs; the measure of ‘satisfaction’ must be judged by the alternative, which was removal and joint occupation of another reservation). As a section is 640 acres, ‘about six’ would have come to about 4,000 acres. Twenty-two years later, President Grover Cleveland with the stroke of a pen further reduced the reservation to three fractional sections – a piddling 471 acres.

There was some irony to this land seizure. When the Federal government created the Chehalis reservation in 1864, it paid a squatter named D Mounts $3,500 – a sum which he considered ‘not unreasonable’ – for title to his overlapping land claim, though of course the true owners were the Chehalis themselves. When President Cleveland further reduced the reservation in 1886, the Chehalis received nothing. (Since the 1990s, the Chehalis have been buying up adjacent land and in 2010 the ‘reservation’ was 4,215 acres, according to the chehalistribe.org website.)

It is high time for non-Native Americans to come to terms with the fact that the US is built on someone else’s land. Their 19th century counterparts wrestled more deeply with the dispossession that underlay the nation than most people do today. Native peoples were ‘benighted’ and in a ‘degraded state’, wrote one Kentucky resident to the editor of the Western Recorder in 1825, expressing the widespread condescension that whites felt towards native peoples at the time. But, he continued, ‘This continent is their home. It is the land of their fathers. We are foreign intruders.’ The writer, informed by Christian universalism, was no modern-day multiculturalist. Nonetheless, the presence of native peoples in Kentucky forced him to reconcile their dominion over the land – ‘from time immemorial’, as colonists often said – with the imperious claims of the US.

Five years later, in 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed into law ‘an Act to provide for an exchange of lands with the Indians residing in any of the states or territories, and for their removal west of the river Mississippi’. Popularly known as Indian removal, the act authorised the federal government to deport 100,000 men, women and children from their homelands, an operation that took most of the decade and cost the lives of thousands of native people. This massive state-sponsored forced migration, which passed by a mere five out of 199 votes in the House of Representatives, marked a turning point, when white Americans abdicated their moral responsibility towards the continent’s indigenous peoples. The deportation, according to many whites and even some native activists, was in the best interests of those who were rounded up and driven out. If that was the case, it was because white Americans made it so by defrauding or killing those who wanted to stay. After removal, most indigenous Americans were situated a thousand miles distant from the centre of US population and power on the Atlantic coast. Out of sight and out of mind, Native Americans became relics of the past for most whites.

What would American history look like if native peoples had been kept in sight and in mind? ‘The Invasion of America’ visualises one possibility. Compare it with a map of ‘Territorial Acquisitions’ produced by the US Geological Survey in 2014:

The large single-hued areas of land on the USGS map represent exchanges between imperial powers, with no reference to the longtime residents who also claimed title.

There are many reasons to favour a more inclusive history of the US that places the dispossession of native peoples at its centre. Such a history erases the artificial distinctions that earlier generations drew to discount the presence of native peoples, does not privilege the rise of the nation-state, and better reflects the makeup of today’s US population, which will soon be majority non-white. Its themes also resonate with 21st century concerns, including state-sponsored social engineering, large-scale population displacement, environmental degradation, and global capitalism.

But perhaps the best reason is that it is more faithful to the past. I teach in the state of Georgia, where the legislature mandates that graduates of its public universities fulfill a US history requirement, a law born of the belief that an informed populace is essential to democracy. Good history makes for good citizens. A history that glosses over the conquest of the continent is partial, in both senses of the word. It misleads people about the past and misinforms their debates about the present. In charting a course for the future, Americans would do well to put the dispossession of native peoples back on the map.

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History: California’s Little-Known Genocide

“Gold! Gold from the American River!” Samuel Brannan walked up and down the streets of San Francisco, holding up a bottle of pure gold dust. His triumphant announcement, and the discovery of gold at nearby Sutter’s Mill in 1848, ushered in a new era for California—one in which millions of settlers rushed to the little-known frontier in a wild race for riches.

But though gold spelled prosperity and power for the white settlers who arrived in California in 1849 and after, it meant disaster for the state’s peaceful indigenous population.

In just 20 years, 80 percent of California’s Native Americans were wiped out. And though some died because of the seizure of their land or diseases caught from new settlers, between 9,000 and 16,000 were murdered in cold blood—the victims of a policy of genocide sponsored by the state of California and gleefully assisted by its newest citizens.

Sutter’s Mill, California, where John Augustus Sutter struck gold and accidentally started the gold rush. (Credit: MPI/Getty Images)

Today, California’s genocide is one of the most heinous chapters in the state’s troubled racial history, which also includes forced sterilizations of people of Mexican descent and discrimination and internment of up to 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II. But before any of that, one of the new state’s first priorities was to rid itself of its sizeable Native American population, and it did so with a vengeance.

California’s native peoples had a long and rich history; hundreds of thousands of Native Americans speaking up to 80 languages populated the area for thousands of years. In 1848, California became the property of the United States as one of the spoils of the Mexican-American War. Then, in 1850, it became a state. For the state and federal government, it was imperative both to make room for new settlers and to lay claim to gold on traditional tribal lands. And settlers themselves—motivated by bigotry and fear of Native peoples—were intent on removing the approximately 150,000 Native Americans who remained.

“Whites are becoming impressed with the belief that it will be absolutely necessary to exterminate the savages before they can labor much longer in the mines with security,” wrote the Daily Alta California in 1849, reflecting the prejudices of the day.

They were assisted by the government, which considered the so-called “Indian Problem” to be one of the biggest threats to its sovereignty. The legal basis for enslaving California’s native people was effectively enshrined into law at the first session of the state legislature, where officials gave white settlers the right to take custody of Native American children. The law also gave white people the right to arrest Native people for minor offenses like loitering or possessing alcohol and made it possible for whites to put Native Americans convicted of crimes to work to pay off the fines they incurred. The law was widely abused and ultimately led to the enslavement of tens of thousands of Native Americans in the name of their “protection.”

Peter Hardeman Burnett, circa 1860. (Credit: Paul Fearn/Alamy Stock Photo)

This was just the beginning. Peter Hardenman Burnett, the state’s first governor, saw indigenous Californians as lazy, savage and dangerous. Though he acknowledged that white settlers were taking their territory and bringing disease, he felt that it was the inevitable outcome of the meeting of two races.

“That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected,” he told legislators in the second state of the state address in 1851. “While we cannot anticipate this result but with painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert.”

Burnett didn’t just refuse to avert such a conflict—he egged it on. He set aside state money to arm local militias against Native Americans. The state, with the help of the U.S. Army, started assembling a massive arsenal. These weapons were then given to local militias, who were tasked with killing native people.

State militias raided tribal outposts, shooting and sometimes scalping Native Americans. Soon, local settlers began to do the killing themselves. Local governments put bounties on Native American heads and paid settlers for stealing the horses of the people they murdered.

Two Native Americans along the waters of Lake Klamath in Oregon, 1857. (Credit: Historia/REX/Shutterstock)

“By demonstrating that the state would not punish Indian killers, but instead reward them,”writes historian Benjamin Madley, “militia expeditions helped inspire vigilantes to kill at least 6,460 California Indians between 1846 and 1873.” The U.S Army also joined in the killing, Madley notes, killing at least 1,600 native Californians.

Large massacres wiped out entire tribal populations. In 1850, for example, around 400 Pomo people, including women and children, were slaughtered by the U.S. Cavalry and local volunteers at Clear Lake north of San Francisco. One of the few survivors was a six-year-old girl named Ni’ka, who stayed alive by hiding in the lake and breathing through a reed.

Meanwhile, white settlers and the California government enslaved native people and forced them to labor for ranchers through at least the mid-1860s. Native Americans were then forced onto reservations and their children forced to attend “Indian assimilation schools.”

An estimated 100,000 Native Americans died during the first two years of the Gold Rush alone; by 1873, only 30,000 indigenous people remained of around 150,000. According to Madley, the state spent a total of about $1.7 million—a staggering sum in its day—to murder up to 16,000 people.

Today, despite all odds, California has the United States’ largest Native American population and is home to 109 federally recognized tribes. But the state’s treatment of native peoples during its founding days—and the role the slaughter of Native Americans played in establishing California’s prosperity—is little known today. California only apologized for the genocide it carried out against its indigenous residents in 2019.

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Sierra Club: John Muir: Racist or Admirer of Native Americans?

“The Spanish had begun the holocaust along the California Coast in the 1700s with the establishment of their Missions and their subjugation of the coastal Native Americans to serfdom on the newly appropriated Mission lands. The foothill and mountain tribes, though, were largely spared the theft of their homelands and the destruction of their way of life. Then gold was discovered in 1848, and as the Anglo-american and Chinese prospectors swarmed over the foothills, conflict arose with the Native Americans in those lands, who quite understandably resisted the theft of their homelands and the murder of those who protested.

The Mariposa Battalion, a band of armed vigilante Indian-hunters, rode into Yosemite Valley in the late winter of 1851, burning the homes and food stocks of the Native Americans there, and murdering the males they could find. In the decade and a half until the young Muir arrived in California, these scenes were repeated throughout the Sierra Nevada. The Native Americans were brutally expelled from their homelands, and relegated by the usurping Anglo-americans to marginalized areas unwanted by the new conquerors. The hunting and foraging resources that formerly sustained them were denied to them, or grudgingly tolerated if no Anglo-americans wanted the areas.

The Native Americans had no standing in the “laws” of the invaders. Murder of the males and rape of the women, as well as kidnapping of the youths for servants, was widespread and without recourse to the victims. So when the young Muir drives a herd of sheep into Tuolumne Meadow in the summer of 1869, the Native Americans he encounters are in the very midst of a holocaust that has utterly destroyed their way of life and banished them from their homes and hunting-gathering lands.”

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Teen Vogue: Treaties Between the United States and Indigenous Nations, Explained

Treaties are part of what the U.S. Constitution calls “the supreme law of the land.” Yet they are too seldom discussed, too often ignored, and viewed by too many today as ancient history.

Nonetheless, treaties are legally binding agreements that occur nation to nation. Treaties were made between newly formed European settler governments and the sovereign Indigenous nations that already populated the continent.

Today, Natives are often thought of in terms of race, and we are considered people of color. But American Indians specifically are also designated by the federal government as a political classification. This is because we belong to ancient Indigenous tribes that predate the existence of the United States of America and we made treaties with them. These treaties recognized our sovereignty as independent nations.

Treaties, and the U.S. government’s history of unilaterally breaching them, have had a profound effect on Native people. To be blunt, we were lied to. Treaties were used as a ruse to coax tribes out of defending their territory and to steal Native lands and resources.

The U.S. made hundreds of treaties with Native nations. The list is exhaustive. I am Dakota and Lakota from the Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation), so I will focus on treaties that my people have signed with the government and how that has affected us.

Minnesota is the ancestral land of the Dakota. More than 1 in 10 treaties ever signed by the U.S. involved land in what is today Minnesota.

In the 1851 treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota, Dakota of the Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation) ceded land in Minnesota to the U.S. in exchange for money, goods, and services. Unbeknownst to the Dakota, Congress eliminated Article 3 of each treaty. This Article set up reservation land within Minnesota for the Dakota to live on. The government also defaulted on payments to the Dakota. It kept more than 80% of the money. Of the payments that were made, the government often gave the money directly to traders who were supposed to supply the Dakota with rations. The withholding of rations by these traders led to the Dakota War of 1862, because the Dakota, of which there were an estimated 6,500 people, were starving. All told, the war lasted a month and a half. About 400 Dakota were arrested by the U.S. military. Ultimately, 38 Dakota men were hung in the largest mass execution in U.S. history, in Mankato, Minnesota, on December 26, 1862, under the orders of President Abraham Lincoln.

The Dakota people were separated after the war. We became exiles. The governor of Minnesota put a bounty on the scalps of every Dakota man, woman, and child. Some Dakota were taken to prison camps in Iowa. Others, like my ancestor Chief Wabasha, were marched to the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota. More were moved to Nebraska territory. Most Dakota from the Sisseton and Wahpeton bands were moved to the Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota. Some managed to escape to the Spirit Lake Reservation in North Dakota and to Canada. Others died from sickness and famine. More than one-quarter of Dakota in 1862 died during the following year.

In 1863, more than 150 Dakota were massacred at Whitestone Hill, where the cavalry took out their vengeance for the war on many innocent Dakota by ambushing them. Women and children were slaughtered there. They even killed the Dakota’s dogs and horses.

The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 “granted” the Lakota of the Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation) and their allies a large swath of territory in South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Montana, and North Dakota in exchange for the passage of roads and railways. Despite this, Lakota lands were encroached upon by outside invaders in breach of treaty law. The U.S. military launched the 1865 Powder River Expedition to subdue Natives within their own, established territory. The Lakota defended their lands. Oglala and Minniconjou Lakota warriors led by Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and High-Back-Bone killed U.S. Captain W.J. Fetterman and all 80 of his men in half an hour, in what would become known as the Fetterman Fight.

Enter the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which came about because of Red Cloud’s War. In short, the Lakota, led by the Crazy Horse, were kicking settler butt. In this treaty, the Lakota were promised half of South Dakota and part of North Dakota as a “Great Sioux Reservation.”

The Black Hills are the birthplace of the Lakota. Important ceremonies that bring harmony to the Universe have been held there for millennia. They are sacred to the Oceti Sakowin and are part of Lakota treaty lands, but they were taken from the Lakota when Congress reneged on the Fort Laramie Treaty during the gold rush that historians say began in 1874 — although rumors of gold in the Black Hills had lingered for years before then. In 1980, in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the seizure of the Black Hills from the Lakota was a wrongful taking and that the Sioux were entitled to “just compensation” under the 5th Amendment’s “Takings Clause.” The Lakota refuse to accept the money, because the Black Hills are not for sale. To this day, they rightfully belong to the Great Sioux Nation.

Lakota treaty land also includes the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, where I was born and where water protectors camped out for nearly a year to prevent the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline through ancient Oceti Sakowin burial sites and under the freshwater source of millions of people downstream, both Native, and non-Native. February 23 marks the anniversary of the final raid of camps there. One of the last arrested was Regina Brave, a Lakota grandmother who was making a treaty stand. She is a veteran of the American Indian Movement’s 1973 Occupation of Wounded Knee.

We are still fighting to protect our lands and waters. In June 2017, a federal judge ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to reconsider its environmental review of the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline by Energy Transfer Partners, thanks to successful protests and litigation by the Oceti Sakowin and their allies. That process is now underway.

Oceti Sakowin tribes mobilized to stop the Keystone XL pipeline from crossing Lakota treaty lands. Lakota tribes were never consulted, nor did they consent.

We are on the right side of history. Honor the treaties. Join us.

 

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“Of the 374 total U.S.-Indian treaties, 229 of these agreements involved the Indian nations surrendering tribal lands and 99 treaties promised reservations in exchange,” said Donald L. Fixico, Regents’ and Distinguished Foundation Professor of history. “Today there are 327 reservations and nearly 600 federally recognized tribes, and 22 of them live in Arizona.” Marshall Terrill, Native American view of the Grand Canyon’s centennial celebration

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Truthout: The Colonial Origins of Conservation: The Disturbing History Behind US National Parks

Iconoclasm – questioning heroes and ideals, and even tearing them down – can be the most difficult thing. Many people root their attitudes and lives in narratives that they hold to be self-evidently true. So it’s obvious that changing conservation isn’t going to be an easy furrow to plow.

However, change it must. Conservation’s achievements don’t alter the fact that it’s rooted in two serious and related mistakes. The first is that it conserves “wildernesses,” which are imagined to be shaped only by nature. The second is that it believes in a hierarchy, with superior, intelligent human beings at the top. Many conservationists still believe that they are uniquely endowed with the foresight and expertise to control and manage so-called wildernesses and that everyone else must leave, including those who actually own them and have lived there for generations.

These notions are archaic; they damage people and the environment. The second also flouts the law, with its perpetual land grabs. For nature’s sake as well as our own, it’s crucial to expose how these ideas grew and flourished, to understand just how mistaken they are. There’s an ongoing attempt to wipe from the map the quagmire around conservation’s wellspring, to pretend it’s all now transparent and sunlit. It isn’t.

Some conservationists, usually those lower in the pecking order, have the morality to face reality. They must prevail. With enough support, they will propel the industry from below toward a radically different approach, one that stands a far better chance of saving the environment and one using far smaller sums of money to do so.

This iconoclastic revolution is urgently needed, and there’s no better time: 2015 is the 125th anniversary of Yosemite National Park, and 2016 completes a century for the United States National Park Service. These are highly symbolic anniversaries: Conservation dogmas were rooted in colonial conquest and were inextricably bound up in the genocide committed against Native Americans. Both lies – that of the wilderness and that of the inferiority of some human beings – were in full flower by 1916, though they were seeded earlier when the US began to invent the parks model that is still, all too harmfully, exported around the world.

The Eviction of the Ahwahneechee People From Yosemite

The conservation movement (and its problems) really began with the 1864 Yosemite Grant Act. Conservation leaders like John Muir believed that the indigenous people who had inhabited Yosemite for at least 6,000 years were a desecration and had to go. Muir deemed them “lazy” because their hunting techniques yielded a good living without wasted effort. Such prejudice is alive and well today: An official in India said that tribal people don’t want to leave their forest because they get “fodder and income … for free” and are too lazy to work, so must be evicted.

White invaders saw the land as pristine wilderness because it didn’t conform to their European industrial image of productivity. In reality, Yosemite had long been an environment shaped by its inhabitants through controlled undergrowth burning (which created its healthy forests with big trees and a rich biodiversity), tree planting for acorns as a food staple, and sustainable predation on its game, which ensured species balance.

In the 19th century, the newcomers didn’t hesitate to send in the army to police this wilderness and get rid of everyone else. One historian, Jeffrey Lee Rodger, is sympathetic to the cavalrymen, but admits their “improvised punishments … were clearly extralegal and may have veered into arbitrary … force.” He might have compared such “punishments” with those still supported by conservation today, particularly in Africa and Asia, where tribal people are routinely kicked out of parks and beaten, even tortured, when they resist.

Native Americans were evicted from almost all the American parks, but a few Ahwahneechee people were tolerated inside Yosemite for a few more decades. They were forced to serve tourists and act out humiliating “Indian days” for the visitors. The latter wanted the Indians they saw in the movies, so the Ahwahneechee had to dress and dance as if they were from the Great Plains. If they didn’t serve the park, they were out – and they all did finally die or leave, with their last dwellings deliberately and ignominiously burned down in a fire drill in 1969.

As Luther Standing Bear declaimed, “Only to the white man was nature a wilderness … to us it was tame. Earth was bountiful.” The parks were and are supposed to preserve their “wilderness,” but they’ve never been very successful. In the case of Yosemite: over a thousand miles of often-crowded roads and hiking trails were constructed; trees were felled to make viewpoints; the balance of species was altered as animal and human predators were eliminated; trout were introduced to delight anglers; a luxury hotel was built; bear feeding areas were established to thrill visitors, so conditioning the animals to scavenge for human food; and hoteliers carried out a “firefall” for a century, in which burning wood was pushed over Glacier Point to cascade thousands of feet into the valley (the scars remain visible nearly 50 years after it was halted).

The Native Americans’ own fires, their ancient practice of seasonal and controlled undergrowth burning, was stopped. One result is the devastating conflagrations that now plague California; those simply wouldn’t have happened on the Natives’ watch.

This wasn’t preservation, it was reshaping the environment to extract tourist dollars. In spite of this, and the fact that the National Park Service has presided over a loss of biodiversity and dozens of species extinctions, many conservationists have continued to believe they’re better at protecting environments than the tribal peoples who live in them.

Scientific Racism in the Conservation Movement

The conservation movement’s historically dismissive attitudes toward indigenous people were intertwined with the ideas of scientific racism and eugenics that were just beginning to emerge when the Yosemite Grant Act was passed. Charles Darwin had published The Origin of Species five years before the passage of the act, and Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, was beginning to develop his racist ideas of eugenics, declaring, “The feeble nations of the world are necessarily giving way before the nobler varieties of mankind.” Eugenics enthusiasts in Britain included writer H.G. Wells and playwright George Bernard Shaw, who thought those he saw as genetically inferior, who couldn’t “justify their existence,” should be humanely gassed. John Maynard Keynes, William Beveridge and Marie Stopes joined up, together with most of the liberal intelligentsia.

In the US, eugenics and conservation were born twins. Wealthy big-game hunters, including Teddy Roosevelt and his friend Madison Grant, both major conservationists, were among the most enthusiastic to embrace the racist creed. Their initial priority was to conserve the herds that provided their sport, and the easiest way to do that – so they thought – was to remove the “predators” who were killing the game to eat (and for its leather) rather than to hang horns on the wall. But these predators were principally human hunters – both Native Americans and poor colonists trying to eke a living from an unfamiliar world.

Ousting these subsistence hunters had the opposite of the desired effect. Elk herds in Yellowstone, for example, grew beyond the carrying capacity of the land. (The same is happening now, with elephants in Botswana.) Weak animals, once the first to fall from hunter’s arrow or wolf’s fang, started reaching reproductive age. The herd grew, but the animals sickened as hunger took its toll. Seeing their precious trophies fading through their bungling, the elite came up with ideas of “game management,” still applied today. The key is to cull, keeping the herd smaller but stronger.

They then turned their attention to the human “herd,” which was expanding rapidly from European immigration. Following Galton, they categorized humankind into hierarchical “races” and feared the country being swamped by what they considered to be lower races, including “Mediterraneans,” “Alpines,” and Jews.

The big-game hunting boys saw themselves as a different ilk. As the “Aryans” from northern Europe, they saw themselves as the creators of “true” civilization, science, culture, religion and wealth. They believed that racial mixing would threaten their “race” and what they saw as its irreplaceable talents. They passed laws to reduce immigration to the United States from “non-Aryan” countries, they outlawed interracial marriage and imposed segregation wherever possible, and they coercively sterilized anyone they could get their hands on who didn’t fit their bill; no one with a mental, physical, or even social, problem was safe, particularly the poor.

The most important hunter-turned-conservationist, Madison Grant, was also their principal writer. He was a key supporter, often founder or leader, of a dozen or so conservation groups that still exist, though he barely appears in their official histories. Among the most prominent were the Save the Redwoods League; the New York Zoological Society (now the Wildlife Conservation Society, WCS); and the National Parks Association (now the National Parks Conservation Association).

His book, The Passing of the Great Race, was published in the year the National Park Service was founded. Science Magazine’s glowing review enthused over its “solid merit.” Thirty years later, it would be cited by German Nazis who couldn’t understand why they were on trial: They were, they pleaded, simply emulating the United States, where scientific eugenics had long been used to shape society. Grant had sent a translation of his book to Hitler, who called it his Bible.

Widespread Support for Eugenics

Scratch the record anywhere in the early conservation movement, and eugenics sounds loud and clear: Alexander Graham Bell, who falsely claimed to have invented the telephone and who was one of the founders of the National Geographic Society; two charter members of the Sierra Club, David Starr Jordan (founding president of Stanford University) and Luther Burbank were all prominent members of the movement. George Grinnell, founder of the Audubon Society (and Edward Curtis’ mentor) was Madison Grant’s close friend for nearly 50 years. The National Park Service’s first director, mining magnate Stephen Mather, was backed by Charles Goethe, of the Audubon and Kenya Wildlife Societies, regional head of the Sierra Club and outspoken advocate of Nazi eugenic laws.

In 1937, Goethe wrote to Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, director of “racial hygiene” in Frankfurt, saying, “I feel passionately that you are leading all mankind herein,” according to Garland E. Allen’s 2012 essay, “Culling the Herd,” in the Journal of the History of Biology. Verschuer was doctoral supervisor and collaborator of Josef Mengele, infamous for his barbaric experiments on children in Auschwitz. He continued to excel after the war, as professor of genetics at Münster.

