Nautica Western’s Reviews > An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States > Status Update

“‘Indian Country’ and ‘In Country’ mean ‘behind enemy lines.’ Its current use should serve to remind us of the origins and development of the US military, as well as the nature of our political and social history: annihilation into unconditional surrender.”

“One of [Lieutenant William “Rusty”] Calley’s biggest supporters was Jimmy Carter, then governor of Georgia. Three years later, as president, Carter would pardon Calley.”

The US government sympathizing with perpetrators of unfathomable evil? Nobody gasped

“As Vietnam veteran and author Michael Herr observed, we ‘might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along, the turnaround point where it would touch and come back to form a containing perimeter.’”

“Mexican migrant workers largely replaced the Asian agricultural workers displaced by the Japanese American internment, but in 1953 ‘Operation Wetback,’ as the federal program was called, forced the deportation of more than a million Mexican workers, in the process subjecting millions of US citizens of Mexican heritage to illegal search and arrest.”

Mom history is repeating itself come pick me up

“Roosevelt [..] observed that Filipinos did not have the right to govern their country just because they happened to occupy it. […] Roosevelt pronounced what has come to be known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. It mandated that any nation engaged in ‘chronic wrong-doing’ [..] would be disciplined militarily by the United States […] an ‘international police power.’”

“In the best-selling book Our Country (1885) the Reverend Josiah Strong of the American Home Missionary Society argues that the United States has inherited the mantle of Anglo-Saxonism and, as a superior race, had a divine responsibility to control the world.”

“The United States had its own motives for assigning Black troops to the West. Southerners and the eastern population did not want thousands of armed Black soldiers in their communities. There was also the fear that if they demobilized, the labor market would be flooded. For US authorities, it was a good way of getting rid of the Black soldiers and the Indians.”

“This reality strikes many as tragic, as if oppressed former slavers and Indigenous peoples being subjected to genocidal warfare should magically be unified against their common enemy, ‘the white man.’ In fact, this is precisely how colonialism in general and colonial warfare in particular work.”

See: poor whites & minority groups continuing to blame each other instead of uniting against upperclass

“So, when the white men wanted to build railroads, or when they wanted to farm or raise cattle, the buffalo still protected the Kiowas. They tore up the railroad tracks and the gardens. They chased the cattle off the ranges. The buffalo loved their people as much as the Kiowas loved them.”

“In an effort to create Indigenous economic dependency and compliance in land transfers, the US policy directed the army to destroy the basic economic base of the Plains Nations—the buffalo.”