NOTES Notes on Indigenous American History ~~ compiled by collectivist action
https://youtu.be/PF__STmW6Tk?si=VXRxo67Nxy6zfxHe
(sorry about the weird formatting - I have worked over this as much as possible and hope that it doesn't detract too much from CA's fine work, NB)
NOTES ON INDIGENOUS AMERICAN HISTORY
Part 1
Compiled by Collectivist Action
“Our nation was born in genocide. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter
of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that
tragic experience into a noble crusade., Indeed, even today we have not permitted our-
selves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
“From the advent of Columbus to the end of the 19th century, it is possible that 5 million indigenous Americans were enslaved. This form of slavery coexisted roughly with enslavement of Africans, leading to a catastrophic decline in the population of indigenes. In the Caribbean basin, the Gulf Coast, northern Mexico and what is now the U.S. Southwest, the decline in population during the 16th and 17th centuries was nothing short of catastrophic. . .The majority of the enslaved were women and children, an obvious precursor, and trailblazer, for the sex trafficking of today.”
Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, pgs. 7-8
“Britain’s victory at the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 led to English domination
of World trade, sea power and colonial holdings for a century and a half. In the Treaty of
Paris(1763) France ceded Canada and all claims east of the Mississippi. In the course of the
war anglo settlers had gained strength in numbers and security in relation to Indigenous
people just outside the British-occupied colonies. Even there, significant numbers of settlers
had squatted on Indigenous lands beyond the colonies’ putative boundaries, reaching into
the OhioValley region. To the settlers’ dismay, soon after the Treaty of Paris was signed, King
George lll issued a proclamation that prohibited British settlement west of
the Allegheny-Appalachian Mountain barrier, ordering those who had settled there to
relinquish their claims and move back east of the line. However, British authorities did not
commit enough troops to the frontier to enforce the edict effectively. As a result, thousands of
more settlers poured over the mountains and squatted on Indigenous lands.
The French and Indian War would later be seen as the trigger for independence of the settler
population, in which the distinctly ‘American’ nation was born. This mythology was expressed
in the 1826 novel. The Last of the Mohicans: a Narrative of 1757, in which the author - land
speculator James Fenimore Cooper - created a usable settler-colonial history. Blockbuster
Hollywood adaptations of the book in 1932 and 1992 reinforced the mythology. But the 1940
film, based on the best-selling novel, Northwest Passage, which is considered a classic and
remains popular due to repeated television showings goes even further in portraying the blood-
thirsty mercenaries, Roger’s Rangers, as heroes for the annihilation of a village of Abenakis. “ Ibid., pg. 71
“The accurate recognition of U.S.-Indian treaties as agreements between sovereign nations
carries profound consequences. Along with the Constitution, international treaties - including
those with the indigenous nations - are the foundation of the U.S. legal system.. As article 6 of
the Constitution says, “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States shall be made in
Pursuance thereof, and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the
United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.”
Martin Case, The Relentless Business of Treaties, pg. 5
“Though the pioneer - the rugged individualist - is a central character in the American myth
corporate land speculators were the initial drivers of westward expansion of the United
States. From Day 1, prominent Americans were eager to make fortunes by acquiring
Indigenous land and selling it to pioneers. Even before the American Revolution ended
speculators held political and military positions from which they could take charge of land
policies, territorial governmental relationships with indigenous nations.”
Ibid. pg. 13
“After the 1783 Treaty of Paris with Great Britain, the United States claimed a territory that
stretched from the Atlantic Ocean all the way to the Mississippi River”
Ibid. pg. 13
”The American Revolution eliminated the detested British ban on acquiring indigenous land.
The need of the Founding Fathers to finance a federal government converged with their
desire to make money from land speculation. Their first target was land north of the Ohio
River. . . . Exactly two weeks after Great Britain finally ratified the Treaty of Paris, Congress passed
the Land Ordinance of 1784. Written by geometrically-minded Thomas Jefferson, the ordinance divided the vast territory of the Ohio River - 170 million acres.” Ibid. pg. 17 . .
Plight of the Indians
Tongva women in the San Fernando Valley, circa 1890.
“Los Angeles was incorporated as a U.S. city on April 4, 1850. Five months later, California was admitted into the Union. Although the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo required the U.S. to grant citizenship to the Indians of former Mexican territories, it did not happen for another 80 years. The Constitution of California deprived Indians of any protection under the law, considering them as non-persons. As a result, it was impossible to bring an Anglo to trial for killing an Indian or forcing Indians off their properties. Anglos concluded that the "quickest and best way to get rid of (their) troublesome presence was to kill them off, (and) this procedure was adopted as a standard for many years."[55](Wikipedia
“By th "By the early 1700s, terror against Indigenous people on the part of Anglo settlers increased in all the colonies, and speculation in Western land was rampant. In the southern colonies esp. farmers who had lost their land in competition with larger, more efficient, slave-worked plantations rushed for western land. These settler-farmers thus set, as Grenier writes, “a prefigurative pattern of U.S. annexation and colonization of Indigenous nations across the continent for the following century: a vanguard of farmer-settlers led by seasoned ‘Indian fighters’ calling on authorities/militias of the British colonies first and the U.S.government/army later, to defend their settlements, forming the core dynamic of ‘democracy’.
Ibid. pg. 71
“T The British withdraw from the fight to maintain their 13 colonies in 1763 in order to redirect
their resources to the conquest of South Asia. The British East India Company had been
operating in the subcontinent since 1600 in a project parallel to Britain’s colonization of the
North American Atlantic coast. Britain’s transfer to the United States if its claims to the Ohio Country spells a nightmarish disaster for all Indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi.
Britain’s withdrawal in 1783 did not end military actions against Indigenous peoples but rather was a prelude to unrestrained violent colonization of the continent. In negotiations to end the war Britain did not insist on consideration for the Indigenous nations that resisted the settler’s war of secession. In the resulting 1783 Treaty of Paris the Crown transferred to the United States ownership of all its territory south of the Great Lakes, from Mississippi to the Atlantic, and north of Spanish-occupied Florida.”
Ibid., pg 78
With the consolidation of the new State, the United States of America, by 1790, the opportunity for Indigenous nations to negotiate alliances with competing European empires against the despised settlers who intended to destroy them was greatly narrowed. Nevertheless, Indigenous nations had defied the founding of the independent United States in a manner that allowed for their survival and created a legacy - a culture of resistance - that has persisted. By the time of the birth of the U.S. republic, Indigenous people in what is now the continental United States had been resisting European colonization for two centuries. They had no choice given the aspirations of the colonizers : total elimination of Native nations.”
Ibid., pg. 79
“The collusion of business and government in the theft and exploitation of Indigenous land and resources is the core element of colonization and forms the basis of U.S. wealth and power. By the end of the 19th century Indigenous communities had little control over their resources or their economic situations, receiving only royalties for mining and leasing, funds held in trust in Washington.” Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, pg. 72
“The first patent granted in colonial America, in 1626, was to a Virginian merchant and planter, William Claiborne, for inventing a device that would not just restrain Indians but also make them work. Claiborne was given an Indian to experiment on. . .Colonial records do not say what this invention might have been, only noting that it wasn’t successful.” Greg Grandon, The End of a Myth, pg. 12
“With independence from Great Britain, the United States had inherited a tome of treaty of treaty obligations London had made to Indigenous communities. . .The new republic was a jigsaw of indigenous nations within a nation; some holding extensive forested hunting grounds. In the Old Northwest Territory, these nations included the Iroquois, Ojibwa, Ottawa, Potawatomi, and Winnebago. In southern Appalachia were the Cherokees, the Creeks in western Georgia and Tennessee, the Choctaws and Chickasaws in the western Mississippi Valley and the Seminoles in Florida, along with many other groups. All told nominal Indigenous sovereignty stretched west of the Alleghenies from a large region around the Great Lakes down to northwestern Ohio, most of Georgia, Alabama, Mssissippi, the western third of Tennessee and western Kentucky.”
Ibid, pgs. 48-49
Simple military conquest was only part of the process. The framing of the bloody wars to come cast the Indians as aggressive ‘savages’ with the Anglo settlers as victims. Seventy years later the U.S.army had jackbooted across the continent to the Pacific, incorporating 17 new states and ethnically cleansing the continent east of the Mississippi by forcibly removing Native peoples. Although the legal term ‘genocide’ did not exist until the mid 20th century, it was embedded in the conscious designs of the Constitution’s drafters.” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Not a Nation of Immigrants, pg.14
“ Conquest of the continent, including the military conquest of Mexico, which ceded half of its territory to the U.S., was only the beginning of U.S. imperialism. Native nations were the first subjects of U.S.empire, but not the last.” Ibid, pg., 15
“The road map (literally, the maps) for the conquest of the continent was the Northwest Ordinance promulgated by the Continental Congress in 1787, which drew up plans and military strategies for seizing this vast region of dozens of Native nations whose citizens lived in villages surrounded by their self-subsistent food crops of maize, corn squash and pumpkins. During the previous two decades, George Washington, leading the Virginia colony militia had encroached into this territory through the Appalachians, mapping the land and selling plots to land-poor white farmers, who then illegally settled on the unceded lands. Although Britain claimed the territory in a 1763 proclamation, it barred settlement west of the 13 colonies. The drive of colonial settlers to expand over the mountain range to appropriate this territory was a primary motivation for independence from Britain.” Ibid., pg., 16
“In the case of the United States, settler colonialism was more than a colonial structure that developed and replicated itself over time in the 170 years of British colonization in North America preceding the founding of the United States. The founders were not an oppressed colonized people. They were British citizens being restrained by the monarch from expanding the 13 colonies to enrich themselves. They were imperialists who visualized the conquest of the continent and gaining access to the Pacific and China. Achieving that goal required land, wealth and settler participation. They devised a unique plan, manifested in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, which was created during the War of Independence by the U.S. Congress in 1789. Designed as what historian Howard Lamar called “an internal colonial system for the West,” its provisions were borrowed in part from the British system of settler colonialism in Ulster, Ireland, and the 13 North American colonies.” Ibid., pg.,16
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