In one article, “Patriotism and Racial Standards” published in a 1936 issue of Eugenical News, Goethe enthused, “We are moving toward the elimination of humanity’s undesirables like Sambo, the husband to Mandy the ‘washerlady.’ ” In 1965, on his 90th birthday, Goethe was dubbed the state’s “number one citizen” by California’s governor. He fought immigration from Mexico, making the racist argument that Mexicans have low IQs.

Eugenics grew into the establishment belief of the first half of the 20th century and didn’t falter seriously until 1945, when an American battalion stumbled into Buchenwald, just after its prisoners had seized it from fleeing camp guards.

When the Nazis had built it, their second concentration camp, an oak tree growing inside its fences had consciously been conserved. It was symbolic, though not about nature: Goethe (no relation to the conservationist) had written poetry, including some of Faust, under its branches.

The military defeat of Nazism was to unveil scientific eugenics as a true Faustian pact, absurdly false and grotesquely violent. That should have been its end. But as with much in this history, the fog of obfuscation hangs over the landscape: Eugenic affiliations are continually denied or censored.

Acclaimed figures in post-war European conservation included former Nazis like Prince Bernhard, a founder of WWF (who joined the allies before the war), and Bernhard Grzimek, the self-proclaimed “savior of the Serengeti,” cofounder of Friends of the Earth Germany, and former director of the Frankfurt Zoological Society – one of Europe’s biggest conservation funders. He made sure the Maasai and other tribes were expelled.

So did Mike Fay of the Wildlife Conservation Society, the creator of the Nouabalé-Ndoki Park in the Congo, which kicked out the Mbendjele people, using US taxpayers’ money. The Wildlife Conservation Society trained the guards who now beat Mbendjele people for suspected poaching. Given the way they’re treated, it’s frankly not surprising that those who once lived on and from the land “poach” if the opportunity arises: Conservation breeds poachers.

When today’s environmental leaders press for curbs on immigration and population, it can only call to mind this violent past. Did David Brower, for example, founder of both Friends of the Earth and Earth Island Institute, have to assert that having children without a license should be a crime – given that he had four of his own?

Few environmentalists protest at the theft of tribal lands or stand for indigenous rights. For example, John Burton, of the World Land Trust, formerly of Friends of the Earth, and Fauna and Flora International, openly opposes the very idea, though other key players, some in Greenpeace for example, have signaled support for tribes.

The unexpurgated history of conservation matters because it still shapes attitudes toward tribal peoples. Conservationists no longer pretend to be saving their “race,” but they certainly claim to be saving the world’s heritage, and they mostly retain a supercilious attitude toward those they are destroying.

Such attitudes must change. Conservation nowadays, particularly in Africa and Asia, seems to be as much about land grabbing and profit as anything else. Its quiet partnerships with the logging and mining industries damage the environment. Tribal people are still abused, even shot, for poaching, when they’re just trying to feed their families, while “conservation” still encourages trophy hunting. The rich can hunt, the poor can’t.

In spite of the growing evidence to the contrary, many senior conservationists can’t accept that tribal peoples really are able to manage their lands. They’re wrong. It’s a great con trick and it’s time it was stopped.

Other conservationists are keen to do better. They deserve to know there’s a groundswell of public support behind them, pushing for a major change in conservation to benefit, finally, tribal peoples, nature, and us all.

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Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone: How They Did It: Exposing How U.S. Universities Profited From Indigenous Land

There’s a four-bedroom house for sale in Moorhead, Minnesota. “Perfect location,” the listing says. There’s a golf course next door and a shopping center across the street complete with bank, salon, hotel, and fast food. For this 160 acres, the United States paid the eastern bands of the Dakota, the Indigenous people of the region, approximately $3.78 cents for title. The land was later granted to the state of Mississippi to fund Alcorn State University and Mississippi State University. In total, the two land-grant universities raised $143.50 from those 160 acres, a return of 38-to-1 for every dollar spent to acquire the land from the Dakota.

This is how the land-grant university system began in the US. The Morrill Act of 1862 granted expropriated Indigenous land to states in order to fund universities. Indigenous territory acquired through lopsided treaties and outright seizures was funneled through the act to make advanced agricultural and mechanical education more widely accessible.

The lands were usually sold quickly to raise money for college endowments, but in some cases, they remain in the possession of the states and continue to produce revenue for their associated universities. In all, the act redistributed 10.7 million acres of land from more than 250 tribal nations for the benefit of 52 colleges — an area approximately the size of Denmark.

Image by Margaret Pearce / High Country News. United States, undated.

Nearly 160 years after the signing of the Morrill Act, a team consisting of a historian, cartographer, photographer, fact-checkers, web designer, coder, and reporters, investigated the impact of this landmark legislation on tribal nations and universities. In partnership with the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Pulitzer Center, the Land-Grab Universities investigation was published by High Country News, a nonprofit news organization covering the western US.

From the first explorers to colonial settlers, newcomers to what is currently the United States have killed or removed Indigenous people from the continent, resulting in the deaths of tens of millions — actions that meet international definitions of genocide. With the elimination of Indigenous communities, land was opened for settlers. The US and its citizens have been loath to refer to those actions as genocide, but our investigation provides a window into the process by revealing one set of institutions that directly benefited from the act: land-grant universities.

Nowadays land-grant universities enroll more than a million students and perform cutting-edge research, but they offer little acknowledgment that the foundation for their success lies in the dispossession of Indigenous land and eradication of Indigenous people. From Cornell University to the University of California, land-grant universities are some of the most prestigious colleges in the US. Only now are we beginning to see the links between higher education and colonialism through data.

Image by Margaret Pearce / High Country News. United States, undated.

Investigating Untold Histories

At the core of our investigation was the development of a custom geodatabase that reconstructs the Morrill Act’s enormous, scattered footprint. Our data maps approximately 80,000 individual land parcels, spread out over 24 states. For each parcel, we identified the Indigenous cessions through which the US claimed the land and contrasted the price paid for Indigenous title, if anything, to money raised for university endowments — money that remains on the books today.

With this data on hand, we could overlay the land grants on existing maps of Indigenous land cessions and identify, for the first time, the connections between university beneficiaries and the land’s original owners and caretakers. To gain a sense of how the Morrill Act redistributed wealth, we researched payments made to tribal nations for the land that supplied the grants, as well as money raised for universities from land sales, and distributed them across the dataset.

Drawing on the data surveys, we told the story of the intertwined histories of the dispossession of tribal nations and the growth of fledgling land-grant universities. We dispatched photographer Kalen Goodluck to the actual land parcels to document how the land was being used today. His travels took him from Minnesota down through Nebraska, as well as Nevada, California, and Washington state.

Using the geodata to guide his photography, we were able to put a “face” to the story through old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting: it was through Goodluck’s time on the land that we were able to establish that the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles, California, was built on a parcel of land taken from nearly a dozen tribal nations and granted to the University of California. Marrying that location with payment information we collected, we could show that the US paid nothing for that land, despite signing a legal agreement with those tribes, while the University collected $786.74 from its sale.

An accompanying website enables readers to sift through the database themselves and find places like the 160-acre tract in Moorhead, Minnesota. By making all our data available to explore through interactive maps and tables, or for download, the project invites newsrooms, researchers, tribal governments, and universities to reconsider the foundations — and responsibilities — of the land-grant system.

Building the Geodatabase

There is neither a single source of Morrill Act land parcels nor a comprehensive accounting of how many acres were distributed through the Morrill Act. To compile a directory as complete as possible, we created a master list of Morrill Act parcels state by state. We identified the land parcels from a range of digital and archival repositories and extracted most of our data digitally, pulling tens of thousands of land patents that were tagged as issued under the legal authority of the Morrill Act, from the US Bureau of Land Management’s General Land Office database.

To fill the significant gaps that remained, we went to the National Archives in Washington, DC, where we photographed Morrill Act parcel selection lists compiled by states. Brittle and often tied up in twine, many of these documents appeared to have been untouched since being archived.

We completed our search by consulting printed lists of agricultural college land offered for sale. Some were available digitally, while others were located at special collections at colleges — like the University of Missouri, Columbia — as well as state selection lists available on microfilm and microfiche. While we were usually able to pull data on acres, locations, and beneficiaries from the BLM database, corresponding information from archival and print sources had to be transcribed by hand. In many cases, illegible or missing records created undercounts.

Our search yielded a database of 79,461 Morrill Act land parcels that had to be mapped. Using their public land survey descriptions, we created polygons for all the parcels using online maping tool ArcGIS. We were able to draw precise polygons for roughly 97% of the parcels, and locate nearly all the rest to within one square mile or less. A negligible portion — less than one-tenth of 1% — could not be mapped due to incomplete or illegible location descriptions.

Image by Margaret Pearce / High Country News. United States, undated.

With these locations identified, we could now use spatial analysis to specify Indigenous sources of the grants. To establish Indigenous land cessions we relied on maps created for the Smithsonian, a museum and research institution managed by the US federal government, in the late 19th century by cartographer Charles Royce, a standard used by courts and historians throughout the 20th century and now publicly available as shapefiles. We spatially joined these shapefiles to our Morrill Act parcels to establish “original ownership.”

It’s important to note that while the Royce maps represent who the US entered into legal agreements with, they are not entirely accurate, particularly from Indigenous perspectives: The maps often leave out tribal nations living in the same areas who may have resisted US expansion and been forcibly removed, exterminated, or excluded from negotiating treaties with the federal government. Those legal agreements made by the US have still not been honored or enforced to this day.

Tracing the Money

After connecting university beneficiaries to Indigenous land sources, we conducted research on treaty payment histories, endowment principal raised from the Morrill Act grants, and the value of unsold grant land in an effort to shed light on the Morrill Act’s function as an Indigenous wealth transfer. This required consulting copious legal documents, federal accounting reports, and compilations of land-grant college statistics.

Our research revealed that by the early 20th century, the grants were worth about $22.8 million in endowment principal and unsold land, or about half-a-billion dollars when adjusted to current values. By contrast, we found that the US paid just $400,000 dollars for Indigenous title to the same land, although much of it was simply seized. Not a single dollar was paid for more than a quarter of the parcels that supplied the grants.

The funds raised through the Morrill Act are still on the books generating income for their beneficiaries. And as we discovered during the reporting process, over a half million acres of Indigenous land redistributed through this law are still owned by states for their respective universities.

Holdings of so-called “mineral acres” — land that contains oil, natural gas, or other extractable minerals — are even more extensive. Unlike the parcel sold in Moorhead, Minnesota, these retained surface and mineral acres continue to generate sizable incomes — at least $8.6 million in fiscal year 2019 alone — for their associated universities and leave lots of opportunities for reporters to ask questions of institutions and report on the ongoing impact of the 1862 law.

The investigation was published as the full force of the COVID-19 pandemic hit the US, and so far, university response has been muted. However, the project continues to receive recognition and spark conversation. At multiple universities, we have learned that students and professors have begun using the data to advocate for tuition reform for Indigenous students, to fund Indigenous faculty positions, create accurate curriculum for land grant students to learn the factual history of their institutions, and even discuss the possibility of establishing land buy-back programs to restore traditional homelands for tribal nations. As well, with COVID-19 coverage leveling off, many newsrooms are beginning to dig into the data in order to localize stories and focus on their local universities and associated tribal nations, while follow-up stories continue to be reported.

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The Intercept: How a Right-Wing Attack on Protections for Native American Children Could Upend Indian Law

A law key to preventing state welfare agencies from separating Indigenous children from their families is at risk of being overturned thanks to the yearslong effort of a network of libertarian and right-wing organizations.

In the 1970s, between a quarter and a third of Indigenous children across the United States had been removed from their homes. Social services often cited neglect or deprivation — euphemisms for poverty — as grounds for placing children in the custody of non-Native families and institutions, offering birth parents little opportunity for redress. Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978 in order to reform a system designed to destroy Indigenous people.

Last October, a U.S. district judge in Texas declared the law unconstitutional under the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection clause, arguing that it creates a separate set of practices for a so-called racial group. The federal government and four tribes appealed the decision, which is currently pending before the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. If the ruling is upheld and the case makes its way to the Supreme Court, it could not only upend protections for the nation’s most vulnerable children, but also undermine a foundational concept of Indian law: that to be Indian is political, not racial.

The campaign against the Indian Child Welfare Act fits into a wider right-wing effort to legally challenge civil rights-era gains that have remained instrumental in shielding marginalized communities from America’s foundational systems of discrimination and genocide.

Leading the charge against the law is the Goldwater Institute, which brands itself as a “free-market public policy research and litigation organization” that supports limited government and private property rights. The institute has participated in 12 cases challenging ICWA in the last five years. The Texas decision is its biggest victory yet. The Cato Institute and the Project on Fair Representation, founded by the strategist responsible for two major Supreme Court cases challenging affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act, also filed briefs in the Texas case.

Tribal leaders, child advocates, and attorneys specializing in Indian law worry that if the Texas ruling is upheld, it could open the door to constitutional challenges of a range of federal laws based on Native American tribes’ political relationship with the U.S. government, including the Major Crimes Act, which establishes the federal government’s law enforcement role on reservations; the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which governs casinos on tribal land; federal policies that allow tribes to regulate the oil and gas industry; and programs that offer housing and health care to Native American communities.

Timothy Sandefur, Goldwater’s vice president for litigation, claims that the Texas decision is “a major step forward for the rights of Indian children in this country and their parents.” But 31 child welfare organizations disagree, writing in an amicus brief that ICWA “both embodies and has served as a model for the child welfare policies that are best practices generally.”

Shannon Smith, executive director of the ICWA Law Center in Minnesota, rejects Goldwater’s assertion that taking down ICWA would be good for children. “This is very misguided, and the potential impacts to Indian children and their connection to families and tribes could be devastating.”

“Kill the Indian, Save the Man”

The U.S. government’s efforts to “kill the Indian, save the man” via removal of Native children from their communities dates to the opening of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1879. Hundreds of thousands of children were placed in institutions where they were typically not allowed to speak their language or practice their culture. Later, the Indian Adoption Project placed hundreds of Native children in the custody of white families between 1958 and 1967.

In a remarkable series of Senate hearings in 1974, family after family described children who were disappeared by the state with no notice or court hearing, welfare agents repeatedly requesting that mothers give up their newborns, and kids making plans to hide if child services showed up to take them away.

The Indian Child Welfare Act, passed four years later, set a high bar for the removal of Indigenous children from their parents, requiring “active” efforts to avoid the breakup of an American Indian family. That might mean a social worker driving a parent struggling with chemical dependency to treatment, rather than simply mandating that they go or handing them a brochure. Before a parent’s rights can be terminated, ICWA requires evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” that continued custody would result in serious physical or emotional damage. And when a removal does occur, child welfare agencies must first attempt to place the child with a family member, then with a member of their tribe, then with a member of another tribe.

The law has been important for curbing the flow of children out of Indigenous communities, but it fell short of eliminating the problem. A 2011 NPR series found that, despite the availability of licensed Native foster parents, 90 percent of Indigenous kids in foster care in South Dakota were still placed in group homes or with non-Native families. In Minnesota, Native kids are 17 times more likely than non-Native kids to be removed from their parents.

In recent years, as advocates for Indigenous families were fighting to strengthen ICWA, a concerted effort to undermine the law emerged in the form of non-Native couples attempting to adopt Native children.

The lead plaintiffs in the Texas case are Jennifer and Chad Brackeen, a white couple who sought to adopt a Navajo baby they had fostered for a year. After the tribe’s attempt to place him with an adoptive Navajo family fell through, the Brackeens were able to keep the child. But their lawsuit argued that a provision of ICWA allowing tribes to contest an adoption for up to two years threatened the integrity of their family.

What happened in the wake of the Texas ruling demonstrates what losing ICWA can mean for Native families. The adopted child’s biological mother had another baby that she planned to put up for adoption. The baby girl’s great aunt, Alvetta James, sought to adopt her, making the case that she would maintain connections to her culture and family in James’s care, according to a New York Times profile. But the Brackeens asserted that they were the best family for the sibling, and in May, a family court judge agreed, citing the ruling that found ICWA unconstitutional and giving them primary custody of the baby girl.

The Definition of “Indian”

ICWA applies to children who have a parent who is a tribal member and are eligible for membership, even if they have not yet been enrolled. According to U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, who presided over the Texas case, the fact that a baby who has not yet been enrolled in a tribe could be called “Indian” means the designation is racial, not political.

“Babies don’t get born and run down to the citizenship office and file a petition,” said Matthew Fletcher, director of the Indigenous Law and Policy Center at Michigan State University. When his own child was born, he and his partner took a year to register him as a tribal member, in part because he was eligible for more than one tribal nation. “To say that somehow this kid hasn’t been enrolled yet and therefore doesn’t have a political relationship is really quite disingenuous.”

The political relationship Native Americans maintain with the U.S. government dates back to treaty commitments the government made between 1778 and 1868 in exchange for the millions of acres of land that constitute the United States. The treaties form the basis of what’s known as the “trust relationship” between Native nations and the United States. ICWA is part of a body of law meant to fulfill the U.S. government’s trust responsibility.

The reason the distinction between racial and political matters is that under the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause, laws that differentiate on the basis of race are subject to a higher level of scrutiny in the courts and must be narrowly tailored to fulfill an important government interest.

Over the years, various parties have attempted to raise equal protection challenges to Indian laws. Despite numerous legal attacks, O’Connor is the first judge to declare ICWA unconstitutional. “Basically, the judge is saying that any federal statute with the word ‘Indian’ in it should be subject to strict scrutiny,” Fletcher said.

The Goldwater Institute, the Cato Institute, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the Academy of Adoption and Assisted Reproduction Attorneys claimed in an appellate brief that concerns about the Brackeen decision’s potential to undermine Indian law more widely are “radically overblown.” But even as the ICWA ruling is being appealed, at least one attorney has already signaled willingness to use it to challenge the Major Crimes Act — a foundational law that gives the federal government jurisdiction over certain crimes committed by Indian people on Indian land, such as murder, rape, and burglary.

Derrick Jim, a Navajo man from Arizona, was sentenced to life in prison for raping a woman at a party at her house. Because he’s legally an Indian and the assault took place in the Navajo Nation, he was tried in federal court. Had he been tried in New Mexico’s state system, his sentence might have been lighter. In an appeal filed at the end of April, his lawyer asked the judge to preserve Jim’s right to bring his case to the Supreme Court and challenge the constitutionality of the Major Crimes Act should the Texas ICWA ruling be upheld.

According to Fletcher, loss of the Major Crimes Act could throw the legal system into disarray and allow more violent crimes on tribal land to be committed with impunity. “The majority of tribes don’t have the capacity to exercise criminal jurisdiction,” he explained.

Fletcher pointed out that the same arguments advanced in the Texas decision have been used by private casinos attempting to overturn laws that allow Indian gaming. He expressed concern that, if upheld, the Brackeen decision could also be used to argue against Environmental Protection Agency policies that grant some tribes the right to enforce the oil and gas industry’s compliance with environmental regulations.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has repeatedly signaled other ways that a redefinition of “Indian” as racial could be used to take away welfare benefits that fulfill the U.S. government’s treaty responsibilities to Native people. In a 2017 signing statement for an appropriations bill, President Donald Trump listed Native American Housing Block Grants among programs he described as allocating benefits “on the basis of race, ethnicity, and gender.” He said he planned to treat those programs as subject to equal protection requirements — suggesting that Native housing benefits for communities where affordable housing is notoriously rare and run-down might be unconstitutional.

In 2018, the administration attempted to use the same argument to deny Native people access to Medicaid. After several states passed laws requiring Medicaid recipients to fulfill work requirements, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services denied requests for exemptions for Native Americans, many of whom live on isolated reservations where jobs are difficult to find. The administration cited constitutional concerns that the exemption would be a racial preference.

“The United States has a legal responsibility to provide health care to Native Americans,” Mary Smith, who headed Indian Health Service under Barack Obama, told Politico. “It’s the largest prepaid health system in the world — they’ve paid through land and massacres — and now you’re going to take away health care and add a work requirement?”

Eventually, the administration backed down and allowed the exemptions, but many experts in Indian law see clear warning signs that the Trump administration has benefits to Native people in its crosshairs.

Behind the Legal Attacks

Sandefur, the Goldwater Institute lawyer, insists that concern for children drives his interest in ICWA. “I know that there’s a lot of skepticism on the left toward our motives about this,” he told The Intercept, “that this is all some sort of secret Koch brothers conspiracy to destroy Indian tribes and all this bullshit.” In fiscal year 2016, the Charles Koch Foundation donated $100,000 to Goldwater. The Mercer Family Foundation, backed by the billionaires who propelled Trump to power, donated $1.1 million between 2014 and 2016. Goldwater has also accepted more than $1 million from the murky right-wing fund Donors Trust, through which billionaires like the Kochs and the Mercers funnel money to an array of causes.

“The reason we’re interested in this is that these children are our fellow Americans who deserve the same constitutional rights as every other American,” Sandefur continued, proceeding to quote Martin Luther King’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” Sandefur has a habit of co-opting the words of black historical figures to justify right-wing agendas. He is also the author of “Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man,” a biography published by the Cato Institute that paints the abolitionist critic of white supremacy as a “radical individualist.”

While Sandefur couches his claims in the language of civil rights, Goldwater and the other right-wing groups fighting ICWA have a track record of challenging policies meant to address systemic discrimination in the United States.

The Project on Fair Representation, which has also received funding from Donors Trust, is directed by Edward Blum, the strategist behind Abigail Fisher’s case challenging affirmative action before the Supreme Court, as well as Shelby v. Holder, which gutted the Voting Rights Act by eliminating rules that required federal oversight of districts with a history of voter discrimination. Another amicus filer, the Pacific Legal Foundation, is in the midst of a lawsuit challenging New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s effort to enroll more black and Latino students in the city’s most prestigious high schools.

The adoption industry, meanwhile, has a clear financial stake in undermining ICWA. A high demand for adoptable children, driven in part by an evangelical Christian movement that frames adoption as a social cause, has coincided with increased restrictions from foreign countries and fewer U.S. children put up for adoption. The Academy of Adoption and Assisted Reproduction Attorneys, whose members are paid to represent adoptive parents in court, has filed amicus briefs in at least four separate legal cases attacking ICWA.

The relative material wealth of people living outside of Native communities is the subtext of the arguments for more adoptions to non-Native families.

Chad Brackeen, an evangelical Christian whose property includes a pool, greenhouse, and zip-line, reportedly told the family court judge that he imagined the baby girl “not as an infant living in a room with a great-aunt but maybe as an adolescent in smaller, confined homes.” He added, “I’m a little bit concerned with the limited financial resources possibly to care for this child, should an emergency come up.”

Sandefur dismissed statistics showing that Native children continue to be disproportionately removed from their families. “Do you assume that these kids shouldn’t have been removed?” he asked The Intercept. “Native Americans are also overrepresented in terms of the poverty statistics, crime statistics, and drug and alcohol statistics, so it’s natural to assume that children growing up in such circumstances are going to be taken into state custody more often.”

It was Darcy Olsen, Goldwater’s former CEO, who initially set the organization’s sights on ICWA. Olsen has fostered and adopted multiple children, and since she left Goldwater, her vision has expanded far beyond Indian Country. Through her nonprofit Generation Justice, she is pushing for state-level laws that would limit kinship preferences in all adoptions and more quickly terminate parental rights, particularly for parents coping with addiction.

