Decompiling Oppression #101
Sam McVeety
More and more, we are seeing the unraveling of America's founding myths, forcing us to acknowledge uncomfortable (but also liberatory) truths that have been hiding in plain sight all along. This Native American Heritage Day, I would turn our attention to the history of Native Nations in (what is now known as) North America, and the settler colonial origins of the United States. While I can't hope to cover all of its nuance here, I want to offer a window into different tellings of history, and the profound lessons they offer for us today.
Our main guidepost today will be The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, by David Treuer (Ojibwe), which has much to say not only about history itself, but the telling of it as well. In putting together this entry, I found this to be an especially difficult topic to explore: because of the complexities of how this history is told, and by whom. Across more than 500 federally recognized tribes (and many more that are unrecognized, including the Duwamish) and non-Native historians, there is no single authoritative voice to find, and even some prominent scholars in this field bring their own challenges (for example, Pekka Hämäläinen's Indigenous Continent contains a wealth of scholarship, and invites several critiques; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's Indigenous Peoples' History is a another major text in the field, and the author's claimed tribal affiliation is disputed).
Perhaps more confidently, we can begin with what this history is not. Earlier accounts of the colonial era often began with an ideological narrative, centering the doctrine of discovery and the idea of manifest destiny. Roughly: the land was here not only for the taking, but there was a moral imperative to claim this land, expel, exterminate, or "civilize" its inhabitants, and establish a nation that reached from one ocean to another. While some of this ideology has fallen into disfavor, it is by no means extinct, given the frequent positioning of the United States on the world stage and the resurgence of Christian Nationalism.
Some of this ideological narrative was supplanted by a purportedly rationalist narrative, epitomized by Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. It goes something like this: Native people were here before colonists, but superior technology and epidemics decimated their numbers and left them a feeble shell of whatever former power they might have had. Thus, manifest destiny was still inevitable, but not because of religion or ideology, but because of simple facts of geography and population trends. It simultaneously erases Native (and colonial) agency from the picture, creating a palatable history that can be digested as unavoidable, however regrettable it might appear.
Both of these perpetuate the myth of the "vanishing Indian" (mentioned previously), where Native lives and voices steadily and inevitably are seen to disappear (whether violently or passively) into the footnotes of history. It is here that we return to The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, where the title itself is a rejection of this narrative. Speaking directly against the assertion that the Wounded Knee massacre represented the end of Native vitality on the continent, Treuer declares instead that Native Nations are still here, and he employs a combination of personal narrative and historical survey to make his case.
In reclaiming the past, he details the dynamic nature of Native Nations across the past several centuries (and before). Rather than a steady decline of a monolithic "Indian" people:
Even during the French and British conquest of the Great Lakes, and disease notwithstanding, the population of Algonquian tribes such as the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi boomed, quadrupling between 1600 and 1800. The land base of the northern Algonquians expanded by a factor of twenty.
Indeed, many Native Nations thrived in the economic and political context of competing imperial powers, skillfully playing England, France, Spain, and the Netherlands off of each other to establish favorable trade relations. In military conflicts, rather than "choosing the winning side" (framed as colonial wards) Native Nations would often determine the winning side.
Increasingly, though, Native Nations had to contend with horrific violence from colonial powers. Rather than engage in open military conflict, the United States and others often committed to a strategy of total war, destroying food sources and other means of survival. Individual groups of settlers (with the backing of the United States military) would harass and massacre entire villages, irrespective of any treaties or negotiations between Native and colonial governments. None other than George Washington (no stranger to violence against Native Nations) would note that "the bulk of the frontier inhabitants consider the killing of Indians in time of peace, to be no crime and that their murderers are faultless." Thus, Treuer concludes:
America did not conquer the West through superior technology, nor did it demonstrate the advantages of democracy. America “won” the West by blood, brutality, and terror.
These are challenging truths to simultaneously hold: that Native Nations thrived for centuries in the presence of colonial powers, and were not displaced by the fatalistic sweep of history. That the decline in power of these Nations was not from disease or failure according to the "rules of war", but because the United States was willing "to eliminate whole civilizations of people in order to possess their land," repeatedly violating even its own constructions of domestic and international law to do so. That, despite the deployment of these genocidal means, these Nations have endured and evolved, as they have since time immemorial.
Here are this week's invitations:
Personal: When have you had to navigate multiple tellings of interrelated stories? How did you approach it?
Communal: How can we hold space for the feelings of guilt and shame that can accompany these topics, and move past those emotions to action?
Solidarity: Support Native Land Digital and their work to create and foster conversations about the history of colonialism, Indigenous ways of knowing, and settler-Indigenous relations, through educational resources such as their map at https://native-land.ca/ and Territory Acknowledgement Guide.
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