Invading Native America

Question for Discussion: How did an expanding Anglo-American society
justify the creation of what Thomas Jefferson called "an Empire of Liberty"?
Could American Indians be a part of this expanding American Empire?

Reading: Loewen, pp. 93-134; Chief Seattle's Speech of 1854;
Standing Bear, "What the Indian Means to America" ;
Theodore Roosevelt, " The Takeover of Indian Land"

Film: Western Stories DVD: The Movie West: the Myth
of the West Documentary (1999)

Maps of the Old West

American Indian Tribes, 1600 (in-class)

Native American Indian Tribes, 1783 (in-class)

European Possessions Bordering the U.S., 1783

U.S. Territorial Growth, 1775 (in-class)

U.S. Territorial Growth, 1810

U.S. Territorial Growth, 1820 (in-class)

U.S. Territorial Growth, 1830 (in-class)

Republic of Texas, 1836

U.S. Territorial Growth, 1840

U.S. Territorial Growth, 1850 (in-class)

U.S. Territorial Growth, 1870 (in-class)

U.S. Terriotorial Growth, 1920

Map of Indian Reservations (2000) (in-class)

The Right Has Avatar Wrong | David Boaz
What is the place of American Indians in American History and Society?
Steiner, The Invention of an America without Indians: America
as Anglo-American (in-class)
Lewis, What should be the place of Indians in America?
What is America? (in-class)
Takaki: How do we include the Indian Story in the American Story?
Standing Bear, "What the Indian Means to America"
The White Man does not Understand America: America is Indian (in-class)
For Colonial Americans, Indians were savages, obstacles in the
way of progress, wild beasts, un-Christian, primitive, and
ruthless devils, even children of Satan.
Theodore Roosevelt, " The Takeover of Indian Land
Apes on Anglo-American Treatment of Indians
Apes' Conclusion: What Whites must do Now (1836)
Jefferson's Empire of Liberty
David Reynolds, America, Empire of Liberty (2009)
McCormick, What would William Appleman Williams Say?
Indians and Maps of the Old West (in-class)
Gast's "American Progress" (1872) (in-class)
Explanatory Text used to market American Progress Lithograph (in-class)
Beck, The Myth of the Vanishing Race (in-class)
Turner's Frontier Vision of the West (in-class)
President Andrew Jackson on the place of Indians in America (1832)
(in-class)
Chief Seattle's Speech of 1854
Chief Joseph on how Anglo-Americans think about Indians (1872) (in-class)
Loewen, Writing Indians out of American History:
Cognitive Dissonance and the American Indian (in-class)
Turner's Frontier Thesis as White Cognitive
Dissonance: America is Anglo-American (in-class)
Ehcohawk, America as Indian: Indians are still part of
American Society & History (in-class)
Deloria, "The Indians were Invisible"
Wilkinson, The Future of American Society and Indians (in-class)
Native American Nations (in-class)
Foner, "The Idea of American Freedom"
Foner, "The Birth of American Freedom
How should we understand Anglo-American understanding of Freedom on the eve of the American Revolution?
Look at the ways American declare that their basic rights have been violated by the English in the "Declaration of Independence." Notice that Anglo-American rights are contrasted with the rights of Indians and Black Slaves.
With the growth of the English colonies 1607 to 1775, Anglo-American colonists had demanded increasing rights and freedoms.
But Colonial Americans do not include Indians, Black Slaves, and other groups in this expanding realm of rights and freedoom. In fact, Indians and Blacks will fight on the side of the British, assuming that the British
will grant them more rights and freedoms than the Colonial Americans.
Can you see the growing contradiction here. America wants
to believe it is a society defined on basic rights and freedoms,
but it at the same time will sharply limit who is entitled to
those rights and freedoms. This contradiction will fuel the
"struggle for freedom" that will take us up to 21st-century
American society.

Jefferson's Empire of Liberty

Thomas Jefferson used a version of this phrase several times:

"...we shall divert through our own Country a branch of commerce which the European States have thought worthy of the most important struggles and sacrifices, and in the event of peace on terms which have been contemplated by some powers we shall form to the American union a barrier against the dangerous extension of the British Province of Canada and add to the Empire of liberty an extensive and fertile Country thereby converting dangerous Enemies into valuable friends." - Jefferson to George Rogers Clark, 25 December 1780 [1]

"we should then have only to include the North in our confederacy, which would be of course in the first war, and we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation: & I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire & self government." - Jefferson to James Madison, 27 April 1809 [2]

David Reynolds, America, Empire of Liberty: A New History (2009)

"It was Thomas Jefferson who envisioned the United States as a great 'empire of liberty'. In the first new one-volume history of the United States in two decades, David Reynolds takes Jefferson's phrase as a key to the saga of America, helping unlock both its grandeur and its paradoxes. He examines how the anti-empire of 1776 became the greatest superpower the world has seen, and how the country that offered liberty and opportunity on a scale unmatched in Europe nevertheless founded its prosperity on the labour of black slaves and the dispossession of the Native Americans."

What Would William Appleman Williams Say Now?