Echoes of the Past

Reflecting on the rhetoric used by ICWA opponents like Sandefur, Nicole Adams, a spokesperson for Partnership for Native Children, pointed to the institutions that pushed for the use of boarding schools and adoption for decades before ICWA’s passage. “They were led by very well-intentioned Christian coalitions purporting that Indian children needed to be saved, and they were just the ones to do it. If you look at the rhetoric being put out by some of ICWA’s most staunch opponents, it is eerily and frighteningly similar.”

Smith said there’s plenty of room to build a system that better supports Native children. “If we’re really going to talk about child welfare, we need to talk about the welfare of moms,” she said, and assuring that they have access to safe and affordable housing and health care — the kinds of services that could be undermined with the Texas ICWA decision as precedent.

Adams is hopeful that it won’t get to that point. “This decision is only the first step in a long process,” Adams said. “Indian Country will be fighting together to ensure that doesn’t happen.”

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Smithsonian: Colonial America Depended on the Enslavement of Indigenous People

“Textbooks and classroom lesson plans are starting to present a more clear-eyed view of America’s history—such as slowly recognizing the violence that happened when European settlers encountered the indigenous people of the so-called “New World.” But there are still many overlooked stories. One of these startling omissions to the history books is something Margaret Ellen Newell is calling attention to in her book, Brethren by Nature: Colonists living in New England relied on the labor of thousands of Native Americans to build their new lives. 

The enslavement of New England’s indigenous people was glossed over in the work of historians after World War I, Newell says, as Tanya H. Lee reports for Indian Country Today. Newell, an associate professor of history at Ohio State University, writes that historians “reconstructed the compelling narrative of the Puritan migration…. Many of these works stressed the uniqueness of New England culture and sought there the origins of American exceptionalism.”

During the course of researching her first book, From Dependency to Independence: Economic Revolution in Colonial New England, Newell came across a list of Native American slaves kept by colonists in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She was surprised by the find because she had been taught that New England colonists didn’t keep Native Americans as slaves, because they often ran away. But that impression was incorrect.

Lee writes:

The colonial economy depended on slavery, many well-to-do households functioned only because of slavery, early colonial legal codes were devised to justify slavery and the Pequot War and King Philip’s War were fought in large measure to perpetuate slavery.

Indeed, in the 1630s, the Connecticut River Valley was home to the powerful Pequots. The settlers at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay wanted their rich, fertile land and in order to get it, they persuaded Mohegan and Narragansett allies to help them fight the Pequots. In 1637, they burned a village on the banks of the Mystic River in southeastern Connecticut, killing 400 to 700 Pequots, according to the Society of Colonial Wars in the State of Connecticut. That massacre turned the tide of the war and Pequot survivors were pursued, captured and sold as slaves.

King Philip’s War in the mid 1670s—which was fought to protest the English colonists encroaching influence and forced labor of Native Americans—ended with “as many as 40 percent of the Indians in southern New England living in English households as indentured servants or slaves,” Lee writes.

The English colonists weren’t the only ones to use the labor of enslaved indigenous people, of course. ”The Spanish were almost totally dependent on Indian labor in most of their colonies,” writes Alan Gallay for History Now. Enslaving Native Americans became one of the primary ways to expand the economy for colonists in South Carolina and to a lesser extent in North Carolina, Virginia and Louisiana. “From 1670 to 1720 more Indians were shipped out of Charleston, South Carolina, than Africans were imported as slaves—and Charleston was a major port for bringing in Africans,” Gallay writes.

As the African slave trade took off in the late 1700s, the Native American slave trade waned. Many remaining tribes had been pushed West, but something else was taking place, that pushed the data down, as well. Some Native Americans were intermarrying with African American. The children were then referred to as “colored,” effectively erasing their Native American heritage. The enslavement of Native Americans thus became obscured, but modern DNA technology helped keep that story from being lost to time. 

The history of the enslavement of Native Americans continues to be a complicated and dark part of America’s history, but it is one that deserves to continue to be researched and reconciled with.

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Indian Country Today: Assimilation, Integration and Colonization

“The expression “colonization” has gained a great amount of use in recent decades. At earlier times, peopled debated about assimilation and integration. It is important to understand what colonization, assimilation, and integration are. In the context of Indigenous Peoples, colonization has come to mean any kind of external control, and it is used as an expression for the subordination of Indian peoples and their rights since early contact with Europeans. In North America, colonization took the task of subordinating Indigenous Peoples to the political power of Christian European kings. In Spanish colonies, with the appearance of the colonists, the land was immediately considered under the control of the colonizing nations. Indigenous Peoples had only the right to land sufficient for their agricultural subsistence.

After 1763, in British North American colonies, Indigenous Peoples retained the right to sell land to the colonial government, and Indians lived on the land at the discretion of the king. In addition, colonizing powers sought to Christianize Indians, and bring Indians into the fold as subjects to the Christian king. Christian Indian communities and non-Christian Indians alike were considered political subjects of the king. Colonial governments regulated the fur trade, and worked to manage fur trade labor and trade relations with Indians. Indians in Latin and South America, during colonial times, were subject to taxes by the colonial government, and on an annual basis they worked those taxes off by performing labor in silver and gold mines, missions, or as workers appended to large farms of wealthy landowners.

In North America, the fur trade during the colonial and early U.S. periods was a major source of wealth production. Colonial governments sought to exploit the labor of Indigenous Peoples. And if labor exploitation was not possible, to marginalize Indians and move them from control over resources valued by the colonial government. Colonial governments were created to extract resources and wealth from colonial territories and transport the wealth to benefit the mother country.

Assimilation and Integration are expressions that are used in the post-colonial period. Significant changes in relations with Indian peoples emerged after the U.S., Canada, and Mexico reject colonial status, and become independent democratic nation states. Now the purpose of the nation state is to assist in the creation of wealth and protection of the rights of citizens. The Indian problem is addressed in similar ways among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Indians are seen as possible citizens. In the long run, the policies of the nations states was to turn Indians into citizens and invite them as individuals to join the new post-colonial economies and governments of Mexico, the United States, and Canada.

In the case of Mexico, Indians are granted rights of citizens, but not rights as Indigenous Peoples. Assimilation in the post-colonial nation states refers to socializing and acculturation—Indian people to taking up national cultures and institutions. Integration refers to the process of Indian people abandoning their own nations and cultures, and accepting the government, culture, and property laws of the nation states. Indigenous Peoples are invited to join the modernizing nation state, while abandoning their own tribal political and cultural identities.

In Mexico a majority of people, who are participants in the national government, economy, and culture, are also descendants of indigenous nations. The Mestizo citizens of Mexico have accepted the assimilation and integration path, and reject indigenous identities and culture. Many Indigenous Peoples in U.S., Mexico, and Canada continue to choose to uphold significant aspects of indigenous life, including self-government, control over land, and cultural views. In the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, Indigenous Peoples accept national citizenship, but many also choose to live within and support tribal nations and communities. Indigenous Peoples make choices about their identities, and as a result live in multiple tribal and national contexts, which are not fully captured by the expressions of assimilation, integration, or colonization.”

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Teen Vogue: Treaties Between the United States and Indigenous Nations, Explained

Treaties, and the U.S. government’s history of unilaterally breaching them, have had a profound effect on Native people.

OG History is a Teen Vogue series where we unearth history not told through a white, cisheteropatriarchal lens. In this op-ed, Ruth H. Hopkins (Cankudutawin-Red Road Woman), a Dakota/Lakota Sioux writer, biologist, attorney, and former tribal judge, explains the history of broken treaties between the United States government and the Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation), which she belongs to.

Treaties are part of what the U.S. Constitution calls “the supreme law of the land.” Yet they are too seldom discussed, too often ignored, and viewed by too many today as ancient history.

Nonetheless, treaties are legally binding agreements that occur nation to nation. Treaties were made between newly formed European settler governments and the sovereign Indigenous nations that already populated the continent.

Today, Natives are often thought of in terms of race, and we are considered people of color. But American Indians specifically are also designated by the federal government as a political classification. This is because we belong to ancient Indigenous tribes that predate the existence of the United States of America and we made treaties with them. These treaties recognized our sovereignty as independent nations.

Treaties, and the U.S. government’s history of unilaterally breaching them, have had a profound effect on Native people. To be blunt, we were lied to. Treaties were used as a ruse to coax tribes out of defending their territory and to steal Native lands and resources.

The U.S. made hundreds of treaties with Native nations. The list is exhaustive. I am Dakota and Lakota from the Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation), so I will focus on treaties that my people have signed with the government and how that has affected us.

Minnesota is the ancestral land of the Dakota. More than 1 in 10 treaties ever signed by the U.S. involved land in what is today Minnesota.

In the 1851 treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota, Dakota of the Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation) ceded land in Minnesota to the U.S. in exchange for money, goods, and services. Unbeknownst to the Dakota, Congress eliminated Article 3 of each treaty. This Article set up reservation land within Minnesota for the Dakota to live on. The government also defaulted on payments to the Dakota. It kept more than 80% of the money. Of the payments that were made, the government often gave the money directly to traders who were supposed to supply the Dakota with rations. The withholding of rations by these traders led to the Dakota War of 1862, because the Dakota, of which there were an estimated 6,500 people, were starving. All told, the war lasted a month and a half. About 400 Dakota were arrested by the U.S. military. Ultimately, 38 Dakota men were hung in the largest mass execution in U.S. history, in Mankato, Minnesota, on December 26, 1862, under the orders of President Abraham Lincoln.

The Dakota people were separated after the war. We became exiles. The governor of Minnesota put a bounty on the scalps of every Dakota man, woman, and child. Some Dakota were taken to prison camps in Iowa. Others, like my ancestor Chief Wabasha, were marched to the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota. More were moved to Nebraska territory. Most Dakota from the Sisseton and Wahpeton bands were moved to the Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota. Some managed to escape to the Spirit Lake Reservation in North Dakota and to Canada. Others died from sickness and famine. More than one-quarter of Dakota in 1862 died during the following year.

In 1863, more than 150 Dakota were massacred at Whitestone Hill, where the cavalry took out their vengeance for the war on many innocent Dakota by ambushing them. Women and children were slaughtered there. They even killed the Dakota’s dogs and horses.

The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 “granted” the Lakota of the Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation) and their allies a large swath of territory in South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Montana, and North Dakota in exchange for the passage of roads and railways. Despite this, Lakota lands were encroached upon by outside invaders in breach of treaty law. The U.S. military launched the 1865 Powder River Expedition to subdue Natives within their own, established territory. The Lakota defended their lands. Oglala and Minniconjou Lakota warriors led by Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and High-Back-Bone killed U.S. Captain W.J. Fetterman and all 80 of his men in half an hour, in what would become known as the Fetterman Fight.

Enter the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which came about because of Red Cloud’s War. In short, the Lakota, led by the Crazy Horse, were kicking settler butt. In this treaty, the Lakota were promised half of South Dakota and part of North Dakota as a “Great Sioux Reservation.”

The Black Hills are the birthplace of the Lakota. Important ceremonies that bring harmony to the Universe have been held there for millennia. They are sacred to the Oceti Sakowin and are part of Lakota treaty lands, but they were taken from the Lakota when Congress reneged on the Fort Laramie Treaty during the gold rush that historians say began in 1874 — although rumors of gold in the Black Hills had lingered for years before then. In 1980, in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the seizure of the Black Hills from the Lakota was a wrongful taking and that the Sioux were entitled to “just compensation” under the 5th Amendment’s “Takings Clause.” The Lakota refuse to accept the money, because the Black Hills are not for sale. To this day, they rightfully belong to the Great Sioux Nation.

Lakota treaty land also includes the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, where I was born and where water protectors camped out for nearly a year to prevent the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline through ancient Oceti Sakowin burial sites and under the freshwater source of millions of people downstream, both Native, and non-Native. February 23 marks the anniversary of the final raid of camps there. One of the last arrested was Regina Brave, a Lakota grandmother who was making a treaty stand. She is a veteran of the American Indian Movement’s 1973 Occupation of Wounded Knee.

We are still fighting to protect our lands and waters. In June 2017, a federal judge ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to reconsider its environmental review of the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline by Energy Transfer Partners, thanks to successful protests and litigation by the Oceti Sakowin and their allies. That process is now underway.

Oceti Sakowin tribes are now mobilizing to stop the Keystone XL pipeline from crossing Lakota treaty lands. In January, permits were granted to start additional gold mining operations in the Black Hills. Lakota tribes were never consulted, nor did they consent. But we are on the right side of history.

Honor the treaties. Join us.

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Further Readings

• Everyday Feminism: 8 Things The History Books Don’t Tell Us About Native People
• Washington Post: Powhatan and his people: The 15,000 American Indians shoved aside by Jamestown’s settlers
• PRI: Indian Country remembers the trauma of children taken from their parents

• High Country News: The U.S. stole generations of Indigenous children to open the West

• Vox: 6 Native leaders on what it would look like if the US kept its promises

• Smithsonian: Ulysses S. Grant Launched an Illegal War Against the Plains Indians, Then Lied About It

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Native Issues Today

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• 567 tribes (229 Alaska Native communities)
  • currently recognized by the federal government
• Natives on reservations have high poverty, alcoholism, unemployment, suicide rates
  • Poverty
    • 27% of all Native Americans and Alaska Natives live in poverty
    • 40% of Native Americans who live on reservations are in substandard housing
      • One-third of homes are overcrowded, and less than 16% have indoor plumbing.
      • Housing on reservations is funded by the HUD and administered and augmented by tribes
        • Historically underfunded, despite treaties and the trust responsibility of the federal government.
  • High Levels of mass incarceration and policing
    • Native s account for less than 1% of the national population
      • but who make up nearly 2% of all police killings
    • In South Dakota Native Americans make up 9% of the total population
      • but 29% of the prison population
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  • Trauma and Suicide
    • Their historic loss of lives, land, and culture has led to widespread historical trauma
      • Trauma is inherited in our epigenetics, the proteins that control DNA expression
      • Suicide is the second most common cause of death for Native youth ages 15 to 24
        • two and a half times the national rate for that age group
      • 22% of Native children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder
  • Land
    • Indian nations don’t own their reservation lands rather lands are held in trust by the federal government
      • Prevents leveraging assets for loans to start businesses or promote economic growth
    • Natives continue to fight US gov from selling land land and water to mining, waste, etc. industries
  • Voting Rights
    • Natives are often unable to vote because there’s no polling places nearby or don’t have addresses to register
      • Last people to gain suffrage in 1924 and couldn’t vote in states like Arizona, New Mexico and Utah until 1948
  • Education
    • Lack decent funding for majority of schools Indian reservations
    • Only 51% of Native Americans in the class of 2010 graduated high school (85% national average)
• Many government policies today
  • Reduce Native language, culture, self-determination and increases their poverty
  • The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) is behind many of these policies.

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Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)

“Principally, the root of the Native tribes’ destruction is the Federal Government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The BIA has stolen money from the Native groups, undermined their autonomy, and ruined their ability to self-govern.

The BIA (is) an agency that is supposed to defend Indian rights but that persuades tribes to sign contracts exploiting tribal raw materials in return for a fraction of their real value. The BIA seeks only to benefit itself; Congress allots funds to the BIA … which then passes along whatever is left after its employees are finished spending, taking, or losing huge chunks”

Even after stealing a majority of the money, the BIA does not even allow the tribes to spend the money as they choose. The remainder of the funds are not for the tribe to spend or invest as it wishes, but are earmarked for particular programs, which the BIA has already chosen. The BIA receives the money, keeps much of it, and decides how the rest will be spent

As a result of this preference of programs, the power is removed from the tribal councils. Without that key decision-making power, the BIA virtually usurped the tribal self-governing powers. This colonialist policy is destroying the Native tribes. ” Charles Marr – Native American Survival in the Colonial United States

Forbes: 5 Ways The Government Keeps Native Americans In Poverty

Imagine if the government were responsible for looking after your best interests. All of your assets must be managed by bureaucrats on your behalf. A special bureau is even set up to oversee your affairs. Every important decision you make requires approval, and every approval comes with a mountain of regulations.

How well would this work? Just ask Native Americans.

The federal government is responsible for managing Indian affairs for the benefit of all Indians. But by all accounts the government has failed to live up to this responsibility. As a result, Native American reservations are among the poorest communities in the United States. Here’s how the government keeps Native Americans in poverty.

Indian lands are owned and managed by the federal government.

Chief Justice John Marshall set Native Americans on the path to poverty in 1831 when he characterized the relationship between Indians and the government as “resembling that of a ward to his guardian.” With these words, Marshall established the federal trust doctrine, which assigns the government as the trustee of Indian affairs. That trusteeship continues today, but it has not served Indians well.

Underlying this doctrine is the notion that tribes are not capable of owning or managing their lands. The government is the legal owner of all land and assets in Indian Country and is required to manage them for the benefit of Indians.

But because Indians do not generally own their land or homes on reservations, they cannot mortgage their assets for loans like other Americans. This makes it incredibly difficult to start a business in Indian Country. Even tribes with valuable natural resources remain locked in poverty. Their resources amount to “dead capital”—unable to generate growth for tribal communities.

Nearly every aspect of economic development is controlled by federal agencies.

All development projects on Indian land must be reviewed and authorized by the government, a process that is notoriously slow and burdensome. On Indian lands, companies must go through at least four federal agencies and 49 steps to acquire a permit for energy development. Off reservation, it takes only four steps. This bureaucracy prevents tribes from capitalizing on their resources.

It’s not uncommon for years to pass before the necessary approvals are acquired to begin energy development on Indian lands—a process that takes only a few months on private lands. At any time, an agency may demand more information or shut down development. Simply completing a title search can cause delays. Indians have waited six years to receive title search reports that other Americans can get in just a few days.

The result is that many investors avoid Indian lands altogether. When development does occur, federal agencies are involved in every detail, even collecting payments on behalf of tribes. The royalties are then distributed back to Indians—that is, if the government doesn’t lose the money in the process.

Reservations have a complex legal framework that hinders economic growth.

Thanks to the legacy of federal control, reservations have complicated legal and property systems that are detrimental to economic growth. Jurisdiction and land ownership can vary widely on reservations as a result of the government’s allotment policies of the nineteenth century. Navigating this complex system makes development and growth difficult on Indian lands.

One such difficulty is fractionated land ownership. Federal inheritance laws required many Indian lands to be passed in equal shares to multiple heirs. After several generations, these lands have become so fractionated that there are often hundreds of owners per parcel. Managing these fractionated lands is nearly impossible, and much of the land remains idle.

Energy regulations make it difficult for tribes to develop their resources.

Darrin Old Coyote, chairman of the Crow Tribe in Montana, puts it plainly: “The war on coal is a war on our families and our children.” Coal provides the greatest economic opportunity for the impoverished tribe, but regulations are making it hard for the tribe to capitalize on their natural resources. Some are even trying to prevent the tribe from exporting coal to Asia.

The federal government has repeatedly mismanaged Indian assets.

Tribes historically had little or no control over their energy resources. Royalties were set by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but the agency consistently undervalued Indian resources. A federal commission concluded in 1977 that leases negotiated on behalf of Indians were “among the poorest agreements ever made.”

Unfortunately, it hasn’t gotten much better. A recent class action suit alleged that the government mismanaged billions of dollars in Indian assets. The case settled in 2009 for $3.4 billion—far less than what was lost by the feds.

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Reservations contain valuable natural resources worth nearly $1.5 trillion, according to a recent estimate. But the vast majority of these resources remain undeveloped because the federal government gets in the way. Ron Crossguns of the Blackfeet Tribe recently put it this way: “It’s our right. We say yes or no. I don’t think the outside world should come out here and dictate to us what we should do with our properties.”

As long as tribes are denied the right to control their own resources, they will remain locked in poverty and dependence. But if tribes are given the dignity they deserve, they will have the opportunity to unleash the tremendous wealth of Indian nations.

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Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW)

• 4 out of 5 of our Native women are affected by violence today
  • Native women are 3.5x more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted in their life than women of other races
• DOJ found Native women face murder rates 10x national average
  • 2016, 5,712 reported missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW)
• According to DOJ over 70% of violence experienced by Natives is committed by non native people
  • “About one-quarter of all cases of family violence (violence involving spouses) against American Indians involve a non-Indian perpetrator, a rate of inter-racial violence five times the rate of inter-racial violence involving other racial groups. A larger percent of victimization against American Indian and Alaskan Native women are committed by white offenders compared to American Indian and Alaska Native offenders.” Futures Without Violence
• SCOTUS – tribal governments may not prosecute non-Indians
  • Jurisdiction fallen to fed or state who are hours away from reservations
    • And lack the resources to respond.
  • Many jurisdictional complexities and limitations in Indian Country
    • Confusion and lack of coordination from tribal, federal and state
• 2013 Violence Against Women Act
  • Lets tribes prosecute non-Native Domestic Abusers
    • Opposed by many Republicans
      • Objected to protections to same-sex couples and undocumented immigrants
    • 2019 GOP Senate let act expire

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Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women: 4 out of 5 of our Native women are affected by violence today.

The U.S Department of Justice found that American Indian women face murder rates that are more than 10 times the national average.

Homicide is the 3rd leading cause of death among 10-24 years of age and the fifth leading cause of death for American Indian and Alaska Native women between 25 and 34 years of age. – Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Homicide

The legacy of violence against our Native women and children within New Mexico dates to the Spanish and Euro-American invasion of our Native lands and our sacred bodies. From the Navajo Long Walk to the slave trades in Albuquerque’s Old Town to the current struggles of cases being lost within our judicial system- this is a legacy of violence… This incursion of violence onto our most sacred… Must be spoken about. Many times Native people are targeted in bordertowns for the color of a person’s skin, anti-Indianism, and the influences of settler colonialism.

New Mexico ranks 3rd of being the “highest violent” state in the United States with 6,561 violent crimes per 100,000. When we look at border-town violence and police brutality against Native people, Native people are more likely to be killed by police officers than any other minority group in the Nation. We are #1 in child poverty, and we rank 49th in education; over 40% of our Native youth live in poverty here.

Wikipedia: Violence Against Women Act (VAWA )

“VAWA was reauthorized by bipartisan majorities in Congress in 2000 and again in December 2005. The Act’s 2012 renewal was opposed by conservative Republicans, who objected to extending the Act’s protections to same-sex couples and to provisions allowing battered undocumented immigrants to claim temporary visas, but it was reauthorized in 2013, after a long legislative battle. As a result of the United States federal government shutdown of 2018–2019, the Violence Against Women Act expired on December 21, 2018. It was temporarily reinstated via a short-term spending bill on January 25, 2019, but expired again on February 15, 2019. The House of Representatives passed a bill reauthorizing VAWA in April 2019; the bill, which includes new provisions protecting transgender victims and banning individuals convicted of domestic abuse from purchasing firearms, has been ignored by the Senate.^[5]”

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HuffPost: At Last, Violence Against Women Act Lets Tribes Prosecute Non-Native Domestic Abusers

Two years after Congress reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, Native American tribes can finally take advantage of one of the law’s most significant updates: a provision that allows tribal courts to investigate and prosecute non-Native men who abuse Native women on reservations.

Starting Saturday, tribes can claim jurisdiction over non-Native men who commit crimes of domestic violence, dating violence or who violate a protection order against a victim who lives on tribal land. Until now, that jurisdiction has fallen to federal or state law enforcement, who are often hours away from reservations and lack the resources to respond. The result has effectively allowed non-Native abusers immunity from punishment.

For the first time, tribal law enforcement will now have the ability to intervene.

“I want to encourage all tribal governments to get this law on their books,” said Juana Majel of the National Congress of American Indians. “On most reservations, there are a handful of bad actors who have figured out how to slip between jurisdictional boundaries. They need to get the message. If they continue to assault our women, we will prosecute and put them in jail.”

