Warfare in indigenous cultural traditions characteristically was short and seasonal but cruel and vicious. Indians attacked by surprise, carried out excruciating tortures, took scalps and otherwise mutilated the corpses of the dead. Profoundly gendered, Indian violence was a young warrior’s masculine path to glory. Contact with the enemy and taking scalps provided evidence of courage and accomplishment in battle, thereby enhancing the warrior’s status in society. Success on the battlefield was a prerequisite for would-be chieftains. With virtually every male needing to prove his worth on the battlefield, indigenous cultures were violent, warlike, and underscored “the brutal side of Indian life.”8
The killing of some captives and the taking of others characterized the Indian way of war. Indians took into their societies captives—both Indian and European—to replace those who had been lost to war or disease (thus to “cover the dead”). Especially as their populations became ravaged by diseases to which they lacked immunities, many North American Indian tribes employed war and captive-taking to rebuild their numbers. At other times, however, Indians took captives, mainly women and children, to exploit them for sex, labor, trade, and as tools of diplomacy. Captives could be traded for goods or other captives and thus often played an important role in diplomacy and peacekeeping.
Indians routinely carried out torture as a means of displaying power while testing the victim’s courage. Some indigenes used mutilation to underscore their dominance or to achieve a more practical purpose, for example cutting off thumbs to prevent a captive from untying his or her bonds. The captive’s ability to endure torture with equanimity, even if mockingly so, showed that while you might maim or kill the victim, his or her spirit would not be taken in the process.9
Without ennobling indigenous violence and militarism, it is important to point out the cultural context in which these elements functioned. Indigenous people operated on the basis of reciprocal relationships with the natural, human, and spiritual worlds. Just as they would kill animals or exploit nature to eat and to live, indigenous culture allowed for violence against other people. Indigenes viewed war as a natural activity to promote manhood and keep the community strong and secure. Indian culture demanded “blood revenge” for attacks against family or community. Once revenge had been taken, the conflict could end. Violence in such cases was reciprocal and proportionate rather than indiscriminate and total. Pre-contact Indians typically did not engage in genocidal campaigns against their rivals. Indigenous people placed limitations on warfare, which paradoxically could also establish a foundation for peaceful relations once both sides’ cultural drives have been satisfied. As gift giving was a critical aspect of indigenous diplomacy, the exchange of captives could serve to mitigate conflict.
While Europeans did not introduce violence and militarism, already well ensconced within Indian cultures, colonialism did profoundly intensify indigenous violence. Colonial violence functioned in the context of the demands of a globalizing market economy. While Indians took captives, the arrival of European colonialism precipitated a “frenzy of slaving,” the marketing of captives for weapons, ammunition, and other goods.10 Competition among Indians for access to weapons, to gain a foothold in the global marketplace, or merely to avoid becoming slaves themselves, dramatically accelerated the pace and scale of colonial violence.
The forces unleashed by colonialism undermined the Mississippian chieftain system and sharply increased the levels of violence. Political uncertainty, disease, slavery, and the introduction of market forces shattered equilibrium and introduced powerful and destructive new forces. As David Dye points out, “It was Western contact that was responsible as an agent of change in native warfare patterns.”11
New Spain, New France, New Worlds
The arrival of the Europeans brought revolutionary changes that ultimately overwhelmed indigenous ways of life. Sailing for Spain in 1492 and believing he had discovered a maritime route to India, Christopher Columbus dubbed the people he encountered in the Caribbean los Indios. The name stuck, and remains preferred by many Indian peoples to this day. Many of the names that Europeans subsequently applied to North American Indian tribes—Creeks, Sioux, and Navaho for example—were also contrived yet they too endure. Most North American indigenous groups identified themselves simply as “the people” or “the true people.”
