An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (13 page)

In mid-1780, eighty Virginia separatist settler-rangers attacked the Shawnees in southern Ohio and spent a month destroying and looting their towns and fields. At the same time, the Cherokee Nation regained momentum in its resistance, raiding squatters' settlements within its territory. In retaliation, North Carolina sent five hundred mounted rangers to burn Cherokee towns, with orders to “chastise that nation and reduce them to obedience.” During the winter of 1780–81, the separatist seven-hundred-man Virginia militia wreaked destruction again in the Cherokee Nation. On Christmas Day, the militia commander wrote to Thomas Jefferson, then a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress, that a detachment had “surprised a party of Indians, [and taken] one scalp, and Seventeen Horses loaded with clothing and skins and House furnishings”—a clear sign that these were noncombatant refugees trying to flee. The commander also reported that his forces had thus far destroyed the principal Cherokee towns of Chote, Scittigo, Chilhowee Togue, Micliqua, Kai-a-tee, Sattoogo, Telico, Hiwassee, and Chistowee, along with several smaller villages.

All told, more than a thousand homes had been laid waste, and some fifty thousand bushels of corn and other provisions either burned or looted.
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At this point, the Virginia and North Carolina separatist authorities pooled their manpower and matériel and organized a force that effected a broad sweep of annihilation through the Cherokee towns, driving residents out into present-day middle Tennessee and northern Alabama, where they exterminated Indigenous families and burned down the towns in that area too.

Throughout the war between separatist settlers and the forces of
the monarchy, armed settlers waged total war against Indigenous people, largely realizing their objectives. The Cherokees were forced to accept tributary status, yet the attacks continued. It would take nearly a half century after US independence was won to forcibly remove the Cherokee Nation from the South, but the effort was unrelenting. For the settlers squatting on Indigenous lands across the 1763 Proclamation Line of King George III, the wars waged by settlers during the war of independence were a continuation of those their ancestors and other predecessors had waged since the early seventeenth century. Some historians portray the British as the organizers of Indigenous resistance during this period. The separatist colonial oligarchy that drew up the Declaration of Independence in 1776 certainly took that view. Yet, as Grenier points out, the Indigenous people were well aware that negotiating with a faraway empire would yield much better outcomes than would dealing with the government of extermination-minded settlers.
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On the western edge of the colony of New York, as in the southern colonies, settlers were invading and squatting on the territory of the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois) by the mid-1770s. As with the Cherokee Nation, the British and the separatists knew that the Haudenosaunee would be an important factor in their war, and, as with the Cherokee Nation, both parties sent representatives to the Haudenosaunee councils to appeal for their support. Each member nation of the confederacy had its own specific interests because each had had different experiences in the previous century and a half of British and French intrusion. Much of the French and Indian War had been fought in their territories, with Indigenous people doing most of the actual fighting on both sides. In 1775, the Mohawk Nation allied with the British against the separatist settlers. The Seneca Nation had early on considered the British to be an intractable enemy but with the separatist war looming was more afraid of the settlers, and so the Senecas followed the Mohawks' lead into a British alliance. The Cayuga, Tuscarora, and Onondaga Nations did not
choose sides. Only the Christianized Oneidas conceded support for the separatist settlers.

In response to the decisions by five of the Iroquois Nations, General George Washington wrote instructions to Major General John Sullivan to take peremptory action against the Haudenosaunee, “to lay waste all the settlements around … that the country may not be merely
overrun
but
destroyed
. . . . [Y]ou will not by any means, listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected. . . . Our future security will be in their inability to injure us … and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them.” Sullivan replied, “The Indians shall see that there is malice enough in our hearts to destroy everything that contributes to their support.”
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By 1779, the Continental Congress had decided to start with the Senecas. Three armies were mustered to scorch the earth across New York and converge at Tioga, the principal Seneca town, in what is now northern Pennsylvania. Their orders were to wipe out the Senecas and any other Indigenous nation that opposed their separatist project, burning and looting all the villages, destroying the food supply, and turning the inhabitants into homeless refugees. The separatist governments of the New York and Pennsylvania colonies offered rangers for the project, and, as an incentive for enlistment, the Pennsylvania assembly authorized a bounty on Seneca scalps, without regard to sex or age. This combination of Continental Army regulars, settler-rangers, and commercial scalp hunters ravaged most of Seneca territory.

With the Iroquois Confederacy disunited regarding the war, the Continental Army forces were practically unimpeded in their triumphal and deadly march. In another scenario typically resulting from European and Anglo-American colonialism and neocolonialism, civil war erupted within the Iroquois Confederacy itself, with Mohawks destroying Oneida villages. The Oneidas could no longer give their separatist allies intelligence. “By 1781,” Grenier observes, “after three seasons of the Indian war, New York's frontier had become a no-man's-land.”
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FIVE

Our nation was born in genocide.… We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode
.

—Martin Luther King Jr.