There are epidemic levels of domestic violence on tribal lands. Three out of five Native women have been assaulted in their lifetimes, and 34 percent will be raped, according to the National Congress of American Indians. Getting to the heart of the VAWA provision, 59 percent of assaults against Native women take place at or near a private residence, and, as of 2010, 59 percent of Native women were married to non-Native men.

On some reservations, Native women are murdered at a rate more than 10 times the national average.

House Republicans nearly torpedoed the entire VAWA bill in 2013 because they opposed the new protections for Native victims of abuse. Vice President Joe Biden, an original Senate sponsor of the 1994 law, stepped in and negotiated directly with then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.). Congress ultimately reauthorized VAWA, but with Democrats providing the bulk of votes for it.

Three tribes have already been granted the new jurisdiction as part of a 2014 pilot project authorized by VAWA. Those tribes — the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, and the Tulalip Tribes — had to submit applications laying out their proposed codes and procedures, and were approved by the U.S. attorney general. To date, they have charged a total of 26 offenders.

As of Saturday, tribal courts may take advantage of the new authority with only the approval of their tribal council. The courts must provide people with the same rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution.

“This is a major step forward to protect the safety of Native people, and we thank all members of Congress for passing the Violence Against Women Act of 2013 and recognizing tribal authority,” said Brian Cladoosby, president of the National Congress of American Indians.

In related news, Acting Associate Attorney General Stuart Delery on Friday gave the green light to two tribes to move forward immediately with the new jurisdiction. The Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, and the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate of the Lake Traverse Reservation, are both large tribes in rural areas with larger populations, which means they can be a model for other large rural tribes interested in rolling out the new authority.

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Debra Anne Haaland: Women are disappearing and dying in Indian country. We must act

What would you do if your sister, your daughter or your mother went missing without explanation? There would be search parties. Law enforcement would issue amber alerts. Investigations would begin. Suspects would be brought in for questioning.

In Indian country, that’s not the case. In Indian country, it is often days before law enforcement shows up for a missing person call or homicide. In the case of Ashlyn Mike, a seven-year-old-girl in New Mexico, an amber alert wasn’t issued for more than 10 hours, when typically for cases of missing children those alerts are posted almost immediately. Ashlyn Mike lost her life at the age of seven.

In Indian country, families sometimes wait days for the authorities to respond, and frequently lead the only search parties. What’s worse, sometimes the record of that missing indigenous person isn’t documented, leaving questions unanswered for decades, leading to gaps in information, missing person cases unsolved and perpetrators roaming the streets.

Leona Kinsey disappeared from her home in Oregon 20 years ago – her car was found empty, purse in her home, groceries still in the fridge. She is still missing, and her family still wonders what happened to her.

What we do know is women and girls are disappearing without warning. What we do know is Native women face murder rates that are 10 times higher than the national average. What we do know is that families are left without answers. What we do know is there is a lot we do not know.

Indian country has been severely underfunded for decades. It leads to a lack of funding for roads, cellphone service and public safety departments.

There are several things we can do right away to begin addressing the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women. First, we must adequately fund tribal law enforcement and victim advocates so survivors of domestic violence and trafficking do not become part of the statistics that contribute to loss of life. With the resources to hire more officers in Indian country and provide the proper training on missing person cases, law enforcement can improve response times and conduct effective investigations.

The picture can be even more dire for urban Indians. Recent reports by the Urban Indian Health Institute identified 506 cases of missing and murdered indigenous women across 71 urban cities – my state of New Mexico ranked number one for the highest number of MMIW cases with 78. These numbers are believed to be an extremely low estimate due to the lack of programmatic resources across the board to address issues of missing and murdered indigenous people in urban locations.

Due to devastating federal policies like forced relocation and removal over generations, 71% percent of the Native American population live in urban areas. Cities with high populations of Native Americans include places like Phoenix and Seattle and – my district – Albuquerque. That means communicating and sharing information, so that these cases can be tracked is critical, but right now communication between jurisdictions is limited and often times non-existent.

Three transgender Native people, Ryan Shey Hoskie, Fredrick Watson and Teri Benally, all in different stages of their lives – 23, 32, and 42 – were found beaten to death in Albuquerque between 2005 and 2009. The circumstances surrounding their deaths remain a mystery.

City, county, state and tribal agencies must work together so we can fully understand the scope of this epidemic. If unaddressed, Native people will continue slipping through the jurisdictional cracks.

We must commit as a country to the principle that every person deserves justice – every person deserves the same attention when they go missing, regardless of whether they are located in rural or urban areas, Native or an immigrant, rich or poor. I’m challenging my colleagues and law enforcement around the county to commit to that effort.

The epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women has been overlooked for far too long, but we’re finally giving a voice to this silent crisis. When your community is at risk – when it could be your daughter, your sister or your mom – the issue demands urgency. The attention this issue has received wouldn’t have been possible without the women in Indian country saying, “enough is enough, we deserve to feel safe too”. It was a call for Congress to direct real resources to the problem.

We finally have political voices to raise this issue on the national level. That’s why I’m fighting for Savana’s Act, and to ensure protections for Native people are included in the Violence Against Women Act.

The cases of Leona Kinsey, Ashlyn Mike, Shey Hoskie, Fredrick Watson and Teri Benally could have been different. We must act in order to change this deadly cycle in Indian country.

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EJI: Police Killings Against Native Americans Are Off the Charts and Off the Radar

Police shootings of Native Americans are generating greater attention after recent reports reveal that Native Americans are more likely to be killed by the police than any other racial group in the United States.

“The racial group most likely to be killed by law enforcement is Native Americans, followed by African Americans, Latinos, Whites and Asian Americans,” according to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collected between 1999 and 2011 shows that Native Americans, who are 0.8 percent of the United States population, comprise 1.9 percent of police killings. They are 3.1 times more likely to be killed by police than whites. (Law enforcement kills African Americans at 2.8 times the rate of whites.)

“Yet these killings of Native people go almost entirely unreported by mainstream U.S. media,” writes Stephanie Woodard in a special investigation released this month. Of the 29 Native people killed by police between May 2014 and October 2015, only one received sustained coverage in any of the nation’s top 10 newspapers, and brief mentions of a second shooting misidentified the victim, Suquamish tribal member Daniel Covarrubias, as Latino. None of the other 27 deaths received any coverage.

Major media likewise failed to report on a series of Native deaths in custody in 2015, including that of Sarah Lee Circle Bear, a 24-year-old Sioux mother of two who died in a South Dakota jail after being denied medical care during the same month that Sandra Bland died in police custody.

Ms. Woodard reports that even the most recent and most egregious examples of resistance to civil rights for Native Americans by police, public agencies, and private citizens continue to be left out of the national conversation about race. Recent hearings held by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR), an independent federal agency created by the Civil Rights Act of 1957, revealed that Native Americans today experience mistreatment, from being denied service in public places to police brutality, that “sound[s] like tales from the pre-civil-rights Deep South.”

In Northern Plains states, USCCR members personally observed staff in restaurants and stores hassling or refusing to serve Natives. In South Dakota, the commission heard testimony about a police department that found reasons to fine Natives hundreds of dollars, then “allowed” them to work off the debt on a ranch. USCCR Rocky Mountain director Malee Craft described the situation as “slave labor.”

Violence and discrimination against Native Americans are legacies of this country’s history of racial injustice. The United States has done very little to acknowledge the genocide of Native Americans or the myth of racial difference created to justify the “removal” of Native people and the forced assimilation of their children. Generations of Native American activists have challenged this country to more truthfully confront this history and its legacy, which includes not only the highest police-violence rates, but also the highest poverty and suicide rates in the country.

The latest incarnation of this activism is Native Lives Matter. On December 19, 2014, NLM founder and Lakota attorney Chase Iron Eyes and others, taking inspiration from Black Lives Matter, marched in Rapid City, South Dakota, to draw attention to police brutality against Native people. The next day, Rapid City police shot and killed Allen Locke, a Native man who had attended the protest. In the nearly two years since, activists across the country have adopted the NLM slogan as an umbrella term to advocate for a range of issues affecting Native people, from child welfare to mass incarceration, and to seek accountability for police violence against Native and non-Native people.

After 32-year-old Jacqueline Salyers, a member of the Puyallup tribe, was killed by police in Tacoma, Washington, earlier this year, her family and tribal members joined with other residents, Native and non-Native, who had lost loved ones to police violence. Under the banner “Justice for Jackie, Justice for All,” they are now advocating for a statewide ballot initiative that seeks greater police accountability for using lethal force.

Ramona Bennett, a Puyallup elder in her 70’s who was gassed, beaten, shot at, and arrested during 1970s protests for Native rights, wants recognition and accountability for Native victims of police violence like Jackie Salyers – and for victims of racial violence who have been been denied public acknowledgement and commemoration for decades. She explained that, in the late 19th century, presidential proclamations and Congressional actions broke up the Puyallup reservation and forced tribal members to move to isolated cabins on separate plots.

“Fishing and trapping were outlawed, so the men went out at night, making the cabins very dangerous,” says Bennett. “White men would come, kick the doors in, rape and murder the [women] and throw their bodies on the railroad tracks, where they’d be called ‘railroad accident deaths.’ … We discovered in our tribal enrollment office a stack of ‘railroad death’ documents from 1912 to 1917.’’

Among them was one that recorded the death of Bennett’s grandmother Jennie.

The Justice for Jackie, Justice for All effort will succeed, Bennett believes. “But I’m still out for justice for Jennie … a girl who has been dead for 104 years.”

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Further Readings

• Future without Violence: The Facts on Violence Against American Indian/Alaskan Native Women
• Spokensman Review: Leaving her mark: Native high schooler uses state track meet to raise awareness for missing and murdered women
• Democracy Now: “The Police Killings No One Is Talking About”: Native Americans Most Likely to be Killed by Cops

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DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska: NATIVE AMERICAN SURVIVAL IN A COLONIAL UNITED STATES

The persecution of Native Americans in the United States has not yet come to an end. There are many policies still in place that lead to the reduction of the unique culture of the Native Americans. This can have disastrous impacts for their own survival and well being. These policies reduce their language, culture, self-determination, their knowledge of the environment, and increases their poverty. The United States government can help to solve these problems by eliminating the Bureau of Indian Affairs and forming a think tank that would be composed of Tribal leaders, lawyers who specialize in Native American Law, and a few trusted government officials.

The Native peoples of North America have been persecuted by the United States government since this country’s Forefathers arrived here. This is evident all the way from the Trail of Tears to modem atrocities and examples of genocide and ethnocide inflicted upon the native peoples. Key to the Natives well being and identity is their heritage and culture. Marge Anderson best captures this in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “Without our culture, language and traditions, we are not Ojibwe people – we are only the descendents ofOjibwe people … Protecting and preserving our sovereignty allows us to protect and preserve the things that make us Indian” (Haga 1999: 1 B). A key point of this quote is the concept of sovereignty. Natives believe that the government’s control over them is harming their very existence. Due to the harmful nature of the government, a nongovernment think tank should be developed including tribal leaders, Native law lawyers, and government officials to determine what should be repealed and what needs to be done. The government harms the Native peoples through colonization, cultural
degradation, and environmental damages.

The lack of self-determination that the Native peoples face today did not start out that way. When the framers of the Constitution wrote that important document, they set the Native tribes in the same grouping as foreign nations in the first Article of the Constitution (Deer 1997:23). They were meant to be treated as separate, distinct nations. It did not take long to start down the slippery slope from independent to dependent nations. “The earliest pronouncements of the U.S. Supreme Court … characterized them as ‘domestic dependent nations’” (Reno 1995:113). From that reinterpretation of the framers’ intent to the current situation has been a slow process of incremental changes until the Native Americans were again colonies. For some reason, the United States government has continually tried to needlessly assimilate Native Americans into the “melting pot” of America. Maybe it is the inability to tolerate differences, or perhaps just some form of manifest destiny that strives to control everything within its borders. “One of the legacies of the colonization process is the fact that Indian tribes, which began their
interaction with the federal government as largely sovereign entities outside the
republic, were increasingly absorbed in the republic, eventually becoming internal
sovereign nations of a limited kind” (Pommersheim 1992:417). This divide
continues to be upheld in the court system of today, and the Federal Government is wholly responsible for the destruction of these people.

Principally, the root of the Native tribes’ destruction is the Federal Government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The BIA has stolen money from the Native groups, undermined their autonomy, and ruined their ability to self-govern. “The BIA (is) an agency that is supposed to defend Indian rights but that persuades tribes to sign contracts exploiting tribal raw materials in return for a fraction of their real value.” (Huff 1997:xvi). The BIA seeks only to benefit itself; “Congress allots funds to the BIA … which then passes along whatever is left after its employees are finished spending, taking, or losing huge chunks” (Atkinson 1998:428). Even after stealing a majority of the money, the BIA does not even allow the tribes to spend the money as they choose. “The remainder of the funds are not for the tribe to spend or invest as it wishes, but are earmarked for particular programs, which the BIA has already chosen. The BIA receives the money, keeps much of it, and decides how the rest will be spent” (Atkinson 1998 :428). As a result of this preference of programs, the power is removed from the tribal councils. Without that key decision-making power, “the BIA virtually usurped the tribal self-governing powers” (Clinton 1993 :n.p.) This colonialist policy is destroying the Native tribes.

The colonialist policies of the Federal Government are reflected through their entire approach to Native American policy making. This stems from a flawed sense of colonialism; the idea that the Native Americans need to be controlled. They are viewed as wild and war-hungry, in desperate need of the law and order and culture of the United States (Shanley 1997:60). This has led to horrible policy-making. When both sides do not view each other as equal stakeholders, then that lopsidedness is going to be evident in the policy itself. “So long as the United States preserves the colonial foundation of its Indian law, it will be unable to formulate an effective and mutually beneficial policy for dealing with the Indian nations” (Porter 1998:939). This action violates the rights of indigenous groups. “The right of self-determination has long been recognized as an indisputable prerequisite to any genuine appreciation and enjoyment of human rights. It is a positive legal obligation” (Morris 1997:n.p.). The right to self-determination is key to their survival. “Native America is at a crossroads. If the present hegemony of. .. governance is maintained … the outlook is bleak indeed. The future would consist of a permanent reduction of American Indian sovereignty and self-governance … absorption directly into the ‘melting pot’ seems like the most likely outcome” (Churchill 1993 :507). This policy not only affects the Indigenous peoples of North America, it affects all Natives worldwide. “The policy of the United States towards indigenous nations has frequently been emulated by other (nations)” (Morris 1992:n.p.). It is evident how the subjugation and colonization of Native Americans has dire implications for the entire world.

One of the basic parts of sovereignty is the language and culture of a group. The United States colonization is directly responsible for the loss of cultural ties within the indigenous community. “When governments and courts impose Western conceptions of liberty on Native Peoples … Native Peoples sustain a loss of cultural and political identity as a result” (Trakman 1997:6). This goes back to the melting pot theory, in which the majority wants the minority to learn their language and is not satisfied until they have, and in the process forgotten their deep, rich heritage. So many languages (90%) are spoken by the few Indigenous peoples of the world. That presents a problem because they comprise only ten percent of the world’s population (Bernard 1992:82). This reminds me of the old adage; don ‘t put all your eggs in one basket. To leave such an important resource as the some ofthe worlds oldest languages in only ten percent of the world’s population, and then to persecute that same ten percent is ridiculous. Our current policies are counter effective if we continue to try to preserve something, but destroy the best trained guardians that we have.

“Take (language) away from the culture, and you take away its greetings, its curses, its praises, its laws, its literature, its songs, its riddles, its proverbs, its cures, its
wisdom, its prayers. The culture could not be expressed and handed out in any other
way” (Fishman 1996:81). Language is important to the Native Americans, “the loss
of language is viewed by many Native Americans as one of the most critical dilemmas facing them today” (Inglebret 1993:147), and rightly so. Language is home to so many important things in every culture. Culture and language have “the ability to speak and learn from their elders, the music and art forms, the historical and practical knowledge, the traditional social and cultural practices” (Indian Nations at Risk Task Force 1991 :5). Without their language, Native tribes are lost. “In language is life, in language is death. When an indigenous language is lost … (it) accelerates the destructive process of assimilation, ethnocide, and genocide” (Almeida 1998:7).

Also included with the Native Americans’ language and culture is their knowledge of the environment, “specialized ways of talking about them, to convey this vital knowledge and ways of acting upon it for individual and group survival” (Maffi 1998:2). The Native Americans have empirically been good protectors of the environment. “The evidence for this can be found in the rapid ecological deterioration that usually follows an invasion of indigenous peoples’ territory by settlers” (Barsh 1994:260). They were thought of as the original stewards of the environment, with one of their main goals to live in harmony with their surroundings instead of controlling it. The Native Americans have a consistent habit of protecting the environment, and not only the environment of their reservations. The “indigenous peoples and their way of life are essential to the future of the planet … (the) ecologically conscious … the indigenous traditions of maintaining a balance between conservation and development should be at the foundation of every decision affecting world interest” . (Guzman 1996:n.p.). Their dedication to environmental stewardship is unmatched in
today’s societies.

Even with Native Americans’ commitment to the environment, their cause is still suffering because they do not have self-determination. “(The) indigenous peoples are doing their best to fulfill their sacred duties to care for the earth. The states of the earth … can help by respecting … the right of self-determination” (Suagee 1992:721). All of the decisions could be handled at the tribal level, without the BIA or other governmental programs interfering. “Tribal policy decisions tend to reflect tribal
cultural values … Tribal officials tend to have a wide range of reasons for developing
environmental regulatory programs, the survival of tribal culture is usually one of the
main reasons” (Suagee 1998:234). But these decisions need to be made at the tribal level.
“Governmental action to protect the environment does not work well … The further removed government decision … the harder it is to motivate the allegiance on the
part of citizens” (Suagee 1998:245). Without the Native Americans’ environmental knowledge, we are doomed to environmental ruin.

In order to solve these problems and restore sovereignty to the Native Americans I propose that a team of people solve the problem. This think-tank should be composed of Tribal leaders, lawyers who specialize in Native American Law, and a few trusted, non-voting, government officials, such as Senators, or Department of the Interior representatives. “Instead of administrators trying to symbolically include Indian voice on a committee by adding one Native American, the committee needs to reconsider how it might constitute itself so that Indian people are fully represented and participate” (Tierney 1992: 150). This thinktank would have a set date to reach a decision within five years. The think-tank would work towards guiding the Native Americans away from the colonization which they currently endure and towards self-determination. This would be advantageous for Native Americans to gain more control over their policies. “Key to the survival of all Indigenous peoples is self-determination, the freedom to control our own lives … Prior to colonization, Indigenous nations had their own laws and legal systems” (Almeida 1998:8). By gaining self-determination, tribes would be able to greatly increase their policy effectiveness. “Ideally, under selfdetermination there would be neither a middle man nor a bureaucratic body interfering with the tribes and their effort to fulfill their needs. Further, there would be no government agencies telling the tribes what they need or how they should meet those needs” (Timmermans 1993:n.p.).

The centuries of colonization have left an immeasurable scar on the face of
Native America. What is important now is that we move forward and try to overcome the past. Even though colonization denied self-determination to Native Americans and ruined their culture, language, and environment. We must look forward and move step by step to heal the wounds that so many before us have produced. Since 1960, the Native American population has tripled. The United States Bureau of Census has tried to pinpoint the reason, but has ruled out immigration and births, and focused on ethnic switching (Gonzales 1998:200). This means that a number of Americans have realized their cultural heritage and decided to step forward and proudly proclaim who they are. There must be something that entices them to switch, and that something is a worthy cause in which they believe. These people and many others are living by a very pertinent quote with which I would like to conclude. “I would suggest the best help non-Indians could render would be to support the .. .Indian organizations. If we could be assured … strong support for our work, then it would be up to us to provide our own solutions” (Deoloria Jr. 1969:271).

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HuffPost: 13 Issues Facing Native People Beyond Mascots And Casinos

These are the problems you’re not hearing enough about.

Most of the recent headlines about indigenous Americans have had to do with a certain D.C. football team, or a surpassingly dumb Adam Sandler movie, or casinos of the kind operated by the fictional Ugaya tribe on “House of Cards.” And we’re not saying these issues don’t matter. But beyond the slot machines, the movie sets and the football fields, there are other problems facing Native communities — insidious, systemic, life-or-death problems; the kinds of problems it takes years and votes and marches to resolve — that aren’t getting nearly as much attention.

There are 567 tribes, including 229 Alaska Native communities, currently recognized by the federal government. The Bureau of Indian Affairs — the primary federal agency in charge of relations with indigenous communities — is also considering extending federal status to Native Hawaiians.

Each of the federally recognized tribes is a nation unto itself — sovereign, self-determining and self-governing — that maintains a government-to-government relationship with the United States. In addition, the rights of all indigenous peoples, including Native Hawaiians, have been affirmed in a 2007 United Nations declaration. Each indigenous nation has a distinct history, language and culture. While many face concerns that are specific to their government, state, or region, there are certain issues that affect all Native communities throughout the United States — from Hawaii to Maine, and Alaska to Florida. Here are 13 such issues that you probably aren’t hearing enough about.

Native Americans face issues of mass incarceration and policing.

Thanks in large part to the Black Lives Matter movement, which has insisted that demands for justice and equality for the black community remain part of the national conversation, there is now growing momentum to address the issues of policing and mass incarceration. But while the brutalization of black Americans at the hands of police, and their maltreatment within the criminal justice system, have garnered national headlines, similar injustices against Native Americans have gone largely unreported.

Earlier this month, Paul Castaway, a mentally ill Rosebud Sioux tribal citizen, was shot and killed by Denver police. His death led to protests in the Denver Native community, and has shed light on the shocking rate at which police kill Native Americans — who account for less than 1 percent of the national population, but who make up nearly 2 percent of all police killings, according to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Native peoples are also disproportionately affected by mass incarceration. In states with significant Native populations, Native Americans are wildly overrepresented in the criminal justice system. In South Dakota, for example, Native Americans make up 9 percent of the total population, but 29 percent of the prison population. In Alaska, Native people account for 15 percent of the total population and 38 percent of the prison population. And Native Hawaiians are only 10 percent of the state’s population, but 39 percent of the incarcerated population.

The issue of mass incarceration in Native communities is complicated by overlapping and unresolved conflicts between tribal, federal and state jurisdictions. If a crime is thought to have occurred on a Native reservation or within a Native community, it’s not always clear which agency is going to be in charge of prosecution. That’s determined by a complex set of factors, including the severity of the charges and the races of the victims and alleged perpetrators. The overlapping jurisdictions of federal and tribal sovereignty also mean that Indians who commit crimes on tribal lands can be punished twice for the same offense: once under federal jurisdiction and again in tribal court. Lastly, aside from cases of domestic violence, tribal courts are not allowed to try major crimes as defined under the Major Crimes Act. This means that suspects in most felony cases are prosecuted in federal courts, where sentencing tends to be more severe.

In February, building off the momentum of Black Lives Matter, the Lakota Peoples’ Law Project released its “Native Lives Matter“ report, which gives an overview of the inequities faced by Native Americans in the criminal justice system. The report, like the voices of Native peoples in general, has been largely ignored in the growing national conversation about policing and criminal justice reform.

Native communities are often impoverished and jobless.

Native peoples suffer from high rates of poverty and unemployment. Seventeen percent of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders and 27 percent of all self-identified Native Americans and Alaska Natives live in poverty, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

However, the national figure distorts the prevalence of poverty on Indian reservations and in Alaska Native communities, where 22 percent of Native people live. In 2012, three of the five poorest counties in the U.S., and five of the top 10, encompassed Sioux reservations in North and South Dakota.