“Indians” have never existed as a single coherent entity rather Europeans invented the homogenizing trope. This invention of “Indians” created the colonial binary of savagery and civilization from the moment of contact. Once the category of “Indians” was created, distinguishing features had to be elaborated. The process of articulating difference creates “the other” through narratives and discourses that persistently reaffirm the fundamental colonial binary.12
Despite the polarizing discourse, ambivalence manifested from the beginning, as Indians and Europeans cooperated, accommodated, and adapted within the colonial encounter. Indigenous groups and Europeans engaged in trade and diplomacy and marriage and friendship and all manners of cultural exchange, as well as violent conflict. Whether or not they respected or empathized with indigenous people, the vast majority of Europeans viewed their way of life as superior to that of “savages” and this conceit ultimately drove the colonial encounter. The devastating impact of European-borne diseases, which killed as much as 90 percent of the indigenous population, reinforced the European fantasy that they were a superior people with divine sanction to assume possession of colonial space. The precise impact of the European-borne pathogens remains uncertain, but it is clear that disease combined with warfare, Indian slavery, and sweeping economic and cultural changes transformed indigenous life in North America in previously unimaginable ways.
With Columbus at the helm “New Spain” took the lead in European colonization of the “New World.” The Treaty of Tordesillas finalized in 1494 gave Spain the bulk of colonization rights in the Americas; with God and the Pope behind the effort the Spanish believed that no one had the right to oppose them. Following the conquest of the Aztecs and the Incas, Spain established outposts in the Caribbean and worked its way up to “La Florida.” In 1513 Juan Ponce de Leon had named the colony noting the beauty of the flora as he traversed the coastline. The Spanish explorer made landfall and conducted trade with the Calusa tribe, but eight years later he would die in conflict with Indians. After a series of colonization efforts failed because of lack of food and persistent conflict with the indigenes, Spain in 1565 established a single enduring colonial outpost in La Florida at St. Augustine.13
Spain imported intolerance and militancy, conditioned by centuries of conflict with “infidels” on the Iberian Peninsula. As they had already demonstrated in South and Central America and the Caribbean, the Spanish sanctioned “savage violence against people who were considered ‘heathens.’ ” No one better displayed this uncompromising Christian militancy than Hernando de Soto, a seasoned conquistador, who embarked from Tampa on a four-year long scorched earth campaign across the southeast. Accompanied by a 600-men army, 200 horses, pigs, and war dogs, Soto employed the Spanish technological advantages of guns and armor to terrorize, rape, plunder, and kill thousands of indigenous people in a futile search for gold.
“The kind of all-consuming violence that Soto imported was unknown to the chieftains that inhabited the region,” Jennings notes. In 1540 at the Battle of Mabila in central Alabama, Soto’s army suffered 22 casualties and some 150 were injured, but killed hundreds and perhaps thousands in the army of the chieftain Tuscalusa. Soto died in 1542 and his entrada ended the next year but by that time European diseases were spreading rapidly across the continent. Soto’s invasion destroyed several chieftainships—on occasion with the help of ambivalent rival Indian allies—as the Spanish invasion undermined indigenous politics and diplomacy.14
In contrast to settler colonialism, which would drive the eventual success of English colonization, Spain pursued more of an enclave strategy founded upon the two main institutions of
colonization: the mission and the presidio. While the English would remove Indians to establish colonies along the Atlantic seaboard, Spanish colonialism sprawled much more widely and emphasized cultivation of a docile labor force. “Spanish settlement of America was based on the domination of peoples” more than the displacement of them, J. H. Elliott observes.15 Moreover, beginning with Bartolomé de Las Casas, Catholic reformers condemned the Spanish brutalities against indigenous people of the Americas and sought to shift the emphasis toward saving souls through the establishment of missions.16
The Spanish never succeeded in resolving the contradiction between benevolent salvation on the one hand and forced labor as well violence and sexual assaults on indigenous people on the other. Missions spread from the Florida coast in the late sixteenth century across to New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California, where the last mission was built in the Sonoma Valley, north of San Francisco, in 1823. Some were more successful than others in securing conversions and cultivation of agriculture and cattle herds but in general the Spanish never succeeded in maintaining their authority very far beyond the walls of the mission and the presidio.
