It is my habit to read quietly before bed every night, and I vary between cheesy sci-fi and classic literature. Lately I’ve been re-reading (after a long interval) Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown, because I figured I’d better catch up on my anti-white American history before it gets banned by the Republicans.
It is not an uplifting story.
It is a story of continuous betrayal and horrific murder, and white Americans do not emerge as heroic or noble. The Indians are also not particularly heroic — they just want to live their lives, and sporadically explode in violent reprisals, and are also capable of horrific, monstrous acts. White America, though, has the numbers and the guns and the willingness to use them that leads to the carving up and seizure of Indian lands, and the confinement of tribal peoples to reservations. It turns out that Americans are not good or honorable people.
For example, here’s an excerpt, an account of the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864.
Robert Bent, who was riding unwillingly with Colonel Chivington, said that when they came in sight of the camp “I saw the American flag waving and heard Black Kettle tell the Indians to stand around the flag, and there they were huddled—men, women, and children. This was when we were within fifty yards of the Indians. I also saw a white flag raised. These flags were in so conspicuous a position that they must have been seen. When the troops fired, the Indians ran, some of the men into their lodges, probably to get their arms. … I think there were six hundred Indians in all. I think there were thirty-five braves and some old men, about sixty in all … the rest of the men were away from camp, hunting. … After the firing the warriors put the squaws and children together, and surrounded them to protect them. I saw five squaws under a bank for shelter. When the troops came up to them they ran out and showed their persons to let the soldiers know they were squaws and begged for mercy, but the soldiers shot them all. I saw one squaw lying on the bank whose leg had been broken by a shell; a soldier came up to her with a drawn saber; she raised her arm to protect herself, when he struck, breaking her arm; she rolled over and raised her other arm, when he struck, breaking it, and then left her without killing her. There seemed to be indiscriminate slaughter of men, women, and children. There were some thirty or forty squaws collected in a hole for protection; they sent out a little girl about six years old with a white flag on a stick; she had not proceeded but a few steps when she was shot and killed. All the squaws in that hole were afterwards killed, and four or five bucks outside. The squaws offered no resistance. Every one I saw dead was scalped. I saw one squaw cut open with an unborn child, as I thought, lying by her side. Captain Soule afterwards told me that such was the fact. I saw the body of White Antelope with the privates cut off, and I heard a soldier say he was going to make a tobacco pouch out of them. I saw one squaw whose privates had been cut out. … I saw a little girl about five years of age who had been hid in the sand; two soldiers discovered her, drew their pistols and shot her, and then pulled her out of the sand by the arm. I saw quite a number of infants in arms killed with their mothers.”
This Chivington SOB is a truly monstrous villain.
In a public speech made in Denver not long before this massacre [the Sand Creek massacre] Colonel Chivington advocated the killing and scalping of all Indians, even infants.
Nits make lice!”he declared.
The book was written in the context of the Vietnam War and it’s clear that we learned nothing in the intervening century. But I kept thinking, not of Vietnam, but of Israel. They learned well from us.
You are trying to occupy a land inhabited by indigenous people, who you outgun and confine? Ethics be damned, you can murder them at will, because your manifest destiny gives you that right, and any resistance is an excuse to slaughter. There are just too many parallels.
I would hope that we could learn from our past and have sense of humility and shame. I fear though, that we are going to outsource our history to PragerU and we’ll learn nothing.
This was obvious and known 150 years ago.
It explains a lot and needs repeating.
As an undergraduate, one day I was over at a friend’s house visiting and hanging out. The TV was on and we weren’t paying much attention to it. My friend was a Paiute off the reservation.
At one point, she noticed that the TV show was a cowboy and Indian western. She just said, “We learned that you can’t fight millions of technologically superior white people.”
Which sums it up.
Sound familiar?
It should.
Itamar Ben Gvir is an internet class troll.
He is also a high Israeli government official, Minister of National Security.
You could substitute “Indian” for Palestinian and it would read the same, as something from the 1800s in the USA.
I’ve been reading Clauio Saunt’s Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (2020), about the “removal” of the original occupants from everywhere east of the Mississippi River to the promised “Indian Canaan” in the west (highly recommended, for those prepared for almost 400 pages of national shame).
Among many other things, this book follows the money – how the “pioneers” of Wall Street profited from seizing lands from Ohio to Florida to Mississippi, and invested their gains in more grabs. The US government spent almost as much money in killing and exiling everyone from the Senecas to the Chickasaw to the Seminoles as the capitalists made from land sales and cotton plantations – Saunt doesn’t say how much of the loot went back to Washington by taxation, but we can look around and make some informed guesses.
It is my understanding the area is little changed. Those who escaped crossed the creek and headed to what I think would be NE into a great expanse of nothingness. I don’t know how they were able to escape. These killers came from a distance I think mostly at night and it was cold and nasty. They wanted to kill very badly. That was not enough and they took body parts and paraded them in downtown Denver. I think too Chivington’s group eventually morphed into the Colorado Highway Patrol. The Sand Creek site is a very sad place.
I recently watched The Convert, which was about the early interactions between the British and Māori in what would become New Zealand. Of course, it was filled with atrocities.
I don’t believe you can achieve a settler colonialist state without gratuitous bloodshed. Israel, undoubtedly, is a settler colonialist state so the actions it has taken thus far have been unsurprising, while still abhorrent, if viewed from that perspective.