An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (30 page)

As it happened, the fifth anniversary of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam occurred at the time of the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee. It was difficult to miss the analogy between the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre and My Lai, 1968. Alongside the front-page news and photographs of the Wounded Knee siege that was taking place in real time were features with photos of the scene of mutilation and death at My Lai. Lieutenant William “Rusty” Calley was then serving his twenty-year sentence under house arrest in luxurious officers' quarters at Fort Benning, Georgia, near his hometown. Yet he remained a national hero who received hundreds of support letters weekly, who was lauded by some as a POW being held by the US military. One of Calley's most ardent defenders was Jimmy Carter, then governor of Georgia. Three years later, as president, Carter would pardon Calley. One of the documented acts, among many, that Calley committed and ordered others to carry out at My Lai took place when he saw a baby crawling from a ditch filled with mutilated, bloody bodies. He picked the baby up by a leg, threw the infant back into the pit, and then shot the baby point-blank. My Lai was one of thousands of such slaughters led by officers just like Calley, who a few weeks before My Lai had been observed throwing
a stooped old man down a well and firing his automatic rifle down the shaft.

The ongoing siege at Wounded Knee in 1973 elicited some rare journalistic probing into the 1890 army massacre. In 1970, university librarian Dee Brown had written the book
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
, which documented and told the 1890 Wounded Knee story, among many other such nineteenth-century anti-Indian crimes and tragedies. The book was a surprise best seller, so the name Wounded Knee resonated with a broad public by 1973. On the front page of one newspaper, editors placed two photographs side by side, each of a pile of bloody, mutilated bodies in a ditch. One was from My Lai in 1968, the other from the Wounded Knee army massacre of the Lakota in 1890. Had they not been captioned, it would have been impossible to tell the difference in time and place.

During the first US military invasion of Iraq, a gesture intended to obliterate the “Vietnam Syndrome,” on February 19, 1991, Brigadier General Richard Neal, briefing reporters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, stated that the US military wanted to ensure a speedy victory once it committed land forces to “Indian Country.” The following day, in a little-publicized statement of protest, the National Congress of American Indians pointed out that fifteen thousand Native Americans were serving as combat troops in the Persian Gulf. As we have seen, the term “Indian Country” is not merely an insensitive racial slur to indicate the enemy, tastelessly employed by accident. Neither Neal nor any other military authority apologized for the statement, and it continues to be used by the military and the media, usually in its shortened form, “In Country,” which originated in the Vietnam War. “Indian Country” and “In Country” are military terms of trade, like other euphemisms such as “collateral damage” (killing civilians) and “ordnance” (bombs) that appear in military training manuals and are used regularly. “Indian Country” and “In Country” mean “behind enemy lines.” Its current use should serve to remind us of the origins and development of the US military, as well as the nature of our political and social history: annihilation unto unconditional surrender.

When the redundant “ground war,” more appropriately tagged a “turkey shoot,” was launched, at the front of the miles of killing
machines were armored scouting vehicles of the Second Armored Calvary Regiment (ACR), a self-contained elite unit that won fame during World War II when it headed General Patton's Third Army crossing Europe. In the Gulf War, the Second ACR played the role of chief scouts for the US Seventh Corps. A retired ACR commander proudly told a television interviewer that the Second ACR had been formed in the 1830s to fight the Seminoles, and that it had its first great victory when it finally defeated those Indians in the Florida Everglades in 1836. The Second ACR in the vanguard of the ground assault on Iraq thus symbolized the continuity of US war victories and the source of the nation's militarism: the Iraq War was just another Indian war in the US military tradition. After weeks of high-tech bombing in Iraq followed by a caravan of armored tanks shooting everything that moved, the US Special Forces entered Iraqi officers' quarters in Kuwait City. There they found carrier pigeons in cages and notes in Arabic strewn over a desk, which they interpreted to mean that the Iraqi commanders were communicating with their troops, and even with Baghdad, using the carrier pigeons. High-tech soldiers had been fighting an army that communicated by carrier pigeon—as Shawnees and Muskogees had done two centuries earlier.