Last year, President Barack Obama visited the Standing Rock Sioux on the border of North and South Dakota, where the poverty rate is 43.2 percent — almost three times the national average. The unemployment rate on the Standing Rock Reservation was over 60 percent as of 2014.

The federal government is still stripping Native people of their land.

The U.S. was built on land taken from Indian nations, and indigenous peoples across the country are still living with the reality of dispossession. Right now, members of the San Carlos Apache Nation in Arizona are fighting the sale of their sacred Oak Flat site to foreign mining conglomerates.

The Kanaka Maoli in Hawaii are fighting to protect their sacred mountain Mauna Kea from the construction of a 30-meter, $1.4 billion telescope. Many Hawaiians are now questioning the legality of the state’s annexation, which took place after a group of business interests, most of them American, overthrew of the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1893.

And in the heartland, the Great Sioux Nation has refused a $1.3 billion settlement as payment for the government’s illegal seizure of their sacred Black Hills in South Dakota in 1877. The faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt are etched into the Black Hills at Mount Rushmore.

Exploitation of natural resources threatens Native communities.

Throughout the history of North American settlement, the territorial dispossession of indigenous peoples has gone hand in hand with natural resource exploitation. In the 1800s, Indian nations in the West clashed with miners pouring into their territories in search of gold.

Today, from the Bakken formation in North Dakota to the Tar Sands in northeastern Alberta, Canada, Indian nations often stand on the front lines of opposition to hydraulic fracturing and pipelines that pump oil out of indigenous communities — violating treaty rights, threatening the environment and contributing to climate change in the process.

Other groups, however, such as the Ute Tribe in Utah and the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation in North Dakota, have tried to make the most out of the economic opportunities presented by oil and natural gas extraction. For the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, the rush to cash in on oil has resulted in a mess of inadequate regulation and corruption — including allegations of murder for hire.

Violence against women and children is especially prevalent in Native communities.

Native American communities — and particularly Native women and children — suffer from an epidemic of violence. Native women are 3.5 times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted in their life than women of other races. Twenty-two percent of Native children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder — a rate of PTSD equal to that found among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

Often, this violence comes from outside the community. The nonprofit Mending the Sacred Hoop, citing 1990s data from the CDC and the Department of Justice, reports that “over 80% of violence experienced by Native Americans is committed by persons not of the same race,” a rate “substantially higher than for whites or blacks.”

However, some progress has been made. This year, despite staunch GOP opposition, tribes won the right to prosecute non-Native men who commit crimes of domestic violence or dating violence or who violate orders of protection against Native women on Indian reservations. Tribes have continued to push for control over justice systems on sovereign Indian land, in spite of resistance from state, local and federal lawmakers and law enforcement authorities.

The education system is failing Native students.

Only 51 percent of Native Americans in the class of 2010 graduated high school. Native Hawaiians fare better, but still underperform compared to their peers — as best we can tell from the limited data, anyway. In the mid-‘00s, about 70 percent of Native Hawaiians attending Hawaiian public schools graduated in four years, as compared to 78 percent of students statewide.

For Native Americans, at least, these disparities are in large part the result of inadequate federal funding, to the point where some schools on Indian reservations are deteriorated and structurally dangerous.

Native families live in overcrowded, poor-quality housing.

Forty percent of Native Americans who live on reservations are in substandard housing. One-third of homes are overcrowded, and less than 16 percent have indoor plumbing. Housing on reservations is funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and administered and augmented by tribes, and has been historically underfunded, despite treaties and the trust responsibility of the federal government.

Native patients receive inadequate health care.

Native Americans, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians face massive disparities in health as compared to the general population, suffering from high rates of diabetes, obesity, substance abuse and HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

Although Native Americans and Alaska Natives are eligible to receive health care through Indian Health Services, nearly one in three are uninsured. Like many other federal agencies that serve Native people, IHS has historically been underfunded. Local IHS facilities often lack basic services like emergency contraception, in some cases forcing Native patients to travel hundreds of miles for treatment elsewhere.

There’s a dearth of capital and financial institutions in Native communities.

Indian nations do not own their reservation lands. Rather, the lands are held in trust by the federal government. This prevents Native Americans who live on reservations from leveraging their assets for loans, making it difficult for them to start businesses or promote economic growth in the area.

Compounding this problem, 14.5 percent of Native Americans are unbanked, and therefore lack the basic financial resources needed for economic prosperity.

Native Americans have the right to vote… but that’s not always enough.

Native Americans and Alaska Natives are often unable to vote because there are no polling places anywhere near them. Some communities, such as the Duck Valley Reservation in Nevada and the Goshute Reservation in Utah, are located more than 100 miles from the nearest polling place.

These problems are compounded by high rates of illiteracy in some rural Native communities, such as the Yup’ik in Alaska, who primarily speak and read their native language because public education was not available in their region until the 1980s.

There is an epidemic of youth suicide in Native communities.

Suicide is the second most common cause of death for Native youth ages 15 to 24 — two and a half times the national rate for that age group. In February, following a rash of suicides, the Oglala Lakota Nation in South Dakota declared a state of emergency.

Native languages are dying, and the U.S. government is doing little to help.

Native languages are struggling to survive in the United States, with 130 “at risk,” according to UNESCO, and another 74 “critically endangered.” While some communities, such as the Native Hawaiians, the Anishinaabe and the Navajo, have had success preserving and revitalizing their languages, Native communities face obstacles from the testing and curriculum requirements of No Child Left Behind. And educators who want to teach young people about Native languages and cultures have to contend with a general lack of funding and resources.

Many Native communities do not have their rights recognized by the federal government.

Native Hawaiians, and members of many other Native communities throughout the U.S., have never received federal recognition of their rights as Native peoples. This deprives them of basic services, and even of the limited rights of self-governance available to other Native communities. Many tribes spend decades wading through Bureau of Indian Affairs paperwork, only to lose their petitions for recognition.

Recently, however, the Obama administration announced that it would be streamlining the federal recognition process, making it easier for unrecognized Indian nations to secure their rights under the law.

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Brut: FYI, these facts on Native Americans are still underreported in the U.S

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Further Readings

Aspen Institute: Fast Facts on Native American Youth and Indian Country

IC: Groundbreaking Research Reveals Depth of Discrimination against Native Americans

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Blood Quantum

• Defining Native American membership by the fraction of a person’s ancestors
• Widely applied by the US gov after the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934
  • Gov required persons to have a certain blood quantum to be recognized as Native American
    • To be eligible for financial and other benefits under treaties or sales of land
  • Since then, many Native nations have re-established their own rules for tribal membership
    • But for the purpose of federal benefits, the blood quantum is still used
      • Native Americans are the only racial group in the United States that has to have proof of ancestry to receive government benefits
    • Problems with Blood Quantum
      • Excluded people from fed benefits like African/Native mix race, natives with incorrect recorded history, etc.

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NY Time Op-Docs – A conversation with Native Americans on Race

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Source:  ndn.o

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Reclaiming Native Truth: A Project to Dispel America’s Myths and Misconceptions

• 2018 First Nations Development Institute and Echo Hawk Consulting research study about attitudes toward and perceptions of Native Americans

Findings

• Discrimination:
  • Most Americans surveyed significantly understate discrimination against Natives
  • Only 34% of Americans believe that Native people face discrimination
  • Myths about casinos and free gov benefits to Natives widely held
    • fuel bias across diverse demographics and within institutions
• Narratives:
  • The research found that people have limited personal experience with Natives
    • But accept pervasive negative narratives that are erroneously set or reinforced by others
  • People live/work by Natives, especially in impoverished areas, hold significant bias
    • 56% people living in close proximity to Native communities believed the U.S. should do more to help
      • Compared to 64% of respondents further removed
• Invisibility:
  • Big barrier identified was the invisibility and erasure of Natives in modern U.S. society
  • Congress and local officials state invisibility, stereotypes and narratives do impact policy

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6 Misconceptions About Native American People | Teen Vogue

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Historical Trauma

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Native Pipeline Struggles

• Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL)
  • Running through Native Sacred sites
  • Many Native Tribes concern about environmental impact
    • Concerns about leaks
      • Pipeline passes under Lake Oahe
        • Which serves as a major source of water
      • Lots of oil leaks from similar pipeline in ND (Keystone)
    • Native American protestors were brutalized by police
      • Dogs, clubs, rubber bullets, pepper spray, water cannons during below freezing temps, etc.
    • July 7, 2020, federal judge ordered the Dakota Access pipeline shut down until a more extensive environmental review is done
• Coastal GasLink pipeline
  • Pipeline crosses through the Canadian Rockies
    • Across several Native Lands
    • Some “unceded” Native Lands
      • Land never signed away by the Indigenous people who inhabited them
      • Stolen land
    • Although some tribes have approved
      • Wet’suwet’en tribe did not due to ecological concerns
      • Organized a blockade of the construction
      • They were violently cleared out in February 2020
    • Construction has resumed

Rewrite: The Protests At Standing Rock | The Last Word | MSNBC

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Democracy Now: How Black & Indigenous Groups Won the Fight to Stop the Atlantic Coast Pipeline

 

Anti-pipeline activists are celebrating after Duke Energy and Dominion Energy announced they are dropping plans to build the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a 600-mile pipeline that would have carried fracked gas from West Virginia to North Carolina and threatened rural Indigenous, Black and Brown communities. “There was an awful lot of opposition to this,” says Donna Chavis, senior fossil fuel campaigner for Friends of the Earth and an elder of the Lumbee Nation, whose territory the pipeline would have crossed. She says the communities that would have suffered “irreparable harm” from the pipeline “now have that cloud lifted from them.”

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Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. We’re going now from Standing Rock to Appalachia, where anti-pipeline activists won another massive victory over the weekend when Duke and Dominion Energy said they had canceled plans to build the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a 600-mile pipeline that would have carried fracked gas from West Virginia to North Carolina.

Indigenous leaders and environmental groups have opposed the pipeline since it was announced in 2014, saying it threatened rural Indigenous, Black and Brown communities. The pipeline’s planned route would have run through Union Hill, Virginia, a historically Black community founded by freed slaves after the Civil War, and Robeson County, North Carolina, home to the Lumbee Tribe.

The massive utility companies said lawsuits had increased costs for the pipeline by at least $3 billion, citing increased costs, ongoing delays and potential future legal battles as reasons for canceling the project.

Well, for more on the canceled Atlantic Coast Pipeline, we go to Pembroke, North Carolina, where we’re joined by Donna Chavis, senior fossil fuel campaigner for Friends of the Earth, elder of the Lumbee Nation. She has called the fight against the pipeline a “David versus Goliath” struggle.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Well, it looks like you have won this struggle, Donna Chavis. Can you respond to the decision and where you think it came from?

DONNA CHAVIS: Yes, and thank you for having me today, Amy. The decision is something that I was elated about. I was in a grocery store when I heard about it, and had to go outside to celebrate.

Where it came from? I think it came from a number of sources. Of course, we have Duke and Dominion’s answer, in that it became too expensive, and all of the delays caused by people on the ground forced them to pull out. And I would have to agree with them, in the sense that there was an awful lot of opposition to this.

What the decision means is that the environment, the communities that would have suffered irreparable harm and the Indigenous, Black and other peoples of color who would have been disproportionately impacted, had the pipeline been built, now have that cloud lifted from them.

I think that there were signs that this pipeline was not going to go anywhere. It was called the “pipeline to nowhere” at least two years ago, when all of the financial disarray related to the project began to become apparent.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Donna Chavis, what about the situation, the energy market situation worldwide, as oil has plummeted in price, fracked gas is no longer seen as a good investment by energy companies? Do you think that, combined with the public pressure and the lawsuits, had something to do with it, as well?

DONNA CHAVIS: Absolutely. In fact, Friends of the Earth, over the last 18 months, released no less than three reports that showed the risk of investing in this project, and not just this project, but fossil fuels, in general. Gas and oil are no longer the cheapest source for energy. And I know that, at least in North Carolina, decisions are supposed to be made about what is the best product for the citizens. And in this case, gas and oil is not the best. As you just pointed out, the price for both of those has just plummeted.

In the United States, we have a glut. We have a glut of both gas and oil. So, even though it was said that it was going to be used in North Carolina, in my case, it was clear that this was going to be for export. So, there were so many factors that were involved with the calamity that happened — to the companies, anyway. They see it as a calamity.

AMY GOODMAN: In 2017, Unicorn Riot interviewed John Laury, a lifelong resident of Union Hill, the historic Black community founded by the descendants of freed enslaved people in [un]incorporated Buckingham County, Virginia. Residents of Union Hill for years spoke out against the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would have cut right through Union Hill. This is what he said.

JOHN LAURY: We are in the zero zone. In other words, we are first to go. We know that it will emit poisonous gases. We know that. And we know that it will definitely contaminate the water. We are now just recently beginning to find slave cemeteries. This community is perhaps 85% Black. Perhaps that’s why they say this area has no culture or natural resource, which is both lies.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s John Laury, lifelong resident of Union Hill. If you could, Donna Chavis, talk about the solidarity between Indigenous people, the African American community, as well, what this solidarity meant in defeating the pipelines — the pipeline?

DONNA CHAVIS: This solidarity was absolutely necessary. Early on, we began to say that we were in sacrifice zones. I relate totally to everything that Mr. Laury said, because, in so many cases, the communities, the Black communities, the Indigenous communities, are sometimes officially declared sacrifice zones. And so, as we were working up and down the pipeline in resistance and opposition, we found ourselves in a wonderful situation of crossing the boundaries between race and class, and bringing together the Indigenous and African American communities.

I’ll give you one example. Northampton County, which is what I call — used to call the northern gate of the pipeline coming into North Carolina, it is a majority-Black community. And then you have Robeson County, that is a majority-Native American and Black community together. So, along the pipeline route, we were joining together the northern gate and the southern gate, and all those in between, to work against this substantial problem that we were facing. And we held each other up and kept going, until we were on the phone Sunday calling and texting and emailing all over the place with celebration.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Donna Chavis, we have only about a minute or so left, but I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the Friends — Friends of the Earth is turning its attention now to a gas storage facility in North Carolina that Piedmont Natural Gas, a subsidiary of Duke Energy, is planning to develop. Could you tell us briefly what that project is about?

DONNA CHAVIS: Yes, it is a Duke Energy project through Piedmont Natural Gas, which is a wholly owned subsidiary. It will be a 1-billion-cubic-foot storage and distribution facility. And it is sitting smack dab in the middle of a majority-Indigenous community, Lumbee and Tuscarora, very close to a school, just barely within the limits of the one mile that would have stopped it from being able to be built. The impact has already been shown, in the sense that there’s been clearcutting of all the forest that’s there. There has been some flooding, with all the rains we still have. We were hit very badly with Florence, and that particular spot was flooded most of the time during the storm and for quite a while afterwards. So, we had been already paying attention to that project, and now we will just be able to put even more of our resources into approaching and assisting the community in its opposition.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Donna Chavis, we want to thank you for being with us, senior fossil fuel campaigner for Friends of the Earth and an elder of the Lumbee Nation, Friends of the Earth, speaking to us from Pembroke, North Carolina.

 

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Aljarzeera: Understanding the Wet’suwet’en struggle in Canada

Montreal, Canada – Mass demonstrations, sit-ins and blockades have gripped parts of Canada over the last month as a movement to support the leaders of an Indigenous nation who are opposed to a multibillion-dollar pipeline project in northern British Columbia (BC) grows.

The hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en Nation have come out against the Coastal GasLink pipeline, which seeks to transport liquefied natural gas from northeast BC to a terminal on the coast near the town of Kitimat.

The 670-kilometre (417-mile) pipeline will cut across traditional Wet’suwet’en lands that cover 22,000sq km across northern BC.

The hereditary chiefs, who under Wet’suwet’en law claim authority over those traditional territories, said they never gave their consent for the project to move forward. They have raised concerns about the pipeline’s potential effects on the land, water, and their community.

On Sunday, a Wet’suwet’en hereditary chief and government ministers said they reached a proposed arrangement on how to move forward. The details of the agreement will not be released until they have been presented to the Wet’suwet’en people.

While Sunday’s agreement represents an important step in a conflict that has gripped much of Canada, the struggle of the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs raised important questions of Aboriginal title, land ownership and consultation with First Nations.

“I think it would be a mistake to understand what’s happening right now as just about a natural gas pipeline,” said Eugene Kung, a staff lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law in Vancouver, before the agreement was announced.

“There are much deeper, underlying issues that remain unresolved and that I think are at the root of this,” Kung told Al Jazeera.

Aboriginal title

Key among those underlying issues is the fact that the Wet’suwet’en Nation’s claim to their ancestral lands, through which the pipeline will be built, remains unresolved.

Aboriginal title refers to the inherent right of Indigenous peoples to use and occupy the lands they occupied for thousands of years before the arrival of European settlers. Aboriginal title was “recognised and affirmed” in the Canadian constitution in 1982, and the courts have laid out the test for Indigenous nations to prove their title claims.

In a 2014 case, Tsilhqot’in Nation v British Columbia, the Supreme Court of Canada explained that Aboriginal title flows from the sufficient, continuous and exclusive “occupation” of the land. That can include Indigenous culture and practices, such as hunting or fishing. “Where Aboriginal title has been established, the Crown must not only comply with its procedural duties, but must also justify any incursions on Aboriginal title lands,” the court wrote.

Supporters of the Indigenous Wet’suwet’en Nation’s hereditary chiefs march as part of protests against British Columbia’s Coastal GasLink pipeline, Montreal [Andrej Ivanov/Reuters]

In 1997, the Supreme Court of Canada was asked to determine Aboriginal title in a case involving the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan nations, Delgamuukw v. British Columbia.

The court found that the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs were the rightful holders of title to their unceded territories and recognised that the community’s Aboriginal title had not been extinguished, explained Robert Hamilton, assistant professor at University of Calgary Faculty of Law.

But “for procedural reasons [the Supreme Court] sent the case back to trial” and it was not picked up again, Hamilton told Al Jazeera in a phone interview before Sunday’s announcement.

He said the court signalled to the federal and provincial governments that Aboriginal title remains an outstanding issue that must be resolved. “‘Here’s the test that we’re going to use in determining where Aboriginal title exists … so, you had best get on with the business of negotiating with these parties that have outstanding Aboriginal title claims,'” Hamilton said, about what the court said in Delgamuukw.

The Wet’suwet’en title claim was never resolved, however.

Wet’suwet’en hereditary chief Frank Alec Woos speaks during a news conference at the Mohawk Community Centre in Tyendinaga, Ontario [File: Lars Hagberg/AFP]

On Sunday, Wet’suwet’en Chief Woos, who also goes by the name Frank Alec, said the proposed agreement with the government picks up where Delgamuukw left off.

“What we were always here to do is to protect our yintah [land] … We say to all the developers out there, our pristine waters, our headwaters, our wildlife habitats, our traditional sites … we are going to protect it,” Chief Woos said during a news conference.

It is still unclear what was decided, however, and details of the proposed deal are expected to be presented to the Wet’suwet’en people over the next two weeks.

“While we have disagreement on this issue, we are developing a protocol … to recognise rights and title for the future,” BC Indigenous Relations Minister Scott Fraser said on Sunday in a news conference alongside Chief Woos. “I ask for some space and calm to allow us to continue that work.”

Consultation and accommodation

When Aboriginal title is asserted, as in the case of the Wet’suwet’en, the government holds a duty to consult and accommodate the community when their rights may be infringed by a government decision, such as a resource extraction or development project.

That is a lower standard than when Aboriginal title is established under Canadian law, said Hamilton, as in the Tsilhqot’in Nation case.

The level of consultation and accommodation must be proportional to the potential adverse effects of a decision, or to the strength of the assertion of Aboriginal title, the Supreme Court said in a 2004 decision involving the Haida Nation, also in BC. “The Crown is not under a duty to reach an agreement; rather, the commitment is to a meaningful process of consultation in good faith,” the court said then.

Supporters of the Indigenous Wet’suwet’en Nation’s hereditary chiefs pass by CN Rail as they march as part of protests against British Columbia’s Coastal GasLink pipeline, in Montreal [Christinne Muschi/Reuters]

Governments often outsource the consultation process to third parties, such as the Canada Energy Regulator (formerly known as the National Energy Board). But consultation must be carried out in good faith and what is known as the “honour of the Crown” must be upheld.

The process is flawed, however, because the government is “aiming for the floor” – in other words, it works to meet the minimum standard required, Kung told Al Jazeera. He said the consultation framework was also meant to be temporary until underlying land issues can be resolved, but it is instead “treated as an indefinite norm and as the end of the line in terms of obligations”.

“Obviously, that approach is not working,” Kung said.

Who is consulted?

The groups that are consulted often also become a matter of contention.

In its 1997 ruling, the Supreme Court of Canada recognised that the rightful Wet’suwet’en titleholders were the hereditary chiefs.

The nation is divided into 13 houses and five clans: Gilseyhu, Tsayu, Laksamshu, Gidimt’en and Laksilyu. Under Wet’suwet’en law (Anuk nu’at’en), the traditional territory is divided between the houses and clans, and the hereditary chiefs hold authority over their respective areas.

Supporters of the Indigenous Wet’suwet’en Nation’s hereditary chiefs block the Pat Bay highway as part of protests against the Coastal GasLink pipeline, in Victoria, British Columbia [Kevin Light/Reuters]

But the federal and provincial governments have “maintained a policy of denying the Wet’suwet’en title to the land for decades”, said Bruce McIvor, principal at First Peoples Law who represents the Unist’ot’en, a house group of the Wet’suwet’en Nation.

“As long as they maintain the position of denial, they’re in a stronger position to force through major resource extraction projects, such as pipelines or open-pit mines or hydro dams. The legal obligations on them are significantly lower,” McIvor told Al Jazeera.

Meanwhile, TC Energy said it “has the utmost respect” for the Indigenous systems of governance in BC and “strived to engage with all the Indigenous groups along the pipeline route”. It said it has engaged in “a wide range of consultation activities” with the hereditary chiefs, including 120 in-person meetings.
The company also said it reached agreements with 20 First Nation bands along the project route, including five Wet’suwet’en bands. Those deals “were developed over many years through collaborative engagement”, it said on its website.

Indian Act chief and councils

The First Nations band council and chief system were created by the Indian Act of 1876, the federal law under which the government regulates and manages the lives of First Nations. The act gives the councils and chiefs, who are elected by First Nations band members, the power to administer the day-to-day running of reserves, the First Nations communities that also were created by the Indian Act.

McIvor said while some First Nations have been able to work through the chief and council system with the support of their members, in the case of the Wet’suwet’en “no one really thought that you can simply go speak to the Indian Act chief and councils”.

The rightful titleholders are the hereditary chiefs, he said, and “to say otherwise is either willful ignorance or simple intention to encourage disagreement”.

Supporters of the Wet’suwet’en nation Indigenous group who oppose the construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline, protest outside the provincial headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Surrey, British Columbia [Jesse Winter/Reuters]

It is not clear how many Wet’suwet’en people on an individual level support the Coastal GasLink project or how many are against it. Some have publicly expressed support for the project, some have shown reticent support, and others are strongly opposed.

In the BC Supreme Court decision in late December to issue an injunction allowing construction to continue on the pipeline, Justice Marguerite Church stated that “the Indigenous legal perspective, in this case, is complex and diverse”.

Church also said “the Wet’suwet’en people are deeply divided” over the project.

McIvor said it is understandable that some Indian Act band councils and chiefs would sign on to the project, as communities are impoverished and have been unable to benefit from projects in their territories. “Unfortunately, this is ripe for companies and for [the] government to take advantage of,” he said.

Beyond Canada

Beyond Canadian law, Indigenous rights are also enshrined in international legal frameworks, notably the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). While Canada initially opposed the declaration, it has since signed on and pledged to incorporate it into its national laws. To date, BC is the only place in Canada to pass legislation that aims to get its laws in line with UNDRIP.

