Romanticizing Indians, “Settler Colonialism,” and What Is Genocide

I remember clearly that one morning when I was in the 11th or 12th grade at Shaker Heights HS, Shaker Hts, Ohio, that for some unknown reason the administration decided to play the song “Take an Indian to Lunch” over the PA system while kids were in homeroom. It was written and performed by Stan Freberg in 1961. It makes no sense; a Pilgrim politician in Massachusetts, November 1621, is trying to figure out how to attract the Indian bloc in his upcoming election for mayor (of something). Right, Indians couldn’t vote then, there was no mayoral election, and the Pilgrims were not yet exactly flourishing. Anyway, if you want to listen to such goofy stuff, now considered unacceptable, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qHsW3kEaQw.

More to today’s point is a recent wave of romanticization of Native Americans and corresponding demonization of white people. Ok, I get it that whites killed many an Indian–by the way, that word is back in fashion; it’s now used in many a book title, in the books themselves, and among Indian peoples.

There’s a problem, in my view, with the term “Native American,” although I am willing to use it. We have the word “America,” as you surely know, because an Italian geographer was the first European to say that the lands of the Western hemisphere were continents. A German cartographer, Martin Waldseemüller, published a map of the world in 1507.  To honor Vespucci, or something to that effect, Waldseemüller printed “America” on top of South America. Not even in very big letters! So we get our name via Germany in a Latinized version of an Italian first name. We should be lucky his name wasn’t Luigi or Alfredo. We could have been Luigiana or Alfredomania.

Anyway, many countries names don’t mean much. Austria: Österreich in German; it means the eastern “marches,” or parts of a realm. England: land of the Angles–hence it is called Anglia, Angleterra, etc. in various languages. Ukraine: the land around the edge: у край, u krai , much like Österreich. Germany, Deutschland, land of the people who speak German. Russia: not clear where that came from.

I prefer the old Canadian term “First Nations.” (But “nation” is a freighted word. What makes a nation?) In any case, the Canadian idea indicates that a given people, let’s say the Apache, were the first to arrive someplace. Does that give such people the high moral ground? I think not. That’s because the First Nations moved around a lot, and there were Second, Third, and many more peoples in all kinds of places around the world. Ancient Hebrews? Check. Germans in Berlin? Check. Comanches on the southern Great Plains? Iroquois? Big checks.

So a line from Patrick Wolfe, an Important Academic on the subject of settler colonialism and genocide–which go together in his writings–is wrong to say that the Native peoples “were the only ones who did not come from somewhere else.” Nope, with the exception of certain folk in East Africa, we all came from somewhere else.

Joseph Brant, painted in London by Gilbert Stuart in 1786

Not only did the First (or whatever nation) people move a lot, they changed as they came into contact with others, especially with Euro (i.e., white) newcomers. Here is a Mohawk (Iroquois) leader in London 1786. The American Revolutionary War was over, and he was with the Brits in an effort to see what they could do for his people in the wake of the war. He is in Mohawk dress, I suppose, but he became a British officer in 1775, and the silver plate hanging from his neck is an officer’s gorget. See Richard White’s classic The Middle Ground for the ways in which white settlers and Amerindians copied and borrowed from each other–until, in the old Northwest, Ohio and further west and north, an army under Anthony Wayne defeated an Indian confederation at Fallen Timbers, near today’s Toledo.

Backing up a little, the By 1780, the Shawnee war chief Blue Jacket was raising cattle.  He and his wife slept in a four-poster bed with curtains, used silverware at his table, and kept Black slaves. Enslaving people was absolutely common among Indigenous North Americans; I have read of many tribes that kept slaves, from the Lenapi and Miami in the Northwest to the Comanche.

Indians traded “peltries,” the word for all sorts of skins and hides, to whites in return for “trade goods.” Above all, the Native people wanted two things: cloth or ready-made garments and guns, with shot and powder. The First Comers then used the firearms on their enemies, including other Firsters, and on animals. Shortly after contact with whites, Creeks in the southeast began to hunt
deer just for their hides, which they traded to the British for imported
goods.  See, for example, Kathryn E. Holland Braund, Deerskins and Duffels:  The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685-1815.  Second ed.  Lincoln, NE:  University of Nebraska Press, 1993, 29, 177; Nolan M. Cool, “Pelts and Property:  The Fur Trade and the Mohawk Valley, 1730-1776,” New York History, 97, No. 2 (Spring 2016), 124. 

Braund found that from the Carolinas an average of more than 45,000 deerskins were shipped annually to London from 1699 to1705.  The eventual result of this slaughter was two-fold:  herds “disappeared from many areas by the mid-eighteenth century,” leaving the Creeks “no resources except land with which to pay debts to American traders.”   Creek participation in international trade helped to destroy their original way of life. Overhunting
in the Mohawk Valley in the late seventeenth century “led to a declining local fur supply, leaving the Mohawk and Oneida with fewer pelts to barter.”[ii]  Joseph Brant told Lieutenant Governor Simcoe of “Upper Canada,” i.e. British territory, in 1793 that “the Indian hunts being worn out, and their People fallen into disuse of that method of subsistence,” and that they were not well advanced in agriculture, “the Letting of their lands appeared to him the most reasonable mode of making provision for their Women, Old Men, and Children.” Beaver were “overharvested” as far west as eastern Wisconsin by 1740, and across the “state” by 1790.

So when the latest entry in the Predator series, Prey, 2022, shows evil French traders killing bison only for their hides somewhere in North America, near today’s border between the U.S. and Canada but far west, say Montana, that’s a lot of B.S. Of course, the brilliant Comanche girl, apparently well trained in kung fu, defeats the Predator, we have a sort of heroic Indian story.

Ken Burns’ film The American Buffalo, 2023, takes the same route. The Plains Indians supposedly had a spiritual connection to the animal–wait, anyone can claim such spirituality–and killed buffalo so that they could use every part of the beasts–is also bull. In the documentary, it is the rapacious, vicious white hunters who almost destroy the buffalo completely. True in a sense, but the whites with their long, accurate rifles, developed in the 1840s, produced the last phase of killing that the Indians had been engaged in for many years. On Indian participation in the destruction of American bison for commercial purposes, see Andrew Isenberg, “Social and Environmental Causes and Consequences of the Destruction of the Bison,” Revue française d’études américaines, No. 70, L’écologie aux Etats-Unis (Octobre 1996). And see Charles C. Mann, “We are here,” National Geographic, July 2022; Mike Ives, “Bison’s Return Refreshes Native American Rituals,” New York Times, July 9, 2023; and Prey, dir. Dan Trachtenberg, U.S., 2022, latest film in the Predator series.  Killers of the Flower Moon, dir. Martin Scorsese, U.S., 2023, depicts whites as overwhelmingly evil, while the Osage are nearly but not entirely romanticized. See also Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, 2023.

Many horrible things were done to American Indians. But it does no one any good to deny the full range of their humanity, for good and bad, and to depict them as endlessly wonderful stewards of the earth, democratic, selfless communal people, etc. And all this–to the extent that it gets in front of the eyes of many whites, Chicanos, Asian-Americans, and yes, even Black people, it is irritating.

I will return to this subject and to the history of romanticizing Indians, which dates back to the 16th c, but with many depictions of “savages” as well.