Twelve years after the Gulf War, a US military force of three hundred thousand invaded Iraq again. A little-read report from Associated Press correspondent Ellen Knickmeyer illustrates the symbolic power of Indian wars as a source of US military memory and practice. Once again we find the armored scouting vehicles and their troops retracing historical bloody footprints as they perform their “Seminole Indian war dance”:

Capt. Phillip Wolford's men leaped into the air and waved empty rifles in an impromptu desert war dance.…

With thousands of M1A1 Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, Humvees and trucks, the mechanized infantry unit known as the “Iron Fist” would be the only U.S. armored division in the fight, and would likely meet any Iraqi defenses head on.

“We will be entering Iraq as an army of liberation, not
domination,” said Wolford, of Marysville, Ohio, directing the men of his 4th Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment to take down the U.S. flags fluttering from their sand-colored tanks.

After a brief prayer, Wolford leaped into an impromptu desert war dance. Camouflaged soldiers joined him, jumping up and down in the sand, chanting and brandishing rifles carefully emptied of their rounds.
²⁴

In April 2007, all the news seemed to be coming from Virginia and was about murder—the murder of Indigenous farmers that commenced four hundred years before with the founding of Jamestown and the rampage at nearby Virginia Tech University on April 16, 2007. Yet no one commented in the media on the juxtaposition of these bookends of colonialism. Jamestown was famously the first permanent settlement that gave birth to the Commonwealth of Virginia, the colonial epicenter of what became the United States of America nearly two centuries later, the colony out of which was carved the US capital, Washington, on the river whose mouth lay up the coast. A few years after Jamestown was established, the more familiar and revered colony of Plymouth was planted by English religious dissidents, under the auspices of private investors with royal approval, as with Jamestown, and the same mercenary activities personified by Captain John Smith. This was the beginning of British overseas colonialism, after the conquest and colonization of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland turned England into Great Britain. The Virginia Tech killings were described in 2007 as the worst “mass killing,” the “worst massacre,” in US history. Descendants of massacred Indigenous ancestors took exception to that designation. It was curious with the media circus surrounding the Jamestown celebration, and with Queen Elizabeth and President Bush presiding, that journalists failed to compare the colonial massacres of Powhatans four centuries earlier and the single, disturbed individual's shootings of his classmates. The shooter himself was a child of colonial war, the US war in Korea.

Meditating on the five major US wars since World War II—in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (1991), Afghanistan, and Iraq (2003)—with flashes of historical memory of Jamestown, the Ohio Valley, and Wounded Knee, brings us to the essence of US history. A red thread of blood connects the first white settlement in North America with today and the future. As military historian John Grenier puts it:

U.S. people are taught that their military culture does not approve of or encourage targeting and killing civilians and know little or nothing about the nearly three centuries of warfare—before and after the founding of the U.S.—that reduced the Indigenous peoples of the continent to a few reservations by burning their towns and fields and killing civilians, driving the refugees out—step by step—across the continent.… [V]iolence directed systematically against noncombatants through irregular means, from the start, has been a central part of Americans' way of war.
²⁵

ELEVEN

The whip covers the fault
.

—D'Arcy McNickle,

The Surrounded Native liberty, natural reason, and survivance are concepts that originate in narratives, not in the mandates of monarchies, papacies, severe traditions, or federal policies
.

—Gerald Vizenor,
The White Earth Nation

In 1982, the government of Spain and the Holy See (the Vatican, which is a nonvoting state member of the United Nations) proposed to the UN General Assembly that the year 1992 be celebrated in the United Nations as an “encounter” between Europe and the peoples of the Americas, with Europeans bearing the gifts of civilization and Christianity to the Indigenous peoples. To the shock of the North Atlantic states that supported Spain's resolution (including the United States and Canada), the entire African delegation walked out of the meeting and returned with an impassioned statement condemning a proposal to celebrate colonialism in the United Nations, which was established for the purpose of ending colonialism.
¹

The “Doctrine of Discovery” had reared its head in the wrong place. The resolution was dead, but it was not the end of efforts by Spain, the Vatican, and others in the West to make the Quincentennial a cause for celebration.

