1619 Vs. 1492

I read Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s (RDO) An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. For me it’s an eye-opener. I’m no instant expert; this is all off the top of my head. I read 1491 by Charles Mann a while ago, on pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas. I began Jodi Byrd’s “The Transit of Empire,” but it was too far over my head. I stopped after a couple of chapters. That’s it for me on this subject. I knew only bits of what follows.

By the way, they both use the word ‘Indian’ freely. Apparently, the insistence on ‘Native American’ as terminology is a white liberal thing. This is consistent with the experiences of an old friend of mine with whom I worked at the U.S. Treasury Department who dealt extensively with Indian tribes (sovereign, legal entities under U.S. law).

The biggest jolt comes early in RDO’s critique of multi-culturalism. Indians are not just another ethnic group. Nor are they tribes. They are the survivors of a collection of nations, each with its own culture, economy, and politics. Byrd speaks of “liberal multicultural settler colonialism.”

The “melting pot” of ethnic groups notion is offensive to survivors of conquered nations who have no desire to be assimilated by their conquerors. The U.S. is a colonialist settler-state whose Declaration of Independence refers to “merciless Indian savages.”

This also suggests a different way of looking at African-American descendants of slaves. They are Americans, but they came from nations from which, like the Indians, they were involuntarily denationalized. The wholesale elimination of a nation, its culture, and its people points to the definition of genocide. The key antinomy is race or ethnic group vs. nation. As Byrd says, “the erasure of the sovereign (nationhood — MBS) is the racialization of the Indian.”

Another interesting bit at the start is the possible parallel between the 1619 Project notion that the American Revolution was motivated by a desire to maintain slavery and the RDO suggestion that it was to evade British restrictions on the expropriation of Indian territory west of the Appalachian Mountains. I’m no historian, so I’m not staking out any positions here.

In the time of Columbus, RDO asserts there were twice as many Indians as there were Europeans – one hundred million. You can find estimates ranging from sixty to one hundred and twelve million. Indians had extensive road systems, pyramids, wide-ranging trade, and developed governments. Property was substantially communal.

I’m not totally persuaded. The view seems a bit to come through rose-colored glasses. Pyramids have been found in Mexico and points south, but none in the U.S., only mounds. But the multiculturalism critique – that Indians come from nations, not merely an ethnic enclave – is tenable.

Another flashpoint in the 1619 debates is the role of slavery-based cotton production in the national and world economy. Of course, without land expropriated from Indians, there is no commercial cotton cultivation. The focus on the economics of plantocracy is a gloss on the wholesale seizure of Indian land. In this respect, the dispossession of native Americans reveals the narrowness of the 1619 perspective.

RDO rejects the idea of reparations for Indians, suggesting (with economic justification, I would argue) that a price cannot be put on confiscated, ancestral land. The Sioux seem to agree, as they have turned down an offer of a billion dollars to relinquish their historic claims to the Black Hills territory (which includes Mount Rushmore).

The consistent process of the U.S. government making and abrogating treaties with Indian nations is well-known. I had never heard of its legal foundation in international law, cited in U.S. court cases, thanks to the Catholic Church and its “Doctrine of Discovery,” which ratifies the Spanish monarchy’s colonial seizure of land occupied by non-Christians.

The story of genocidal European pillage is persuasive but arguably race essentialist. There is no mention of parallel abuses by non-Europeans. The Christian destruction of the Moorish Empire is cited, but no notice is given to how the Muslims forged that empire, stretching from Turkey across North Africa to Spain. And what about the Chinese empires, or Genghis Kahn? Didn’t at least some Indian nations expand at the expense of others? There are political conflicts throughout Asia between indigenous populations and those who came from other places.

In no way do I mean to excuse the European depredations, but it seems to be business as usual throughout world history. The strong do what they like and take what they can. It’s not unique to white people.

A counter-narrative is that European colonialism was not preordained. Indian nations had demonstrated the feasibility of a different, communal form of society.  Invoking examples of cruelty within or among Indian civilizations is obnoxious and beside the point. The inescapable fact is the elimination of Indian populations in the Americas that thrived outside of world capitalism. Nothing outweighs that reality.

RDO’s framework is vulnerable to the same criticism leveled by Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels against race-essentialist African-American polemics typified by the writing of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah Jones. In both, the racial or settler abuse of non-whites is ahistorically rooted in primordial bigotry. They speak of “racial capitalism,” but if capitalism is racial, surely race and settler-colonialism are rooted in historical, capitalist development. Instead, both the 1619 and 1492 perspectives are founded on whiteness as the original fount of oppression.

A difference is that in the RDO depiction of Indian societies, although class does not figure, there is no capital or wage labor. Commercial motives drive genocidal policies, so by implication, capitalism and its precursors writ large are at the root of imperialism and slavery. RDO never quite says that. She and Byrd remain focused on whiteness.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the book is RDO’s use of historical events to thoroughly undermine what she calls the origin story of the U.S. There is a continual echo of the Zionist foundational myth: “a land without a people for a people without a land.” It explains how someone like Stephen Salaita could simultaneously produce scholarship on both subjects (Indians and Israel), and also how his academic career was blown up. Now he’s driving a school bus.

The process of incursion and seizure follows a familiar pattern. The colonial power deploys settlers to lands targeted for annexation. The settlers flout local laws and provoke violent attacks. Of course, the scope of the attacks is exaggerated, when not entirely invented. The colonial power sends in military forces, ostensibly to protect the settlers. The target of settlement cannot abide foreign troops, which undermines the entire legitimacy of its state. War ensues. Rinse and repeat, from Texas to Ukraine.

What we could call a cultural problem for the conventional U.S. patriotic mindset is that all the heroes of 18^th and 19^th Century U.S. history – the founders, Lincoln, Grant – are just as implicated in ethnic cleansing as they were in the revolution and the defeat of the Confederacy. Emancipated slaves – the celebrated “buffalo soldiers” – were used to hunt down and murder Indians. The celebrated democratic poet Walt Whitman, while exalting the virtues of Indians, looked forward to their disappearance. The good guys are thin on the ground.

It’s said that America was built on the back of slavery. But that construction depended on a prior, deliberate policy of genocidal, ethnic cleansing. Whether the roots are in class society or whiteness remains an unresolved debate in radical thought.