Spain’s broad geographic stretch, the absence of a large and secure population of settlers, combined with corruption, inefficiency, and a mounting indigenous resistance, continued to undermine the colonial project over a longue dureé.Tobe sure, thousands of indigenes labored for the Spanish, converted to Catholicism, and became wives and mistresses, but far more stayed away, resisted, or turned to the missions only when they were cold or hungry. The Spanish baptized those Indians who came in or were rounded up but most of the indigenes merely went through the motions of conversion in order to access the mission benefits. The Spanish whipped, mutilated, and sometimes killed the “deviating neophytes” and “apostates and fugitives” who fled the missions. The Spanish violence only produced a broader resistance, spurring raids on the Spanish outposts. At the same time, however, many Indians stayed long enough to learn Spanish and to reconfigure their identities by joining with Hispanics and other indigenes in and around the missions. “This process of reinvention ended any hope that Spain possessed of controlling the borderlands,” Gary C. Anderson argues.17
The Franciscans kept coming despite their lack of success, expanding the mission system backed to varying degrees by the army even though the two were not always in accord. The friars condemned the soldiers for their sexual relations with indigenous women, set up sometimes by consent and sometimes by force. For their part the priests exploited indigenous laborers, who were required to work from sunrise to sunset, sometimes on a starvation diet, and often punished them severely for noncompliance. As resistance to colonial oppression is inevitable, the indigenes revolted, most famously in the Pueblo uprising of 1680. This violent uprising against Spanish colonialism took the lives of some 400 Spaniards including 21 priests and drove them out of Santa Fe. Other revolts occurred early in the next century along the Rio Grande and at San Diego in 1775.18
More debilitating than the revolts, however, were the persistent indigenous raids. Increasingly, skilled equestrian tribes descended on Spanish rancheros in hit-and-run raids targeting horses, cattle, and human captives. Spanish missions converted and made farmers of many sedentary Indians but failed utterly to subdue the raiding cultures known as the Apache and Comanche. These indigenes “raided Spanish farms and ranches, destroyed Spanish property, took Spanish lives, and blocked the arteries of commerce that kept the empire alive,” David J. Weber points out. Beginning in 1700 Bourbon reformers sought to pursue a more humane and paternal approach to the indigenes than their Hapsburg predecessors had applied but the effort waned as Indian violence boomeranged on the Spanish. While some continued to emphasize reform and salvation, other traumatized Spaniards called for extermination of the Indios barbaros. Conflict alternated with accommodation, peace could turn quickly to war, and both sometimes appeared to exist simultaneously.19
Despite the obstacles Spain persisted with its overstretched colonial empire, especially as other European powers posed a threat to it. Following the landing on the Texas coast in 1684 of the French under Robert Cavelier de La Salle, the Spanish established missions and presidios in Texas along the Rio Grande and further north at San Antonio. In sharp contrast to Soto, La Salle’s interactions with indigenous groups as he explored the southeast were “exceptionally fruitful and non-exploitative by colonial standards.” “New France” had originated to the north in 1534 with Jacques Cartier’s advance up the St. Lawrence River and accelerated 70 years later with Samuel de Champlain’s founding of Quebec City and reconnoitering of the lake that bears his name.20
The French practiced cultural accommodation with the indigenes rather than forcing conversions or attempting to drive them from the land, hence the relationship was less violent than Spain’s and far less violent than English settler colonialism. “The French tended to learn [indigenous] languages, to adopt to some degree their ways of living, traveling, hunting, and fighting, and to rely heavily on them for their economic and military success,” Cornelius Jaenen points out.21 “The willingness of the French to adopt and adapt to indigenous culture conveyed respect and thus served to reassure the indigenes and to limit violent conflict.” As the French established Catholic missions, forts, and the profitable fur trade, they strove to carve out a “middle ground” of convergence and reciprocal relations in keeping with indigenous cultural traditions.
