An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (33 page)

Sexual abuse of both girls and boys was also rampant. One woman remembers: “We had many different teachers during those years; some got the girls pregnant and had to leave.… [One teacher] would put his arms around and fondle this girl, sometimes taking her on his lap.… When I got there, Mr. M put his arm around me and rubbed my arm all the way down. He rubbed his face against mine.” At one mission school, a priest was known for his sexual advances. “Anyway, I ended up beside him [the priest] … and all of a sudden he started to feel my legs.… I was getting really uncomfortable and he started trying to put his hands in my pants.”
²⁹
Nuns also participated in sexual abuse: “A nun was sponge bathing me and proceeded to go a little too far with her sponge bathing. So I pushed her hand away. She held my legs apart while she strapped the insides of my thighs. I never stopped her again.”
³⁰

Much documentation and testimony attest to the never-ending
resistance by children in boarding schools. Running away was the most common way to resist, but there were also acts of nonparticipation and sabotage, secretly speaking their languages and practicing ceremonies. This surely accounts for their survival, but the damage is nearly incomprehensible. Mohawk historian Taiaiake Alfred asks, “What is the legacy of colonialism? Dispossession, disempowerment, and disease inflicted by the white man, to be sure.… Yet the enemy is in plain view: residential schools, racism, expropriation, extinguishment, warship, welfare.”
³¹

Indigenous women, in particular, have continued to bear the brunt of sexual violence, both within families and by settler predators. Incidence of rape on reservations has long been astronomical. The colonialist restrictions on Indigenous policing authority on reservations—yet another legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery and the impairment of Indigenous sovereignty—opened the door to per petrators of sexual violence who knew there would be no consequences for their actions.
³²
Under the US colonial system, jurisdiction for crimes committed on Native lands falls to federal and state authorities because Native justice can be applied only to reservation residents, and then only for misdemeanors. One in three Native American women has been raped or experienced attempted rape, and the rate of sexual assault on Native American women is more than twice the national average. For five years after publication of a scathing 2007 report by Amnesty International, Native American and women's organizations, including the National Organization for Women (NOW), lobbied Congress to add a new section to the 1994 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) addressing the special situation of Native American women living on reservations.
³³
The added provision would allow Native nations' courts jurisdiction to arrest and prosecute non-Native men who enter reservations and commit rape. At the end of 2012, the Republican-dominated US Congress denied reauthorization of the VAWA, because it included the provision. In March 2013, however, that opposition was overcome, and President Barack Obama signed the amended act back into law—a small step forward for Native sovereignty.

For generations, Native nations, occasionally with the help of federal or state government, treated the symptoms of colonialism. But with the powerful Indigenous self-determination movements of the second half of the twentieth century, those nations participated in drafting and instituting new international law that supports their aspirations, and they began working on shoring up their sovereignty through governance. Through this work, US Indigenous peoples have reconceptualized their current forms of government based on new constitutions that reflect their specific cultures. Navajo thinking on a future constitution expresses that desire. Like some other Native nations, the Navajo, the most populous and the one holding the largest land base in the United States, has never had a constitution. But others do have constitutions similar to that of the United States. Nearly sixty Native nations adopted constitutions before 1934. Following the Indian Reorganization Act of that year, another 130 nations wrote constitutions according to federal guidelines but without significant participation of their citizenry.
³⁴
The movement to create, revise, or rewrite constitutions has seen notable success in two instances during the first decade of the twenty-first century.

From 2004 to 2006 the Osage Nation, located in northeastern Oklahoma, engaged in a contentious process of reform that produced a new constitution. The preamble reflects the extraordinary context and content of the new law:

We the Wah-zha-zhe, known as the Osage People, having formed as Clans in the far distant past, have been a People and as a People have walked this earth and enjoyed the blessing of Wah-kon-tah for more centuries than we truly know.

Having resolved to live in harmony, we now come together so that we may once more unite as a Nation and as a People, calling upon the fundamental values that we hold sacred: Justice, Fairness, Compassion, Respect for and Protection of Child, Elder, All Fellow Beings, and Self.

Paying homage to generations of Osage leaders of the past
and present, we give thanks for their wisdom and courage. Acknowledging our ancient tribal order as the foundation of our present government, first reformed in the 1881 Constitution of the Osage Nation, we continue our legacy by again reorganizing our government.

This Constitution, created by the Osage People, hereby grants to every Osage citizen a vote that is equal to all others and form a government that is accountable to the citizens of the Osage Nation.

We, the Osage People, based on centuries of being a People, now strengthen our government in order to preserve and perpetuate a full and abundant Osage way of life that benefits all Osages, living and as yet unborn.
³⁵

Similarly, in 2009, the White Earth Nation of the Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe people) adopted a new constitution. White Earth is located in central Minnesota and is one of a number of Anishinaabe reservations in Minnesota, with others in Wisconsin, South Dakota, and Canada. The preamble to the White Earth constitution is revealing:

The Anishinaabeg of the White Earth Nation are the ancestors of a great tradition of continental liberty, a native constitution of families, totemic associations. The Anishinaabeg create stories of natural reason, of courage, loyalty, humor, spiritual inspiration, survivance, reciprocal altruism, and native cultural sovereignty.

