A videomap of American aggression against indigenous people from 1776 on and renewed war in Iraq
Above is a map showing the stealing of indigenous territory by “Treaties” – never honored for long, the “big guns” of the time against some (today’s names: Apache helicopters, Tomahawk missiles), divide and rule, attack “hostiles” and soon afterwards, “friendlies”, move ever West even to Hawaii and the Philippines: Manifest Destiny. The currently forgotten phrase Manifest Destiny, that of American racism and ethnic cleansing, ought to be taught as a theme of American political science and history.
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In Colorado, for example, in 1864, the Sand Creek massacre drove out the Cheyennes and Arapahos, while Governor John Evans dealt “peacefully” (with a threat of superior force) with chief Ouray and the Utes; in 1879 under Governor Pitkin’s slogan “The Utes Must Go,” the Utes, too, were killed and dispossessed…
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If Native Americans are human as most of us now – belligerent racists of which there are still some, aside – recognize, what does that make the “Christians”?
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The Methodists today, particularly Bishop Elaine Stanovsky, have acknowledged this and made a new start. See here. But what I have called Founding Amnesia still possesses many people in Colorado and across the country.
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The video is brief, worth looking at several times to take in American rapacity “towards”/as “savages”…
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The aggressors came from across the sea and stole everything with their guns. Who were the “roamers,” the “raiders,” the “savages”? (h/t Tink Tinker, Billy Stratton, and Nancy Wadsworth)
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The Christian aggressors raided stable Indian communities, as at Sand Creek, butchering the inhabitants. Who were the “savages”?
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Murder including of women, children and the elderly was a hallmark of Christian conquest. Who were the “savages”?
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The doctrine of Christian discovery, launched by the Popes and foolishly embraced by Chief Justice Marshall in Johnson v. M’Intosh, is the pseudo-justification for American “savagery.” “I (at least the Federal Government) discover you, murder you and steal everything you have; I am made whole by Catholic and Protestant ‘blessing.'” (not to mention a Supreme “Court” of, in this case, lawlessness and aggression).
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This is what the democratic theorist John Rawls calls the original position. Just describe the acts of the settlers and the government without naming them, and then ask of the colonialist slurs against the “enemy,” who deserves the words. See here.
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The indigenous or Native American point of view toward the slaughters is not “just a perspective” among others, as Rawls’ intellectual device shows. It is also, morally speaking, the truth. The map’s evidence, chillingly, underlines this.
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The map is disturbing, unsettling.
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Descendants of settlers need to be unsettled…
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The Protestant Churches have now repudiated the “doctrine of discovery.” See Settler Aggression here.
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If the US goes fatally gunslinging in Iraq in a renewed hopeless aggression (chanted for in the Beltway and by the corporate press) – see here – the rapacity of American aggressions toward indigenous people, veiled by a now uneasy “Founding Amnesia,” is an important source.
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Robert Kagan, who demands ever more war, has gleefully “studied” American wars (in addition to being a vicious imperialist, he is also, as the New York Times‘ reporter dutifully and exclusively called him, “an historian”) and offers the thesis that America is always at war. Seehere. He is right about that. It is just that he is, morally speaking, entirely on the wrong side about ethnic cleansing and extends this, ever and again, to Iraq. See here.
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We live, noticeably in Colorado on the lands of others, Arapahos and Cheyennes in particular. That this needs to be recognized and steps taken to rectify, to some extent (nothing will bring back the people slaughtered, the environment destroyed) the injury and injustice is clear.
Alan Gilbert is the John Evans professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and author of Marx’s Politics:Communists and Citizens (Rutgers, 1980), Democratic Individuality (Cambridge, 1990), Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy (1999) and Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence (Chicago March, 2012).