French Jesuit missionaries and traders ventured into Indian villages, establishing reciprocal relations and tapping into the lucrative fur trade. An exchange economy emerged as the French supplied indigenous people with European trade goods in return for beaver pelts with which Europeans made and sold felt hats. The fur trade was partly responsible for the outbreak of the “Beaver Wars” in which the group of tribes led by the Mohawk and known collectively as the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) launched merciless assaults on the Huron and other rival bands. Armed and equipped by Dutch and English traders to the east, the Iroquois drove out the Huron and virtually wiped out the Mahicans. The Iroquois, however, could not subdue the French, who reciprocated violent assaults and “burned Iroquois villages in the late seventeenth century.”22
The Iroquois went to war for cultural reasons as well as to protect their stake in the fur trade. The confederation conducted “mourning wars” with the primary purpose of seizing captives to replenish the confederation for the devastating losses of more than 90 percent of its population to diseases such as measles and smallpox. “A major goal of Iroquois warfare and diplomacy through both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was to replenish the populations of Iroquois communities with war captives and refugees,” Thomas S. Abler notes.23 Moreover, in keeping with indigenous traditions, “Young men went to war as a rite of passage to prove themselves as warriors and to gain a reputation among their peers,” Timothy Shannon points out. In order to take captives while keeping their own losses to a minimum, the Iroquois engaged in surprise attack. Europeans derisively labeled these hit-and-run assaults the “skulking way of war,” but they soon adopted the same tactic, which would become integral to the American way of war.24
The Iroquois facilitated English settler colonialism through a mutually beneficial alliance that endured until the American Revolution. In addition to having a powerful indigenous ally, the English also had the advantage of having the Atlantic Ocean at their back. Like the Spanish and the French, the English embraced patriarchy, private property, and Christianity, but the emphasis on the settlement of families and communities distinguished them. The Spanish were spread thin across vast reaches of the continent. Surrounded by indigenous people on the interior, the French traders and missionaries had to find ways to coexist. Overwhelmingly male, the French often took Indian wives and mistresses thus establishing enduring kinship ties with the indigenes. By contrast European women migrated along with men and children to settle in the English colonies. In sum, unlike its two major European rivals, family-based British colo
nialism proved mobile and resilient over a longue dureé, enabling “a steady westward migration towards the agricultural frontier as the threat of Indian attack diminished.”25
Settler colonialism thus was primarily a British project, with practices distinct from those of France and Spain. British mobility and institutions—the family, private property, Protestantism, and legal structures—anchored settlement in North America as well as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. English settlers displayed ambivalence and accommodation within the colonial encounter, but “as the balance of numbers tilted in favor of the colonists, the tendency simply to encroach on Indian land became harder to resist.” Ultimately, “The removal of indigenous people allowed for the wholesale introduction of British institutions.”26
The Emergence of the English Settler Colonies
Settler colonialism was not the initial intent of English colonization, which instead was driven by the profit motive. Europeans had long been traversing the Atlantic coast and fishing off the Newfoundland banks by the time of the establishment of Jamestown in 1607. Thus English colonists up and down the coast encountered a few Indians who knew a bit of their language. The Spanish had briefly established a Jesuit mission in Virginia but the friars were driven out.27 The English had already suffered the “lost colony” at Roanoke Island in 1584 and very nearly met the same end in Virginia. Permanent settlement seemed a virtually hopeless idea in the early years of the seventeenth century, as death and psychic anxiety stalked efforts to establish a viable colony. Under pressure from their sponsors to find gold and other riches, the desperate colonials could not even find food. For years they died by the scores from disease, starvation, and Indian conflict.28
American Settler Colonialism: A History Page 6