NOTES ON INDIGENOUS HISTORY
PART 3
Compiled by Collectivist Action
“Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men, we didn’t have any kind of prison. Because of this, we had no delinquents.Without a prison, there can be no delinquents. We had no locks nor keys and therefore among us there were no thieves. When someone was so poor that he couldn’t afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift. We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property. We didn’t know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth.
We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians,
therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another.
We were really in bad shape before the white men arrived and I don’t know how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society.
John (Fire) Lame Deer, Sioux Lakota
“ . . . For most U.S. historians, the United States' invasion and colonization of the Spanish territories of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and thePhilippines in the late 1890s (also U.S. interventions in those peoples’ independence movements to throw off Spanish colonialism) mark the era of United States Imperialism, hich they portray as a period, not a persistent reality from the nation’s founding and continuing into the 21st century. . .U.S. historians employ passive terms such as ‘manifest destiny’, ‘westward movement’, or ‘expansion’ in conceptualizing the invasion, conquest and colonization of Indigenous nations across the continent, as well as the invasion and occupation of the Republic of Mexico, as natural; not colonialism, not imperialism. But they know better. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner, the author of the ‘frontier thesis’ of U.S.democracy, observed in 1897: “Our colonial System did not begin with the Spanish war; the United States had a colonial history and policy from the beginning of the Republic.”
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Not a Nation of Immigrants, pg. 84
“Exploring the origins of United States colonialism, historian Howard Lamar traced its roots to the Northwest Ordinance enacted by the Continental Congress in 1787 and reenacted by the United States Congress in 1789; which specified successive stages of colonial development, from an imposed territorial government to a semi-epresentational government to, finally admission to the Union as a state.
Ibid., pg. 84
“In 1803, the Jefferson administration, without consulting any affected Indigenous nation, ‘purchased' the Louisiana Territory from France. The 828, 000 square miles doubled the size of the United States.The territory encompassed all or part of multiple Indigenous nations, including the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Pawnee, Ponca, Osage, Arikara,and Comanche, among others. It also included the area that would soon be designated ‘Indian Territory’ (Oklahoma), the site of forced relocation of Indigenous peoples from east of the Mississippi.
15 states would be carved out of the Louisiana Territory during the following decades: all of present day Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota (west of the Mississippi), most of North and South Dakota, northeastern New Mexico and north Texas, the portions of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado (east of the continental divide); Louisiana (west of the Mississippi River, Including the city of New Orleans.”
Ibid., pg. 85
“The United States was the first nation to be founded on the idea (only recently developed at the time) that private property could be equated with personal liberty. . . The U.S. system - based on property rights - proved incompatible with the traditional political, economic and social systems of Indigenous nations. The treaties would determine which relationship with the natural world would serve as an organizing principle in a specific location on the continent.
In the rhetoric of the American myth, land cession treaties are often presented as real estate transactions, exchanges between landowners. The idea of land ownership is so deeply seated in American society that at times it can be difficult to imagine land as anything other than real estate. But rather than being property sales, the treaties were in effect moments when the natural world became private property of the United States.”
Martin Case, The Relentless Business of Treaties, pg. 7
““From the mid-fifteenth century most of the NON-European world was colonized under the Doctrine of Discovery, one of the first principles of international law promulgated by Christian European monarchies to legitimize investigating, mapping and claiming lands belonging to people outside of Europe. It originated in a papal bull issued in 1455 that permitted the Portuguese monarchy to seize West Africa for enslaving those who lived there. . . Disputes between the Portuguese and Spanish monarchies led to the papal-initiated Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which, besides dividing thee globe equally between the two Iberian empires, clarified that only non-Christian lands fell under the discovery doctrine..”
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded, A Disarming History of the 2nd Amendment, pg. 37
Charlie Hill at One Nation: "We've been fighting terrorism since 1492."
(To be continued. . .)