The British withdrew from the fight to maintain their thirteen colonies in 1783, in order to redirect their resources to the conquest of South Asia. The British East India Company had been operating in the subcontinent since 1600 in a project parallel to Britain's colonization of the North American Atlantic Coast. Britain's transfer to the United States of its claim to the Ohio Country spelled a nightmarish disaster for all Indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi. Britain's withdrawal in 1783 did not end military actions against Indigenous peoples but rather was a prelude to unrestrained violent colonization of the continent. In negotiations to end the war, Britain did not insist on consideration for the Indigenous nations that resisted the settlers' war of secession. In the resulting 1783 Treaty of Paris, the Crown transferred to the United States ownership of all its territory south of the Great Lakes, from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, and north of Spanish-occupied Florida. Muskogee Creek leader Alexander McGillivray expressed the general Indigenous view: “To find ourselves and country betrayed to our enemies and divided between the Spaniards and Americans is cruel and ungenerous.”
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Wars continued for another century, unrelentingly and without pause, and the march across the continent used the same strategy and tactics of scorched earth and annihilation with increasingly deadly firepower. Somehow, even “genocide” seems an inadequate description for what happened, yet rather than viewing it with horror, most Americans have conceived of it as their country's manifest destiny.

With the consolidation of the new state, the United States of America, by 1790, the opportunity for Indigenous nations to negotiate alliances with competing European empires against the despised settlers who intended to destroy them was greatly narrowed. Nevertheless, Indigenous nations had defied the founding of the independent United States in a manner that allowed for their survival and created a legacy—a culture of resistance—that has persisted. By the time of the birth of the US republic, Indigenous peoples in what is now the continental United States had been resisting European colonization for two centuries. They had no choice given the aspirations of the colonizers: total elimination of Native nations or survival. Precolonial Indigenous societies were dynamic social systems with adaptation built into them. Fighting for survival did not require cultural abandonment. On the contrary, the cultures used already existing strengths, such as diplomacy and mobility, to develop new mechanisms required to live in nearly constant crisis. There is always a hard core of resistance in that process, but the culture of resistance also includes accommodations to the colonizing social order, including absorbing Christianity into already existing religious practices, using the colonizer's language, and intermarrying with settlers and, more importantly, with other oppressed groups, such as escaped African slaves. Without the culture of resistance, surviving Indigenous peoples under US colonization would have been eliminated through individual assimilation.

A new element was added in the independent Anglo-American legal regime: treaty making. The US Constitution specifically refers to Indigenous nations only once, but significantly, in Article 1, Section 8: “[Congress shall have Power] to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”
In the federal system in which all powers not specifically reserved for the federal government go to the states, relations with Indigenous nations are unequivocally a federal matter.

Although not mentioned as such, Native peoples are implied in the Second Amendment. Male settlers had been required in the colonies to serve in militias during their lifetimes for the purpose of raiding and razing Indigenous communities, the southern colonies included, and later states' militias were used as “slave patrols.” The Second Amendment, ratified in 1791, enshrined these irregular forces into law: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The continuing significance of that “freedom” specified in the Bill of Rights reveals the settler-colonialist cultural roots of the United States that appear even in the present as a sacred right.
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US genocidal wars against Indigenous nations continued unabated in the 1790s and were woven into the very fabric of the new nation-state. The fears, aspirations, and greed of Anglo-American settlers on the borders of Indigenous territories perpetuated this warfare and influenced the formation of the US Army, much as the demands and actions of backcountry settlers had shaped the colonial militias in North America. Owners of large, slave-worked plantations sought to expand their landholdings while small farm owners who were unable to compete with the planters and were pushed off their land now desperately sought cheap land to support their families. The interests of both settler groups were in tension with those of state and military authorities who sought to build a new professional military based on Washington's army. Just as the US government and its army were taking form, a number of settlements on the peripheries of Indigenous nations threatened to secede, prompting the army to make rapid expansion into Indigenous territories a top priority. Brutal counterinsurgency warfare would be the key to the army's destruction of the Indigenous peoples' civilization in the Ohio Country and the rest of what was then called the Northwest over the first quarter-century of US independence.
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The first Washington administration was consumed by the crisis engendered by its inability to quickly conquer and colonize the Ohio Country over which it claimed sovereignty.
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During the Confederation period, before the US Constitution was written and ratified, the Indigenous nations in that region had access to a constant supply of British arms and had formed effective political and military alliances, the first of them forged by Mohawk leader Joseph Brant during the 1780s. Washington's administration determined that only war, not diplomacy, would break up the Indigenous alliances. Secretary of War Henry Knox told the army commander of Fort Washington (where Cincinnati is today) that “to extend a defensive and efficient protection to so extensive a frontier, against solitary, or small parties of enterprising savages, seems altogether impossible. No other remedy remains, but to extirpate, utterly, if possible, the said Banditti.”
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These orders could not be implemented with a conventional army engaged in regular warfare. Although federal officers commanded the army, the fighters were nearly all drawn from militias made up primarily of squatter settlers from Kentucky. They were unaccustomed to army discipline but fearless and willing to kill to get a piece of land to grab or some scalps for bounty.

The army found the Miami villages they planned to attack already deserted, so they set up a base in one of the villages and waited for a Miami assault. But the assault was not forthcoming. When the commander sent out small units to find the Miamis, these search-and-destroy missions were ambushed and sent fleeing by allied Miamis and Shawnees under the leadership of Little Turtle (Meshekinnoqquah) and Blue Jacket (Weyapiersenwah). The deserted towns had been bait to lure the invaders into ambushes. The commander reported to the War Department that his forces had burned three hundred buildings and destroyed twenty thousand bushels of corn. Those were likely facts, but his claim to have broken up the Indigenous political and military organization was not accurate. Knox apparently knew that more than food and property destruction would be needed to quell resistance. He ordered the commanders to recruit five hundred weathered Kentucky mounted rangers to burn and loot Miami towns and fields along the Wabash River. They were to capture women and children as hostages to use
as terms of surrender.