That move was welcomed in November as a key step on the path to reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and the government. But at the height of the standoff on Wet’suwet’en lands, BC Premier Horgan said the legislation was not retroactive and would not apply to the Coastal GasLink project.

“We want everyone to understand that there are agreements from the Peace Country to Kitimat with Indigenous communities that want to see economic activity and prosperity take place,” he said on January 13. “This project is proceeding and the rule of law needs to prevail in BC.”

Protesters demonstrate in downtown Seattle, Washington, to support the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, a community in British Columbia, Canada opposing a natural gas pipeline [File: Ted S Warren/AP Photo]

Brenda Gunn, associate professor at the University of Manitoba faculty of law, explained that UNDRIP lays out the government’s obligation to obtain Indigenous peoples’ “free, prior and informed consent” if their rights will be affected by a decision.

“One of the key aspects of free, prior and informed consent is the notion of ‘free’ – and this means without coercion and it also means the right to participate according to their own government institutions and determine for themselves who represents them,” Gunn told Al Jazeera.

She said “free” also means people should not seek to divide and conquer Indigenous peoples, or in the case of the Wet’suwet’en, not pit the hereditary chiefs against the band councillors, chiefs or anyone else who supports the Coastal GasLink project.

“Free, prior and informed consent includes the ability to give or withhold consent. You don’t effectively have consent in law if you’re not allowed to say no,” Dunn said.

On Sunday, Canada’s minister of Crown-Indigenous relations, Carolyn Bennett, said major projects need to be put before an Indigenous nation as outlined by UNDRIP.

“It means that at the very first idea of a project, that the rights holders would be there at the table with their Indigenous knowledge and the voices of their nation,” she said during the news conference alongside Chief Woos.

What’s next?

The Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs have repeatedly laid out their demands: withdraw federal police (RCMP) officers from their traditional territory and order Coastal GasLink to suspend construction while nation-to-nation discussions with the government are continuing.

It is unclear which, if any, demands are part of Sunday’s proposed agreement, and what the future of the pipeline may be.

Wet’suwet’en land defenders have set up camps and checkpoints to reclaim their traditional territories in the area slated for pipeline construction and stop the project from moving ahead. They have also insisted that the RCMP leave the area and for Coastal GasLink to stop building – and it is unclear what Sunday’s proposed agreement may mean for them.

In January, RCMP officers removed dozens of Wet’suwet’en land defenders and their supporters from the camps along the pipeline route to allow the company to continue with construction activities.

“Obviously, [the RCMP is] not out there to protect the Wet’suwet’en people; they’re out there to protect the CGL employees. We need to correct that,” Wet’suwet’en Chief Woos said on Sunday.

After three days and nights of talks NO agreement on Coastal GasLink has been reached. However, a tentative agreement has been reached on Wet’suwet’en rights and title. This will not be publicly released until Wet’suwet’en people have a chance to review over the next few weeks. pic.twitter.com/2Zevt7FNmP

— Gidimt’en Checkpoint (@Gidimten) March 1, 2020

Late last month, the BC Environmental Assessment Office (EAO) said it could not issue a final certificate authorising construction on the pipeline through a section of Wet’suwet’en territory until Coastal GasLink went back to negotiate with the leadership about some outstanding potential effects. The office said concerns about the project’s effects on a Wet’suwet’en healing centre still needed to be addressed. It gave Coastal GasLink 30 days to conduct more consultations and provide an updated assessment.

“It is very distressing, after we’ve faced assault rifles and endured arrests at the beckoning of CGL, to now be advised by EAO to work collaboratively with them to address these gaps,” Karla Tait, a Unist’ot’en house member and volunteer director at the Unist’ot’en healing centre, said in a statement.
In a statement, Coastal GasLink president said construction that was paused for talks between the Wet’suwet’en chiefs and the government will resume on Monday.

“While much has been accomplished, much work remains and we wish all parties success as their work continues and the Wet’suwet’en people consider the proposed arrangement,” David Pfeiffer said.

It was also unclear whether Sunday’s proposed agreement addressed the presence of the RCMP in Wet’suwet’en traditional territories.

Still, Chief Woos told reporters Sunday’s announcement represented “quite a milestone for all of us to view this together”.

“We’re at a point, in this moment in time, to see if the arrangements will work in all aspects of what we stand for as Wet’suwet’en,” he said.

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Comic about the blockades in Canada by chloloula

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WBUR: Secretary Of Interior Orders Mashpee Wampanoag Reservation ‘Disestablished,’ Tribe Says

The federal Bureau of Indian Affairs told the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe on Friday that the tribe’s reservation will be “disestablished” and its land taken out of trust, per an order from Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt, tribe Chairman Cedric Cromwell announced in a post on the tribe’s website.

“Today’s action was cruel and it was unnecessary. The Secretary is under no court order to take our land out of trust. He is fully aware that litigation to uphold our status as a tribe eligible for the benefits of the Indian Reorganization Act is ongoing,” Cromwell wrote. “It begs the question, what is driving our federal trustee’s crusade against our reservation?

Having land “held in trust” by the federal government effectively affords a tribe special legal status and autonomy to decide how to tax, develop and manage a plot of land. The decision to take land into trust is typically made by the Department of the Interior, which had OK’d the trust status for the Mashpee land in 2015.

But in February, the tribe suffered a legal defeat when the U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston upheld a lower court decision declaring the federal government had not been authorized to take the land into trust. That ruling marked another major development in what has been a lengthy legal battle over the land.

As The Associated Press reported:

The case was a largely semantic debate centered on whether the tribe could be considered “Indian” under the 1934 [Indian Reorganization Act], which created the process for taking lands into trust for tribes, among other things.

Despite the ruling, those 321 acres remained in trust because a separate federal court case was still pending, according to the AP.

Benjamin Wish, an attorney for the tribe, said in a statement on Monday that the Department of the Interior’s justification for disestablishing the tribe is based in a false reading of the court decision.

“No court has ever ordered the Department to take the Tribe’s land out of trust,” he said. “The District Court did not so order. The First Circuit did not so order. In fact, neither court ordered anyone to do anything.”

In an email to the leadership of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, Jean-Luc Pierite, head of the North American Indian Center of Boston, called the federal government’s action an existential crisis for all tribes federally recognized after 1934. (The Cape Cod-based Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe gained federal recognition in 2007.) The department’s move without a court order signals that reservations across the United States could be taken out of trust at the discretion of the secretary of the interior, Pierite said.

“For the federal government, it could mean a situation in which hundreds of tribes seek reaffirmation through an act of Congress, as the Massachusetts delegation has done,” Pierite said.

Pierite said the interior secretary’s move is based on the 2009 Supreme Court ruling Carcieri v. Salazar, which established that the federal government cannot take land into trust for tribes that weren’t “under federal jurisdiction” in the year 1934.

Conner Swanson, a spokesman for the Department of the Interior, said the tribe remains federally recognized, and that there was in fact a court decision mandating the department’s action.

“In Fall 2015, Interior issued a decision approving a trust acquisition for the Tribe. Subsequently, both a federal district court and a federal circuit court panel comprised of former Supreme Court Justice David Souter, former Chief Judge Sandra Lynch, and Senior Judge Kermit Lipez, found there to be no statutory authority for this decision. The Tribe did not petition for a panel rehearing or a rehearing en banc,” he said. “On March 19th, the court of appeals issued its mandate, which requires Interior to rescind its earlier decision. This decision does not affect the federal recognition status of the Tribe, only Interior’s statutory authority to accept the land in trust. Rescission of the decision will return ownership of the property to the Tribe.”

Cromwell argued, however, that no court mandate had been issued that told the Department of the Interior to take the land out of trust.

“We know that Congress is the only group that has a plenary authority to do that. So the court did not issue a mandate,” Cromwell said. “So this is very nefarious activity by the [interior secretary].”

Massachusetts U.S. Rep. Bill Keating, who represents the South Shore, South Coast, Cape and Islands and who earlier had reintroduced the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe Reservation Reaffirmation Act to solidify federal recognition of the land trust, called the interior secretary’s action “one of the most cruel and nonsensical acts I have seen since coming to Congress.”

“The Secretary should be ashamed,” Keating said in a statement. “This also calls out the need for the Senate to act on the dual bipartisan proposals led by myself and [Oklahoma U.S. Rep. Tom Cole], which would rectify this issue.”

In addition to the tribe’s members potentially having to pay back taxes, losing its land trust could spell other changes. As The Associated Press reported earlier:

If the Mashpee Wampanoag loses trust status for its 321 acres, the tribe’s four-judge court and two-member police department would likely have to be shut down, because they would no longer be operating on sovereign land, said [Jessie “Little Doe”] Baird, the tribe’s vice chairwoman.

The House was originally supposed to vote on the bill in early May 2019, until a critical tweet by President Trump led its sponsors to pull it from the House floor. The bill eventually passed with a vote of 275-146. Almost all Democrats voted for it, and most Republicans voted against it.

Cromwell said the Trump administration has been actively working against the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, and that this move has left the tribe scrambling to determine what exactly the impacts will be.

“The secretary walked away from us, and it’s never happened before in the history of this country,” he said. “They did nothing to help support us at all.”

“My tribe [is] just gonna continue to fight for our land, including going through proper channels like the courts. This isn’t the end for us,” Cromwell said.

In his statement, Cromwell affirmed the tribe’s commitment to survival despite adversity.

“We have survived, we will continue to survive,” he wrote. “These are our lands, these are the lands of our ancestors, and these will be the lands of our grandchildren. This Administration has come and it will go. But we will be here, always. And we will not rest until we are treated equally with other federally recognized tribes and the status of our reservation is confirmed.”

Further Reading

• WTOP: Monday is Indigenous Peoples’ Day in DC — get to know the region’s indigenous people

• Teen Vogue: Mass Shootings Are Connected to America’s Legacy of Anti-Indigenous Violence

• The Hill: Judge orders Mnuchin to give Native American tribes full stimulus funding

• Vox: The Supreme Court’s landmark new Native American rights decision, explained

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Whitewashing Native Atrocities

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Sub Table of Contents

Columbus Day

Thanksgiving

RedskinsRedskins

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Columbus Day

 

• Columbus did not “discover” America in 1492 but instead began the colonization of it
  • Columbus enslaved 1000s of natives, committed horrible brutalities like cutting off hands of any native who did not meet his quota of gold, burning people alive, feeding native babies to attack dogs, slaughtered men, women and children, and successfully committed genocide against the Arawaks in Haiti.
• As of 2017 over 50 cities and 4 states replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead of Columbus Day

Columbus Day? True Legacy: Cruelty and Slavery

“Once again, it’s time to celebrate Columbus Day. Yet, the stunning truth is: If Christopher Columbus were alive today, he would be put on trial for crimes against humanity. Columbus’ reign of terror, as documented by noted historians, was so bloody, his legacy so unspeakably cruel, that Columbus makes a modern villain like Saddam Hussein look like a pale codfish.

Question: Why do we honor a man who, if he were alive today, would almost certainly be sitting on Death Row awaiting execution?

If you’d like to know the true story about Christopher Columbus, please read on. But I warn you, it’s not for the faint of heart.

Here’s the basics. On the second Monday in October each year, we celebrate Columbus Day (this year, it’s on October 11th). We teach our school kids a cute little song that goes: “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” It’s an American tradition, as American as pizza pie. Or is it? Surprisingly, the true story of Christopher Columbus has very little in common with the myth we all learned in school.

Columbus Day, as we know it in the United States, was invented by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal service organization. Back in the 1930s, they were looking for a Catholic hero as a role-model their kids could look up to. In 1934, as a result of lobbying by the Knights of Columbus, Congress and President Franklin Roosevelt signed Columbus Day into law as a federal holiday to honor this courageous explorer. Or so we thought.

There are several problems with this. First of all, Columbus wasn’t the first European to discover America. As we all know, the Viking, Leif Ericson probably founded a Norse village on Newfoundland some 500 years earlier. So, hat’s off to Leif. But if you think about it, the whole concept of discovering America is, well, arrogant. After all, the Native Americans discovered North America about 14,000 years before Columbus was even born! Surprisingly, DNA evidence now suggests that courageous Polynesian adventurers sailed dugout canoes across the Pacific and settled in South America long before the Vikings.

Second, Columbus wasn’t a hero. When he set foot on that sandy beach in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, Columbus discovered that the islands were inhabited by friendly, peaceful people called the Lucayans, Taínos and Arawaks. Writing in his diary, Columbus said they were a handsome, smart and kind people. He noted that the gentle Arawaks were remarkable for their hospitality. “They offered to share with anyone and when you ask for something, they never say no,” he said. The Arawaks had no weapons; their society had neither criminals, prisons nor prisoners. They were so kind-hearted that Columbus noted in his diary that on the day the Santa Maria was shipwrecked, the Arawaks labored for hours to save his crew and cargo. The native people were so honest that not one thing was missing.

Columbus was so impressed with the hard work of these gentle islanders, that he immediately seized their land for Spain and enslaved them to work in his brutal gold mines. Within only two years, 125,000 (half of the population) of the original natives on the island were dead.

If I were a Native American, I would mark October 12, 1492, as a black day on my calendar.

Shockingly, Columbus supervised the selling of native girls into sexual slavery. Young girls of the ages 9 to 10 were the most desired by his men. In 1500, Columbus casually wrote about it in his log. He said: “A hundred castellanoes are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand.”

He forced these peaceful natives work in his gold mines until they died of exhaustion. If an “Indian” worker did not deliver his full quota of gold dust by Columbus’ deadline, soldiers would cut off the man’s hands and tie them around his neck to send a message. Slavery was so intolerable for these sweet, gentle island people that at one point, 100 of them committed mass suicide. Catholic law forbade the enslavement of Christians, but Columbus solved this problem. He simply refused to baptize the native people of Hispaniola.

On his second trip to the New World, Columbus brought cannons and attack dogs. If a native resisted slavery, he would cut off a nose or an ear. If slaves tried to escape, Columbus had them burned alive. Other times, he sent attack dogs to hunt them down, and the dogs would tear off the arms and legs of the screaming natives while they were still alive. If the Spaniards ran short of meat to feed the dogs, Arawak babies were killed for dog food.

Columbus’ acts of cruelty were so unspeakable and so legendary – even in his own day – that Governor Francisco De Bobadilla arrested Columbus and his two brothers, slapped them into chains, and shipped them off to Spain to answer for their crimes against the Arawaks. But the King and Queen of Spain, their treasury filling up with gold, pardoned Columbus and let him go free.

One of Columbus’ men, Bartolome De Las Casas, was so mortified by Columbus’ brutal atrocities against the native peoples, that he quit working for Columbus and became a Catholic priest. He described how the Spaniards under Columbus’ command cut off the legs of children who ran from them, to test the sharpness of their blades. According to De Las Casas, the men made bets as to who, with one sweep of his sword, could cut a person in half. He says that Columbus’ men poured people full of boiling soap. In a single day, De Las Casas was an eye witness as the Spanish soldiers dismembered, beheaded, or raped 3000 native people. “Such inhumanities and barbarisms were committed in my sight as no age can parallel,” De Las Casas wrote. “My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature that now I tremble as I write.”

De Las Casas spent the rest of his life trying to protect the helpless native people. But after a while, there were no more natives to protect. Experts generally agree that before 1492, the population on the island of Hispaniola probably numbered above 3 million. Within 20 years of Spanish arrival, it was reduced to only 60,000. Within 50 years, not a single original native inhabitant could be found.

In 1516, Spanish historian Peter Martyr wrote: “… a ship without compass, chart, or guide, but only following the trail of dead Indians who had been thrown from the ships could find its way from the Bahamas to Hispaniola.”

Christopher Columbus derived most of his income from slavery, De Las Casas noted. In fact, Columbus was the first slave trader in the Americas. As the native slaves died off, they were replaced with black slaves. Columbus’ son became the first African slave trader in 1505.

Are you surprised you never learned about any of this in school? I am too. Why do we have this extraordinary gap in our American ethos? Columbus himself kept detailed diaries, as did some of his men including De Las Casas and Michele de Cuneo. (If you don’t believe me, just Google the words Columbus, sex slave, and gold mine.)

Columbus’ reign of terror is one of the darkest chapters in our history. The REAL question is: Why do we celebrate a holiday in honor of this man? (Take three deep breaths. If you’re like me, your stomach is heaving at this point. I’m sorry. Sometimes the truth hurts…

…Let’s come clean. Let’s tell the truth about Christopher Columbus. Let’s boycott this outrageous holiday because it honors a mass murderer. If we skip the cute song about “In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” I don’t think our first graders will miss it much, do you? True, Columbus’ brutal treatment of peaceful Native Americans was so horrific… maybe we should hide the truth about Columbus until our kids reach at least High School age. Let’s teach it to them about the same time we tell them about the Nazi death camps…

…These people were not adventurers who “discovered” an island in the Caribbean. They were noble souls who discovered what is best in the human spirit.”

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Further Readings

Time: Here Are The Cities That Celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day Instead of Columbus Day (2017)

Huffpost: Why Indigenous Peoples Day Matters

CNN: More than 60 cities and states in the US no longer observe Columbus Day

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Thanksgiving

• Small Pox
  • In 1614 English explorers sailed home to England from Massachusetts with a ship full of Patuxet Indians bound for slavery
  • They left behind smallpox which killed the majority of the Native population in the area
• Pilgrims
  • Pilgrims arrived and only found one living Patuxet Indian, a man named Squanto who had survived slavery in England and knew their language
  • He taught them to grow corn and to fish, and negotiated a peace treaty between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Nation
  • First thanksgiving was a harvest feast between Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians
• Puritans and the Pequot War
  • More British settlers and religious zealots called Puritans began seizing land, killing and capturing Natives for slaves
  • The Pequot Nation fought back starting the Pequot War, one of the bloodiest Indian wars ever fought
• First Thanksgiving Massacre
  • In 1637 over 700 Pequot Tribe members gathered for the Green Corn Festival which is our Thanksgiving celebration
    • As they sleep the t English and Dutch mercenaries massacred them, burning many women and children alive
  • In honor of the massacre, the local governor declared “A Day Of Thanksgiving”
• More Massacres and Thanksgivings
  • The colonists continued to attacked many native villages
    • Women and children over 14 were sold into slavery while the rest were murdered
    • Bounties were paid for Indian scalps to encourage as many deaths as possible
  • After a exceptionally brutal raid the churches declared another “thanksgiving”
    • During the feasting, the hacked off heads of Natives were kicked through the streets like soccer balls
    • The friendly Wampanoag Chief was beheaded and impaled on a pole in Plymouth, where it remained on display for 24 years
  • After each massacre of a Native villages there would be a thanksgiving feast
• National Holiday
  • George Washington suggested that only one day of Thanksgiving per year be set aside instead of celebrating every massacre
  • Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday on the same day he ordered troops to march against the starving Sioux in Minnesota

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Susan Bates: The Truth about Thanksgiving

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Native American Girls Describe the REAL History Behind Thanksgiving | Teen Vogue

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Medium: Decolonizing Thanksgiving: A Toolkit for Combatting Racism in Schools

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Manataka: THE REAL STORY OF THANKSGIVING

“Most of us associate the holiday with happy Pilgrims and Indians sitting down to a big feast. And that did happen – once.

The story began in 1614 when a band of English explorers sailed home to England with a ship full of Patuxet Indians bound for slavery. They left behind smallpox which virtually wiped out those who had escaped. By the time the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts Bay they found only one living Patuxet Indian, a man named Squanto who had survived slavery in England and knew their language. He taught them to grow corn and to fish, and negotiated a peace treaty between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Nation. At the end of their first year, the Pilgrims held a great feast honoring Squanto and the Wampanoags.

But as word spread in England about the paradise to be found in the new world, religious zealots called Puritans began arriving by the boat load. Finding no fences around the land, they considered it to be in the public domain. Joined by other British settlers, they seized land, capturing strong young Natives for slaves and killing the rest. But the Pequot Nation had not agreed to the peace treaty Squanto had negotiated and they fought back. The Pequot War was one of the bloodiest Indian wars ever fought.

In 1637 near present day Groton, Connecticut, over 700 men, women and children of the Pequot Tribe had gathered for their annual Green Corn Festival which is our Thanksgiving celebration. In the predawn hours the sleeping Indians were surrounded by English and Dutch mercenaries who ordered them to come outside. Those who came out were shot or clubbed to death while the terrified women and children who huddled inside the longhouse were burned alive. The next day the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared “A Day Of Thanksgiving” because 700 unarmed men, women and children had been murdered.

Cheered by their “victory”, the brave colonists and their Indian allies attacked village after village. Women and children over 14 were sold into slavery while the rest were murdered. Boats loaded with a many as 500 slaves regularly left the ports of New England. Bounties were paid for Indian scalps to encourage as many deaths as possible.

Following an especially successful raid against the Pequot in what is now Stamford, Connecticut, the churches announced a second day of “thanksgiving” to celebrate victory over the heathen savages. During the feasting, the hacked off heads of Natives were kicked through the streets like soccer balls. Even the friendly Wampanoag did not escape the madness. Their chief was beheaded, and his head impaled on a pole in Plymouth, Massachusetts — where it remained on display for 24 years.

The killings became more and more frenzied, with days of thanksgiving feasts being held after each successful massacre. George Washington finally suggested that only one day of Thanksgiving per year be set aside instead of celebrating each and every massacre. Later Abraham Lincoln decreed Thanksgiving Day to be a legal national holiday during the Civil War — on the same day he ordered troops to march against the starving Sioux in Minnesota.

This story doesn’t have quite the same fuzzy feelings associated with it as the one where the Indians and Pilgrims are all sitting down together at the big feast. But we need to learn our true history so it won’t ever be repeated. Next Thanksgiving, when you gather with your loved ones to Thank God for all your blessings, think about those people who only wanted to live their lives and raise their families. They, also took time out to say “thank you” to Creator for all their blessings.”

INTRODUCTION FOR TEACHERS

This is a particularly difficult introduction to write. I have been a public schools teacher for twelve years, and I am also a historian and have written several books on American and Native American history. I also just happen to be Quebeque French, Metis, Ojibwa, and Iroquois. Because my Indian ancestors were on both sides of the struggle between the Puritans and the New England Indians and I am well versed in my cultural heritage and history both as an Anishnabeg (Algokin) and Hodenosione (Iroquois), it was felt that I could bring a unique insight to the project.

For an Indian, who is also a school teacher, Thanksgiving was never an easy holiday for me to deal with in class. I sometimes have felt like I learned too much about “the Pilgrims and the Indians.” Every year I have been faced with the professional and moral dilemma of just how to be honest and informative with my children at Thanksgiving without passing on historical distortions, and racial and cultural stereotypes.

The problem is that part of what you and I learned in our own childhood about the “Pilgrims” and “Squanto” and the “First Thanksgiving” is a mixture of both history and myth. But the THEME of Thanksgiving has truth and integrity far above and beyond what we and our forebearers have made of it. Thanksgiving is a bigger concept than just the story of the founding of the Plymouth Plantation.

So what do we teach to our children? We usually pass on unquestioned what we all received in our own childhood classrooms. I have come to know both the truths and the myths about our “First Thanksgiving,” and I feel we need to try to reach beyond the myths to some degree of historic truth. This text is an attempt to do this.

At this point you are probably asking, “What is the big deal about Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims?” “What does this guy mean by a mixture of truths and myth?” That is just what this introduction is all about. I propose that there may be a good deal that many of us do not know about our Thanksgiving holiday and also about the “First Thanksgiving” story. I also propose that what most of us have learned about the Pilgrims and the Indians who were at the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Plantation is only part of the truth. When you build a lesson on only half of the information, then you are not teaching the whole truth. That is why I used the word myth. So where do you start to find out more about the holiday and our modern stories about how it began?

