This volume exposes the distortions and omissions about the history of the United States propagated by popular culture, taught in schools and colleges, and eulogised in churches and political rallies; a history that largely ignores the scale of the genocidal campaign by the settlers against the indigenous people of the continent.
The author takes us through the arrival of the Europeans, the founding of the British colonies, independence and the conquest of the continent, and how this history would shape what became the great imperial power that is the United States today.
Reading this book in April 2024, against a backdrop of death and destruction in Gaza and the lamentable failure of our political class to stop what the International Court of Justice describe as a plausible genocide there, reminds us of the extent to which imperialism remains part of our culture today
The Doctrine of Discovery
Crucially the story starts with the Catholic Church and the Papal Bulls of the 15th century that established “The Doctrine of Discovery” that gave European Nations the right to claim land they discovered as their own, and allowing them to dispossess those who lived there. Later in 1792 Thomas Jefferson would claim that the Doctrine of Discovery was international law. Upheld by the US Supreme court in 1823 it remains the basis for some federal laws (p.198-199).
When the Europeans first arrived in North America they found a continent of many nations with advanced agriculture, roads, towns and trade (p.28).Then death and destruction followed…
“Nearly all the population areas of the Americas were reduced by 90% … decreasing the targeted indigenous populations of the Americas from one hundred million to ten million.”
(p.40)
For many historians it seems that it is enough to claim that the main cause of this decline was a lack of immunity to disease. They are happy, it seems, to ignore other significant causes described here such as the wars between the Europeans and the indigenous people, the Europeans setting indigenous nations against each other, food shortages caused by the disruption to trade, the introduction of alcohol, and overall disruption to social structures caused by the settlers.
British Colonisation
Early in the 17th century the northern part of Ireland was brutally settled by the British who gifted the land to people taken mostly from lowland Scotland. To force the Irish from the north, a bounty was offered per head. Sickeningly, as the number of heads collected rose, they decided to pay for just the scalp instead (p. 38). The descendants of those who so brutally colonised the north of Ireland would later migrate to the American colonies taking their practices and Calvinistic ideology with them. One passage reveals how the roots of exceptionalism was founded on the covenant of the Hebrew Torah / Old Testament…
“Like biblical Israelites and their fellow Calvinist in New England [Boers in S Africa] believed they were called by God to wander the wilderness, meet and defeat the heathen and occupy the promised land”
(p.48)
In the Calvinistic ideology individuals called by God where among the “elect”. Often wealth was seen as a symbol of being called, and poverty a symbol of sin. To the settlers the indigenous people were heathens and sinners.
“The faithful gathered and pledged to each other and to God to form and support a godly society – God in turn vouchsafes them prosperity in a promised land.”
(p.47)
That belief in the covenant was carried by settlers beyond the Appalachians to claim their promised land, sure in their right to dispossess those they found, killing those who resisted.
US Independence
The settlers’ fight for independence was just not with the Britain but with the indigenous nations including the Cherokee, Shawnee, the Haudenosaunee (p. 72-77). George Washington issued genocidal instructions to Major General John Sullivan…
“To lay waste to all the settlements around… that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed…. [Y]ou will not by any means, listen to any overtures of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected”
(p.77)
Following the British withdrawal, the wars against the indigenous nations would continue for the next 100 years. The US still recognised the indigenous nations as sovereign and as the 19th century progressed treaties were routinely made and broken with them.
Owners of large slave worked plantations were able to expand into the new territories increasing their wealth and influence, and later industrialists would exploit natural resources to make them wealthy and the US a great power. The Land Ordinance acts of the 1780s set a condition on a settled territory joining the US as a new state. This required the number of settlers in the territory to exceed the number of indigenous people, encouraging the forced removal and murder of those who resisted (p.124).
Far from the “natural westward movement” portrayed by the popular US historical narrative (p.118-130), we read that the route to the west was forged through war with Mexico. The new republic of Mexico had given refuge to thousands fleeing forced removal to “Indian Territories”, but it had also opened the door to settlers from the US. When in 1829 Mexico abolished slavery, the settlers who had brought their slaves with them sought annexation by the US. War in the 1840s resulted in the annexation of Northern Mexico where states such as Texas, Arizona, Colorado and California are today.
The 1860’s saw the civil war between the Union and the Confederate States being fought alongside the ongoing wars with the indigenous nations, the Comanches, Apache, Navajo. After its conclusion the intensity of the brutality by the US towards the indigenous nations increased as it expanded west of the Mississippi.
The Foundation of US Imperialism
The account of how the Sioux Nation was colonised between 1805 and 1890 (p.186-191) sets out a familiar process. This started with treaties of peace and friendship, followed by economic penetration, sphere of influence, protectorate status, military occupation and annexation that would become the hallmark of US imperial power around the globe.…
“On the front page of one newspaper, editors placed two photographs side by side, each a pile of blood, mutilated bodies in a ditch. One was taken from My Lai in 1968, the other from the Wounded Knee army massacre of the Lakota in 1890. Had they not been captioned, it would have been impossible to tell the difference in time and place.”
(p. 192)
Then as now settler colonialism is about dehumanising the indigenous, theft of land and resources, driving people from their land, destroying their culture and way of life. In short settler colonialism is genocide. The author quotes Jodi Byrd
“The story of the new world is horror, the story of America is a crime”
(p.228)
Roxanne Dunbar-Oritz has shared the details of that story, but no matter, it seems, what the evidence is, the media will continue to ignore inconvenient truths and leaders will continue to deny them as President Obama did in an interview a few days after his inauguration in 2009 when he declared that ….
“America was not born as a colonial power”
(p.116)
It is now no longer a surprise that the US Presidential election in 2024 will be contested between an incumbent complicit in a plausible genocide and a former president who has just published their own version of the Bible that incorporates the US Constitution.
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, published by Beacon Press, 2014 (new edition 2022). Part 3 of the ReVisioning History series. Details here.
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