We the Anishinaabeg of the White Earth Nation in order to secure an inherent and essential sovereignty, to promote traditions of liberty, justice, and peace, and reserve common resources, and to ensure the inalienable rights of native governance for our posterity, do constitute, ordain, and establish this Constitution of the White Earth Nation.
³⁶

Gerald Vizenor, a citizen of the White Earth Nation, best-selling author, and leading intellectual, participated in the writing of this constitution. Explaining the concept of “survivance,” a term he coined, he stresses that it originates in Indigenous narratives:x “The
conventions of survivance create a sense of Native presence over nihility and victory. Survivance is an active presence: it is not absence, deracination, or ethnographic oblivion, and survivance is the continuance of narratives, not a mere reaction, however pertinent. Survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, the unbearable sentiments of tragedy, and the legacy of victimry.”
³⁷

The Doctrine of Discovery is dissolving in light of these profound acts of sovereignty. But neither arcane colonial laws nor the historical trauma of genocide simply disappear with time, certainly not when conditions of life and consciousness perpetuate them. The Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty movement is not only transforming the continent's Indigenous communities and nations but also, inevitably, the United States. The ways it is doing that are explored in the concluding chapter.

CONCLUSION

That the continued colonization of American Indian nations, peoples, and lands provides the United States the economic and material resources needed to cast its imperialist gaze globally is a fact that is simultaneously obvious within—and yet continually obscured by—what is essentially a settler colony's national construction of itself as an ever more perfect multicultural, multiracial democracy. . . . [T]he status of American Indians as sovereign nations colonized by the United States continues to haunt and inflect its raison d'etre.

—Jodi Byrd

The conventional narrative of US history routinely segregates the “Indian wars” as a subspecialization within the dubious category “the West.” Then there are the westerns, those cheap novels, movies, and television shows that nearly every US American imbibed with mother's milk and that by the mid-twentieth century were popular in every corner of the world.
¹
The architecture of US world dominance was designed and tested by this period of continental US militarism, which built on the previous hundred years and generated its own innovations in total war. The opening of the twenty-first century saw a new, even more brazen form of US militarism and imperialism explode on the world scene when the election of George W. Bush turned over control of US foreign policy to a long-gestating neoconservative and warmongering faction of the Pentagon and its civilian hawks. Their subsequent eight years of political control included two major military invasions and hundreds of small wars employing US Special Forces around the globe, establishing a template that continued after their political power waned.

One highly regarded military analyst stepped forward to make the connections between the “Indian wars” and what he considered the country's bright imperialist past and future. Robert D. Kaplan, in his 2005 book
Imperial Grunts
, presented several case studies that he considered highly successful operations: Yemen, Colombia, Mongolia, and the Philippines, in addition to ongoing complex projects in the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
²
While US citizens and many of their elected representatives called for ending the US military interventions they
knew
about—including Iraq and Afghanistan—Kaplan hailed protracted counterinsurgencies in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Pacific. He presented a guide for the US controlling those areas of the world based on its having achieved continental dominance in North America by means of counterinsurgency and employing total and unlimited war.

Kaplan, a meticulous researcher and influential writer born in 1952 in New York City, wrote for major newspapers and magazines before serving as “chief geopolitical strategist” for the private security think tank Stratfor. Among other prestigious posts, he has been a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, DC, and a member of the Defense Policy Board, a federal advisory committee to the US Department of Defense. In 2011,
Foreign Policy
magazine named Kaplan as one of the world's “top 100 global thinkers.” Author of numerous best-selling books, including
Balkan Ghosts
and
Surrender or Starve
, Kaplan became one of the principal intellectual boosters for US power in the world through the tried-and-true “American way of war.” This is the way of war dating to the British-colonial period that military historian John Grenier called a combination of “unlimited war and irregular war,” a military tradition “that accepted, legitimized, and encouraged attacks upon and the destruction of noncombatants, villages and agricultural resources … in shockingly violent campaigns to achieve their goals of conquest.”
³

Kaplan sums up his thesis in the prologue to
Imperial Grunts
, which he subtitles “Injun Country”:

By the turn of the twenty-first century the United States military had already appropriated the entire earth, and was ready to flood the most obscure areas of it with troops at a moment's notice.

The Pentagon divided the planet into five area commands—similar to the way that the Indian Country of the American West had been divided in the mid-nineteenth century by the U.S. Army. . . . [A]ccording to the soldiers and marines I met on the ground in far-flung corners of the earth, the comparison with the nineteenth century was … apt. “Welcome to Injun Country” was the refrain I heard from troops from Colombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq. To be sure, the problem for the American military was less [Islamic] fundamentalism than anarchy. The War on Terrorism was really about taming the frontier.
⁴

Kaplan goes on to ridicule “elites in New York and Washington” who debate imperialism in “grand, historical terms,” while individuals from all the armed services interpret policy according to the particular circumstances they face and are indifferent to or unaware of the fact that they are part of an imperialist project. This book shows how colonialism and imperialism work.

Kaplan challenges the concept of manifest destiny, arguing that “it was not inevitable that the United States should have an empire in the western part of the continent.” Rather, he argues, western empire was brought about by “small groups of frontiersmen, separated from each other by great distances.” Here Kaplan refers to what Grenier calls settler “rangers,” destroying Indigenous towns and fields and food supplies. Although Kaplan downplays the role of the US Army compared to the settler vigilantes, which he equates to the modern Special Forces, he acknowledges that the regular army provided lethal backup for settler counterinsurgency in slaughtering the buffalo, the food supply of Plains peoples, as well as making continuous raids on settlements to kill or confine the families of the Indigenous fighters.
⁵
Kaplan summarizes the genealogy of US militarism today: