An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

  The continuity between invading and occupying sovereign Indigenous nations in order to achieve continental control in North America and employing the same tactics overseas to achieve global control is key to understanding the future of the United States in the world. The military provided that continuity. As a colonel in the 1870s, Nelson Miles had been in charge of pursuing every last Sioux and herding them onto reservations guarded by troops or recently trained Indian police. The reservations were not safe havens for the incarcerated. Struck By the Ree told of multiple horrors of daily life on the Yankton Sioux Reservation, which was not out of the ordinary:

  Another time when General Sully came up he passed through the middle of our field, turned all his cattle and stock into our corn and destroyed the whole of it.… The soldiers set fire to the prairie and burnt up four of our lodges and all there was in them.… The soldiers are very drunken and come to our place—they have arms and guns; they run after our women and fire into our houses and lodges; one soldier came along and wanted one of our young men to drink, but he would not, and turned to go away, and the soldier shot at him. Before the soldiers came along we had good health; but once the soldiers come along they go to my squaws and want to sleep with them, and the squaws being hungry will sleep with them in order to get something to eat, and will get a bad disease, and then the squaws turn to their husbands and give them the bad disease.5

  As related in chapter 8, Miles had also led the army’s pursuit of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce as they sought to escape to Canada, and in 1886 Miles took charge of the War Department’s efforts to capture Geronimo, commanding five thousand soldiers, a third of the army’s combat force, along with five hundred Apache scouts forced into service and thousands of volunteer settler militiamen. In 1898, now general in chief of the army, Miles personally commanded the army forces that seized Puerto Rico. Miles’s second in command, General Wesley E. Merritt, was assigned to head the military invasion of the Philippines. He had served under Custer, fighting Sioux and Cheyenne resistance. Commanding the army occupation of the Philippines was General Henry W. Lawton, to whom Geronimo had turned himself in, making Lawton an instant hero for “capturing” Geronimo. Lawton had led troops in Cuba before going to the Philippines. Ironically, Filipino insurgents under the leadership of a man named Geronimo killed Lawton in an attack. What these US officers had learned in counterinsurgency warfare in North America they applied against the Filipinos. Younger officers would apply lessons learned in the Philippines to future imperial ventures, or in at least one case, pass them to a son. General Arthur MacArthur, father of World War II general Douglas MacArthur, chased Filipino guerrilla leader Emilio Aguinaldo, finally capturing him.6

  By this time, Theodore Roosevelt was president. His corporate-friendly militarism, particularly his rapid development of the navy and his carefully staged performance as leader of the Rough Riders militia in Cuba, brought him to the presidency. He was popular with both settlers and big business. Roosevelt referred to Aguinaldo as a “renegade Pawnee” and observed that Filipinos did not have the right to govern their country just because they happened to occupy it. Two hundred thousand US soldiers fought in the Philippines, suffering seven thousand casualties (3.5 percent). Twenty percent of the Philippine population died, mostly civilians, as a result of the US Army’s scorched-earth strategy (food deprivation, targeting civilians for killing, and so on) and displacement.7 In 1904 Roosevelt pronounced what has come to be known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. It mandated that any nation engaged in “chronic wrong-doing”—that is, did anything to threaten perceived US economic or political interests—would be disciplined militarily by the United States, which was to serve as an “international police power.”8

  As the US economy rapidly industrialized, the army also intervened frequently on the side of big business in domestic conflicts between corporations and workers. Troops were used for this purpose in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877—the first nationwide work stoppage—begun by railroad workers protesting wage cuts. Begun in West Virginia, the strike soon spread along rail lines from ocean to ocean and from north to south. General Philip Sheridan and his troops were called in from the Great Plains, where they had been campaigning against the Sioux, to halt the strike in Chicago.

  Industrialization affected farming as machinery replaced farmers’ hands and cash crops came to prevail. Large operators moved in and banks foreclosed on small farmers, leaving them landless. Farmers’ movements, most of them socialist-leaning and anti-imperialist, opposed military conscription and US entry into World War I—the “rich man’s war,” as they called it. Tens of thousands protested and carried out acts of civil disobedience. In August 1917, white, Black, and Muskogee tenant farmers and sharecroppers in several eastern and southern Oklahoma counties took up arms to stop conscription, with a larger stated goal of overthrowing the US government to establish a socialist commonwealth. These more radically minded grassroots socialists had organized their own Working Class Union (WCU), with Anglo-American, African American, and Indigenous Muskogee farmers forming a kind of rainbow alliance. Their plan was to march to Washington, DC, motivating millions of working people to arm themselves and to join them along the way. After a day of dynamiting oil pipelines and bridges in southeastern Oklahoma, the men and their families created a liberated zone where they ate, sang hymns, and rested. By the following day, heavily armed posses supported by police and militias stopped the revolt, which became known as the Green Corn Rebellion. Those who didn’t get away were arrested and received prison sentences. The rebellion is today considered as the waning voice of the people pushed off the land, but it also reflects the crisis induced by the forced allotment of Indigenous territories and the reality of a multiethnic resistance movement, a rare occurrence in US colonialist history.9

  At the same time, landless Indigenous farmers were launching a revolution in Mexico. Before President Wilson put General John J. Pershing at the head of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe in 1917, the president had sent him to lead troops, mainly buffalo soldiers, inside Mexico for nearly a year to stop the revolution in the north led by Francisco “Pancho” Villa. The military intervention did not go well. Even the Mexican federal troops fighting Villa resented the presence of US soldiers. About the only notable success for the US military expedition was the killing of Villa’s second-in-command by a young lieutenant named George Patton.10

  MARKETS KILL

  The extension of US military power into the Pacific and Caribbean was not militarism for its own sake. Rather, it was all about securing markets and natural resources, developing imperialist power to protect and extend corporate wealth. Indigenous peoples in the United States were severely affected by US industrialization and the development of corporations. In a study of corporations in Indian Territory, historian H. Craig Miner defines the corporation as “an organization legally authorized by charter to act as a single individual, characterized by the issuance of stock and the limitation of liability of its stockholders to the amount of their respective investment … an artificial person that could not be held accountable in a manner familiar to the American Indian way of thinking. Individual responsibility could be masked in corporate personality … a legal abstraction.”11

  The burgeoning of the corporation brought about a new era of attacks on Indigenous governments, lands, and resources. After the military power and resistance of Indigenous nations and communities were stifled by the growing US military machine following the Civil War, compliance on the part of Indigenous leaders became necessary for survival. Miner argues that “industrial civilization” diminishes the relevance of persons or communities in its way and also notes that industrial civilization is not exactly the same as “industrialization,” that it is something quite different and more pervasive. Industrial civilization justified exploitation and destruction of whole societies and expansion without regard for the sovereignty of peoples; it promoted individualism, competition, and selfishness
as righteous character traits.12 The means by which the US government assured corporate freedom to intrude in Indigenous territories was federal trusteeship, the very instrument that was mandated to protect them.

  Beginning at the end of the Civil War, government funds from Indigenous land sales or royalties were not distributed to reservation citizens or held by their governments; rather they were held in trust and managed in Washington. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, without Indigenous peoples’ consent, invested Indigenous funds in railroad companies and various municipal and state bonds. For instance, the Cherokee national fund and the Muskogee Creek Orphan Fund were so invested. Indigenous leaders were well aware of these practices but were powerless to stop them. They certainly did protest, as evidenced by a petition filed by the Chickasaw Nation: “The Indians did not lend this money; the United States lent it, to increase the value of its multiple states.… But now the attempt is made to force the Indian to contribute his pittance to the growth of all this prosperity and power; and this, too, when the United States, triumphant over the perils that once surrounded it, is more than ever able to be liberal, although nothing more is asked of it than to be just.”13

  Cherokee official Lewis Downing, writing in 1869 that rules would have to be agreed on and adhered to, noted the differences between Indigenous values and those of American businessmen, “in that industry, habit, and energy of character which is the result of the development of the idea of accumulation.” Free development without restraint of consensual policy would not do, Downing declared: “To us, it appears that once cut loose from our treaty moorings, we will roll and tumble upon the tempestuous ocean of American politics and congressional legislation, and shipwreck [will] be our inevitable destination.”14

  Entering the 1920s, Indigenous peoples were at their lowest point—both in population and possibility for survival after decades of violent military operations during and following the Civil War, along with federal theft of Indigenous treaty-guaranteed funds and then two decades of allotment of Indigenous lands. Then the US government imposed unsolicited citizenship on American Indians with the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, gesturing toward assimilation and dissolving the nations. It was a boom time for the national economy, but life threatening for Native Americans everywhere. Robert Spott of the Yurok Nation in Northern California, also an army veteran of World War I, described his community’s situation, which could have been applied to every Native community. Speaking before the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco in 1926, he said:

  There are many Indian women that are almost blind, and they only have one meal a day, because there is no one to look after them. Most of these people used to live on fish, which they cannot get, and on acorns, and they are starving. They hardly have any clothing to cover them. Many children up along the Klamath River have passed away with disease. Most of them from tuberculosis. There is no road into there where the Indians are. The only road they have got is the Klamath River.

  To reach doctors they have to take their children down the Klamath River to the mouth of the Klamath. It is 24 miles to Crescent City, where we have to go for doctors. It costs us $25.00. Where are the poor Indians to get this money from to get a doctor for their children? They go from place to place to borrow money. If they cannot get it, the poor child dies without aid. Inside of four or five years more there will be hardly any Indians left upon the Klamath River.

  I came here to notify you that something has to be done. We must have a doctor, and we must have a school to educate our children, and we must have a road upon the Klamath River besides the bank of the river.…

  My father was an Indian chief, and we used to own everything there. When the land was allotted they allotted him only ten acres, a little farm of land which is mostly gravel and rock, with little scrubby trees and redwood.…

  Often we see a car go past. It is the Indian Service. Do you suppose the man driving that car would stop? Always he has no time for the Indians, and the car with some one from the U.S.A. Indian Service goes past just like a tourist.15

  Natives joined African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Chinese immigrants as targets of individual racial discrimination between the end of Reconstruction in the South in the 1880s to the mid-twentieth century. Jim Crow segregation reigned in the South, where more than five thousand African Americans were lynched.16 As Black people fled terror and impoverishment in the South, their populations grew in northern and midwestern cities where they still faced discrimination and violence. Chicago, Tulsa, and dozens of other cities were marred by deadly “race riots” against African Americans.17 The virulent and organized racism of the 1920s spilled over to other peoples of darker hue. The pseudoscience of eugenics and racial purity was more robust in the United States than in Europe, further solidifying the ideology of white supremacy. For Indigenous peoples, this was manifest in development of US government policy measuring “blood quantum” in order to qualify for Indigenousness, replacing culture (especially language) and self-identification. While African Americans were classified as such by the measure of “one drop of blood,” Indigenous people were increasingly called to prove their degree of ancestry as a significant fraction.

  NEW DEAL TO TERMINATION

  Some relief for Indigenous nations came with the 1930s New Deal. The Roosevelt administration’s programs to combat economic collapse included an acknowledgment of Indigenous self-determination. Roosevelt appointed anthropologist and self-identified socialist John Collier as US commissioner of Indian affairs in 1933.18 As a young activist scholar in 1922, Collier had been hired by the General Federation of Women’s Clubs to assist the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico in their land-claims struggle, a project that culminated in success when Congress passed the 1924 Pueblo Lands Act. Having lived at Taos Pueblo, whose residents practiced traditional lifeways, Collier had developed respect for the communal social relations he observed in Indigenous communities and had confidence that these peoples could govern themselves successfully and even influence a move toward socialism in the United States. He understood and agreed with Indigenous opposition to assimilation as individuals into the general society—what the ongoing allotment in severalty of Native collective estates and the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 sought to institutionalize.

  As commissioner for Indian affairs, in consultation with Native communities, Collier drafted and successfully lobbied for passage of the Wheeler-Howard bill, which became the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934. One of its provisions was to end further allotment of Indigenous territories, which was immediately implemented, although already allotted land was not restored. Another provision committed the federal government to purchase available land contiguous to reservations in order to restore lands to relevant Native nations. The IRA’s main provision was more controversial with Indigenous peoples, calling for the formation of “tribal governments.” In a gesture toward self-determination, the IRA did not require any Indigenous nation to accept the law’s terms, and several, including the Navajo Nation, declined. The IRA was limited in that it did not apply to the relocated Native nations in Oklahoma; separate legislation was later drawn up for their unique circumstances.19

  The Navajo Nation, with the largest land base and population among Indigenous peoples in the United States, soundly rejected signing off on the IRA. The Great Depression of the 1930s was, in the words of postwar Navajo chairman Sam Ankeah, “the most devastating experience in [Navajo] history since the imprisonment at Fort Sumner from 1864–1868.”20 When Collier became commissioner in 1933, he pushed for reduction of Navajo sheep and goats as part of a larger New Deal conservation scheme to stem stock overgrazing. He badgered the twelve Navajo Council members into accepting the reduction, promising unlikely new jobs under the Civilian Conservation Corps to replace lost income. Collier suggested, without basis, that soil erosion in the Navajo Reservation was responsible for the silting up of the Boulder Dam site. His action likely was influenced by agribusinesses that wanted to get rid of all small producers i
n order to create an advantage to Anglo settler ranchers in New Mexico and Arizona.21 The process is still bitterly remembered by Navajos. With traumatized Navajos watching, government agents shot sheep and goats and left them to rot or cremated them after dousing them with gasoline. At one site alone, thirty-five goats were shot and left to rot. One hundred fifty thousand goats and fifty thousand sheep were killed in this manner. Oral history interviews tell of the pressure tactics on the Navajos, including arrests of those who resisted, and express bitterness over the destruction of their livestock. As Navajo Council member Howard Gorman said:

  All of these incidents broke a lot of hearts of the Navajo people and left them mourning for years. They didn’t like it that the sheep were killed; it was a total waste. That is what the people said. To many of them livestock was a necessity and meant survival. Some people consider livestock as sacred because it is life’s necessity. They think of livestock as their mother. The cruel way our stock was handled is something that should never have happened.22

  In addition to the trauma experienced by the Navajos, the effect of the reductions was to impoverish the owners of small herds.

  For those Native nations, the majority, that did accept the Indian Reorganization Act, a negative consequence was that English-speaking Native elites, often aligned with Christian denominations, signed on to the law and formed authoritarian governments that enriched a few families and undermined communal traditions and traditional forms of governance, a problem that persists. However, the IRA did end allotment and set a precedent for acknowledging Indigenous self-determination and recognizing collective and cultural rights, a legal reality that made it difficult for those who sought to undo the incipient empowerment of Indigenous peoples in the 1950s.