A good place to start is with a very important book, “The Invasion of America,” by Francis Jennings. It is a very authoritative text on the settlement of New England and the evolution of Indian/White relations in the New England colonies. I also recommend looking up any good text on British history. Check out the British Civil War of 1621-1642, Oliver Cromwell, and the Puritan uprising of 1653 which ended parliamentary government in England until 1660. The history of the Puritan experience in New England really should not be separated from the history of the Puritan experience in England. You should also realize that the “Pilgrims” were a sub sect, or splinter group, of the Puritan movement. They came to America to achieve on this continent what their Puritan bretheran continued to strive for in England; and when the Puritans were forced from England, they came to New England and soon absorbed the original “Pilgrims.”

As the editor, I have read all the texts listed in our bibliography, and many more, in preparing this material for you. I want you to read some of these books. So let me use my editorial license to deliberately provoke you a little. When comparing the events stirred on by the Puritans in England with accounts of Puritan/Pilgrim activities in New England in the same era, several provocative things suggest themselves:

1. The Puritans were not just simple religious conservatives persecuted by the King and the Church of England for their unorthodox beliefs. They were political revolutionaries who not only intended to overthrow the government of England, but who actually did so in 1649.

2. The Puritan “Pilgrims” who came to New England were not simply refugees who decided to “put their fate in God’s hands” in the “empty wilderness” of North America, as a generation of Hollywood movies taught us. In any culture at any time, settlers on a frontier are most often outcasts and fugitives who, in some way or other, do not fit into the mainstream of their society. This is not to imply that people who settle on frontiers have no redeeming qualities such as bravery, etc., but that the images of nobility that we associate with the Puritans are at least in part the good “P.R.” efforts of later writers who have romanticized them.(1) It is also very plausible that this unnaturally noble image of the Puritans is all wrapped up with the mythology of “Noble Civilization” vs. “Savagery.”(2) At any rate, mainstream Englishmen considered the Pilgrims to be deliberate religious dropouts who intended to found a new nation completely independent from non-Puritan England. In 1643 the Puritan/Pilgrims declared themselves an independent confederacy, one hundred and forty-three years before the American Revolution. They believed in the imminent occurrence of Armegeddon in Europe and hoped to establish here in the new world the “Kingdom of God” foretold in the book of Revelation. They diverged from their Puritan brethren who remained in England only in that they held little real hope of ever being able to successfully overthrow the King and Parliament and, thereby, impose their “Rule of Saints” (strict Puritan orthodoxy) on the rest of the British people. So they came to America not just in one ship (the Mayflower) but in a hundred others as well, with every intention of taking the land away from its native people to build their prophesied “Holy Kingdom.”(3)

3. The Pilgrims were not just innocent refugees from religious persecution. They were victims of bigotry in England, but some of them were themselves religious bigots by our modern standards. The Puritans and the Pilgrims saw themselves as the “Chosen Elect” mentioned in the book of Revelation. They strove to “purify” first themselves and then everyone else of everything they did not accept in their own interpretation of scripture. Later New England Puritans used any means, including deceptions, treachery, torture, war, and genocide to achieve that end.(4) They saw themselves as fighting a holy war against Satan, and everyone who disagreed with them was the enemy. This rigid fundamentalism was transmitted to America by the Plymouth colonists, and it sheds a very different light on the “Pilgrim” image we have of them. This is best illustrated in the written text of the Thanksgiving sermon delivered at Plymouth in 1623 by “Mather the Elder.” In it, Mather the Elder gave special thanks to God for the devastating plague of smallpox which wiped out the majority of the Wampanoag Indians who had been their benefactors. He praised God for destroying “chiefly young men and children, the very seeds of increase, thus clearing the forests to make way for a better growth”, i.e., the Pilgrims.(5) In as much as these Indians were the Pilgrim’s benefactors, and Squanto, in particular, was the instrument of their salvation that first year, how are we to interpret this apparent callousness towards their misfortune?

4. The Wampanoag Indians were not the “friendly savages” some of us were told about when we were in the primary grades. Nor were they invited out of the goodness of the Pilgrims’ hearts to share the fruits of the Pilgrims’ harvest in a demonstration of Christian charity and interracial brotherhood. The Wampanoag were members of a widespread confederacy of Algonkian-speaking peoples known as the League of the Delaware. For six hundred years they had been defending themselves from my other ancestors, the Iroquois, and for the last hundred years they had also had encounters with European fishermen and explorers but especially with European slavers, who had been raiding their coastal villages.(6) They knew something of the power of the white people, and they did not fully trust them. But their religion taught that they were to give charity to the helpless and hospitality to anyone who came to them with empty hands.(7) Also, Squanto, the Indian hero of the Thanksgiving story, had a very real love for a British explorer named John Weymouth, who had become a second father to him several years before the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth. Clearly, Squanto saw these Pilgrims as Weymouth’s people.(8) To the Pilgrims the Indians were heathens and, therefore, the natural instruments of the Devil. Squanto, as the only educated and baptized Christian among the Wampanoag, was seen as merely an instrument of God, set in the wilderness to provide for the survival of His chosen people, the Pilgrims. The Indians were comparatively powerful and, therefore, dangerous; and they were to be courted until the next ships arrived with more Pilgrim colonists and the balance of power shifted. The Wampanoag were actually invited to that Thanksgiving feast for the purpose of negotiating a treaty that would secure the lands of the Plymouth Plantation for the Pilgrims. It should also be noted that the INDIANS, possibly out of a sense of charity toward their hosts, ended up bringing the majority of the food for the feast.(9)

5. A generation later, after the balance of power had indeed shifted, the Indian and White children of that Thanksgiving were striving to kill each other in the genocidal conflict known as King Philip’s War. At the end of that conflict most of the New England Indians were either exterminated or refugees among the French in Canada, or they were sold into slavery in the Carolinas by the Puritans. So successful was this early trade in Indian slaves that several Puritan ship owners in Boston began the practice of raiding the Ivory Coast of Africa for black slaves to sell to the proprietary colonies of the South, thus founding the American-based slave trade.(10)

Obviously there is a lot more to the story of Indian/Puritan relations in New England than in the thanksgiving stories we heard as children. Our contemporary mix of myth and history about the “First” Thanksgiving at Plymouth developed in the 1890s and early 1900s. Our country was desperately trying to pull together its many diverse peoples into a common national identity. To many writers and educators at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one, this also meant having a common national history. This was the era of the “melting pot” theory of social progress, and public education was a major tool for social unity. It was with this in mind that the federal government declared the last Thursday in November as the legal holiday of Thanksgiving in 1898.

In consequence, what started as an inspirational bit of New England folklore, soon grew into the full-fledged American Thanksgiving we now know. It emerged complete with stereotyped Indians and stereotyped Whites, incomplete history, and a mythical significance as our “First Thanksgiving.” But was it really our FIRST American Thanksgiving?

Now that I have deliberately provoked you with some new information and different opinions, please take the time to read some of the texts in our bibliography. I want to encourage you to read further and form your own opinions. There really is a TRUE Thanksgiving story of Plymouth Plantation. But I strongly suggest that there always has been a Thanksgiving story of some kind or other for as long as there have been human beings. There was also a “First” Thanksgiving in America, but it was celebrated thirty thousand years ago.(11) At some time during the New Stone Age (beginning about ten thousand years ago) Thanksgiving became associated with giving thanks to God for the harvests of the land. Thanksgiving has always been a time of people coming together, so thanks has also been offered for that gift of fellowship between us all. Every last Thursday in November we now partake in one of the OLDEST and most UNIVERSAL of human celebrations, and THERE ARE MANY THANKSGIVING STORIES TO TELL.

As for Thanksgiving week at Plymouth Plantation in 1621, the friendship was guarded and not always sincere, and the peace was very soon abused. But for three days in New England’s history, peace and friendship were there.

So here is a story for your children. It is as kind and gentle a balance of historic truth and positive inspiration as its writers and this editor can make it out to be. I hope it will adequately serve its purpose both for you and”

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Further Readings

• New Yorker: The Invention of Thanksgiving: Massacres, myths, and the making of the great November holiday.
• The Public: Thanksgiving: A Native American View
• Huff Post: As A Native American, Here’s What I Want My Fellow Americans To Know About Thanksgiving
• Time: The Thanksgiving Tale We Tell Is a Harmful Lie. As a Native American, I’ve Found a Better Way to Celebrate the Holiday
• Ibram Kendi: How to Talk About the Truth and Trump at Thanksgiving
• A Racial Justice Guide to Thanksgiving for Educators and Families
• Learn Which Tribes Lived on the Land You Now Live On

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Redskins and History of State Sponsored Genocide of Californian Indians

• Redskins
  • Term created to describe the blood mixing with the skin of a Native who was scalped, often for money
    • Natives don’t have red skin
• 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians (California)
  • Removed California Indians from their traditional land
  • Kidnapped children (apprenticeship)
  • Enslaved Natives (vagrancy laws)
  • Removed ability to defend in court

1863 Winona, Minnesota Native Bounty

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Wikipedia: Redskin

Redskin is a slang term for Native Americans in the United States and First Nations in Canada. The term “redskin” underwent pejoration through the 19th to early 20th centuries^[1] and in contemporary dictionaries of American English it is labeled “usually offensive”,^[2] “disparaging”,^[3][4] “insulting”,^[5] or “taboo”.^[6]

The origin of the choice of “red” to describe Native Americans in English is debated. While related terms were used in anthropological literature as early as the 17th century, labels based on skin-color entered everyday speech around the middle of the 18th century. “At the start of the eighteenth century, Indians and Europeans rarely mentioned the color of each other’s skins. By midcentury, remarks about skin color and the categorization of peoples by simple color-coded labels (red, white, black) had become commonplace.”^[7]

Although the term has almost disappeared from common use, it remains as the name of many sports teams, most prominently the Washington Redskins, and the term’s meaning has been a significant point of controversy. That controversy has led to high schools in the United States changing their team name as a result of protest by Native Americans, government regulations, or voluntary action…

Pejoration

The pejoration of the term “redskin” arguably begins as soon as its introduction in the early 19th century. A linguistic analysis of 42 books published between 1875 and 1930 found that negative contexts for the use of “redskin” were significantly more frequent than positive ones. However, the use of the word “Indian” in a similarly selected set of books was nearly the same, with more frequent negative than positive contexts, indicating that it was not the term “redskin” that was loaded pejoratively, but that its usage represents a generally negative attitude towards its referent.^[25] The word was first listed in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary in 1898 as “often contemptuous.”^[26]

Sociologist Irving Lewis Allen suggests that slang identifiers for ethnic groups based upon physical characteristics, including “redskin”, are by nature derogatory, emphasizing the difference between the speaker and the target.^[27] However, Luvell Anderson of the University of Memphis, in his paper “Slurring Words”, argues that for a word to be a slur, the word must communicate ideas beyond identifying a target group, and that slurs are offensive because the additional data contained in those words differentiates those individuals from otherwise accepted groups.^[28] In the same sense that “nigger” originated as meaning nothing more than “black-skinned”, redskin also took on an increasingly negative meaning.^[18]

Some Native American activists in the 21st century, in contradiction of the etymological evidence discussed above, assert that “redskin” refers directly to the bloody, red scalp or other body part collected for bounty.^[29][30] While this claim is associated in the media with litigants in the Washington Redskins trademark dispute; Amanda Blackhorse^[31] and Suzan Shown Harjo,^[32] the NCAI’s support indicates that the belief is widespread. Goddard (2005) denies any direct connection to scalping, and says there is a lack of evidence for the claim.^[15]:1[33] King (2016) argues that the lack of direct evidence for the assertion does not mean that those making the claim are “wrong to draw an association between a term that empathizes an identity based upon skin color and a history that commodified Native American body parts”.^[34]

The term “red-skin” was, in fact used in conjunction with scalp hunting in the 19th century. In 1863 a Winona, Minnesota, newspaper, the Daily Republican, printed an announcement: “The state reward for dead Indians has been increased to $200 for every red-skin sent to Purgatory. This sum is more than the dead bodies of all the Indians east of the Red River are worth.”^[35] A news story published by the Atchison Daily Champion in Atchison, Kansas, on October 9, 1885, tells of the settlers’ “hunt for redskins, with a view of obtaining their scalps”, worth $250.^[36] In his early career as the owner of a newspaper in South Dakota, L. Frank Baum wrote an editorial upon the death of Chief Sitting Bull in which he advocates the annihilation of all remaining Redskins in order to secure the safety of white settlers, and because “better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.”^[37]

When Hollywood westerns were most popular, roughly 1920–1970, the term “redskins” was often used to refer to Native Americans when war was imminent or in progress.^[38] In the Washington Redskins trademark dispute, the main issue was the meaning of the term in the period when the trademark registrations were issued, 1967–1990. The linguistic expert for the petitioner, Dr. Geoffrey Nunberg, successfully argued that whatever its origins, “redskins” was a slur at that time based upon passages from books and newspapers and movie clips, in which the word is inevitably associated with contempt, derision, condescension, or sentimental paeans to the noble savage.^[39] John McWhorter, an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University, had compared the evolution of the name into a slur to that of other racial terms such as “Oriental” which also acquired implied meanings associated with contempt.^[40]

Current use

The Redskin Theater in Anadarko, Oklahoma. The town proclaims itself to be the “Indian Capital of the Nation”, and its population is 41% Native American.

In the United States, “redskin” is regarded as a racial epithet by some,^[41] but as neutral by others, including some Native Americans.^[42] The American Heritage style guide advises that “the term redskin evokes an even more objectionable stereotype” than the use of red as a racial adjective by outsiders,^[43] while others urge writers to use the term only in a historical context.^[44] In modern dictionaries of American English it is labeled “usually offensive”,^[2] “disparaging”,^[3][4] “insulting”,^[5] or “taboo“.^[6]

Use among Native Americans

Three predominantly Native American schools use the name for their athletic teams, two of which serve reservations: Red Mesa High School in Teec Nos Pos, Arizona where the student body is 99% Native American.^[45] and Wellpinit High School, Wellpinit, Washington.^[46] The principal of Red Mesa said in 2014 that use of the word outside American Indian communities should be avoided because it could perpetuate “the legacy of negativity that the term has created.”^[47] In 2014, Wellpinit High School, located on the Spokane Indian Reservation, voted to keep the Redskins name.^[48] Native American writer and attorney Gyasi Ross compares Native American use of variations of the word “Redskin” with African-American use of variations of the word “Nigger”. Use of these terms by some members of minority communities does not mean that these words may be used by outsiders. Ross also notes that while activism on the issue may be from a minority of Native Americans, this is due to most being concerned with more immediate issues, but also says “The presentation of the name ‘Redskins’ is problematic for many Native Americans because it identifies Natives in a way that the vast majority of Natives simply don’t identity ourselves.”^[49]

Sports teams

Main article: Native American mascot controversy

Numerous civil rights, educational, athletic, and academic organizations consider any use of native names/symbols by non-native sports teams to be a harmful form of ethnic stereotyping which should be eliminated.^[50]

Washington Redskins

Main article: Washington Redskins name controversy

The R-word is the moral equivalent of the N-word. It packs the same level of bigotry and insensitivity for Native Americans as any other racial slur. We cannot tolerate the NFL’s continued commitment to normalizing this demeaning characterization of Native Americans. The success of the Washington football franchise does not depend on the name of its team, but rather the talent of its players and leadership. The NFL must abandon its tone-deaf culture as it relates to people of color and change the hurtful name of this team.

Marc H. Morial, President and CEO of the National Urban League^[51]

The controversy regarding Native mascots in general, and use of the name Redskins, is most prominent in the name of the Washington Redskins, a National Football League team. Public protest of the name began in 1968, with a resolution by the National Congress of American Indians.^[52] Native American groups and their supporters argue that since they view the word “redskin” as offensive, it is inappropriate for an NFL team to continue to use it, regardless of whether any offense is intended.^[25][53][54] A claim by Pete Hegseth on May 26, 2014 in a segment on “Outnumbered” that Redskins is “used historically” as “a term of respect” was deemed to be “Mostly False” by PolitiFact.^[55]

College and secondary school teams

Main article: Sports teams named Redskins

College teams that formerly used the name changed voluntarily:

• The University of Utah Redskins became the Utah Utes in 1972.
• The Miami University (of Ohio) Redskins became the RedHawks in 1997.
• The Southern Nazarene University Redskins became the Crimson Storm in 1998.

As of early 2013 the Capitol News Service (CNS) in Maryland listed 62 high schools using the Redskins name. Twenty-eight high schools in 18 states had dropped the Redskins name during the prior 25 years, either voluntarily or as a result of a combination of state legal action and protests from Native American groups.^[45] Since the CNS list was compiled, this trend has continued, with an additional thirteen high school teams having changed, plus one closed,^[74] leaving a total of 48 high schools continuing to use the name.

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African American Colonialism

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African American Colonialism

• European colonialism started as corporations using plantation economies to export cash crops (tobacco, indigo, rice, cotton) to accumulate massive wealth
  • Plantations required lots of labor under harsh conditions
    • Native American slaves were first used
    • Replaced with Indentured servants
    • Eventually replaced with African slaves – 1619-1865
• Transatlantic Slave Trade
  • Western European slave trade corps bought Central/Western African slaves to Americas
    • Europe started arms races in rival Western African empires by trading modern weapons for slaves
  • 12 million African slaves shipped
    • Around 2 million died during transport
    • Half a million were shipped to North America
  • The number of lives lost in the procurement of slaves remains a mystery
    • May equal or exceed the number who survived to be enslaved
• Enormous wealth was accumulated in the Western World from slavery
  • Slave trade financed the industrial revolution and built Modern Europe and US
  • Many people profited from governments, slave ship owners, slave traders, plantation owners, factory owners who processed the raw materials, factory workers, port towns, bankers, insurance companies, auctions, etc
  • No reparations were ever paid.

• Slave Codes -1639-1724
  • Series of codes solidifying racial slavery in the colonies after the Bacon Rebellion
    • Solidified automatic life-long racial slavery in the colonies
    • Gave slave owners full rights to punish, rape and kill slaves
    • Legalized segregation
• Domestic Slave trade
  • Displaced and separated 1.2 million men, women, and children
    • Separated 1 in 5 marriages of all slaves
• Brutality of slavery
  • Slaves were property with no rights or protections
    • Slaves were punish by whipping, shackling, beating, mutilation, branding, imprisonment
    • Sexual abuse and rape were common
    • Horrible living and working conditions
  • Estimated that 1/3 of imported slaves died within their first 3 years
• Justification for slavery brought by colonialism
  • Racism – first slave system to spread myths that black people were biologically inferior
  • White Supremacy – bringing civilization in exchange for domination
  • Dehumanization – all blacks were lump together as savages and heathens
  • Capitalism – division and exploitation of labor
  • Christianity – supported slavery and white supremacy

The Atlantic slave trade: What too few textbooks told you – Anthony Hazard

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The Legacy of Colonialism

• White Western world
  • Directly attribute much of its wealth and prosperity to the exploitation and deaths of indigenous people of color
• Many world’s poorest countries former European colonies
  • Much of the poverty can be traced to the past and present exploitation of resources from European colonial powers
• Ethnic tensions and conflicts
  • From artificial European colonial boundaries still exist and cause new conflicts
• Colonial institutions of systemic racism and neocolonialism
  • Shape are societies and power structures today
  • Continue to marginalize and hurt millions of people worldwide
• Historical Trauma
  • Generations of trauma and suffering still felt by millions

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Philschatz.com: The Impact of Colonization

“As Europeans moved beyond exploration and into colonization of the Americas, they brought changes to virtually every aspect of the land and its people, from trade and hunting to warfare and personal property. European goods, ideas, and diseases shaped the changing continent.

As Europeans established their colonies, their societies also became segmented and divided along religious and racial lines. Most people in these societies were not free; they labored as servants or slaves, doing the work required to produce wealth for others. By 1700, the American continent had become a place of stark contrasts between slavery and freedom, between the haves and the have-nots.

THE INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY

Everywhere in the American colonies, a crushing demand for labor existed to grow New World cash crops, especially sugar and tobacco. This need led Europeans to rely increasingly on Africans, and after 1600, the movement of Africans across the Atlantic accelerated. The English crown chartered the Royal African Company in 1672, giving the company a monopoly over the transport of African slaves to the English colonies. Over the next four decades, the company transported around 350,000 Africans from their homelands. By 1700, the tiny English sugar island of Barbados had a population of fifty thousand slaves, and the English had encoded the institution of chattel slavery into colonial law.

This new system of African slavery came slowly to the English colonists, who did not have slavery at home and preferred to use servant labor. Nevertheless, by the end of the seventeenth century, the English everywhere in America—and particularly in the Chesapeake Bay colonies—had come to rely on African slaves. While Africans had long practiced slavery among their own people, it had not been based on race. Africans enslaved other Africans as war captives, for crimes, and to settle debts; they generally used their slaves for domestic and small-scale agricultural work, not for growing cash crops on large plantations. Additionally, African slavery was often a temporary condition rather than a lifelong sentence, and, unlike New World slavery, it was typically not heritable (passed from a slave mother to her children).

The growing slave trade with Europeans had a profound impact on the people of West Africa, giving prominence to local chieftains and merchants who traded slaves for European textiles, alcohol, guns, tobacco, and food. Africans also charged Europeans for the right to trade in slaves and imposed taxes on slave purchases. Different African groups and kingdoms even staged large-scale raids on each other to meet the demand for slaves.

Once sold to traders, all slaves sent to America endured the hellish Middle Passage, the transatlantic crossing, which took one to two months. By 1625, more than 325,800 Africans had been shipped to the New World, though many thousands perished during the voyage. An astonishing number, some four million, were transported to the Caribbean between 1501 and 1830. When they reached their destination in America, Africans found themselves trapped in shockingly brutal slave societies. In the Chesapeake colonies, they faced a lifetime of harvesting and processing tobacco.

Everywhere, Africans resisted slavery, and running away was common. In Jamaica and elsewhere, runaway slaves created maroon communities, groups that resisted recapture and eked a living from the land, rebuilding their communities as best they could. When possible, they adhered to traditional ways, following spiritual leaders such as Vodun priests.”

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Socialist Worker: The Roots of Racism

“Racism is a particular form of oppression. It stems from discrimination against a group of people based on the idea that some inherited characteristic, such as skin color, makes them inferior to their oppressors. Yet the concepts of “race” and “racism” are modern inventions. They arose and became part of the dominant ideology of society in the context of the African slave trade at the dawn of capitalism in the 1500s and 1600s.

Although it is a commonplace for academics and opponents of socialism to claim that Karl Marx ignored racism, Marx in fact described the processes that created modern racism. His explanation of the rise of capitalism placed the African slave trade, the European extermination of indigenous people in the Americas and colonialism at its heart. In Capital, Marx writes:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of the continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins are all things that characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production.

Marx connected his explanation of the role of the slave trade in the rise of capitalism to the social relations that produced racism against Africans. In Wage Labor and Capital, written 12 years before the American Civil War, he explains:

What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is as good as the other.

A Negro is a Negro. He only becomes a slave in certain relations. A cotton spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It only becomes capital in certain relations. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold by itself is money, or as sugar is the price of sugar.

In this passage, Marx shows no prejudice to Blacks (“a man of the black race,” “a Negro is a Negro”), but he mocks society’s equation of “Black” and “slave” (“one explanation is as good as another”). He shows how the economic and social relations of emerging capitalism thrust Blacks into slavery (“he only becomes a slave in certain relations”), which produce the dominant ideology that equates being African with being a slave.

