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“The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism—the founding ofa state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft. Those who seek history with an upbeat
ending, a history of redemption and reconciliation, may look around and observe that such a conclusion is not visible, not even in utopian dreams of a better society.Writing US history from an Indigenous peoples’ perspective requires rethinking the consensual national narrative. That narrative is wrong or deficient, not in its facts, dates, or details but rather in its essence. Inherent in the myth we’ve been taught is an embrace of settler colonialism and genocide. The myth persists, not for a lack of free speech or
poverty of information but rather for an absence of motivation to ask questions that challenge the core of the scripted narrative of the origin story. How might know the reality of US history work to transform society? That is the central question this book pursues.Teaching Native American studies, I always begin with a simple exercise. I ask students to quickly draw a rough outline of the United States at the time it gained independence from Britain. Invariably most draw the approximate present shape of the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific—the continental territory not fully
appropriated until a century after independence. What became independent in 1783 were the thirteen British colonies hugging the Atlantic shore. When called on this, students are embarrassed because they know better. I assure them that they are not alone.
I call this a Rorschach test of unconscious “manifest destiny,” embedded in the minds of nearly everyone in the United States and around the world. This test reflects the seeming the inevitability of US extent and power, its destiny, with an implication that the continent
had previously been terra nullius, a land without people.”“...the extension of the United States from sea to shining sea was the
intention and design of the country’s founders. “Free” land was the magnet that attracted European settlers. Many were slave owners who desired limitless land for lucrative cash crops. After the war for independence but preceding the writing of the US Constitution, the
Continental Congress produced the Northwest Ordinance. This was the first law of the incipient republic, revealing the motive for those desiring independence. It was the blueprint for gobbling up the British-protected Indian Territory (“Ohio Country”) on the other side of the Appalachians and Alleghenies. Britain had made the settlement there illegal with the Proclamation of 1763. In 1801, President Jefferson aptly described the new settler-state’s intentions for horizontal and vertical continental expansion, stating: ‘However our present interests may restrain us within our own limits, it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid
multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar form by similar laws.’ This vision of manifest destiny found to form a few years later in the Monroe Doctrine, signaling the intention of annexing or dominating former Spanish colonial territories in the Americas and the Pacific, which would be put into practice during the rest of the century. Origin narratives form the vital core of a people’s unifying identity and of the values that guide them. In the United States, the founding and development of the Anglo-American settler-state involve a narrative about Puritan settlers who had a covenant with God to take the land.That part of the origin story is supported and reinforced by the Columbus myth and the ‘Doctrine of Discovery.’ According to a series of late-fifteenth-century papal bulls, European
nations acquired title to the lands they ‘discovered and the Indigenous inhabitants lost their natural right to that land after Europeans arrived and claimed it.’