(See Williams, "The Myth of Empty Continents (web))

By Thomas McCormick

"Williams's unique contribution was to give dissenters the opportunity to understand the Vietnam War not simply as a quagmire born of policy mistakes or of a moral blot on the nation's ledger, but as the logical consequence of empire. Indeed, he gave them a theory of American imperialism which argued that American elites, from George Washington to George Bush, could only envision a nation that was both prosperous and democratic if it had perpetual recourse to a growing empire. In the nineteenth century, that empire took the form of a frontier for settlers and capital (at the expense of Indian nations and the Mexican Republic). Following the closing of that continental frontier in the 1890s, America's expansion thereafter emphasized the overseas drive for an Open Door to the markets, raw materials and investment opportunities of the global economy. Informal economic dominance, less costly, was the preferred mode of that expansion, but colonies, protectorates, military bases or covert coups were acceptable when Third World resistance or Great Power rivalry seemed to require them."

Takaki: Stolen Lands: A World Turned Upside Down (44-48)

"Ever since the arrival of the English strangers in Jamestown in 1607 and and Plymouth Rock in 1620, the Indians' story had been one of
stolen lands, sickness, suffering, starvation, and sadness. After the War of Independence in 1776 and the founding of a new nation, the original people of the land ominously asked: What would the future hold for them with the advance of "civilization" against "savagery" westward across America to the Pacific." (45)

For Jefferson, Indians had to be civilized or exterminated. In a letter to John Adams, Jefferson pointed out that Indians who rejected assimilation would face a dismal future. "These will relapse into barbarism and misery, lose numbers by war and want, and we shall be obliged to drived them, with the beasts of the forests into the Stony
mountains." (47)

from William Apes' Eulogy

Apes on Anglo-American treatment of Indians

'You see, my red children, that our fathers carried on this scheme of getting your lands for our use, and we have now become rich and powerful ; and we have a right to do with you just as we please; we claim to be your fathers. And we think we shall do you a great favor, my dear sons and daughters, to drive you out, to get you away out of the reach of our civilized people, who are cheating you, for we have no law to reach them, we cannot protect you although you be our children. So it is no use, you need not cry, you must go, even if the lions devour you, for we promised the land you have to somebody else long ago, perhaps twenty or thirty years ; and we did it without your consent, it is true. But this has been the way our fathers first brought us up, and it is hard to depart from it ; therefore you shall have no protection from us. Now while we sum up this subject. Does it not appear that the cause of all wars from beginning to end, was and is -for the want of good usage ? That the whites have always been the aggressors, and the wars, cruelties and blood shed is a job of their own seeking, and not the Indians? Did you ever know of Indians hurting those who was kind to them? No. We have a thousand witnesses to the contrary. Yea, every male and female declare it to be the fact. We often hear of the wars breaking out upon the frontiers, and it is because the same spirit reigns there that reigned here in New England; and wherever there are any Indians, that spirit still reigns; and at present, there is no law to stop it. What, then, is to be done; let every friend of the Indians now seize the mantle of Liberty and throw it over those burning elements that has spread with such fearful rapidity, and at once extinguish them forever. It is true, that now and then a feeble voice has been raised in our favor. Yes, we might speak of distinguished men, but they fall so far short in the minority, that it is heard but at a small distance. We want trumpets that sound like thunder, and men to act as though they were going at war with those corrupt and degrading principles that robs one of all rights, merely because he is ignorant, and of a little different color. Let us have principles that will give every one his due ; and then shall wars cease, and the weary find rest. Give the Indian his rights, and you may be assured war will cease."

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Apes' Conclusion on what Whites must now do

"Having been deceived so much by them, how can I help it; being brought up to look upon white people as being enemies and not friends, and by the whites treated as such, who can wonder? Yes, in vain have I looked for the Christian to take me by the hand and bid me welcome to his cabin, as my fathers did them, before we were born; and if they did, it was only to satisfy curiosity, and not to look upon me as a man and a Christian. And so all of my people have been treated, whether Christians or not. I say then, a different course must be pursued, and different laws must be enacted, and all men must operate under one general law. And while you ask yourselves, what do they, the Indians, want? you have only to look at the unjust laws made for them, and say they want what I want, in order to make men of them, good and
wholesome citizens. And this plan ought to be pursued by all missionaries, or not pursued at all. That is not only to make Christians of us, but men; which plan as yet has never been pursued. And when it is, I will then throw my might upon the side of missions, and do what I can to favor it. But this work must begin here first, in New England. "

Deloria, The Indians were Invisible

"If the People were beasts, then they had neither a culture nor a history worth considering. Nor was it conceivable that the pioneers would learn anything of value from them. They literally did not exist."

"That was the paradox. In fighting the Americans, the Europeans became Americans. And it was the "beasts" who Americanized them--by "Indianizing" them.

"None of the white settlers knew the lay of the land. None of them knew its meanings. These were things they had to learn from the People, who had lived there for thousands of years. "

"All the land was the land of the People. The nature of the land gave to them their nature, as they gave their nature to the land. That was the history of the American West, retold as myths that were truth. It may be that the Europeans' intense feelings of guilt, which came with the taking of the land in the way it was taken, and the intense angers of the People at losing their lands, combined to distort this knowledge of what the land meant and corrupted the history of America. "

"By the beginning of the twentieth century, the People had all but vanished, historically and numerically, from the eyes of the whites. "We became invisible when we were no longer a threat," Vine Deloria, Jr., has said.

What Would William Appleman Williams Say Now?

(See Williams, "The Myth of Empty Continents (web))

By Thomas McCormick