These fragments of Marx’s writing give us a good start in understanding the Marxist explanation of the origins of racism. As the Trinidadian historian of slavery Eric Williams put it: “Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.” And, one should add, the consequence of modern slavery at the dawn of capitalism. While slavery existed as an economic system for thousands of years before the conquest of America, racism as we understand it today did not exist.

From time immemorial?

The classical empires of Greece and Rome were based on slave labor. But ancient slavery was not viewed in racial terms. Slaves were most often captives in wars or conquered peoples. If we understand white people as originating in what is today Europe, then most slaves in ancient Greece and Rome were white. Roman law made slaves the property of their owners, while maintaining a “formal lack of interest in the slave’s ethnic or racial provenance,” wrote Robin Blackburn in The Making of New World Slavery.

The African slave trade

The slave trade lasted for a little more than 400 years, from the mid-1400s, when the Portuguese made their first voyages down the African coast, to the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888.

Slave traders took as many as 12 million Africans by force to work on the plantations in South America, the Caribbean and North America. About 13 percent of slaves (1.5 million) died during the Middle Passage–the trip by boat from Africa to the New World. The African slave trade–involving African slave merchants, European slavers and New World planters in the traffic in human cargo–represented the greatest forced population transfer ever…

…Unfree labor in the North American colonies

Notwithstanding the horrible conditions that African slaves endured, it is important to underscore that when European powers began carving up the New World between them, African slaves were not part of their calculations.

When we think of slavery today, we think of it primarily from the point of view of its relationship to racism. But planters in the 17th and 18th centuries looked at it primarily as a means to produce profits. Slavery was a method of organizing labor to produce sugar, tobacco and cotton. It was not, first and foremost, a system for producing white supremacy. How did slavery in the U.S. (and the rest of the New World) become the breeding ground for racism?

For much of the first century of colonization in what became the United States, the majority of slaves and other “unfree laborers” were white. The term “unfree” draws the distinction between slavery and servitude and “free wage labor” that is the norm in capitalism. One of the historic gains of capitalism for workers is that workers are “free” to sell their ability to labor to whatever employer will give them the best deal. Of course, this kind of freedom is limited at best. Unless they are independently wealthy, workers aren’t free to decide not to work. They’re free to work or starve. Once they do work, they can quit one employer and go to work for another.

But the hallmark of systems like slavery and indentured servitude was that slaves or servants were “bound over” to a particular employer for a period of time, or for life in the case of slaves. The decision to work for another master wasn’t the slave’s or the servant’s. It was the master’s, who could sell slaves for money or other commodities like livestock, lumber or machinery.

The North American colonies started predominantly as private business enterprises in the early 1600s. Unlike the Spanish, whose conquests of Mexico and Peru in the 1500s produced fabulous gold and silver riches for Spain, settlers in places like the colonies that became Maryland, Rhode Island, and Virginia made money through agriculture. In addition to sheer survival, the settlers’ chief aim was to obtain a labor force that could produce the large amounts of indigo, tobacco, sugar and other crops that would be sold back to England. From 1607, when Jamestown was founded in Virginia to about 1685, the primary source of agricultural labor in English North America came from white indentured servants.

The colonists first attempted to press the indigenous population into labor. But the Indians refused to be become servants to the English. Indians resisted being forced to work, and they escaped into the surrounding area, which, after all, they knew far better than the English. One after another, the English colonies turned to a policy of driving out the Indians.

The colonists then turned to white servants. Indentured servants were predominantly young white men–usually English or Irish–who were required to work for a planter master for some fixed term of four to seven years. The servants received room and board on the plantation but no pay. And they could not quit and work for another planter. They had to serve their term, after which they might be able to acquire some land and to start a farm for themselves.

They became servants in several ways. Some were prisoners, convicted of petty crimes in Britain, or convicted of being troublemakers in Britain’s first colony, Ireland. Many were kidnapped off the streets of Liverpool or Manchester, and put on ships to the New World. Some voluntarily became servants, hoping to start farms after they fulfilled their obligations to their masters.

For most of the 1600s, the planters tried to get by with a predominantly white, but multiracial workforce. But as the 17th century wore on, colonial leaders became increasingly frustrated with white servant labor. For one thing, they faced the problem of constantly having to recruit labor as servants’ terms expired. Second, after servants finished their contracts and decided to set up their farms, they could become competitors to their former masters.

And finally, the planters didn’t like the servants’ “insolence.” The mid-1600s were a time of revolution in England, when ideas of individual freedom were challenging the old hierarchies based on royalty. The colonial planters tended to be royalists, but their servants tended to assert their “rights as Englishmen” to better food, clothing and time off. Most laborers in the colonies supported the servants. As the century progressed, the costs of servant labor increased. Planters started to petition the colonial boards and assemblies to allow the large-scale importation of African slaves.

Black slaves worked on plantations in small numbers throughout the 1600s. But until the end of the 1600s, it cost planters more to buy slaves than to buy white servants. Blacks lived in the colonies in a variety of statuses–some were free, some were slaves, some were servants. The law in Virginia didn’t establish the condition of lifetime, perpetual slavery or even recognize African servants as a group different from white servants until 1661. Blacks could serve on juries, own property and exercise other rights. Northampton County, Virginia, recognized interracial marriages and, in one case, assigned a free Black couple to act as foster parents for an abandoned white child. There were even a few examples of Black freemen who owned white servants. Free Blacks in North Carolina had voting rights. In the 1600s, the Chesapeake society of eastern Virginia had a multiracial character, according to historian Betty Wood:

There is persuasive evidence dating from the 1620s through the 1680s that there were those of European descent in the Chesapeake who were prepared to identify and cooperate with people of African descent. These affinities were forged in the world of plantation work. On many plantations, Europeans and West Africans labored side by side in the tobacco fields, performing exactly the same types and amounts of work; they lived and ate together in shared housing; they socialized together; and sometimes they slept together.

The planters’ economic calculations played a part in the colonies’ decision to move toward full-scale slave labor. By the end of the 17th century, the price of white indentured servants outstripped the price of African slaves. A planter could buy an African slave for life for the same price that he could purchase a white servant for 10 years. As Eric Williams explained:

Here, then, is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial; it had to do not with the color of the laborer, but the cheapness of the labor. [The planter] would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labor. Africa was nearer than the moon, nearer too than the more populous countries of India and China. But their turn would soon come.

Planters’ fear of a multiracial uprising also pushed them towards racial slavery. Because a rigid racial division of labor didn’t exist in the 17th century colonies, many conspiracies involving Black slaves and white indentured servants were hatched and foiled. We know about them today because of court proceedings that punished the runaways after their capture. As historians T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes point out, “These cases reveal only extreme actions, desperate attempts to escape, but for every group of runaways who came before the courts, there were doubtless many more poor whites and blacks who cooperated in smaller, less daring ways on the plantation.”

The largest of these conspiracies developed into Bacon’s Rebellion, an uprising that threw terror into the hearts of the Virginia Tidewater planters in 1676. Several hundred farmers, servants and slaves initiated a protest to press the colonial government to seize Indian land for distribution. The conflict spilled over into demands for tax relief and resentment of the Jamestown establishment. Planter Nathaniel Bacon helped organize an army of whites and Blacks that sacked Jamestown and forced the governor to flee. The rebel army held out for eight months before the Crown managed to defeat and disarm it.

Bacon’s Rebellion was a turning point. After it ended, the Tidewater planters moved in two directions: first, they offered concessions to the white freemen, lifting taxes and extending to them the vote; and second, they moved to full-scale racial slavery.

Fifteen years earlier, the Burgesses had recognized the condition of slavery for life and placed Africans in a different category as white servants. But the law had little practical effect. “Until slavery became systematic, there was no need for a systematic slave code. And slavery could not become systematic so long as an African slave for life cost twice as much as an English servant for a five-year term,” wrote historian Barbara Jeanne Fields.

Both of those circumstances changed in the immediate aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion. In the entire 17th century, the planters imported about 20,000 African slaves. The majority of them were brought to North American colonies in the 24 years after Bacon’s Rebellion.

In 1664, the Maryland legislature passed a law determining who would be considered slaves on the basis of the condition of their father–whether their father was slave or free. It soon became clear, however, that establishing paternity was difficult, but that establishing who was a person’s mother was definite. So the planters changed the law to establish slave status on the basis of the mother’s condition.

Now white slaveholders who fathered children by slave women would be guaranteed their offspring as slaves. And the law included penalties for “free” women who slept with slaves. But what’s most interesting about this law is that it doesn’t really speak in racial terms. It attempts to preserve the property rights of slaveholders and establish barriers between slave and free which were to become hardened into racial divisions over the next few years.

Taking the Maryland law as an example, Fields made this important point:

Historians can actually observe colonial Americans in the act of preparing the ground for race without foreknowledge of what would later arise on the foundation they were laying. [T]he purpose of the experiment is clear: to prevent the erosion of slaveowners’ property rights that would result if the offspring of free white women impregnated by slave men were entitled to freedom. The language of the preamble to the law makes clear that the point was not yet race.

Race does not explain the law. Rather, the law shows society in the act of inventing race.

After establishing that African slaves would cultivate major cash crops of the North American colonies, the planters then moved to establish the institutions and ideas that would uphold white supremacy. Most unfree labor became Black labor. Laws and ideas intended to underscore the subhuman status of Black people–in a word, the ideology of racism and white supremacy–emerged full-blown over the next generation.

“All men are created equal”

Within a few decades, the ideology of white supremacy was fully developed. Some of the greatest minds of the day–such as Scottish philosopher David Hume and Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence–wrote treatises alleging Black inferiority.

The ideology of white supremacy based on the natural inferiority of Blacks, even allegations that Blacks were subhuman, strengthened throughout the 18th century. This was the way that the leading intellectual figures of the time reconciled the ideals of the 1776 American Revolution with slavery. The American Revolution of 1776 and later the French Revolution of 1789 popularized the ideas of liberty and the rights of all human beings. The Declaration of Independence asserts that “all men are created equal” and possess certain “unalienable rights”–rights that can’t be taken away–of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

As the first major bourgeois revolution, the American Revolution sought to establish the rights of the new capitalist class against the old feudal monarchy. It started with the resentment of the American merchant class that wanted to break free from British restrictions on its trade.

But its challenge to British tyranny also gave expression to a whole range of ideas that expanded the concept of “liberty” from being just about trade to include ideas of human rights, democracy, and civil liberties. It legitimized an assault on slavery as an offense to liberty. Some of the leading American revolutionaries, such as Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, endorsed abolition. Slaves and free Blacks also pointed to the ideals of the revolution to call for abolishing slavery.

But because the revolution aimed to establish the rule of capital in America, and because a lot of capitalists and planters made a lot of money from slavery, the revolution compromised with slavery. The Declaration initially contained a condemnation of King George for allowing the slave trade, but Jefferson dropped it following protests from representatives from Georgia and the Carolinas.

How could the founding fathers of the U.S.–most of whom owned slaves themselves–reconcile the ideals of liberty for which they were fighting with the existence of a system that represented the exact negation of liberty?

The ideology of white supremacy fit the bill. We know today that “all men” didn’t include women, Indians or most whites. But to rule Black slaves out of the blessings of liberty, the leading head-fixers of the time argued that Blacks weren’t really “men,” they were a lower order of being. Jefferson’s Notes from Virginia, meant to be a scientific catalogue of the flora and fauna of Virginia, uses arguments that anticipate the “scientific racism” of the 1800s and 1900s.

With few exceptions, no major institution–such as the universities, the churches or the newspapers of the time–raised criticisms of white supremacy or of slavery. In fact, they helped pioneer religious and academic justifications for slavery and Black inferiority. As C.L.R. James put it, “[T]he conception of dividing people by race begins with the slave trade. This thing was so shocking, so opposed to all the conceptions of society which religion and philosophers had, that the only justification by which humanity could face it was to divide people into races and decide that the Africans were an inferior race.”

White supremacy wasn’t only used to justify slavery. It was also used to keep in line the two-thirds of Southern whites who weren’t slaveholders. Unlike the French colony of St. Domingue or the British colony of Barbados, where Blacks vastly outnumbered whites, Blacks were a minority in the slave South. A tiny minority of slave-holding whites, who controlled the governments and economies of the Deep South states, ruled over a population that was roughly two-thirds white farmers and workers and one-third Black slaves.

The slaveholders’ ideology of racism and white supremacy helped to divide the working population, tying poor whites to the slaveholders. Slavery afforded poor white farmers what Fields called a “social space” whereby they preserved an illusory “independence” based on debt and subsistence farming, while the rich planters continued to dominate Southern politics and society. “A caste system as well as a form of labor,” historian James M. McPherson wrote, “slavery elevated all whites to the ruling caste and thereby reduced the potential for class conflict.”

The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass understood this dynamic:

The hostility between the whites and blacks of the South is easily explained. It has its root and sap in the relation of slavery, and was incited on both sides by the cunning of the slave masters. Those masters secured their ascendancy over both the poor whites and the Blacks by putting enmity between them. They divided both to conquer each. [Slaveholders denounced emancipation as] tending to put the white working man on an equality with Blacks, and by this means, they succeed in drawing off the minds of the poor whites from the real fact, that by the rich slave-master, they are already regarded as but a single remove from equality with the slave.

Slavery and capitalism

Slavery in the colonies helped produce a boom in the 18th century economy that provided the launching pad for the industrial revolution in Europe. From the start, colonial slavery and capitalism were linked. While it is not correct to say that slavery created capitalism, it is correct to say that slavery provided one of the chief sources for the initial accumulations of wealth that helped to propel capitalism forward in Europe and North America.

The clearest example of the connection between plantation slavery and the rise of industrial capitalism was the connection between the cotton South, Britain and, to a lesser extent, the Northern industrial states. Here, we can see the direct link between slavery in the U.S. and the development of the most advanced capitalist production methods in the world. Cotton textiles accounted for 75 percent of British industrial employment in 1840, and, at its height, three-fourths of that cotton came from the slave plantations of the Deep South. And Northern ships and ports transported the cotton.

To meet the boom in the 1840s and 1850s, the planters became even more vicious. On the one hand, they tried to expand slavery into the West and Central America. The fight over the extension of slavery into the territories eventually precipitated the Civil War in 1861. On the other hand, they drove slaves harder–selling more cotton to buy more slaves just to keep up. On the eve of the Civil War, the South was petitioning to lift the ban on the importation of slaves that had existed officially since 1808.

Karl Marx clearly understood the connection between plantation slavery in the cotton South and the development of capitalism in England. He wrote in Capital:

While the cotton industry introduced child-slavery into England, in the United States, it gave the impulse for the transformation of the more or less patriarchal slavery into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage-laborers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal. Capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.

The close connection between slavery and capitalism, and thus, between racism and capitalism, gives the lie to those who insist that slavery would have just died out. In fact, the South was more dependent on slavery right before the Civil War than it was 50 or 100 years earlier. Slavery lasted as long as it did because it was profitable. And it was profitable to the richest and most “well-bred” people in the world.

The Civil War abolished slavery and struck a great blow against racism. But racism itself wasn’t abolished. On the contrary, just as racism was created to justify colonial slavery, racism as an ideology was refashioned. It now no longer justified the enslavement of Blacks, but it justified second-class status for Blacks as wage laborers and sharecroppers.

Racist ideology was also refashioned to justify imperialist conquest at the turn of the last century. As a handful of competing world powers vied to carve up the globe into colonial preserves for cheap raw materials and labor, racism served as a convenient justification. The vast majority of the world’s people were now portrayed as inferior races, incapable of determining their own future. Slavery disappeared, but racism remained as a means to justify the domination of millions of people by the U.S., various European powers, and later by Japan.

Because racism is woven right into the fabric of capitalism, new forms of racism arose with changes in capitalism. As the U.S. economy expanded and underpinned U.S. imperial expansion, imperialist racism–which asserted that the U.S. had a right to dominate other peoples, such as Mexicans and Filipinos–developed. As the U.S. economy grew and sucked in millions of immigrant laborers, anti-immigrant racism developed.

But these are both different forms of the same ideology–of white supremacy and division of the world into “superior” and “inferior” races–that had their origins in slavery.

Racism and capitalism have been intertwined since the beginning of capitalism. You can’t have capitalism without racism. Therefore, the final triumph over racism will only come when we abolish racism’s chief source–capitalism–and build a new socialist society.”

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NPR: The Invention of Race (Audio Story)

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Discovering Bristol: Racist ideas

“As the slave trade developed, Europeans created a racist ideology which could be used to justify the trade. Africans were thought to be sub-human, uncivilised, and inferior to Europeans in every way. And as they were ‘not one of us’, they could be bought and sold. The development of racism is linked to the slave trade. The slave trade could not have continued without this ideology to justify it. Racism cannot be ignored in any study of the slave trade…

…From about 1600, with the development of science in Europe, racism could be ‘proved’ scientifically. Scientists and philosophers like David Hume could state that Africans were ‘naturally inferior to the whites’. It was widely believed that Africans and Europeans had developed separately. Many, like Sir Thomas Herbert, writing in 1634, believed that Africans must be descended from apes and were part of a separate and inferior race. This was long before Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which showed that all humans are part of the same species. In the 18th and 19th century, many white people campaigned for an end to the slave trade and for freedom for the slaves. But few of those white people believed in racial equality, that is equality between the black and white races.

In the 19th century, racist ideologies were strengthened by ‘fake’ sciences such as phrenology. It was believed that the shape of the skull reflected the character of the person. Phrenologists applied their theory to African skulls and classified all Africans as inferior to white races intellectually, culturally and morally. Phrenology showed Africans to be unsuited to work other than that supervised by white people. In the minds of most, this justified making Africans work as slaves.

The study of teleology looked at design in nature. This allowed men to argue that Africans were, by nature, suited to hard work but not to thinking. They were, therefore, obviously made to serve white people. “The Negro in general is a born slave” wrote Sir Harry Johnston, a British colonial administrator in Africa in the 1890s.

Anthropology, the study of mankind, looked at such things as the size of the brain and the physical appearance of people. Again, anthropologists could conclude that the African was inferior to the white man, a separate species more closely related to apes than to whites.

The English naturalist, Charles Darwin, developed a theory of evolution. It suggested that Europeans were related to Africans and that all humans were related to the apes. Whilst this upset the anthropological theories about separate species, other aspects of the evolutionary theory still ‘proved’ the superiority of the white races over all others. His theory saw the Anglo-Saxons, that is, the British, at the top of the evolutionary scale. The British were at the top of the family tree of the human race, as the most ‘civilised’ race. The African, as a ‘primitive’ race, was considered childlike and unintelligent. Such ‘inferior’ races were doomed to be either ruled by or destroyed by the ‘superior’ races. Survival of the fittest was the rule in Darwin’s theory of evolution.

The belief in the superiority of the British and European races fed the expansion of the empire. The British empire grew from the idea ‘that the British were the best race to rule the world’, a view expressed by Cecil Rhodes, the colonial administrator who founded the British colony  of Rhodesia, in Central Africa (now Zimbabwe).

These ‘scientific’ theories of the inferiority of the African were generally accepted by the British public. Racism was taken for granted. For example, books by G A Henty were seen as great reads for boys. His book By Sheer Pluck: a tale of the Ashanti war was written in 1884 and probably still available in school libraries until the middle of the 20th century. The boys reading it learned that black people are ‘just like children. They are always either laughing or quarelling. They are good-natured and passionate, indolent, but will work hard for a time; clever up to a certain point, densely stupid beyond… They are absolutely without originality, absolutely without inventive power.’

Black people living in Britain, as well as those living in their own countries under European colonial rule, had to cope with this racism. Racism has been and is central to the experience of black people in Britain, over the centuries.”

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kottke: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry in the United States

The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry by Ned & Constance Sublette is a book which offers an alternate view of slavery in the United States. Instead of treating slavery as a source of unpaid labor, as it is typically understood, they focus on the ownership aspect: people as property, merchandise, collateral, and capital. From a review of the book at Pacific Standard:

In fact, most American slaves were not kidnapped on another continent. Though over 12.7 million Africans were forced onto ships to the Western hemisphere, estimates only have 400,000-500,000 landing in present-day America. How then to account for the four million black slaves who were tilling fields in 1860? “The South,” the Sublettes write, “did not only produce tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton as commodities for sale; it produced people.” Slavers called slave-breeding “natural increase,” but there was nothing natural about producing slaves; it took scientific management. Thomas Jefferson bragged to George Washington that the birth of black children was increasing Virginia’s capital stock by four percent annually.

Here is how the American slave-breeding industry worked, according to the Sublettes: Some states (most importantly Virginia) produced slaves as their main domestic crop. The price of slaves was anchored by industry in other states that consumed slaves in the production of rice and sugar, and constant territorial expansion. As long as the slave power continued to grow, breeders could literally bank on future demand and increasing prices. That made slaves not just a commodity, but the closest thing to money that white breeders had. It’s hard to quantify just how valuable people were as commodities, but the Sublettes try to convey it: By a conservative estimate, in 1860 the total value of American slaves was $4 billion, far more than the gold and silver then circulating nationally ($228.3 million, “most of it in the North,” the authors add), total currency ($435.4 million), and even the value of the South’s total farmland ($1.92 billion). Slaves were, to slavers, worth more than everything else they could imagine combined.

Just reading that turns my stomach. The Sublettes also recast the 1808 abolition of the transatlantic slave trade as trade protectionism.

Virginia slaveowners won a major victory when Thomas Jefferson’s 1808 prohibition of the African slave trade protected the domestic slave markets for slave-breeding.

I haven’t read the book, but I imagine they touched on the fact that by growing slave populations, southern states were literally manufacturing more political representation due to the Three-Fifths clause in the US Constitution. They bred more slaves to help politically safeguard the practice of slavery.

Update Because slaves were property, Southern slave owners could mortgage them to banks and then the banks could package the mortgages into bonds and sell the bonds to anyone anywhere in the world, even where slavery was illegal.

In the 1830s, powerful Southern slaveowners wanted to import capital into their states so they could buy more slaves. They came up with a new, two-part idea: mortgaging slaves; and then turning the mortgages into bonds that could be marketed all over the world.

First, American planters organized new banks, usually in new states like Mississippi and Louisiana. Drawing up lists of slaves for collateral, the planters then mortgaged them to the banks they had created, enabling themselves to buy additional slaves to expand cotton production. To provide capital for those loans, the banks sold bonds to investors from around the globe — London, New York, Amsterdam, Paris. The bond buyers, many of whom lived in countries where slavery was illegal, didn’t own individual slaves — just bonds backed by their value. Planters’ mortgage payments paid the interest and the principle on these bond payments. Enslaved human beings had been, in modern financial lingo, “securitized.”

Slave-backed securities. My stomach is turning again. (via @daveg)

Update Tyler Cowen read The American Slave Coast and listed a few things he learned from it.

2. President James Polk speculated in slaves, based on inside information he obtained from being President and shaping policy toward slaves and slave importation.

3. In the South there were slave “breeding farms,” where the number of women and children far outnumbered the number of men.

Update In his book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, Edward Baptist details how slavery played a central role in the making of the US economy.

As historian Edward Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, slavery and its expansion were central to the evolution and modernization of our nation in the 18th and 19th centuries, catapulting the US into a modern, industrial and capitalist economy. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a sub-continental cotton empire. By 1861 it had five times as many slaves as it had during the Revolution, and was producing two billion pounds of cotton a year. It was through slavery and slavery alone that the United States achieved a virtual monopoly on the production of cotton, the key raw material of the Industrial Revolution, and was transformed into a global power rivaled only by England.

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Further Readings

USA Today: Slavery’s explosive growth, in charts: How ’20 and odd’ became millions

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