Only five years before the debacle in the UN General Assembly, the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas conference at the UN's Geneva headquarters had proposed that 1992 be made the UN “year of mourning” for the onset of colonialism, African slavery, and
genocide against the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, and that October 12 be designated as the UN International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples. As the time drew near to the Quincentennial, Spain took the lead in fighting the Indigenous proposals. Spain and the Vatican also spent years and huge sums of money preparing for their own celebration of Columbus, enlisting the help of all of the countries of Latin America except Cuba, which refused (and paid for this in withdrawn Spanish financial investments). In the United States, the George H. W. Bush administration cooperated with the project and produced its own series of events. In the end, compromise won at the United Nations: Indigenous peoples garnered a Decade for the World's Indigenous Peoples, which officially began in 1994 but was inaugurated at UN headquarters in New York in December 1992. August 9, not October 12, was designated as the annual UN International Day for the World's Indigenous Peoples, and the Nobel Peace Prize went to Guatemalan Mayan leader Rigoberta Menchú, announced in Oslo on October 12, 1992, a decision that infuriated the Spanish government and the Vatican. The organized celebrations of Columbus flopped, thanks to multiple, highly visible protests by Indigenous peoples and their allies. Particularly, support grew for the work of Indigenous peoples at the United Nations to develop new international law standards.

According to the centuries-old Doctrine of Discovery, European nations acquired title to the lands they “discovered,” and Indigenous inhabitants lost their natural right to that land after Europeans had arrived and claimed it.
²
Under this legal cover for theft, Euro-American wars of conquest and settler colonialism devastated Indigenous nations and communities, ripping their territories away from them and transforming the land into private property, real estate. Most of that land ended up in the hands of land speculators and agribusiness operators, many of which, up to the mid-nineteenth century, were plantations worked by another form of private property, enslaved Africans. Arcane as it may seem, the doctrine remains the basis for federal laws still in effect that control Indigenous peoples' lives and destinies, even their histories by distorting them.

From the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, most of the non-European world was colonized under the Doctrine of Discovery, one of the first principles of international law Christian European monarchies promulgated to legitimize investigating, mapping, and claiming lands belonging to peoples outside Europe. It originated in a papal bull issued in 1455 that permitted the Portuguese monarchy to seize West Africa. Following Columbus's infamous exploratory voyage in 1492, sponsored by the king and queen of the infant Spanish state, another papal bull extended similar permission to Spain. Disputes between the Portuguese and Spanish monarchies led to the papal-initiated Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which, besides dividing the globe equally between the two Iberian empires, clarified that only non-Christian lands fell under the discovery doctrine.
³
This doctrine on which all European states relied thus originated with the arbitrary and unilateral establishment of the Iberian monarchies' exclusive rights under Christian canon law to colonize foreign peoples, and this right was later seized by other European monarchical colonizing projects. The French Republic used this legalistic instrument for its nineteenth- and twentieth-century settler colonialist projects, as did the newly independent United States when it continued the colonization of North America begun by the British.

In 1792, not long after the US founding, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson claimed that the Doctrine of Discovery developed by European states was international law applicable to the new US government as well. In 1823 the US Supreme Court issued its decision in
Johnson v. McIntosh
. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Marshall held that the Doctrine of Discovery had been an established principle of European law and of English law in effect in Britain's North American colonies and was also the law of the United States. The Court defined the exclusive property rights that a European country acquired by dint of discovery: “Discovery gave title to the government, by whose subjects, or by whose authority, it was made, against all other European governments, which title
might be consummated by possession.” Therefore, European and Euro-American “discoverers” had gained real-property rights in the lands of Indigenous peoples by merely planting a flag. Indigenous rights were, in the Court's words, “in no instance, entirely disregarded; but were necessarily, to a considerable extent, impaired.” The Court further held that Indigenous “rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished.” Indigenous people could continue to live on the land, but title resided with the discovering power, the United States. The decision concluded that Native nations were “domestic, dependent nations.”