NOTES ON INDIGENOUS AMERICAN HISTORY
Part 4
Compiled by Collectivist Action
"I don’t know how to save the world. I don’t have the answers or The Answer. I hold no secret knowledge as to how to fix the mistakes of generations past and present. I only know that without compassion and respect for all of Earth’s inhabitants, none of us will survive—nor will we deserve to.”
Leonard Peltier
Lakota/Dakota/Anishinaabe
“. . .The Cherokees, Muskogees, Seminoles, Choctaws and Chicasaws - the 5 ‘civilized’ tribes -were forcibly removed from their homelands during the Jackson administration, but in the Indian territory they rebuilt their townships, farms, ranches, and institutions, including newspapers, schools and orphanages. Although a tiny elite of each nation was wealthy and owned enslaved Africans and private estates, the majority of the people continued their collective agrarian practices.” . . .
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, pgs. 134-135
“Abraham Lincoln’s campaign for the presidency appealed to the vote of land-poor settlers who demanded that the government ‘open’ Indigenous lands west of the Mississippi River. They were called ‘free soilers’, in reference to cheap land, free of slavery. New gold rushes, and other incentives, brought new waves of settlers who squatted on Indigenous land. For this reason, some Indigenous people preferred a Confederate victory, which might divide and weaken the United States, which had grown ever more powerful. Indigenous nations in Indian territory were more directly affected by the Civil War than anywhere else.”
Ibid., pg. 135
“Savagery and civilization; upon this distinction the U.S. property system rests. Colonists brought with them from Europe an assumption of superiority. They found ample evidence to refute that assumption. For one telling, practical instance, many Europans who lived for extended periods among Indigenous people seemed to prefer that life. And in fact, the premise behind Indian removal, the factor that allowed Andrew Jackson to call ethnic cleansing a “benevolent policy,” was that U.S. society was so toxic to Indigenous people.”
Martin Case, The Relentless Business of Treaties, pg. 166
“The enduring debate of the treaty-making era, from a U.S. point of view, was the question of whether Indigenous people should be assimilated into U.S. society or removed from it. . .Common to both options was an unrelenting assault on Indigenous social structures and relationships to the natural world. At every opportunity the United States included clauses in treaties that ‘allotted’ reservation land to individuals in a conscious effort to destroy traditional Indigenous relationships to land. “In the details of these treaties,” Alexander Ramsey and Luke Lea, reported, after securing the cession of Dakota homeland. . . was our constant aim to do what we could to break up the community system among the Indians, and cause them to recognize the individuality of property. . .
The choice to destroy Indigenous culture was seldom questioned anywhere in the U.S. Even the missionaries who organized opposition to the Indian Removal Act intended Indigenous identity to disappear. In fact, John Marshall - in Johnson v. M’Intosh - made the issue unquestionable from a legal standpoint.”
Ibid., pg. 167
“According to the founding narratives of the United States, colonists from Europe acquired a vast expanse of land from a scattering of benighted peoples who lacked a concept of private property and therefore could claim no right, in any Western sense, to the land.The historical record is clear, however, that English colonizers aggressively displaced a large network of small and large nations, whose governments, commerce, arts and sciences, philosophies and institutions were intricately developed. These nations maintained sophisticated relations with one another and with the environments which supported them. They were stewards of one of the 7 locales of agricultural civilization, which they created over tens of thousands of years.
Many have noted that had North America been an unpopulated wilderness, underdeveloped without roads and uncultivated, it might still be so, for the European colonists could not have survived without forcibly appropriating the Indigenous peoples’ developed land and resources. They appropriated what had already been created by Indigenous civilizations. They stole already cultivated farmland and the vegetables, tobacco, cotton and other crops domesticated centuries before the arrival of European invaders who took control of the deer parks that had been cleared and maintained by Indigenous communities. They used existing land and water routes in order to move armies to conquer, and relied on captured Indigenous people to identify the locations of water, oyster beds and medicinal herbs.”
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded, A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, pgs. 110-111
