NOTES ON INDIGENOUS HISTORY
Part 2
Compiled By Collectivist Action
“. . .The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.”
Karl Marx
“. . .in the process of the preceding British colonization and continuing with U.S. colonization of the Muskogee Nation and other southeastern Indigenous Nations, an Indigenous client class - called ‘compradors’ by Africans - essential to colonialist projects, was firmly in place. This privileged class was dependent on their colonial masters for their personal wealth. This class division wracked the traditional relatively egalitarian and democratic Indigenous societies Internally. This small elite in the Southeast embraced the enslavement of Africans, and a few even became affluent planters. . .
The trading posts established by U.S. merchants further divided Muskogee society, pulling many deeply into the U.S. economy through dependency and debt, and away from the Spanish and British trading firms, which had previously left their lands undisturbed. This method of colonization by co-optation and debt proved effective wherever employed by colonial powers in the world, but only when it was accompanied by extreme violence at any sign of Indigenous Insurgency. The United States moved across North America in this manner.”
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, pg. 91
“U.S. leaders brought counterinsurgency out of the pre-independence into the new republic, im-printing on the fledgling federal army a way of war with formidable consequences for the continent and the world. Counterinsurgent warfare and ethnic cleansing targeting Indigenous civilians continued to define U.S. warmaking throughout the 19th century, with markers such as the 3 U.S. counterinsurgent wars against the Seminoles through the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, to Wounded Knee in 1890. Early on, regular armies had incorporated these strategies and tactics as a way of war to which it often turned, although frequently the regular army simply stood by while local militias and settlers acting on their own used terror against Indigenous non- combatants.”
Ibid, pgs. 93-94
“President Andrew Jackson was more brutal in dealing with Native Americans than his pre-decessors had been. Madison and Monroe distrusted Jackson. Jefferson disliked him intensely, saying he was much alarmed at the idea of Jackson becoming president : “He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place. He has had very little respect for laws and constitutions. . .His passions are terrible. . .He is a dangerous man. . .”
"Yet all three of them came to depend on Jackson. Madison wanted the British out of the Mississippi valley, for which he started the War of 1812.General Jackson won it. James Monroe wanted Spanish Florida. Jackson gave it to him; his murderous 1818 raid into Pensacola convinced Spain to cede the territory to Washington.
As to Jefferson he believed that the ‘final consolidation’ of American liberty wouldn’t be achieved until "the surface of the continent was occupied by white, English-speaking people”, with “neither blot nor mixture on that surface.” But three obstacles stood in the way to this vision of a continent scoured white: Native Americans, African and African Americans (both enslaved and free), and the multihued citizens of Mexico, which after winning its independence from Spain in 1821, claimed territory as far north as modern-day Utah, blocking access to the Pacific. .
Jackson sensed the tension in the founders, of wanting it all but not wanting to do all it took to have it all. Thomas Jefferson, in particular, came to embody for Jackson a failure of will. Jefferson swung wildly, for instance, between issuing instructions for how to use predatory loans to break up Indigenous culture, fantasizing genocide - “to pursue them to extermination” - and dreaming that sex would solve the problem of difference. He once told a delegation of Delaware and Mohegan Indians that “we shall all be Americans. You will mix with us by marriage. Your blood will run in our veins.” Jefferson knew that if the federal government wanted to establish new states it would have to extinguish Indigenous title in western Georgia at some point in the future.” Jackson was the future.”
Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth, pgs. 54-55
“Indian removal opened the floodgates, allowing, as one legal theorist would describe the Age of Jackson, “an irresistible tide of Cacasian democracy” to wash over the land.” King Cotton extended its domination through the South, creating unparalleled wealth, along with unparalleled forms of racial domination over both enslaved and free blacks. At the same time, Native Americans were driven west, and the white settlers and planters who got their land experienced something equally unprecedented: an extraordinary degree of power and popular sovereignty. Never before in history could so many white men consider themselves so free. Jacksonian settlers moved across the frontier, continuing to win a greater liberty by putting down people of color, and then continuing to define their liberty in opposition to people of color. . .”
Ibid., pg., 67
“Most of the Texas republic’s Anglo settlers were from the Deep South, including Tennessee, and many shared Andrew Jackson’s profile: they were land speculators, slavers, militia leaders and Indian killers. Taking Texas, {President }Adams feared, would lock in the world view that Jackson represented. The country was already fighting what Adams considered a perpetual war on Native Americans, a crusade that Jacksonians used to create a racist solidarity among whites and to beat back demands for a more robust state capable of addressing social problems. Violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples also made possible the alliance between the worst, most retrograde elements of the country.”
Ibid., pg. 85
(To be continued)
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AIM occupation of Wounded Knee begins | February 27, 1973 | HISTORY
On the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, some 200 members of the Oglala Lakota tribe, led by members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), occupy Wounded Knee, the site of the infamous 1890 massacre of 300 Sioux by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry. The AIM members, some of them armed, took 11 residents of the historic Oglala Sioux settlement hostage as local authorities and federal agents descended on the reservation.
AIM was founded in 1968 by Russell Means, Dennis Banks, and other Native leaders as a militant political and civil rights organization. From November 1969 to June 1971, AIM members occupied Alcatraz Island off San Francisco, saying they had the right to it under a treaty provision granting them unused federal land. In November 1972, AIM members briefly occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., to protest programs controlling reservation development. Then, in early 1973, AIM prepared for its dramatic occupation of Wounded Knee. In addition to its historical significance, Wounded Knee was one of the poorest communities in the United States and shared with the other Pine Ridge settlements some of the country’s lowest rates of life expectancy.
The day after the Wounded Knee occupation began, AIM members traded gunfire with the federal marshals surrounding the settlement and fired on automobiles and low-flying planes that dared come within rifle range. Russell Means began negotiations for the release of the hostages, demanding that the U.S. Senate launch an investigation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and all Sioux reservations in South Dakota, and that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hold hearings on the scores of Indian treaties broken by the U.S. government.
The Wounded Knee occupation lasted for a total of 71 days, during which time two Sioux men were shot to death by federal agents and several more were wounded. On May 8, the AIM leaders and their supporters surrendered after officials promised to investigate their complaints. Russell Means and Dennis Banks were arrested, but on September 16, 1973, the charges against them were dismissed by a federal judge because of the U.S. government’s unlawful handling of witnesses and evidence.
Violence continued on the Pine Ridge Reservation throughout the rest of the 1970s, with several more AIM members and supporters losing their lives in confrontations with the U.S. government. In 1975, two FBI agents and a Native man were killed in a shoot-out between federal agents and AIM members and local residents. In the trial that followed, AIM member Leonard Peltier was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to two consecutive life terms. With many of its leaders in prison, AIM disbanded in 1978. Local AIM groups continued to function, however, and in 1981 one group occupied part of the Black Hills in South Dakota.
Congress took no steps to honor broken Indian treaties, but in the courts some tribes won major settlements from federal and state governments in cases involving tribal land claims. Russell Means continued to advocate for Native rights at Pine Ridge and elsewhere and in 1988 was a presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party. In 2001, Means attempted to run for the governorship of New Mexico, but his candidacy was disallowed because procedure had not been followed. Beginning in 1992, Means appeared in several films, including Last of the Mohicans. He also had a guest spot on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. His autobiography, Where White Men Fear to Tread, was published in 1997. Means died on October 12, 2012, at age 72.
Leonard Peltier remains in prison, although efforts to win him pardon continue. (NB note, Leonard Peltier was released from prison recently by President Biden).
